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Philosophy

Knowing the World Anew (I): The Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary

Aug 2, 2022·15 min read

The seed of this piece was planted a long time ago. With a little free time lately, I finally sat down to write it out.

The original idea was to braid together posthumanist theory and the line of thought running through Lacan and Žižek, fold in a concept I call the Digital Order, and from all of that sketch a fuller picture of the modern and near-future world.

But as I wrote, the word count kept swelling. What started as a hundred-word memo grew, even when I stuck to the essentials, into something close to a ten-thousand-word philosophical essay. It made more sense to break it into several posts.

By rights, Žižek's thought deserves ten times this much space to be properly unpacked and explained. But that is not the center of gravity for what I want to discuss in this series, Knowing the World Anew. So here I only gesture at it, as a way to start a conversation and lay down some background.

They say the world was chaos at first, and the world took shape under the poet's pen.

from Chen Jiaying, Perception, Reason, and Self-Knowledge

Lacan and Žižek divide the subject into three registers:

  • the Imaginary Order
  • the Symbolic Order
  • the Real

A human subject's knowledge of itself is always indirect. We have no way to know ourselves directly. We can only come to know ourselves through the feedback loop of interacting with the outside world.

We look at ourselves in mirrors and cameras to learn what our faces look like. We build a sense of our current self and our ideal self through external systems of judgment and moral exemplars.

So we end up taking the observed, objectified self for the real self. This misrecognition of the self is what constructs our self-knowledge, and because the misrecognition is rooted deep in our minds, this is the Imaginary Order.

The Symbolic Order, or the order of signs, is a world built entirely by human beings.

Symbols are language in the broad sense, and the discussion of signs and language has been the center of gravity for modern philosophy. Saussure's structuralist linguistics holds that a sign has two parts: the signifier and the signified.

The signifier is the sign's image or sound-form. The signified is the concept being expressed.

The signifier lives in the Symbolic Order, while the signified sits in the real world.

A classic example is this proposition:

"Snow is white" if and only if snow is white.

The first clause is the signifier, the symbol written on paper or the sound spoken aloud. The second is the signified, the snow in the real world showing up white.

Much of later philosophy and sociology is built on reading and interpreting signs. Take Baudrillard's critique in The Consumer Society: the consumption of objects no longer rests on their use-value but on their sign-value. To turn something into a sign is to turn it into a commodity, and commodity-signs form an endless chain of signs and meanings. The body, experience, relationships, status, all of it gets sign-ified and folded into the order of commodities.

The Symbolic Order is false, and also not false. It contains the whole of what we might call "the real as confirmed by signs."

J.L. Austin, of the ordinary-language school, proposed the influential theory of the speech act: some utterances are equivalent to the act itself, and an act has effects on the world.

Take marriage. The process is entirely verbal. The pronouncement of the marriage is the marrying itself. Nothing in the real world changes, yet the social relation between two people, and the rest of their lives, will be different from before. This is because the Symbolic Order, though it has nothing to do with the real world, is the world we humans have been forced to dwell in from the moment we acquired self-consciousness and language. Social relations, nations and peoples, property rights and human rights, language and signs, all of these exist, and exist only, in the Symbolic Order.

If you want to understand why entities like nations and societies also exist only within the Symbolic Order, go read Imagined Communities. I will not belabor it here.

Now for the Real, the hardest and most subtle part of Lacan and Žižek's theory.

You have actually already met the Real in what came before. It is that "real world" I kept invoking. The Real is the truth of the world, the chaos that has not yet been carved up by symbolic cognition.

Hayek argued that the basic function of the brain is to classify things. To classify is to name things in order to mark off the differences between one thing and another, which is to say, it is the process of sign-ifying the world. But between one thing and another there is no inherent boundary. The boundary is human-made, and it lives in the Symbolic Order.

When I see an animal's tracks in the snow, I will say they are "footprints." But for a small insect, they are not "footprints," they are "the rise and fall of the terrain." Our cognition of the world comes pre-loaded with an understanding of it, which is why understanding the world as another person or another creature sees it is harder than we tend to imagine.

Of course, "terrain" and "rise and fall" are not good enough descriptions either, because those words are concepts in the human language system. They already carry our basic cognitive model of things, and they likewise do not exist in the insect's cognition.

From this example we can see that the Real cannot be felt or known, because any act of cognition is a process of sign-ifying and structuring, and that process belongs to the Symbolic Order, not the Real.

Seen through the lens of evolution, a sign system or a system of ideas comes from an organism adapting to the rewards and punishments of its surroundings. So an organism's environment reaches back and prescribes how its signs are used and what they mean. This sits comfortably alongside Wittgenstein's remark that "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life."

The Real is the world before it is known. In the terms Heidegger uses for Being in Being and Time, the Real is the world in the absence of "Dasein." To put it in a not-quite-fitting metaphor: the real world is itself a kind of gray, and the presence of a conscious subject lights it up. But the observed world is not entirely equivalent to the world before it was observed. The presence of the observer, the conscious subject (which is to say "I," "Dasein"), cannot be ignored.

The Real comes close to the physical world that modern science has disenchanted: no nations or societies running their course, no human joys or sorrows, only the mechanical universe of elementary particles in motion.

But the Real is more chaotic, more primordial, than the world in a physicist's eye, because signs like "electron" and "photon" are not allowed there. Even mathematical laws are not admitted into the Real, since mathematics is a formal language.

The theory-ladenness of observation is a famous thesis in the philosophy of science. Observation has to rest on theory. Behind the method, the object, and the aim of any observation there is always some conceptual support. So theory seeps into observation and changes what it finds, which makes objective observation an impossibility.

To run a physics experiment, I necessarily need some premise and intention that lets the experiment happen at all, and that intention seeps into my experiment. So a detached, objective experimental result does not exist. Put strictly, science does not transcend experience.

The theory-ladenness of observation also lays bare something more frightening: objective history does not exist either, which is the impossibility built into the discipline of history. Croce said "all history is contemporary history," and Benjamin Schwartz reopened his book The World of Thought in Ancient China by restating it: "the history of the past is inevitably and always the history of the present." This is a return to humane concern and an attention to the problems of the present day. It is also the historian flinching away from the problem of the Real.

In the sciences we can see a similar flinch. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn proposed his widely circulated concept of the paradigm. A paradigm is something like a "namespace" in a programming language. Scientific conclusions are always conclusions under a given paradigm, and within the scope of that paradigm they are correct. There is no denying the value of the paradigm as a guide to scientific research, but the incommensurability between paradigms has become a sticking point hard to resolve. Kuhn's account of whether relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics is that the two understand and define space and time differently, so each is correct within its own paradigm. That argument is not wrong, but it offers no guidance on how to reconcile and mediate the differences between paradigms, and it does not face up to the subtle influence of human cognition and vocabulary on scientific research. (Newton and Einstein may define space and time differently, but the words they use are the same.)

In 1972, Philip Anderson, a founder of condensed matter physics and a Nobel laureate, published a semi-philosophical paper in Nature titled More is Different, which went deep into the hierarchical structure of science:

elementary particle physics, condensed matter physics, chemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, physiology, psychology, the social sciences. Across these layers, the entities at each level have to obey the laws of the level above them, yet at every level we still have to find new concepts, definitions, laws, and principles, and these cannot simply be deduced from the level above. A change in scale produces a qualitative change in theory, a phenomenon now widely called emergence.

From a naive reductionist view, if we grasped the properties of the most basic matter, then the more macroscopic properties ought to be "derivable." In practice, though, bridging the gaps between the layers has become one of modern science's hard problems. We have gained sharp tools like statistical mechanics and network science, but the theoretical chasms between disciplines are far from filled.

Hayek, the Nobel economist, and Qian Xuesen, whom we know well, both turned their later scholarly interests toward complex systems theory. I suspect they both sensed the same cloud that hangs over all theory: the very nature of the Real means it cannot be structured or sign-ified in any form, and the attempt to sign-ify it often leaves behind a remainder that cannot be sign-ified. This shows up as Arrow's impossibility theorem in voting theory, Gödel's incompleteness theorems in mathematics, and emergent properties in complexity science.

A small preview: from a more contemporary vantage, these striking "impossibilities" cannot be credited entirely to the fissures of the Real within the Symbolic Order. They also owe something to the encroachment of the Digital Order upon the order of feeling and speech.

Did two new terms appearing out of nowhere just startle you? Don't worry. The matter of the Digital Order is something we will unfold slowly in a later piece.

The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas wrote in his poem "Reflections":

The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address.

Even the clearest water, if it goes deep enough, can drown you.

from R.S. Thomas, "Reflections"

The furies in the poem are the specter of the Real. They are the incompleteness internal to the Symbolic Order. The subject of the Real is usurped and assassinated by its sign-ified identity in the Symbolic Order, and this murdered subject becomes a vengeful specter, tearing rift after rift into the Symbolic Order.

To borrow a line from Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle: "In a world truly turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false." This inverted world is the Symbolic Order, and the truth of the Real can only show itself in the moments when the Symbolic Order contradicts itself.

(A small note: my "borrowing" from Debord above is in fact an instance of his Situationist concept of détournement. The notion of the spectacle was itself a détournement of capital from Marx's Capital, and my reading of Debord here is a second détournement.)

Camus caught hold of this well in his work and called it the absurd. The feeling of the absurd comes precisely from the incompleteness of the symbolic order. When a person, as an actor, feels estranged from the stage of the world, they taste that absurdity.

Seen in the fullest picture, even war and the hero contain a contradiction.

A nation can go to war only once it finds the other side that recognizes the conflict, so each side is necessarily and intricately entangled with the other:

Before I can have an enemy, I must persuade that person to regard me as an enemy.

And I cannot become a hero unless I first find someone who will threaten my life, even take it.

from James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

The Symbolic Order is theatrical. Every concept has to depend on its opposite. In a concrete context a word has a precise, perceptible meaning, but in the abstract arena of discourse it is forced to lean on its opposing concept.

The slogan of "justice" comes from a hatred of and revolt against "injustice." But if there were no justice and no injustice in the world at all, then the pursuit of "justice" would naturally fall into absurdity.

In Genesis, Jehovah warns the first man, Adam: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve ate is exactly this fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

In the Real there is neither good nor evil. The division of good and evil lives in the Symbolic Order. Following this reading, the human beings who can tell good from evil (the Symbolic Order) are naturally cast out of the whole and harmonious garden of Eden (the Real) and sentenced to exile. The "surely die" is the death of the human subject of the Real. We cannot face the chaotic, true Real, and can only live in the theatrical Symbolic Order.

Image M.C. Escher, Three Worlds, lithograph, 1955

The discussion of Lacan's three orders could go on. But since this is not the center of gravity for what I want to talk about, and since there is little here that is original to me, I will stop at a gesture and leave it here.

In the next piece we will bring in the lens of posthumanist theory and discuss the relationship between the Analog and the Digital. Stay tuned.

References

This piece really did not need a references section, since every theorist and book I needed to mention is already named in the text.

But I still want to mention Yusizhou of Gcores, and these three detailed introductions to Žižek. It was these articles that first brought me to Žižek and his theory, that gave me a handhold on theory in the middle of all the chaos. I am sincerely grateful for Yusizhou's writing.

The titles and links to those three pieces are below. I recommend them wholeheartedly.

I am Lunar Mare. Thank you for reading.

You are welcome to reach me by any means. My email is lunar_mare_official@outlook.com. Write to me and let's talk, I reply to every message. :)

PhilosophyLacanŽižekSemiotics
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