The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in a manner which reflects the concerns we develop and order as we elaborate upon our capacity for reflexivity.
There’s an interesting parallel to the Lacanian concept of desire. We always relate to reality through our desire, such that we can never respond neutrally to an inert world. Indeed that notion is itself a potent fantasy which needs to be read in terms of the difficulty of negotiating precisely this predicament. As Todd McGowan observes on loc 2366 of the Cambridge Companion to Lacan, this desire is constitutive of our visual field:
The most basic distortion that desire creates occurs through what we perceive and what we don’t. Certain objects appear more prominently than others because they appeal to our desire while the others don’t. If I’m looking at a shelf of books, I might notice Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit while not perceiving the book next to it, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. (Or perhaps if I’m a little misguided, the opposite will occur.) Desire distributes value throughout what we perceive as reality, but it does not distribute value evenly. The distinctions that we make throughout the social reality emerge from how we desire, not from the inherent worth of the objects in this reality.
It means that our experience of objects can shift as our desire shifts. What at one moment shows up to us as impossibly alluring, might at another suddenly become an inert thing we’re now mystified about our past reaction to. This is the difference between concern and desire: concern is a response to the external world, desire constitutes that world for us.
Can these two concepts be held conjointly? I suspect they can, in the sense that concern captures our evaluative capacity while obscuring the murkiness of the psychic machinery driving our affective responses, while desire misses the former much as it provides a substantial theory of the latter. To find some way of holding them both in the same frame of reference would, I think, mean seeing them as moments in a wider psychic economy through which the world shows up to us as always already meaningful and always already mattering.
The problem arises because Lacanians would argue desire cannot be articulated. Once it is articulated it becomes a demand, losing something of the desire underlying it which by its nature resists symbolisation. This means that identifying the desire in internal conversation and/or articulating it to others misses something crucial. The way round this I think would be to accept there’s always some degree of missed understanding with ourselves, some sense in which we fail to meet ourselves even when we’re trying to do just that. In this senes the Lacanian contribution could be to provide a psychological theory of the fallibilism which critical realists assert but don’t theorise in any substantial way with regards to reflexivity.
Mark Carrigan 