What isn't real?

Ceci n'est pas un toad.

Today I entered the bathroom at work at the same time as another man I'd never met. He placed his briefcase on one of the sinks and we both went our ways. When I returned to wash my hands his briefcase was still blocking the sink – the one with the soap dispenser and the decent water pressure. So I went to the other sink. He quickly realized his faux pas and went to retrieve his briefcase, saying, "here, this sink has real water." He seemed to recognize how odd his word choice sounded, so he added with some apparent irony, "as opposed to fake water…virtual water."

I smiled politely but didn't say anything. I was thinking about this blog post I started writing months ago but never finished:

What is real?

My habit in constructing meanings of words, for good or ill, is generally to consider etymologies. So for me "real" is above all an adjective form of the Latin "res," which simply means "thing." So the real is the world of things. But that's too vague or too fundamental to get us very far.

The essence of reality is such an enduring enigma that it feels like a cliché even to raise the question. Perhaps a back door might be more interesting: What isn't real?

What often strikes me most in discussions of the real is the array of terms people seem to implicitly accept as antonyms for the real:

• artificial. This should properly be an antonym for "natural." The artificial is the product of artifice, of art-making, or more fundamentally, of skill-doing. So anything made or done by means of skill is artificial.
• synthetic. Closely related to 'artificial' in common parlance. Etymologically, however, synthesis means combining, putting things in the same place. The synthetic is that which emerges from combinations of (presumably) non-synthetic elements. If you ever encounter something non-synthetic, please let me know. But don't tell those geeks at the particle physics research lab; you'll ruin their day.
• virtual. This comes to us by way of optics. A virtual image is one which, reflected or projected by a mirror or lens, appears somewhere other than the focus. It cannot be captured by placing a reflective surface at the point where it appears to be, because it's not really there. In digital media the word is used analogically to refer to something that exists only in a flow of digital bits and has no direct meatspace correlate.
• imaginary. The imaginary has a status comparable to that of the digital-virtual, except that the flow of electrons is in our brains rather than in a digital network. However the etymology suggests that mental life consists of images – a notion which I join WJT Mitchell in questioning (see "What is an Image?", Iconology). Of course one can hardly discuss the imaginary without reference to Jacques Lacan's theory of registers: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. But note that the Real is nothing like the real and has more in common with what common parlance labels imaginary and symbolic.
• representational. The problem with separating the real from the representational is, of course, that we only have access to the real by way of our intrinsically representational senses. And we only process these sense-data by way of previously structured symbolic systems, which are intrinsically social. So it is impossible to recognize something utterly new on its own terms.
• mediated. Despite the claims of "immediacy" made by cheerleaders of the digital revolution, we are as mediated as ever. It's just a little quicker. Speed and scale are not to be underestimated – as Mark Poster notes, "quantity 'dialectically' transmutes into quality" ("Words Without Things", The Mode of Information). But they give no short circuit to unmediated experience. Today people write more than ever because the extreme reductionist information parsimony of text allows it to be produced and sent around the globe in seconds. But that parsimony is an extraordinary communicative trade-off (mediation), regardless of the innovation of emoticons. The more we love speed (one sense of 'immediacy'), the more mediated we render ourselves.
• intentional. In the emotionalist ideology, the first, raw, unfiltered response one gives to any situation is the real one, and anything later, more considered, is secondary, mediated (see above). This notion seems to deprivilege what in Freudian terms would be called the superego – the repressive filter that keeps the id and the ego down below the surface in order to accommodate getting along with others. (A closely related word is "tendentious"). I've read interviews with David Lynch where he seemed to disclaim any planning or intentionality in his films – his astonishing intricacies of plot and symbolic entanglements, he would have us believe, emerge organically, as if he had opened a vein on his psyche.
• ironic. The ironic is like the intentional in its purported secondarity. Irony is a distantiating stance, a standing apart from oneself (an ecstasy), seeing oneself as other and commenting on oneself. Philosophers and comedians, according to Paul de Man, bear the cursed gift of irony ("The Rhetoric of Temporality"). The trouble with distinguishing the ironic from the real is that it presupposes one can make any utterance without at the same time observing it and therefore redirecting it by the power of the gaze.
• electronic. See virtual (sense 2).
• academic. I've been told by classmates that I have "a real job." This is in apparent contradistinction to their jobs as teaching assistants, despite the fact that they're doing the real work of teaching introductory courses to undergraduates, which frees up senior faculty to focus their time and energy on the more stimulating and collegial work of advanced classes. The academic is that which is purportedly meaningful only within the halls of higher learning – an enclave thought to stand apart from "the real world." I mistrust that term since it simultaneously endorses the supposed unreality of academia and the supposed reality of … what -- commerce? capital? Both fundamentally symbolic systems. They disappear, or at least go into crisis, the moment people stop believing in them. And let's not forget that a university is a business. Since I work for a university, apparently my real job is not in the real world. I'm like Marianne Moore's real toad in an imaginary garden. The real/academic distinction recalls Jean Baudrillard's notion of Disneyland – the only real place on earth, which we project as a fantasy in order to distract us from the fantasies on which our "real" social systems depend. We call "the real world" real (and even boast of our efforts to introject "real-world experience" into our teaching) in order to convince ourselves that a) the world outside of academia provides an unmediated anchor in substance, however externalized, and b) we remain unsullied by this too, too solid flesh.
• theoretical. Theory is made up of words and pictures, both of which entail physical phenomena. Theory is typically oriented toward producing real effects. Every day millions of cars pass safely over bridges that, in Peter Gabriel's words, "were once just a dream in somebody's head" ("Mercy Street", So). Some people even earn a comfortable living producing nothing but theory. Theory, in short, is a practice.

Other examples I could cite would likely be functionally derivative of these concepts. For example, in my family of origin, once my sisters were old enough to despise their bodies, our milk consumption was bifurcated into skim milk and "real milk". (Later these became, respectively "girl milk" and "boy milk", but that's a whole 'nother blog post.) This distinction referred to the supposed artificiality of skim milk, despite the fact that "real milk" is produced by cows that are artificially controlled, fed, medicated, selected for reproduction, inseminated, maintained in perpetual lactation, milked, killed, butchered, and cannibalized, and whose product is homogenized, pasteurized, fortified, sealed in plastic, distributed, advertised, exchanged, symbolized, and ultimately consumed and metabolized in a curious inter-species relationship of exploitive nurturance. The additional artifice of skimming off some of the fat and applying it to other products hardly seems worth a mention in that context.

An in-class exercise in my Production Workshop class asked us to define "fact." I was struck by how many of the definitions used the word "actual." The actual is the world of acts; it is the verb to the noun of the real. My question was: is a thought an act? If so, then what isn't actual?

From the list above I can't think of a single item that isn't real, that isn't imbricated in the world of things. Artifice and synthesis entail the acts of real persons on real things. (Can unreal entities be composed of real entities?) All the rest of these phenomena entail, at least, flows of electrons, photons, neurotransmitters, pulses of differential air pressure – the stuff our world is made on.

Got more antonyms? Please post a reply. It gets lonely in this virtual prison of the real.