reality and the Real in 2007

Posted by admin on January 4th, 2007 filed in theory

It’s been a good christmas break, on my travels around the island I read t.g. ash’s article on the new reality, published in the guardian 28/12 and felt the need to attempt a Lacanian interpretation. I’m interested in the question of which reality it is strikes back in Ash’s argument and what defines it as such.
The full article and comments are available here:

Reality Strikes Back…

There are two quotes that are of particular interest:

First Quote:

‘a senior adviser to President Bush told the journalist Ron Suskind that people in “the reality-based community” - journalists, for example - had got it seriously wrong. “That’s not the way the world really works any more,” the adviser said. “We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.”‘

This appears to be a kind of summary for how Lacanian fantasy works. Perhaps not at the level of an empire, but on a personal level the idea that “when we act we create our own reality” seems to be in line with the operations of fantasy. Fantasy, in Lacanian theory, being our interface to reality, to the world around us, is an invented necessity that enables us to function socially and to make sense of the vast and meaningless Real. Without this fantasy in place to mediate our social actions the world appears completely overwhelming. So as the Bush advisor pointed out to Ron Suskind, we create our own realities, or fantasies on the side of reality, when we act, when we play out our individual roles. This is surely a description of ideology in action, the establishment of a coherent frame of meaning, or fantasy, not by an individual but by a state acting out its role as a global super power and asserting a particular fantasy-reality.

Second Quote:

‘What should this policy be called? Most people have forgotten that Bush Jr. came to power in 2001 preaching a “new realism”, in contrast to what he pilloried as the unfocused, liberal idealist interventionism of the Clinton years. However, after the 9/11 attacks and especially in his second term, he came to advocate a breathtakingly idealist policy of global democratisation. The American political writer Robert Kagan described Bush’s new approach as a “higher realism”. So that was the new new realism. Now we have the new new new realism, or new3 realism. If new2 realism had an unrealistically large admixture of idealism, believing that democracy would spread across the Middle East as it had across eastern Europe after 1989, new3 realism risks swinging back to the opposite extreme, making the old mistake of believing that a durable order can be built on friendly autocracies. So let us indeed have a reality-based international community in 2007, but let’s not have too much realism. In the long run, nothing could be less realistic.’

So “new realism” was to be something like an alternate ‘reality as fantasy’, one being dependent upon the other in constituting a consistent reality, which is created when the state acts. “New2 realism” established an enhanced idealism yet within the frame of the already established reality. What Ash appears to be pointing out is that the danger in “new3 realism” (or new new new realism) is that it “risks swinging back to the opposite extreme” and gets too close to the site of some kind of original realism, or what it is tempting to refer to as the Real.

This is what I find interesting in Ash’s argument: the missing Real. This would seem to be the direction that the argument is pointing in when ash calls for realism, but not too much much as “nothing could be less realistic”. This seems to me to be a nice summary of Lacan’s Real: in getting to close, what lies beyond the fantasy is the hideous meaningless Real, which is too much to bare. Too much of the Real threatens the consistency of our perceived reality.

So for the consistency of a workable reality, we need to maintain a comfortable distance from Real violence. The reality based community that Ash calls for is one which maintains a safe distance from the Real, rather than one which acts as a catalyst for the violence which is increasingly disturbing our reality. “New3 realism” gets too close to the Real, to the violence carried out in the name of a particular autocracy, it is too close to the violent suppression of human rights and the now everyday blood shed on the streets which permeates our perception of everyday life. The reality-based community that Ash is encouraging requires that we maintain a minimal distance in order to avoid the violence which perturbs such a reality, that the fantasy which is created as we act avoids the oscillations of “new3 realism” which carries reality all too close to the Real.