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.

At some point you had to pick a direction and start swimming: the philosophical anthropology of commitment

I’m slightly haunted by this passage from Lee Cole’s Fulfilment, pg 181-182:

“Love at first sight” made for a good story, but it hadn’t felt that way, not if she was honest with herself. It had felt more like “safety at first sight.” Her father had told her a story once about a time he’d nearly drowned. He’d been swimming in the ocean when the tide came in and he’d lost sight of the shore. For a long time, he treaded water, panic rising, knowing that if he swam in the wrong direction, he would be doomed. Completely disoriented, he decided to pick a point in the distance and start swimming. Soon the thin white line of the beach appeared, the long seagrasses swept back by the wind. Panting, on his hands and knees, he had kissed the sand. This story of her father’s was the closest she came to an explanation. The decade of her twenties had been a blur of intoxication and boredom, of sex with people who cared nothing about her, and about whom she cared even less. She’d been treading water for a long time when she found herself at Beaver’s Tavern on the night in question. At some point, you had to pick a direction and start swimming, and this is what she had done.

There’s also an intellectual challenge in this to a philosophical anthropology of concerns and commitments. This captures in narrative form why I feel the need to stage a dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the realist approach to reflexivity. What the lofty vocabulary of ‘concerns’ and ‘commitments’ fails to recognise is that sometimes people just choose, rather than reflect on what matters to them and what is worthy of their commitment. Those choices then supply their own narrative which can systematically obscure the actual genesis of the commitment which feels solid and meaningful.

In a sense Bourduesian sociology gets this in a way which the realist approach to reflexivity doesn’t but it oversocialises it by incorporating into habitus. Whereas a Lacan approach would I think take the moment of choice here seriously, albeit with the caveat that it’s within a psychic machinery that leaves the person with no choice but to choose i.e. the object of choice is so compelling in that moment, the possession of which would seem to so obviously solve all the problems, that they must of course ‘start swimming’.

To simply ascribe this to habitus misses the psychic texture of the experience, the contingent working out of anxiety, loss and desire in how someone chooses the direction in which they begin to swim. It turns crisis into continuity and fails to recognise the real sense that one must swim or one will drown, at least in that moment.

My point here is not to reject the grammar of commitment but rather to make it psychoanalytically robust. It’s important and shouldn’t be surrendered but I increasingly think it’s (wilfully?) ignorant of a large dimension of human experience.

https://soundcloud.com/frxgxd/philosophy-of-happiness-and-well-being

#archer #bourdieu #commitment #concern #habitus #Lacan #LeeCole #psychoanalysis #sayer #taylor

OHHHH #SAYER S6!!

#audiodrama #podcast

@ me, everyone into #audiodrama #podcasts.

I listen to a lot, I particularly like:

#thebrightsessions
#sayer
#woodenovercoats
#orbitinghumancircus
#themagnusarchives
#theadventurezone #tah
#girlinspace
#eos10
#arsparadoxica
#thephenomenon
#thrillingadventurehour
#thetruth
#ourfaircity

And many more!

Recently finished two back-to-back relistens to "Sayer" (http://geeklyinc.com/category/sayer/). It's awesome to listen along with friends (incl @gregoryaveryweir), one of whom is an English/Urban Edu prof. We end up having discussions of shit like whether it's useful to look at #Sayer as a post-structuralist work.

Despite its flaws, Sayer holds a dear place in my heart and I'm resisting a 3rd relisten since I finished faster than my friends. I love having smart af people to enjoy & critique it with. 😍

#podcast opinions on stuff i started recently

#Sayer is pretty meh so far, feels very "cliche scifi" but it might end up suprising me

#brightsessions is shaping up to be interesting if only for the fact that it has an intersting concept

#itmakesasound is on hold coz it just didn't grab me :/

#withinthewires ending was quite good and I TOTALLY CALLED IT! it was the cliff!
also whattt, a premium SEASON!?
i mean, they gotta feed themselves but that feels so weird