#61 ·
mistyscout2 said:Yeah, like I was saying earlier, when you look at Lacan, the Real is basically this ontological register that just refuses to be captured by symbolism.
I feel like I probably need to remind you that Walter Benjamin was actually onto this back in 1936, when he penned his famous essay, *The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility*. He spends quite a bit of time discussing how an artwork loses its "aura" once it can be reproduced like that.
You’re definitely on the right track with that distinction, though if you don't mind me jumping in to add a little nuance, I think there's an extra layer we should peel back here. The reason representation loses its "meaning" is because it stops being a direct re-presentation of something as it actually exists; instead, it becomes a representation of a representation. We can never truly get back to that original essence—assuming such a thing even existed to begin with—because we're just caught in this endless loop of representations representing other representations. At the same time, the Real (with a capital R) remains constant regardless of how we perceive it. The real issue is that our own personal fictions, along with the collective fictions of society acting as a mass unit (which essentially manifest the Imaginary through various ideologies and meta-narratives), start to feel incredibly real to us. People mistake these constructs for something "natural" or "just common sense," seemingly unaware that they aren't actually perceiving the world itself, but rather their own conceptualization of it. That's really where philosophy begins, and where simple "common sense" ends. 😉
I’ve read that text, but it slipped my mind—I really ought to brush up on it. I found his analysis of the prostitute as a mass-produced object quite interesting, though; it ties right into that Baudrillardian fascination.
I agree with part of the interpretation. Did I not say that the hyperreal has always been reproduced? Representation works by constantly telling us it's a substitute for something else. If there’s absolutely no difference between the original and the representation, then the purpose is lost, because the goal is to re-present the subject, not to simulate it. Simulation, as a third module, isn't imaginary, transcendental, or projective anymore—it's essentially an anticipation. It isn't fictional in any meaningful way because it doesn't differ from reality at all. And when I mention the real now, I definitely don't mean it in a Lacanian context. Representation relies on that gap between the sign and the actual, whereas in simulation, the sign represents the actual itself. So, it’s not just about a chain of representations—though that's the model for serial production—the real kicker is that the distance between the real and the imaginary vanishes. It gets erased. To me, that’s the crucial point: psychologically, it shows the blurring of the line between subject and object. It reveals that split.
Hmm, isn't the Real, according to Lacan, inherently traumatic? That which is "natural" or "understandable" falls under the domain of symbolization—stuff we accept as "given." The Real is that stretched territory, pulled taut between the imaginary and the symbolic; it's the only space where the imaginary can actually bleed into the symbolic.