You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
registers describe psychic development: an infantile experience of embodiment and umbilical reciprocity (imaginary) matures into the mediations of language (symbolic), while an inkling of something inaccessible and unspeakable is retroactively effected by this progression (real).
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posits the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real as the three distinct but interdependent orders of psychic experience. These reframe Sigmund Freud’s topography of the ego, the superego, and the id, respectively, elucidating that the domains of the subject are also objective realms of the social. The imaginary is the register of images, identifications, wholes, and projections; the symbolic is the register of language, institutions, norms, laws, practices, and order; the real is the register of what catalyzes the imaginary and eludes the symbolic—the impossible, the unrepresentable, the material, the contradictory or unmeaningful. – Kornbluh
a sensation of immediacy not only as rapidity but as fullness, the instant as intense presence, an “always on,”
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Whether or not technological advances in image circulation have a net democratizing effect (as many media scholars argue), and whether or not circulation can dispel the crisis of production, it is certain that they reconfigure cognition and affect.
“Every moment, every element of one’s life—tiny observations, banal occurrences, numberless meals—is fodder for instant affirmation.”
Johnathan Thomas at David Krut Projects.
Promising!!!
Art constitutively thwarts immediacy, urgency, and utility; its most direct use rests in this indirection—but today’s immediatist art aspires to void itself, and theory has been following in its wake. Recalling a different vocation for both art and theory requires esteeming mediation at the outset. Adorno writes: “By the affront to needs, by the inherent tendency of art to cast different lights on the familiar, artworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality.”
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Like art itself, critical theory defamiliarizes and reconceptualizes in order to build. In refracting the pressing need to address social calamities into the multidimensional need to reconstitute the social, mediations wield their own formedness—their qualities as artistic detour, their aspects of theoretical abstraction—toward forming, reforming, transforming. Artforms and theory alike demand the slow and uncertain work of making sense, countering immediacy with mediation.
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We creative types can generate dialectical images and poems and novels and art that precipitate new passages from the mesmeric imaginary to the sticky symbolic.
Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh
Confluent inchoate figures marshal some fixity or rather a persistency within the formless.
New York Martinis. Tempting!
I seek for rhythmic whisperings
Where noises bandy—
For life I listen wistfully
In footless banter.
I cast wide nets and tentative
In lakes of sorrow.
I go toward final tenderness
By pathways sordid.
I look for dewdrops glistering
In falsehood’s gardens.
I save truth’s globules glistening,
From dust-heaps garnered.
I fain would fathom fortitude
Through years of wormwood—
And pierce the mortal fortalice,
Yet live, a worldling.
My cup, through ways impassable,
To bear, untainted;
By tenebrous bleak passages
To joy attaining.
Zinaida Gippius, translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky
What must be valued
I’m learning,
in clarity and in error,
are spaces
where
feelings are held.
Spaces, Jenny Johnson
The Haiti That Still Dreams. The country is being defined by disaster. What would it mean to tell a new story? By Edwidge Danticat. New Yorker, April 23, 202
“Nou se wozo / Menm si nou pliye, nou pap kase.” Even if we bend, we will not break.