Inverting the Symbolic-Real dynamic: the icon

I've had a break through thinking about the symbolic-real dynamic in Zizek. Zizek, following Lacan, claims that though we symbolically construct our world there is an interruption of our ability to dwell in the symbolic. Where the symbolic cannot contain all of experience the real leaks from under it. Zizek actually uses the image of a snail in a shell to describe the real (the snail's body) and the symbolic (the shell). He also claims that, like the snail, the real is grotesque. I like to think that the real can be beautiful. One other thing: the early Lacan conceived of the real as extra linguistic, but the late Lacan (and Zizek), claims that the real is actually a function of language. The Symbolic is also a function of language. It is the known of language, where as the real comes through in the unknown, the un-assimilated (think of the Gov't trying to code a new-immigrant who has not papers - birth certificate - yet is full of human constructs; that is how the real exceeds the symbolic).

So, here is my insight. What happens if we invert Zizek's model? The Real explodes through the Symbolic, but it doesn't exhaust it. Thus we have a symbolic that is remaindered, rather then a real. I think that the Orthodox conception of the Icon works along these lines. As Ivan Illich claims, Icons are not for collecting, they are for praying with. Icons are the Symbolic which represents the Real presence of the Saint. But the faithful 'sees' the Saint, which is communicated through the Symbolic. Yet the Real does not exhaust the Symbolic. In fact, the Real isn't even contained by the Symbolic. Switching gears here, consider the Eucharist, which always has an excess of accidents. The substance is totally changed, but the accidents remain (this maybe problematic, as I'm moving from "culture" to "nature" as it were). The bread is the construct, but the presence of Christ is the real.

A final note. Often "the Law" is the example of a symbolic coding that both Lacan and Zizek reference. It is by having a gap between symbolic and real that the subject comes into existence. Christ claimed that he came not to abolish the law (and the prophets), but to fulfill it (them). Christ is then the reconciliation of the symbolic and the real. However, the injunction that Paul gives to obey the law of rulers because they have been set in place by God highlights that he was not working within a metaphysics whereby law of any type was solely nominal. Law, even fallen law, was Real - upheld by God himself, until he should so chose to alter it, or remove the leader. I'm always troubled by this idea because it seems hyper-conservative. Clearly there are laws that are only nominal, like the speed limit. What do we do when the "nature" or "truth" (or real) of our car is to excel beyond the level of mediocrity set by the Gov't? Do I follow the spirit of the law (the car's rpms and gas mileage) or the letter? Does it matter? Well it would seem that Paul was pretty serious about slaves not leaving masters and we certainly do not respect those laws now. Should we say that they were "real"? It would seem to me that not every law is part of the incarnation of Christ, the logos. Lies are held up by signs, yet we do not think that lies are "real". They have real effect, but not reality. Though strangely, this is von Balthasar's logic for claiming that the Greek myths are real: "myths exist only as the react upon immanent being" (Murphy, Christ the Form of Beauty, 154).

Ding an Sich as Eucharist, infinitizing mater

I just finally put two and two together and realized that in Catholicism, the thing in itself is the Eucharist*, which is itself, infinitely deep, such that going into the eucharist takes us into the Logos spoken before time. Like Alice, travelling through a worm hole (or whatever she does), that is always already with us, the Eucharist comes in us from "outside" so that we are more fully part of Logos, Shalom, Love.

It is true though that a Christian goes into the body, while the body comes into her. There are some interesting border issues, or a-border issues, that have to do with spirit as infinitizing our mater.

Somehow though, this idea of the eternal pre-lapsarian body, which I in no way think ever existed other then as Christ, is in tension with this idea of a seed falling into the ground so that it might birth a plant. I know that by retaining the word body, we resist splitting the Christic body into spirit and body (we retain a unity), but sometimes, the idea of spirit as divorced from body (somewhat Cartesian, somewhat Gnostic), is canonical in Christianity. I was just reading about an interval between esse and essentia in Aquinas (around 250 in Pickstock's After Writing). Paul continually talks about putting to death flesh and living in spirit (but he also talks about putting on the body of Christ, or exhaling his self, that he might inhale Christ 1 Col...) God, the father 'exists' not as a body but as a spirit, as nothingness, yet what do we do with the body of Christ, which is itself spiritual. Do we just conflate spirit and body? It's like Hellenism and Hebraism have had a front on collision, and bodies and spirits are flying every which way. I don't know what to think.

* it is a misnomer to say that the Eucharist is a "thing" because it is a relation to the Trinity through the Son. Thus, the Eucharist as ideal ding an sich, redefines ding as Sein (being). Being as itself.
What bothers me about the discourse of being is that we have psychologized it so that being is only there for us if we attend to it. But being is not like that; it is aready there, whether we think it or not. We may have a heightened experience of being, but being is not just a state of consciousness. Ontology is regardless of psychological flux, not that we could do without psyche, but that psyche cannot erase being's persistence without dieing.
If, when we are in "the cloud of unknowing," "the dark night of the soul", the via negativa, we are close to the Father, it would seem that a psychological reading of this experience would side for non-being (perhaps this is true if the Father is nothingness). But God is the pure act of love, and action does not happen outside of a context. Understandably, God is the context for His act.
When we fold "context" and "act" together like that we open language to God. I guess this is how God is impossible.

Quote of the Afternoon

So I just finished my first article for Books in Canada, titled Newfoundland in Letters, and I have been asked to take up another on short fiction in Atlantic Canada. I'm glad to do this. It keeps me abreast of the new writing in the region, while helping me to fill out my CV and become a better writer.

But now that the article is off, I can focus on my comp reading again. Here is the quote that hit me this afternoon, Pickstock, After Writing again:

In contrast to the "urge" of Derridian differance, liturgical language is neither autonomously in command of itself, nor an instrument controlled invisibly by a lurking and manipulative power. Rather, its language is in several ways "impossible". For liturgy is at once a gift from God and a sacrifice to God, a reciprocal exchange which shatters all ordinary positions of agency and reception, especially as these have been conceived in the west since Scotus. Moreover, liturgical expression is made "impossible" by the breach which occurred at the Fall. This breach is the site of an apparent aporia, for it renders the human subject incapable of doxology, and yet, as I have suggested above in my analysis of the Phaedrus, the human subject is constituted (or fully central to itself) only in the dispossessing act of praise. However, the aproria is resolved in the person of Christ, whose resurrection ensures that our difficult liturgy is not hopeless, and enables us to rejoin the angelic liturgy taking place in an ambiguous and shifting space beyond our own. (176-7)

I heard "impossible" used as it is above, in a presentation by Alison Milbank, who was a reader of After Writing before it was published. She was speaking about Huysmans' decadent and satanic images of Christ which, she implied, were "impossible", yet which led him into the Church. I was trying to get at what impossible meant in that context and if she was playing on Pickstock's usage of it, then I think I know what she is about. Pickstock's very theory of the subject is constructed on an impossibility, that of opening to God, which is already transcended by God for us. Not too shaby: she takes Paul and makes him relevant to contemporary theoretical gobily-gook. I like it.

Pickstock critiques my post on represention and the thing in itself

So now that I have a pretty good handle on the Kantian conception of representation and synthetic imagination, Catherine Pickstock goes and messes everything up for me by telling me that this is attached to a nominalist conception of ideas, which thinks being univocally, rather then analogically, and which devoids the space between subject and object of divine participation (mathesis):

“In so far as the “real” is now determined by the intellect, and the first object of the intellect is now Being, it seems that Scotus anticipates the modern invention of the object and its distinction from the subject. …In consequence, the object is now defined on the basis of the concept, as representation. This departs from Aquinas’ Aristotelian theory of knowledge, whereby the form of a thing disengages itself from its matter and becomes a thought or “species” in our mind…[Scotus] opens up the possibility of an empiricism which thinks of material reality in terms of isolated atoms of information streaming in from the outside world, which the mind must then synthesize, since they act upon the mind in the mode of merely efficient causality. This involves a departure form the traditional hylomorphic view that the form of a thing is already synthesized before it “informs” the mind (even though the active intellect must bring out its full coherence), and that the thing fulfills itself in and through its comprehensibility. Such a view regards the knowing of a thing as commensurate with the known thing’s own constitutive repetition. For when the species is formed in our mind, the thing perceived happens again (since being is an event), or repeats itself, though in a different mode. Knowledge, for Aquinas, is therefore akin to an ontological event. In contrast to this, post-Scotist representation is equivalent to a de-ontological process, for the perceived object is reduced to an empirical exigency which simply happens to facilitate or occasion an act of cognition”. (After Writing, 130-1)

So instead of composing the cat from a bunch of sense data, Aquinas would encourage me to see the cat as a form already composed before it “informs” my mind. Now that it is in my mind, the active intellect must bring it to full coherence. When the “species” is formed in my mind (the ‘cat’ of Chloe, I’m suspecting), it is an event, not unlike being itself. This is how Aquinas demonstrates that knowledge is divine participation. In a way, God forms the cat as a whole, and sends it into my mind, at which point I must use my intellect to fully reveal the cat to myself (I suspect this is the inward light of Christ that fully reveals the cat as Chloe). And this revelation is an event, like a party. Have a beer. No, I insist.

So where Kant’s process emphasizes the assembly of the whole only by observance of the parts, Aquinas tells us that God creates the whole, which we must reveal to ourselves. I suspect this has more to do with waiting for the Polaroid picture to reveal itself, then it would connecting the dots of the image. Aquinas is a proponent of Gestalt psychology…and Kant believes in constructivism. I hadn’t realized that these 20th century debates fell along realist-nominalist divides.

Okay, here is something to think about: How does this relate to pointillism (and the TV colour matrix) and the previous preference for whole forms, say in a painting by Delacroix, or David? How does this relate to Alex Colville’s method? Is pointillism Kantian painting?

Now think about the camera. The camera doesn’t expose an image to parts. It captures the whole image. Even when the composition is of a part, say half of a face, the whole is presupposed, and it asks us to fill in the rest of the image, such that we are active viewers. Why would the mind assemble parts, if the film doesn’t? Is reality (what ever that is), really as partial as Kant suggests? Or is there a deeper order running through it all?

And a final thought: I can see that structuralism was a type of heuristic that sought out the logos, but which did so on univocal terms. I think we can revive the search for coherence, the logos, on analogical terms, without ever thinking that we have the logos cornered with any type of positivism.

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.