Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.
That idealist complacency, the certainty that we not only make ourselves, but also make the world in our own minds, confining what exists to consciousness and erasing the real in the process, may be one of the most dangerous features of Western culture in the twenty-first century.
While idealism does not overtly ally itself with the West’s depredation of the planet or its militaristic foreign policy, a theory that materiality is no more than the effect of culture offers no grounds for repudiating either of these practices. On the contrary, the conviction that what exists depends on our idea of it helps to disconnect our lifestyle from the damage it causes. 58
THE INCURSION OF THE REAL
There is some evidence, however, that the irreducible real is beginning to put up a resistance to our wasteful, culturally scripted habits, and to make itself knowable in the form of melting icecaps, floods, forest fires and high levels of skin cancer. Sadly, the West, which has done most to bring this about, only grudgingly acknowledges the situation, at least explicitly, while at the same time scrambling for control of the planet’s remaining natural resources. 60
Why was 9/11 so shocking? Perhaps because it represented the momentary incursion of the unknowable real into an increasingly idealist culture. The destruction of the twin towers seemed unheralded, inexplicable, unaccountable, out of our control. In the immediate aftermath of the event, sophisticated commentators, including Žižek, delighted in maintaining that 9/11 was first and foremost a media spectacle, reproducing in actuality an already-familiar Hollywood fantasy. … These planes were not a repressed fragment of our own psyche but, on the contrary, a violent material intrusion from outside. Idealism could not accommodate them.
Paradoxically, to deny the real is also to claim to know for sure. The subject can never achieve such surety, the correspondence between world and consciousness that was Hegel’s goal. Nor can it confidently assert even the more modest conviction that what we don’t know doesn’t matter. How can we be sure even of that, when we can be certain of nothing? 61
What idealism misses, he maintains, is the crucial contribution of psychoanalysis, its understanding of the continuity between the subject and the world, interrupted but not finally erased by the advent of the symbolic order. We remain marked by the lost but inextricable real. The subject is alienated by the Otherness of the signifier and the consequent lack in being, with its propensity at any moment to subtract something from coherent thought or speech. We are subject to temporary disappearances from the signifying chain, liable at any moment to fade. Indeed,
[Lacan quote] “this is the essential flaw in philosophical idealism which, in any case, cannot be sustained and has never been radically sustained. There is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis [fading] of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established.” (1979, 221) 62