it's like the matrix!

"... once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates..." lacan 190, rice & waugh

my photographer friend said the real no longer exists because it's images and preconceptions of its own reality (the real's reality) have gone beyond catching up with the "actual" real, the images and preconceptions of the real now become constitutive of the real so that one must wonder if the real was ever in the first place a tangible thing. but even with such a question of the real as something that is tangible, all thoughts focused on the real cease to revolve around it and instead, move past it or through it making the real intangible in the first place as a reference point for a discourse that moves far beyond the original start- into the hyperreal. or i think what baudrillard means is that the real is not necessarily exhausted or obsolete but neglected, an antique or artifact made by the proliferating images of mass media (the signs of the real's reality, or existence) that are extending our realities into a "science fiction". yeah, i'm sure he'd roll over in his grave. still it goes to show that what baudrillard implies is that the hyperreal is more real than real.

now what is your symptom? that is the interesting question if one was to employ such an extreme approach to the "i' and subjectivity, i believe an inevitable psychosis would arrive or, materialize to the surface. it's scary stuff to delve into, to even think that your image or the signs you project are moving beyond your own subjectivity, and scripting your texts for you. death to the individual!