the real, the thing in itself (ding an sich)

I just don't know what to think about "the real". It seems that no one thinks that we have any access to the "thing in itself". Reality for those of us born after the "social construction of reality" idea rose to ascendancy is only a construction. Some say it is a linguistic construction. Others say it is the construction of our senses. I don't know what to think, but my intuition tells me that I interact with things that are real and have real experiences with them.

Lets say I look across the room at my cat, sleeping on the blanket on top of the couch. I might linguistically relate this to you, but I do not linguistically relate this to myself. Some people do, but I don't look at the cat and have the words scroll through my head like some sort of wall street electric banner. I don't look at the couch and say couch. I just perceive the whole of the couch. This is where I'm tempted to deny the real. If I look at the cat, and I see say 45 percent of her body, my mind fills in the rest. I don't see a partial cat, I see the whole cat. But this is not a linguistic construction on my part. It is the privileging of the whole over the part, the ideal over the particulars of my visual perception. My imagination assembles the partial view I have, by looking to my tradition of seeing cats (my memory) and assimilating the sense data into a cat schema. Better yet, my imagination working with my memory knows the particulars of Chloe, my cat, and can recognize her at an instance. None of this is linguistically mediated. It isn't like my mind is constantly decoding a textual word into images that I am conscious of. No, I am in touch with the light that is reflected off my cat, which allows me to assimilate the colours, forms, patterns, volume and texture of my cat, such that I perceive the existence of the whole cat, even though part of the cat is hidden to me at all moments.

What isn't real in this equation? I'll tell you: the cat I construct in my mind isn't real, it is an image of the cat. But the light is real. The colours are real - they are not figurative approximations - there is no analogy at work here. The forms are real. How am I not experiencing the "thing in itself"? Certainly I do not experience the thing as Chloe experiences Chloe-catness, but I experience the visual expression of her catness.

Jean Luc Nancy likes to play with the idea that my representation of the cat is nothing but an interior extension of myself, somewhat like an interior phallus, which I "touch". Representation, to Nancy, is masturbatory. Sex is masturbatory. All life is masturbatory. This seems to be solipsism to me, the idea that I am the only mind, all else is simulacra.

Just rereading this post: I do find myself thinking about the "typo". Why if I compose a text, am I likely to read the whole word and not see the scrambled word, or dropped word. For instance, i will often write a sentence with they in it and drop the y. This may have something to do with the key board, but, nonetheless, I rarely catch my "y-less theys" on a proof-read. I'll catch them a day later. I just reread my last post and found a few typos. One that sticks out to me is redure which I read as rendure. I've just found out its spelled render. Anyway. The point is that I have a subjective bias because I can only encounter the world subjectively. Perhaps this is what the denial of "the real" is all about, but still, I don't like how this leads our popular culture to see all constructs as fictions, as arbitrary. That is just careless social theory, despite the fact that you hear such hogwash coming from intelligent people. It might have been arbitrarily assigned, but that don't mean it's arbitrary people. Tradition might be built on top of it. Which would make it real now, since it is a fixture in someone's reality. Oh, I may be pushing it here; it's off to dream land for me.