attention without closure

Desire sustained by non-arrival: objet a is not an object one could possess but the cause of desire, approached only through substitutes, which is why getting what you wanted so rarely resolves the wanting. The structure is old; the engineering of it is recent. A system that let a sorting process reach confident closure would lose exactly the engagement withholding closure produces — the instrumentalised case in autonomous or captured. An object that causes attention without resolving into anything nameable is therefore not a failure of representation; given the gap, it may be the only honest way to present this structure at all.