Precariousness and the Real

Like Tom B, I've been thinking about the Real a lot recently. Tonight, I was thinking of a conversation I had with him the other day about poetry, in which I said that nice lines were nice and everything, but if that's all they were, if they just made you go "aahhh, that's a nice line" then they were fairly useless, because, after reading the Brecht chapter of Owen Hatherley's book Militant Modernism, I now view that line-making somewhat suspiciously.

As I understand him, Brecht was suspicious of nice lines because it dragged the reader (or the spectator in theatre) into a state of pleasure, encouraging them to both view art as a site for value exchange (you go to a play or read a book in order to "get something out of it") and to suspend their critical faculties. In becoming a product to give its user pleasure, art loses any ability to effect change.

Now, whenever I find myself liking a nice line, I remember Brecht. Nevertheless, there is the possibility of a nice line doing something else. It can be so nice that it goes beyond nice, far beyond it, into something beyond value judgements or questions of taste: the Real. Art is able -- though very, very rarely, see Badiou's chapter on "The Real and Semblance" in The Century -- to access the Real, although only as a glimpse, as a quick-as-lightning flash that darts through the gaps in reality/ideology/culture. The Real is beyond what we know, it is just what simply is. (The Real was the topic for our theory reading group last week, and it was one of the best yet; the point was raised about how you take this theory - its language is so totalising one tends to forget it is a theory that can be accepted or not, just like any other).

It is this quick-as-lightning quality that has interest for precariousness. The Real appears unknowable, unpredictable, and undecipherable. It has no quality, no content, no shape; it does not relate to morals or belief systems. It is -- perhaps -- the ultimate precariousness. The section we read was from Catherine Belsey's book, Culture and the Real. On page 14 she says this: "the real is a question, not an answer". I am writing on the potential for the question to be a key form of precariousness. The Real may turn out to be important.