What is the real?

Jacques-Alain Miller

[...]Men how they are, men how they should be... To tell you the truth, it’s totally absurd. To top it all off, it deals with a pronounced formula in a society of characters with wigs who had invented a very sophisticated notion of what’s natural. These characters who lived in an environment specifically codified by human relations that culminated in the court ceremony——it was not called etiquette until the 18th century——had an opinion of men just as they are, of their nature, and, at the same time, of their ideal..

The étiquette as equivoque, meaning label or etiquette. We relate to each other with common etiquettes, little bits of paper or writable surfaces that one finds joined, hung, attached to an object to indicate something which concerns it——its price, its origin, its height, its weight, a significant particle that finds itself linked to it.

I asked myself where the term etiquette came from, which prompted me to find out that I would have to look into the Dutch root, stikkenn, which designates a fishing rod planted in earth, and, from there, a net tied to it to catch fish. It’s about fishing, and there are, as it says in the Bible, fishers of men. Who knows by which channels this word transformed to that of the label that is placed on a cabinet which contains the files of a judicial process. Then——with this we are approaching it——it became the mark which indicates rank in order of precedence. So the etiquette, with a defined article, arrived at designating this very order, the set of etiquettes that assigns each one to his place, and with this, their role.

Since I hold at a distance the question what is the real? I can try in its place a definition of the etiquette. What is the etiquette? The etiquette is a discourse which indicates to each person what should be done, especially in the framework of ceremony. To tell you the truth, it is quite difficult to establish where human beings restrain themselves, in human action, in human society, in ceremony. I even ask about what pertains to the order of the ceremony...[...]

 

art: Saul Fletcher,Untitled #280 (Emma), 2013

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