(Inspired most recently by this random ask about metanarratives, but for people just stumbling on the topic check out this SSC post “Postmodernism for Rationalists”. And when discussing pomo, I am always reminded of this tweet by St_Rev: Postmodernism is like nuclear fission; true but too dangerous for humans to be trusted with.)
Let’s back up a bit. Lacan broke down mental experience into three parts: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. I’m going to accept this, but a) ignore the Imaginary, and b) append Social to Symbolic because they are the same. Which is to say:
Our experience of the world consists of the Real and the Social/Symbolic. What does that mean?
The Real is well, actual reality that exists independent of human understanding. It’s the stuff that’s still there if you close your eyes. It’s the fact that there isn’t enough food no matter what the Emperor says, or that we will all one day die, or the cruelty of cancer, or the unimaginable gulf between the stars. It is the reality that victory goes to the side with more guns not the nobler cause, or that some people won’t get along no matter how much you love them both and try to negotiate peace.
The Real is usually far too complicated and chaotic and unbounded for us to comprehend. Like in the question of “when were the Dark Ages” in the linked SSC post, the Real is all the individual lives and experiences of people over that time period. It’s too big to even put into words, but it’s still undeniably there. Any attempt to just ignore the Real is called repression, and the Real will eventually rise from that and disrupt your plans.
The Symbolic is our attempt to make any sense of the above. It is how we split infinitely varied things into simple categories and binaries, like the insistence that everyone is male or female (or good vs bad.) It is the map instead of the territory, and *every single word* we use is just a Symbolic interpretation of far too messy Real. (Like this post recently asking just what is a boss anyway? Or the well written post “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”) Whenever we try to say something about every type of apple, or define what “life” is, or come up with an ideology that pits an obvious group of good guys and bad guys, or just try to predict the results of a scientific experiment with a probability curve, we are still thinking using the Symbolic.
This is not a huge sin. After all, we can not actually think about the ineffable Real, let alone communicate about it. If we want to make any progress at all, either in reasoning about the world or working with others, we *have* to use the Symbolic. It’s like physicists using models assuming spherical cows - it gets you somewhere, eventually, at least. (Certainly a tribe using imperfect Symbolic thinking would outcompete and defeat a bunch of brainiacs just meditating on the Real. Existence without using the Symbolic is just not sustainable.)
I even upgrade the term to Social/Symbolic since all of our social existence depends on how we use the Symbolic to express concepts to others. That’s well, what language is. And once you have a Symbolic term, and you share it with another via mouth-sounds or ink-scratches, then it takes on an independent Symbolic existence that can be read and interpreted by people who are neither you nor your intended target. Then these symbols really do have an external existence, spreading throughout the population, with no direction by a conscious mind. Words and concepts are like a virus living in the social body this way.
The narrative or metanarrative, is a Social/Symbolic entity this way - fairly detached from the Real that gave it meaning, and evolving based on what is most efficient for the social rules it inhabits.
Two brief examples:
- Science. Science is obviously a quest for the Real, and that is admirable. And yet even when trying hardest to do this, we create standards of objectivity and merit that reflect Social/Symbolic understanding. We talk of p-values and grant writing and peer review and hundreds of ways this search for the most raw truth is filtered through simplistic understanding, and incentive schemes that have long since become normal status-seeking rat races.
- Capitalism. Markets are a method of social relation of course. And yet the values and prices of things fluctuate in response to the necessities of the Real. If food becomes scarce, or a movie is truly terrible, or a new writer is brilliant beyond precedence, no matter how unexpected these things are to the powers that be, they can earn money and renowned in a market, proving some glimmer of the Real in doing so. Now the price of something is not an untainted mark of its true value, but it is at least related to it somehow.
Anyway, the tumblr version of Postmodernism (which is to say, that version that is most politically useful to the class of people who have currently discovered this concept - laypeople arguing about politics on social media) could be reduced to this:
1. In no cases do we ever know the Real, without relying on narratives found in the Social/Symbolic. (We can’t know when the Dark Ages began or ended.)
2. So choose which narratives you want to pursue based on Social/Symbolic reasons. (Do you want to align yourself with the narrative of the Dark Ages spread by the Catholic Church? By labor historians? Etc.)
The problem with these is that are true, but also noxious, as they would always mean dropping the evidence of our own eyes for the narrative of the class we are trying to support. And people who do this too much are very evidently stupid (in action, not in essence.) We see the results of this in Holocaust deniers and Stalin apologists and 9-11 truthers.
The issue is that they are forgetting that the symmetric case is true: the complete Real may be inaccessible *but so is the complete Social/Symbolic*. While amateur pomo knows you can never completely reach the Real, it forgets you can never *escape* it either.
In actuality, total Social/Symbolic is an eternal fantasy. It is referenced in FALC or the singularity, where you are immune from any needs and can spend all your time engaging with only concepts, or only the social sphere you have chosen, free of all messy entanglements. It is a powerful dream (or nightmare), with a lot to say for it, but it’s as impossible as knowing the mind of God. There will always be some element of the Real under the fantasy, repressed and pushing back in the ways we least expect or want.
Everything we know is between two asymptotes - which can approach the Real, but never reach it, and we can approach the pure Social/Symbolic but never realize it.
So an attempt to choose your narrative *solely* on Social/Symbolic grounds (like which side you want to support) will find itself constantly interrupted by rude counter-evidence. It might be the people voting against you, or your story not selling, or just an anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach. It’s really impossible to predict how the Real will erupt, but it always will.
You have to accept you are just stuck as a mutt in the muddled middle, never have authentic Real knowledge or pure Social/Symbolic simplicity, but a mix of both at all times.
