Re: [-empyre-] Nothing is Real?

[Sean Cubitt <seanc@waikato.ac.nz>]

Kia Ora

Real: the foam of physis, the chaotic becoming of the world, and the 
raw sensation of it
Imaginary: this is the realm, I figure, of the subject-object divide 
(Lacan's mirror stage). It reduces the world to space and time, 
distinguishing them from primal unity. Sollers refers to the Real in 
the sense of the quantum activity that 'worlds'. Until it is split 
into subjects and objects, there can be no representation. The 
subject attempts mastery (gender specific?), but is always also 
subjected in the process. Objection, abjection and identity are 
constellated in the Imaginary
Symbolic: has the task of suturing back the torn halves of 
space-time, an activity fundamentally social, in which the tools are 
the relations between objects (causality, logic, math . . .), the 
relations between subjects (law, rhetoric, argument) and the 
relations between objects and subjects (interpretation, address)

There are artists who attempt to recreate the Real: Lyotard sings 
their praises in the essay on acinema, Krauss in the Informe. There 
are those who ring the changes of the Imaginary: Duchamp, Beuys, 
warhol and the core tradition of late 20th century insitutional art. 
And there are those who undertake the utopian task of the Symbolic: 
to render open the relational, communicative zone.

Of course everything is more compelx than that; and each moment of 
this transition is not only subsumed,but also disinterred, worked in 
as dialectical antithesis, reconfigured, redeployed, most of al in 
the pursuit of dominance which, in this perspective, appears as the 
attempt to control the flows of communication by ammassing content, 
channelling distribution, excluding, monopolising. Information wants 
to be free but is everywhere in chains

s


--
Sean Cubitt * Screen and Media Studies * University of Waikato * 
Private Bag 3105 * Hamilton * New Zealand * seanc@waikato.ac.nz * T: 
+64 (0)7 838 4543 * F: +64 (0)7 838 4767

http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film