The Map Is Indestructible (Part 3) by O.G. Rose

If reality is relational, we cannot escape maps, but the same also holds if reality is ultimately abyssal and/or “lacking,” which leads us to the work of Žižek. Now, a “relational reality” and “essentially lacking reality” are not necessarily exclusive positions, and it’s possible that we experience an “essential lack” precisely because we must always lack “the other” to which we relate: in other words, perhaps we are always “passing over” into an otherness (A/B) that we cannot access. In fact, if “things don’t exist” and yet we must experience things “as if “ reality consists of things (Understanding, A/A), that alone suggests an “essential lack,” for we lack the capacities to experience reality like it actually “is” (perhaps “Fundamentally Nonlocal,” as Kaufman discusses, or “Dialectically Material” like Žižek considers). Ultimately though, if models of Relational Metaphysics are wrong and hence it doesn’t follow that “maps are indestructible” for that reason, we might be able to establish another ontological reason for “indestructible maps” if Žižek is right and humans can’t handle a Real without maps. If that was so, reality would consists of “maps we cannot destroy without a psychotic break,” which would mean “maps are (practically) indestructible,” returning us to our dilemma.
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Photo by Alex Azabache