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Epistemic relativism and the escape from the real

I thought this description by Mark Bracher of a particular example of ironist cultural criticism could be applied much more widely: “a game in which the ego plays hide-and-seek with itself, trying, by repeating to itself its knowledge that knowledge is always complete, to repress and/or to reduce to the realm of knowledge what always exceeds knowledge – the object a and the drives and fantasies with which it is involved” (pg 145).

To recognise the lack within our knowledge given the nature of the real entails symbolising that lack; as critical realists do with the concepts of ontological realism, epistemic relativism and judgemental rationality. But once we symbolise that lack we have made it part of our knowledge, leaving it within the comforting horizon of the epistemological and licensing a retreat from an ontological encounter. The value I see in speculative realism exists at this interface as an almost aesthetic response to this dilemma, even if I don’t think it has much of an analytical payoff.

There’s a broader point here about how we congratulate ourselves for facing up to a difficult reality when in reality doing the contrary. Our ‘facing up’ to it involves a symbolisation which comforts us through repetition. To make it into knowledge provides an illusion of control which ironically can often preclude action. This might just be a long-winded way of talking about intellectualisation as a psychological defence mechanism i.e. thinking your way around something difficulty with an intensity that supports you in avoiding feeling it.

But I like the sense of ontological drama that the Lacanian perspective brings to it. As well as the aesthetic pleasure to be taken in this, there is an analytical payoff as well as I think because a narrow psychologism would suggests this is ultimately just a cognitive error. Whereas instead we need to examine the underlying propensity towards that ‘error’ which goes much deeper than an applied perspective on ‘fixing’ the problem would suggest. Indeed ‘fixing’ problems could be seen as a perfect example of avoiding the confrontation with the real, in the sense of confining the troubling element to a discrete symptom which can with proper knowledge and technique be expunged forever.

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