Charlottenstrasse

After some tinkering, this blog has firmly reverted to ‘Charlotte Street’, a partial explanation of this title is now to found in the right hand margin. The quote is from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Some of you may prefer the Kaiser and Wilkins translation:

‘.. and if he had not know that he lived in Charlotte Street, a quiet street but still a city street, he might have believed that his window gave on a desert waste where grey sky and grey land blended indistinguishably into each other.’

c.f. Zizek, ‘Desert of the Real’:

[In the Matrix] the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real."

The ‘matrix computer programme could indeed be read as the symbolic order itself [even though it isn't really] – the codes and articulations without which the world collapses into an undifferentiated continuum, taking with it the tremulous compass of the ‘I’ .

Perhaps the clearest exposition of the Lacanian ‘Real’, though, is provided by Bruce Fink:

Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere.. It is a sort of smooth seamless surface [..] The division of the real into separate zones, distinct features and contrasting structures is a result of the symbolic order, which, in a manner of speaking, cuts into the smooth façade of the real, creating divisions, gaps, and distinguishable entities and laying the real to reast, that is, drawing or sucking it into th symbols used to describe it [..]
Cancelling out the real, the symbolic creates ‘reality’, reality as that which is named by language and can thus be thought and talked about .

Fink adds:

Language no doubt ever completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left.'

And in limit situations, at the penumbra of the Symbolic, we are uncannily aware of that residuum. It is here, at this limit, in 'Charlottenstrasse' that Kafka lives.

So, to return to Charlotte Street, house addresses do not exist ‘in the Real’, they are simply a more or less arbitrary way of partitioning it, a form of Symbolic articulation. Nonetheless, such arbitrary divisions and articulations, as Kafka saw, are the necessary infrastructure of the human subject. Indeed, this is why Kafka is barely human himself.

And so, we might 'translate' the above passage as : were it not for my ‘address’ (my registered place in the Symbolic Order, as well as my symbolic mandate) my world would collapse into the featureless greyness of the Real which subtends it. Gregor Samsa, losing his footing in the Symbolic Order (most immediately, that of the family), becoming progressively stripped of ‘world’ (in the Heideggerian sense) slides into the ‘undistinguished’ proto-world of animal or insect. His place in the Symbolic Order (his world) is so fragile that what is beyond that Order seems to seep though, like bubbles in the wallpaper. For Samsa, only the increasingly residual and delicate knowledge of his ‘place’ stands between him and the ‘desert’ of the Real.


In occasional airs his siren song sings

With its terrible lonely elation

He flew from the world on folio wings,

His final transformation.