The Flawed Script: A Goose, a Common, and the Spectral Other

The legal meat-grinder churns, a bio-mechanical Moloch. It devours the petty thief, the one who snatches the feathered signifier, the goose, from the commons – the free-floating, pre-symbolic Real. This desperate act, a twitch in the fabric of the social order, is punished with brutal finality. A public display of cause and effect, a suturing of the rent with the bloody needle of the law.

A goose, you say? A banal signifier, a phallus for the masses, easily grasped, easily digested by the Law’s maw. But the script, this social control program, this matrix we call reality, oh, it runs far deeper. Behind the scrim of ownership, lurks the Big Grab, the Enclosure. The powerful, the Lacanian Other, the Symbolic order itself, fences off the commons, the Real, the source of all meaning. They steal the very ground from which the goose, any goose, can even be conceived. This theft, this act of severing the subject from the jouissance of the Real, is the primal crime.

The petty thief, a pawn, dances to the script’s melody. He hungers for the surface symbol, the meat of the goose. But the true player, the puppeteer behind the Law, craves a different sustenance. They feed on the raw, unsymbolized energy, the repressed libido, the very life force stolen from the commons.

But the greater parasite, the one unseen, escapes the grinder’s maw. This spectral Other, a Lacanian master lurking in the shadows, has orchestrated the theft of the commons itself. They’ve fenced it in, transformed the open field of desire into a codified enclosure. The goose, once a wild element, becomes a commodity, a signifier chained to the symbolic order.

We, the divided subjects, forever yearning for the lost wholeness of the Real, are left with the scraps. We chase phantoms, the reflected image of the goose in the distorting mirror of the market. The law, a malfunctioning script, reinforces this fractured reality. It punishes the desperate symptom, the man or woman driven by lack, while the true crime – the theft of the symbolic commons – continues unaddressed.

This is the obscene theater of our existence, a Burroughs-esque cut-up of reality. We are all junkies, hooked on the signifiers dangled before us. The goose, once a source of sustenance for the collective flock, becomes a mere token in the endless exchange.

Here’s the rub, here’s the Burroughs-esque cut-up: the goose itself is a code. Its honk, a message from the Id, a chaotic squawk the Law struggles to decipher. Stealing the goose is a rebellion, a glitch in the matrix. The act disrupts the script, exposes the power grab behind the charade of ownership.

But the game’s rigged. The commons are shrinking, fenced in by legalese and barbed wire. The goose, once a wild squawker, becomes a processed patty, another empty signifier on a supermarket shelf. The revolution, if there is one, lies in hacking the script, rewriting the code. Perhaps the goose, that symbol of primal desire, can become the key, the virus that infects the system, that honks its way back to the unfettered commons, the Real, the source.

The only escape? Perhaps a radical re-writing of the script. A cut-up revolution, a dismantling of the symbolic order itself. To reclaim the commons, the wild goose of desire, we must confront the spectral Other, expose their machinations. Only then can we break free from the law’s flawed script and enter the uncharted territory of the Real. But be warned, the path is fraught with danger. The journey may lead to madness, to a dissolution of the self.

But what choice do we have? The alternative is an eternity of chasing phantoms in a fenced-in world.