As soon as we recognise the centrality of dislocation in our experience, we can easily understand the play between possibility and impossibility governing the field of social construction. If it is construction that makes possible the sedimentation of social reality, this reality is always threatened by an encounter with impossibility, with the part of the real that escapes the boundaries of construction.
… dislocation and the lack it creates in our representations of reality, is exactly what stimulates our new attempts to construct new representations of this real.
This play between possibility and impossibility, construction and dislocation, is structurally equivalent to the play between identification and its failure which marks the subjective level. However, this argumentation is still located at the level of a certain phenomenology of the social.
How can we further approach the status of this element which stimulates our desire to represent it through social construction, but which, due to the impossibility to represent it fully, returns to dislocate all our social constructions?
It is here that Lacanian theory can be of great help. In Lacan, the cause of this play between possibility and impossibility is, of course, the real. This is then the paradox of Lacans relation to constructionist argumentation. Lacan is not a mere constructionist because he is a real-ist; that is to say, in opposition to standard versions of constructionism Lacanian theory of symbolic meaning and fantasmatic coherence can only make sense in its relation to the register of a real which is radically external to the level of construction.
This Lacanian real-ism is, however, alien to all other standard versions of epistemological realism in the sense that this real is not the ultimate referent of signification, it is not something representable, but exactly the opposite, the impossible which dislocates reality from within.
The real does not exist in the sense of being adequately represented in reality; its effects however are disrupting and changing reality, its consequences are felt within the field of representation. 69