difference between Lacan and the postmodernists: Although Lacan accepts the priority of the signifier in the formation of meaning he also focuses on the ways this signifier mythologically attempts to embody the real, the ways in which it constructs the imaginary illusion of anchoring our symbolic being to a pre-symbolic level of immediate fulfilment of need. In other words, prioritising the signifier is coupled with exploring the complex ways in which this signifier produces the effect of the signified. The point de capiton is one of these ways. 60
If the role of the point de capiton is necessary (or universal) in structural terms, its particular content (the signified produced by its signifying predominance) is not a matter of mirroring a pre-existing objective reality but of hegemonic struggle. 61
if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions? What stimulates the desire to articulate new constructions of reality?
Dislocation can be conceived as a confrontation with the real.
The real is what destroys, what dislocates this fantasmatic reality, what shows that this reality is lacking.
The real and the not-all
If reality constitutes the symbolically constructed and fantasmatically supported part of objectivity, the real also belongs to the objective level, it is what exceeds the domesticated portion of the objective. It is exactly what accounts for the failure of all symbolic representations of objective reality … the real is not an ultimate referent of external reality but the limit which hinders the neutral representation of external (symbolic) reality … it is exactly what keeps identification from resulting in full identity. … it is exactly what reveals all symbolic truth to be ‘NOT-ALL’, it can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order. 68
… 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
The real dislocates social objectivity 70
WE MUST PRECIPITATE A CRISIS, AN EVENT, THAT CONFRONTS THE LIMITATIONS OF OUR MEANING STRUCTURES