The Real
[7][8][9] In depth psychology and human geography, the Real can be described as a "negative space", analogous to a "black hole", a philosophical void of sociality and subjectivity, a traumatic consensus of intersubjectivity, or as an absolute noumenalness between signifiers.[27]A master signifier (S1) organizes narrative (S2): a defensive form of discourse that is an ideological reaction to the Real: i.e., mythic explanation, hero's journey, storytelling, theme, pathos, ethos, plot, conflict, closure.[46] Felluga states that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's term antagonism, as a societal limit that sits outside of society's articulation, functions similarly to the Real.[51][50]The ineffable, unary signifier of lack (phallus) stitches the unconscious drives to jouissance, dialectically bridging language and desire (logos and eros, the Apollonian and the Dionysian).[74][75][76][77] [T]he fantasm of a devouring orality or of a return to the maternal breast refers to a mother who is neither real, imaginary, nor symbolic but who is cosmic becoming; it is a Universe of processual emergence as much as of abolition.[...] he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius.[80]These objects a take shape as the consequence of repressions, disguises, dissociations, fragmentations, deflections, intellectualizations, reductions, displacements, and discussions, which [...] cover over, and point to, the fact that the traumatic event cannot be assimilated [...] The Real [...] "appears" as failures, ruptures, and inconsistencies caused by the tuché.[82][83] Although the encircling of the Real (Lacan) or constellations (Adorno) tells us that we can never truly grasp the object, our approaching it from different angles of contextual perspectives takes place through a thinking subject who draws on concepts.[138] In practice, Lacanian psychoanalysis derives the event by gazing at the resistance and transference to identify the automaton mechanisms of the Thing (viz., foreclosure, repression, and disavowal) that are utilized to anamorphosically read where the signifiers are hiding the symptomatic objet petit (a), rendering the real subject.[146] Lacan finds in this sublimated image [of the object-as-Thing] the function of an Até, the 'divinization' of a 'limit' that simultaneously draws us toward and keeps us a safe distance from that which 'represents the disqualification of all concepts,' that which represents the void of the 'empty' Real (262).To begin with, the split between "real" and "true" serves only to avoid any confrontation between practice and theory, between lived experience and concepts, so that both sides of these dualities are distorted from the outset.[157] Premodern philosophers also thought up a formless chora, a pre-universal "chaos", and the experience of horror vacui;[158] these conceptions of an unguided ego confronting the void informed psychoanalysis.[159] It prefigured Lacan's outline of how the subject-as-metaphor, later the analysand, encounters the Real and how this experience is slated in analysis to give rise to pathologies, particularly anxieties and traumas.[174]An impasse is the resistance between the real and the imaginary that affects the therapeutic alliance, wherein the client is at odds with the Transcendent Function of the therapist's mind as mediation to the Symbolic Order by way of the Signifier-as-God (i.e., discrepancy).Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.[220] Collective intelligence Collective action Self-organized criticality Herd mentality Phase transition Agent-based modelling Synchronization Ant colony optimization Particle swarm optimization Swarm behaviour Social network analysis Small-world networks Centrality Motifs Graph theory Scaling Robustness Systems biology Dynamic networks Evolutionary computation Genetic algorithms Genetic programming Artificial life Machine learning Evolutionary developmental biology Artificial intelligence Evolutionary robotics Reaction–diffusion systems Partial differential equations Dissipative structures Percolation Cellular automata Spatial ecology Self-replication Conversation theory Entropy Feedback Goal-oriented Homeostasis Information theory Operationalization Second-order cybernetics Self-reference System dynamics Systems science Systems thinking Sensemaking Variety Ordinary differential equations Phase space Attractors Population dynamics Chaos Multistability Bifurcation Rational choice theory Bounded rationality [ Baruch Spinoza ] recognize[s] only three, or primary, affects: joy, sadness, and desire [and Deleuze interprets desire as the "reflection, derivation, and correlation" of the set of ideas that represent "all power" that "is inseparable from a capacity for being affected"].[221][222]In critical overviews of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the Real has been identified, particularly in readings of A Thousand Plateaus, as the plane of defamiliarized and deterritorialized empty signifiers that approach the uncanny valley, destroyed signs of an imploding gaze, and a-temporal semiotic black holes of faciality.[239] The real is a diagrammatic virtuality of reality (or Nature), onticly surpassing all regimes of signs by the merging of content and expression in the body without organs.[241]Slavoj Žižek divides the gist of the Lacanian Real into "three modalities":[242][243][244] Lewis states that the real-of-the-symbolic is the letter (referenced in Lacan's schemas), and the real-of-the-imaginary is objet petit a.[278] Žižek cites, as literary examples of the Real which he identifies as "the primordial abyss which swallows everything, dissolving all identities", the eldritch experience of Pip in the ocean in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, regression and the repetition compulsion of characterological desire in death drive within Poe's Maelström,[279][247][280] and the climax of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Kurtz is in the throes of death.In The Matrix, for example, the symbolic Real is given expression at the point where Neo perceives "reality" in terms of the abstract streams of digital output.