Orders
Imagianry, Symbolic, Real (Imaginaire, symolique, rEel) Of these three terms, the 'imaginary' was the first to appear, well before the Rome Report of 1953. At the time, Lacan regarded the 'imago' as the proper study of psychology and identification as the fundamental psychical process. The imaginayr was then the owrld, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imaginned. In this respect, 'imaginary' is not simply the oppsoite of 'real': the image certainly belongs to reality and Lacan sought in anaimal ehtology facts that brought out formative effects comparable to that described in 'the mirro stage.'
THE NOTION OF THE 'SYMBOLIC' CAME TO THE FOREFRONT IN THE rOME rEPORT. tHE SYMOLS REFERRED TO HERE ARE NOT ICONS, STYLIZED FIGURATIONS, BUT SIGNIFIERS, IN THE SENSE DEVELOPED BY sASSURE AND JAKOBSON, EXTENDED INTO A GENeralized definition: differential elemnts, in themselves without meaning, which acquire value only in their mutual relations, and forming a closed order - the question is whther this order is or is not comlete. Henceforth it is the symbolic, not the imaginary, that is seen to be the determining order of the subject, and its effects are radical: the subject, in Lacan's sense, is himself an effect of the symbolic. Levi-Strauss's formalization of the elementary structures of kinship and its use of Jakobson's binarism provided the basis for LAcan's conception of the symbolic - a conception, however, that goes well beyond its origins. According to Lacan, a distinction must be drawn between what belongs to the imaginary. In particular, the relation between the subject, on the one ahnd, and the signifiers, speehc, language, on the other, is frequently contrasted with the imaginary relation, that between the ego and its iamges. In each case, many problems derive from the relations between these two dimensions.
The 'real' emerges as a third term, linked to the symbolic and the imaginary: it stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and remains foreclosed from the anlytic experience, which is an experience of speech. What is prior to the assumption of the symbolic, the real in its 'raw' state (in the case of the subject, for instance, the organism and its biological needs), may only be supposed, it is an algebraic x. The Lacanian concept fo the 'real' is not to be confused with reality, which is perfectly knowable: the subject of desire knowns now more than that, since for it reality is entirely phantasmatic.
The term 'real', which was at first of only minor importance, acting as a kind of saety rail, has grdually been developed, and its signification has been considerably altered. It began, anturally enough, by presenting, in relation to symbolic substitutions and imaginary variations, a function of constancy: 'the real is that whcih always returns to the same place.' It then became that before which the imaginary faltred, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant. Hence the formula: "the real is the impossible." It is in this sense tha the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symblic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approache,d but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic.
As distinguished by Lacan, these three dimensions are, as we say, profoundly heterogenoeus. Ye t the fact that the three terms have been linked together in a series raises the question as to what they have in common, a question to which Lacna has addressed himself in his most rcent thinking on the subject of the Borromean knot.
