What is real is that which creates mistakes. If one accepts that real is the “residue which can be caught neither in the mirror of the imaginary nor in the grids of the symbolic” then one sees real as a fundamentally oppositional force. Real resists attempts at classification and replication, injecting little bits of failure into feeble attempts to understand it. Thus, real is in some sense a signal of itself: through its flaws, we detect its presence.

It is real when the mistaken gesture betrays humanity. “The fuzziness of the pictures in the cinema” is what makes them real—indeed, perhaps more real than our “reality.” As real resists attempts to seize a monopoly on it, the forces of the symbolic push down on it. Where the real exists, the fabrication is imperfect. Turing’s machine is only real until it actually begins to work: to be perceived as real by others is to remove the nature of being real for oneself. Such is the case as optical fibers remove the faults inherent in fabrication and prevents the real from sneaking through into other realms.

Thus, we are left to question whether the future is real, or merely a product of its own imagination.