Lacan's Three Orders, Symbolic, Imaginary, Real (with a bit about "reality")

[...this is a chunk taken from a letter I wrote to an artist friend. It was prompted by confusions between us about the use of "symbolic", where I was using it in Lacan's sense of the term, and he in the more vernacular way where we might say that "X is symbolic of Y". If you are already familiar with Lacan's use of these terms, I doubt there is much here for you. But if these are deeply mysterious still, it might be of some interest]

Before I get started, whatever else there is to say about these three 'orders', they must be understood to be radically, even constitutively, distinct from one another, but at the same time they are linked, they are what they are because of not being either of the others. A way that you might picture this is shown below, the borromean knot....

The borromean knot is a curious object. Some insist on saying that it is a chain. I'm fine either way, it is a chain that is a knot. But what makes it unique is that if any one link is cut, the entire knot comes undone. If that does not seem odd, imagine a regular chain, stretching from point A to point B. If you cut a link, you break the chain, but the two halves are now simply shorter lengths of chain. When the borromean chain/knot is cut, the other two pieces fall to the ground separately and completely unconnected. 

The Symbolic Order (don't those capitals make it official looking?). It is primarily identified with language, though I would extend this to any semiotic system. But it is also operant in the practices of our daily lives, though let me go back to language to clarify a bit more before we think about how the symbolic can be found in the day to day. That language is identified with the symbolic does not make the two equivalent, be clear about that. That is to say, that at its purest the symbolic is not the words that compose a sentence but all the rules which allow sentences to be composed at all. Or think of it like this, if a game of chess is like a series of statements, then we can record the entire sequence and 'play it back' etc, but it has this one dimension in time (forward-backward, exactly like a spoken utterance) -- the symbolic of the game of chess would be the complete set of 'all possible moves in all possible games'. This particular game we played and recorded is but one variation possible within that enormous set. The set itself, in this extremely restricted example, is generated by the rules of chess. But the symbolic properly speaking is the structural system of possibility/impossibility that lies underneath all semiotic systems, natural languages, computer languages etc. A line of computer code, a sentence in French, a series of hieroglyphs, all of these are related to the symbolic is the same way that a single game of chess is to the set of all possibilities allowed by chess.

So what about the symbolic in everyday life? 

Here is a New Orleans example (as that is where I write these words): a great many houses in this city have a narrow front and are relatively deep. This is because for a long period of time the taxes on a house were determined by its frontage on the street and took no account of how far back the house extended. If one had more money, then a wider house was possible. But so far as the symbolic determination of it with regard to taxation was concerned, if your house was 12ft wide and 12ft deep you paid the same tax as your neighbor whose house was 12ft wide and 100ft deep. Here we see a widespread material characteristic of a place, and thus any number of physical and bodily issues resultant from a mapping of this place, determined by the symbolic functioning of this tax law. 

Another example. I have $21 in my wallet, a 20 and a 1. I know that these objects are just specially printed 'paper' and that they're each equally useful in and of themselves (both would serve as bookmark, as fuel for a fire, as somewhere to put my bubble gum when its flavor has been depleted, etc). But in the way I behave with them, I obey the symbolic order: I treat currency as the material embodiment of wealth. Here we can make a pun that doesn't work with the other orders; the symbolic (order) orders you around. That is, in chess, you can't move the king as the knight moves, that move is against the symbolic order. The symbolic, as it underlies so many more complex semiotic systems (language preeminently) is far more complex that 'the symbolic' of chess in my example. In chess it is rigidly static, the rules do not change, number of sequences in the set of all possible moves in all possible games is finite. But the symbolic, properly understood, is theoretically infinite - even if we nonetheless experience many aspects of it as invariant, and for us in our limited life spans and particular lifeworlds and cultures, many of its 'orders' are effectively invariant in how they determine people's behavior. Imagine that you have an endless supply of 20s and 1s, and every person you see you invite to have one of the two bills, but only one. How many choose the single instead of the $20?  This is a good example as well because, it is possible that someone would choose the single, or even refuse either. Alternatives are in many cases possible, but observation of the way the world functions indicates that the symbolic order is usually obeyed. 

When you begin to look for examples of the symbolic in daily life, they are literally *everywhere* around you. The symbolic is enabling your ability to read my words at this instant. 

& now…

The Imaginary Order.   Again, avoid the ordinary connotations of the word, this is something else with a much larger reference than our everyday usage of this word connotes. It has to do with images, the visual, spatiality, etc - but it also ensnares (or perhaps "overlays") the body, feelings/affects/emotions, and even perception in significant ways. I'll try for a litany of instances with conceptual articulation along the way to help flesh this out. 

• When you look across the street and are immediately certain that you are looking at a woman or a man, this immediacy of recognition is imaginary (and just as immediately mapped on to a symbolic determination; man or woman). 
• When one senses rivalry with another, or lusts for them, or dislikes them, or feels friendly toward them, or is impressed with them, or frightened of them immediately with no 'reason' or justification, maybe nothing one can point to, or even just 'vibe' or 'look' or something - this is the imaginary (it is also involved in every instance when we feel that we do have a reason for whatever response, but we tend not to notice it as clearly because of the ‘reason’, even though the imaginary is always there, adding its input to our feeling - here is a cliche example that we all know, and yet this does not prevent us from being ensnared by it to some degree: we tend to react more positively to people who are conventionally attractive, hence advertisers do not hire ugly people to sell products. 
• By extension (and in a way that is not done with the symbolic usually, though I have done this with the chess example above) one can generalize this concept to certain instances as a way of saying "how we picture this thing happening." You mentioned liking trees. But I know you can also easily draw/paint a 'tree' which does not correspond to any actually existing tree, but it is still a tree because it conforms to the imaginary that we have of 'tree' (and, importantly it also has a symbolic marker, the concept of 'tree' which helps to anchor the imaginary). [Sometimes scholars push this even further and use phrases like "in our economic imaginary at this moment in time, it seems that there is only capitalism" and while I understand this usage, we are at that point talking about something with a somewhat heavier admixture of the symbolic than to call it "imaginary" seems to register, and so I shy away from that sort of usage.] 
• So an image on a canvas is both a materialization of the imaginary and it is also recognized through the imaginary (and/or the symbolic). I show you a drawing and you look and do not recognize any 'depicted' thing from the world or your own imaginary, but then after a moment you think "it kind of looks like a tree." Whether it was an attempt at drawing a tree or not is not at issue. You have filtered it through or interpreted it by the imaginary as you have it in you, or you have imposed your imaginary upon it (all of which in this case are ways of saying essentially the same thing). 
• Here is a curious example (or I think so). Let's say that you have a stomach ache and you look in the medicine cabinet and grab some sort of liquid medicine for it. Ask yourself how it is that you 'picture' to yourself that it works. ... ... Ok, so what did you come up with? Whatever you came up with was imaginary, whether it was the imagery of pepto-bismol where the soothing pink color coats the inside of a shape that is the 'stomach' - or if you imagine it as the way some chemical reactions 'look' where one liquid changes color slightly, or ceases to fizz or bubble - whatever you picture here is imaginary. Even if it were absolutely true that drinking pepto colored everything inside a soothing pink, it would still be imaginary, because a 'picture' in your mind or on a screen or whatever is not actually HOW such a medicine really 'works' to end your stomach ache (just as if we add two clear liquids together and they turn white and completely opaque, that we see this tells us nothing about why or how it happened, all it does is give us a visual cue that something or other did happen). 

When the aspect of the imaginary concerns ourselves, and our 'self-image,' we can notice a feature of the imaginary that is important and which thinking of trees or soothing pink liquid does not allow us to see. We are heavily invested in our imaginary of ourselves and images of us which conflict badly we often reject or push away in some fashion: "Oh my god delete that picture, I look horrifying!" This is sort of the inverse of the immediacy of emotional responses without 'reasons' that I mentioned earlier. "I took one look at him and didn't trust him." "The minute I looked in her eyes I knew I wanted to spend my life with her."  With regard to our imaginary of our bodies we collect images, 'picturings,' of it that we like and which depict us as we wish to be seen, and generally we try to lose or forget those we dislike. This is one of the disquieting things about photography, it has a chance to 'fix' an image which we may very well hate, making it more difficult to repress from our imaginary. This has all been about images, but here are two non-visual examples that are also imaginary. It does not happen to me any more at all, but most people who do not usually hear their voices on recordings are often surprised at both how they sound and at the way that they speak, in the sense of constructing thoughts in words. Maybe it has to do with our own voices sounding different because of their place of origin inside our bodies, but even if this is so, we build our imaginary of their 'sound' from this source, and so when we hear ourselves on a recording, it doesn't match the imaginary ‘picture’ (or perhaps “sonic image”) we have of our voice. Likewise, people say things like "I usually don't feel like I have an accent, but jeez, listen to me" or "Do I really say 'like' every other sentence?" or "Wow, at the time I really thought I was making sense, but listening to that I have no idea what I am talking about." All of these illustrate the difference between our established imaginary about these aspects of our speech and what a recording can reveal (similar to the 'bad picture' issue with photography above).

Now, you might expect the real next. But we must deal with something else first, that thing we call "reality." Reality is not the real. The real is not usually perceptible to us at all in "reality." Reality is, in Lacan's phrasing "a montage of the imaginary and the symbolic." Let’s say you have red paint and yellow paint. You know that mixing these will tend toward orange. You have been given many imaginary exemplars of this having happened and you have a symbolic understanding of colors and their relations as well. If mixing equal parts yellow and red gave you green you would be totally shocked. That you get something orange instead of green is in accord with both the symbolic and the imaginary. This example makes it seem as if these two orders simply map “how the world works”. But that is not quite right (as the pepto-bismol example showed). How we understand the world is organized through the symbolic and the imaginary. But many utterly false beliefs can be organized through these just as easily. Consider the belief that the earth is flat, it is easily imaginable that the symbolic and imaginary framework that allows for the reality by which one experiences the world could make that idea as normal and natural as it gets. Reality then, whether “accurate” or not with regard to empirical matters, still does not correspond to the real. What reality is, is those interdependent parts of the symbolic and the imaginary that we believe in without question, depend upon, etc. In this thing called "reality" all the holes and faults and fissures of the symbolic are systematically masked by the imaginary (much the way that while we all have a blind spot in our ocular field, the brain fills it in so that what we see appears as a seamless view). 

The Order of the Real. This is the most difficult of these three to explain. Certainly it seems to confuse people the most. No matter what I write here, I will not be completely satisfied with it. And, to be fair to myself here, Lacan's ideas about this change over the course of his teaching as his conception of the other orders comes into clearer and clearer focus. I'm going to try to head right at the central confusion and see if I can somehow get untangled from it. 

One of the biggest difficulties of discussing the real conceptually or if trying to provide an example (which usually depends on both the symbolic and the imaginary), is that what distinguishes the real from these other orders is that it cannot be rendered as any kind of image (or other imaginary construct) or concept (that is, symbolically). The real is that which resists 'capture' in either of the other orders. As such, every conceptual explanation tends only to point in the direction of the real, without grasping it. Likewise many imaginary types of examples tend to imply a direct link between the real and matter, which is also incorrect. 

So here is a faulty example that points in the right direction. You go to the library and you look up a book you need and you go to the right section and shelf and you count across and it is missing!  But is it? The symbolic system which determines the places of books in the library is what allows you to say that it is "missing" - with regard to the real, it cannot be "missing." There is nothing “missing” in the real, the real lacks nothing unless perhaps it lacks lack itself.

And here is an example that is not of the real, but which may help to show how the "cracks" in the symbolic are an index that something real has escaped symbolic capture. The famous wave or particle business from physics. That we can tell either where a subatomic particle is, or we can tell which way it is moving, but never both. Our symbolic grasp of these things cannot unify them, it can tell either this or that and each option excludes the possibility of the other. This is a point of symbolic breakdown that we have no way to patch up and deny as a point of breakdown by the use of the imaginary. 

One final way to think about this (again, with limits) is this... Imagine a small rock. With enough time and effort let us imagine that you could know everything about its symbolic determinations, its weight, what sort of rock it is, its density, everything - and you could know it in every imaginary way possible, precisely what it looks like from every angle, that it kinda reminds you of Lenin’s head from this angle, that it has a small crack here, etc etc etc. If it were possible to know everything about it that could be known through symbolic and imaginary means, would this exhaust the rock entirely? Would that be everything? ... In "reality," maybe so. But there would still be the real of this rock which escapes, which is always in excess of what it is in "reality," because of the holes (blind spots) in reality due to the incompleteness of the symbolic (which is constitutively incomplete, that is, it cannot be finally complete, this is a structural impossibility - not unlike the particle or wave issue above). 

Anyway, that is my attempt to discuss that which cannot be adequately delivered in language. Much much more could be said.