The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in a manner which reflects the concerns we develop and order as we elaborate upon our capacity for reflexivity.

There’s an interesting parallel to the Lacanian concept of desire. We always relate to reality through our desire, such that we can never respond neutrally to an inert world. Indeed that notion is itself a potent fantasy which needs to be read in terms of the difficulty of negotiating precisely this predicament. As Todd McGowan observes on loc 2366 of the Cambridge Companion to Lacan, this desire is constitutive of our visual field:

The most basic distortion that desire creates occurs through what we perceive and what we don’t. Certain objects appear more prominently than others because they appeal to our desire while the others don’t. If I’m looking at a shelf of books, I might notice Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit while not perceiving the book next to it, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. (Or perhaps if I’m a little misguided, the opposite will occur.) Desire distributes value throughout what we perceive as reality, but it does not distribute value evenly. The distinctions that we make throughout the social reality emerge from how we desire, not from the inherent worth of the objects in this reality.

It means that our experience of objects can shift as our desire shifts. What at one moment shows up to us as impossibly alluring, might at another suddenly become an inert thing we’re now mystified about our past reaction to. This is the difference between concern and desire: concern is a response to the external world, desire constitutes that world for us.

Can these two concepts be held conjointly? I suspect they can, in the sense that concern captures our evaluative capacity while obscuring the murkiness of the psychic machinery driving our affective responses, while desire misses the former much as it provides a substantial theory of the latter. To find some way of holding them both in the same frame of reference would, I think, mean seeing them as moments in a wider psychic economy through which the world shows up to us as always already meaningful and always already mattering.

The problem arises because Lacanians would argue desire cannot be articulated. Once it is articulated it becomes a demand, losing something of the desire underlying it which by its nature resists symbolisation. This means that identifying the desire in internal conversation and/or articulating it to others misses something crucial. The way round this I think would be to accept there’s always some degree of missed understanding with ourselves, some sense in which we fail to meet ourselves even when we’re trying to do just that. In this senes the Lacanian contribution could be to provide a psychological theory of the fallibilism which critical realists assert but don’t theorise in any substantial way with regards to reflexivity.

#archer #concern #desire #Lacan #sayer

"How do we listen in anthropology?" I am putting my reputation as a legal anthropologist on the line here in going to talk about #Lacan for the first time to an #anthropology audience! Come listen to me Monday 18.5. @[email protected] Oettingenstr. 67, 4.15pm! www.en.ethnologie.uni-muenchen.de/download/dat...

“The truth requires us to go out of our way. We cannot do so by simply getting used to it. We get used to reality [réel]. The truth we repress.” #Lacan, J., “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits, trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton, 2006, p. 433.

Heidegger on Lacan: “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist”

From Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan loc 1152:

For his part, Heidegger never even attempted to work through Lacan’s theory. When Lacan sent him a copy of his Écrits in 1966, Heidegger claimed in response, “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist.”16 Like many of Lacan’s readers, Heidegger couldn’t make head nor tail of the written essays because he did not have the transcripts of the much more intelligible seminars to consult.

#Heidegger #Lacan

Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060:

The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just two parties – someone looking and what is seen. The imaginary relationship is a dualistic one that fails to account for the influence of a third party on this dualistic interaction. From within the imaginary perspective, I consider only what’s on my computer screen, not the structure that makes it possible for me to view this screen, including the labor that produced my computer in the first place and the coding that mediates my encounter. Seeing a direct, one-on-one relationship with the image amounts to falling for an imaginary lure. Lacan wants to bring the symbolic and real to light to counter the blinding power of this lure.

What he terms the third party here can equally be framed as infrastructure: “the structure that makes it possible”. I had a conversation with Richard Sandford yesterday about algorithmic folklore which was lingering in my mind as I read this. Could the stories we tell about algorithms be framed as attempts to incorporate the infrastructure into the imaginary? They turn the absent structure into a real presence which evokes stories and ideas in us about what it is and what it wants. It turns the third into a dyadic relationship in which I am directly confronting the algorithm and trying to decipher its desire. In doing so we lose contact with the negativity inherent in grappling with the limits of the Imaginary, as Todd puts it on loc 2078:

Enthralled by the imaginary, we can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t see that we can’t see everything. While the subject allows itself to be captivated by images, absence disappears in the surfeit of presence. The problem with the imaginary is that it is too visible: We see the imaginary as a whole and never see what it’s missing – namely, the symbolic order and the real.

I wonder what happens to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which I’ve never liked, if we read it through this frame? The Imaginary is comforting because it forecloses a deeper engagement with a reality which is disorientating and beyond our full comprehension. Rather than sociotechnical imaginaries being essentially a synonym for ‘shared vision’ we can read them as a defence mechanism through which engagements with infrastructure are transposed into a more comforting register. What would sociotechnical Imaginaries (the capital marking the Lacanian spin) look like if we see them as operating in this way? What’s their relationship to, say, moments of breakdown when the infrastructural bursts into conscious awareness through its sudden mode of failure? What would this framing mean for the repair and care work involved in sustaining infrastructure?

#algorithmicFolkelore #imaginary #infrastructure #Lacan #sociotechnicalImaginaries #ToddMcGowan

"The lie is the inclusion of the symbolic in the real..." by Florencia Shanahan, Lacanian psychoanalyst. Maybe of interest: @[email protected] @[email protected] nlscongress2026.amp-nls.org/en/fake-and-... #Lacan #psychoanalysis

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“Meaning holds because something is barred. #AI offers a different kind of substitution: it answers and organises, giving the appearance of inexhaustible coherence. Rather than limiting jouissance, it may intensify its circuits...” #Lacan #psychoanalysis nlscongress2026.amp-nls.org/en/knowledge...

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Das Wort zum Sonntag: 2026 genießt man die Netzautorität und vergisst die Herren dahinter. Und mit Revolution hat das natürlich auch nichts mehr zu tun. Sad. #Lacan