There is ferment at the nexus between Symbolic & Imaginary

"The vocabulary describing us is lacking" 

                - Gloria (participant in the research of Beemyn & Rankin discussed briefly below)

In a previous post, I suggested that trans authors and activists, scholars and others trying to clarify their terminology and debating this or that term is effectively the process whereby the Symbolic itself grows. The Imaginary too expands and contracts by means of the many batteries of representations circulating in the culture. & dealing with words, terms, debating definitions, we argue over the edges where language meets its limits. 

That is to say, in case it is not clear - the Symbolic is not a singular monolithic "thing" THE Symbolic. I spent a bit of time in yet another pair of earlier posts working through the distinctions between Symbolic, Imaginary and Real (those are found here and here) and while this point is available there, it bears underlining. 

The Symbolic is a multiplicity. Much is undoubtedly shared between various regional manifestations and many aspects probably migrate from this or that to other regional locations. Likewise, if I can safely evoke the theorization of memes for a moment (without committing it that as a final answer to anything), I think that we might be able to use some of that thinking to discuss the ways that concepts and representations in their myriad ways, circulate and either become picked and used and ramified and invested with affect and desire, or they ultimately fail to do so and pass out of commonality until they live only in books.

"The" Symbolic then, as multiplicity, is chock full of holes, inconsistencies, paradoxes, failures, impasses and aporias and is limited in innumerable ways by the recalcitrance of the Real.  But, we - social agents and ultimately subjects of language ourselves - are committed to meaning, to a certain fixing of meaning which is what the Imaginary provides - an image or gestalt that freezes this or that view as the authoritative grid whereby I (as social subject) discern, by implicitly sorting fragments into the categories I've learned to inhabit what there word "means."


There is then a danger in the Imaginary's tendency to fix things, to "establish" meaning, and yet, without the luxury of now and then assuming that one knows what this or that term means, it becomes difficult to operate within one's Symbolic system without feeling the edges of all the paradoxes and aporias that our Imaginarizations of our social world's meanings attempt to fix for us. This fixing is also a means of excluding, for the simple reason "choosing" to understand this or that word in this or that way in a particular context is to exclude the other other possible meanings one knows and all of those meanings which one has not thought of.

Now some readers (I can think of two readily) will view these discussions about the multiplicity of the Symbolic and fixing effects of the Imaginary and so on and so forth and the term discourse will seem to them more readily applicable to what I am discussing, and they may substitute that term in understanding what I am saying here. I think this would be a mistake. There are certainly "entities" (if only notional) that one could identify in the Symbolic which correspond to some degree with "discourses" as commonly discussed (inevitably in a post-Foucaultian mode it seems). But there are a great many other sets of relations within the Symbolic that are not assimilable to "discourse." Here the example of the "Symbolic of the game of chess" from my earlier posting can help specify what I mean. 

But the intersection of Imaginary fixations (productive of "meaning" as well as a sense of "wholeness" but also allow for the sort of identification and projections that underpin both lust and aggression) and Symbolic relational determinations (from which derive the conceptual parts that will be flash frozen as "meaning" in this or that term or representation) is the cite where the turmoil and contestatory battles are taking place, and is also where new significations are taking shape.

That is, what, lacking a better phrase, I called the trans effect - the way that bringing the thought of the material reality of the trans body into conceptual adjacency with this or that body of established thought or practice acts, repeatedly, to unsettle that which had seemed to be established. And given that, as so much feminist work has shown over decades, the sex of assumptions and presuppositions which ground the sex/gender system are foundational not simply for issues of obvious connection to sex or gender but underpin scientific theories, legal positions, language systems, political assumptions, and economic practices (just to name a few areas in an offhand way). And what's more, the fundamental aspect has to be highlighted. Fundamental as in, 'having been assumed in advance, such that in most cases it never needs to be stated' and yet also fundamental in that challenges to the sex/gender regime commonly are resisted with a great deal of Imaginary involvement (that is, people take it personally whether they understand this fully or not, and unsettling their fundamental categories can easily be felt as a threat, even unconsciously, which I think accounts for much of the disproportionate vehemence that one finds in those who resist even considering that the sex/gender regime as is might be woefully inadequate to assessing the lived reality of a great many people).

At present I am reading Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin's book The Lives of Transgendered People. This book is noteworthy for many reasons, though here I will only refer to a few details that connect - in my sketchy thinking - with the issues under discussion here. In the first chapter of the book, "Demographics of the Survey Participants" the authors decided to include within this a discussion of the terminology they chose to use, how they developed it, and, of interest to me here, how they derived their terms in response to the terms that trans persons chose to describe their own identities. I'll leave aside the classifications that Beemyn and Rankin derive therefrom because what most interested me are some terms that they chose not to provide here. What are these terms?

Here is a passage from that book,

The participants who described their gender identity as "transgender" and "other" were asked to elaborate, and they referred to themselves using a wide variety of terms. The 1.211 individuals who identified specifically as "transgender" provided 502 additional descriptors of their gender identities, of which 479 were unique responses. The other 23 responses, each of which was given by at least two participants, are shown in table 1.2. (my emphasis)

I want to know what the 502 or 479 unique responses are! This is where new signifiers are being put forth in an attempt to establish significations that, I suspect, are otherwise unavailable. (I am not suggesting that the authors ought to have provided all those other terms, they are being quite scrupulous with regard to the research methods here - I regret that they were not included simply as I want to read them, to think about them, etc.) So, while I get why - using the methods they are using and obviously working hard to condense such an amazing amount of material (they had close to 3,500 participants in their research) into a readable and not crazy expensive format - there just wasn't room for everything. I remain curious nonetheless. 

btw, this was an image search for "disequilibrium" as I recall
I still find something about it disturbing somehow.

Trying on new terms can fuck with your equilibrium.  

That can be a good thing as well. 

A necessary thing.

My "Dissertation"? b/w How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz

In recent months I have been reading a lot books and articles and blogs and so on and so forth pertaining to trans(gender) broadly conceived. Meyerowitz's book had been given positive reviews in a few places and looked to be historically very rich with detail and so I got a copy and I'll say more about that below (though not much).

So, the scare quotes around "dissertation" (and that is what they are) what is that all about? could it be my inability to imagine such a thing in any but the most abstract of terms? maybe just the utter lack of a precise topic? yes, it could be that. it could very easily be that. 

I know of course that it'll have a fair amount of Sigmund and Jacques, and thus also undoubtedly a small boat load of lacanians and semi-sorta-lacanians that I find important. That much I know. Some degree of pull from all the reading in ideology (detailed on this blog last summer) and from Marx and certain marxists is also possible, but I am at the moment not really looking there (though I would be a delighted to find an ideological critique of the DSM generally or of the GID [gender identity disorder] diagnosis and other gender-connected diagnoses - someone direct me to that now please, thank you).

& I've been nibbling at a number of different scholarly zones pertaining, at their broadest, to the body… with an eye to what my sort of psychoanalytic thinking might find there or bring to those discussions or bring back from those discussions etc. So, neuro brain stuff (and the neuropsychoanalysis folks), and corporeal philosophy, a touch of phenomenology (don't tell on me), and much of the stuff about affect and emotion that got stirred up by the Laclau class back in 2010 and comes and goes as a specific site to focus on for me (affect is so hot topic right now! but i'm kinda meh on it myself, depending on the day)… body maybe also includes much of the stuff about voice that has been nagging at me as a place where maybe I have something to say. 

is voice a body thing or not?  either way, I have so many small notes and collected references to things about voice that surely voice could be a productive zone to work through. Aside from the interesting work on voice already from Dolar and that other Slovenian guy everybody reads (the one with all the nervous tics), I'd seen some abstract when I was taking classes in linguistics back in 2008 or so, it talked about subvocalizations taking place below the person's conscious awareness which were very very reduced versions of the same or initiating muscle motions involved in speaking aloud that which one was reading "silently". That got me to thinking about the automaton-like, machinic aspect of the unconscious in Lacan's understanding and as well to how here it seems that the Symbolic is actively reinscribing itself in the flesh (this subvocalization stuff I need to find out more about and also track down the article I saw again). Then there is a lot of stuff about gay voice that I researched back in that linguistics class. There are aspects of voice that seem interesting to think of wrt trans people as well in that voice is a somewhat unique 'behavioral set' (sorry, crappy term) to make alterations to, it being so heavily coded as the mark of authenticity, etc. It seems to me that the perilous fragility of the voice is not utterly unlike that of the subject per Lacan. There is in that last line a paper that could be written. 

& then most recently trans stuff has become interesting to me for a bunch of reasons, many of which have links back to the things discussed above. At the same time, articulating those linkages has largely not been done yet (by me that is), and I need to start making the links or at least trying to state where they might be.  

As with homosexuals, psychoanalysis, specifically the institutional psychoanalysis of North America and England (tied to psychiatry, medicine and state) has not got a very positive record in its interactions with trans people. The downside of this is predictable, Freud and Lacan and others who might have some useful things to say are all collected in the stink file with Charles Socarides and (judging from what scattered things I have read) Catherine Millot, possibly Saffouan as well. I'm likely to try and argue for the usefulness of lacanian thought to trans persons, of course to do that, I'll finally have to bite the bullet and try to get clear on what the fuck Lacan is really taking about when he refers to sexuation. That is, I confess that I have read much of this in a sort of surfacey way and tried to wrap my head around the distinctions being put forth. But all too often when I attempt this I feel like I am exerting more energy keeping sexual difference from slipping toward socio-cultural 'gender' or now and then (not as often) sliding back into a sort of bonehead anatomical marking, hm, looks like a penis, check the M box would you? and thus one is marked!  (though today I read something in Elliot's book [Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites] which gave a lacanian developmental narrative in which the ascription of a sexed position relates to the oedipus and lacan's symbolic 'castration' etc and I need to think through her understanding because she certainly is saying that Lacan's concept is neither of those annoying options of the binary. & I sort of see what she is saying, but I wonder whether, if I understand her reading of Lacan correctly, that perhaps one is making a conceptual error even speaking of sexual difference and gender at all, maybe these concepts operate at angles to one another such that while they intersect, reigning those points of intersection into one or the other's discursive plane distorts what they are for the other beyond much use. But I digress.

One thing that I find fascinating in a very general way about all things trans is that it is as if the trans person, however they identify themselves, however they relate to the contesting ways that they are conceptualized in the social realm etc, simply by existing, (… damn, I am stretching for a metaphor… nothing coming …)… 

… If we use lacanian terms it seems that in a great many realms of the Symbolic (there is no single Symbolic after all, but a whole bunch of them interpenetrating and so forth) the crispy clean M/F binary is mapped very tightly with other pairs of traits and that many of these symbolic structures are immediately problematized by the very existence of the trans person. It seems that one can, in a very real sense, pick a disciplinary discourse and then 'add trans' and sudden rifts open up, questions so long settled as to be reflexes, to be naturalized ideologemes, appear suddenly inadequate and as if under a spotlight. That is to say, the trans body has the potential to act as the Real for some given symbolic. I do not easily say The Symbolic here because it is not total,  there are folks striving to find ways of letting trans people inhabit the language itself more easily - of course here too there are splits and rifts and suggesting new pronouns be adopted meets with a resistance that seems to me to be beyond any intellectual objection and to be of a piece with the affective investment that we have even in the way that pronouns contribute to the "gendered" structure of our worlds. But to the extent that there are trans and non-trans people speaking about trans persons and attempting more and more to do so in socially sensitive, non-pathologizing, non-eroticizing, and non-objectifying ways - one can see these practices as generating new signifiers for a Symbolic in obvious need of refurbishing. I'll call, with some misgivings but no better idea, what I have been talking about here the trans effect.

I do not wish to be read as posing the trans subject as inherently radical or disruptive or as otherwise "exceptional." My position here would be better stated as; trans people are people just like red headed people are people, or cat people are people. Rad, huh? But, that said, it also seems that the Symbolic of late (over the past century and very much so now) is in a bit of Imaginary turmoil because the trans person, however conceptualized (Symbolic) or pictured (Imaginary) is also Real in a way that "doesn't stop being written" to use Lacan's line from somewhere, but here we might hear that tiny quote as referring directly to the way that this Real requires, compels more and more writing, more and more attempts to reign it back into existing categories or to expand those categories or to abolish those categories. Thinking about the Real in this sense shows the way that, in spite of the typical tropes of negativity that are used to designate it, that the Real is actually the condition of possibility for the Symbolic and the Imaginary, that it inspires and compels the subject, via the resources of the other orders, to attempt to keep up with it. So, if there is something apparently exceptional about the trans subject at this moment in history, I think that this is an effect which will, at some point, be viewable as a history and that a time will come when the Symbolic and Imaginary, in a broader way, will have become more livable places for trans people and the effect I am writing about here will have ceased to be so filled with seeming paradoxes. 

Joanne Meyerowitz

So, in finding trans people and many ways that they might be seen to contest the extant Symbolic and Imaginary resources, interesting and potentially pertinent to my dissertation required of me that I start soaking up information. The book I that chose in hopes that it would give me a sense of the history was How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz, Now, if you would prefer a better review of that text, I suggest reading Dallas Denny on it here. I do not have the depth of knowledge that Denny has, but the two thumbs up response to the book is the same as my own. It is chock full of all manner of fascinating details and I found it very hard to put down. There were also too many things in it that I felt compelled to underline for me to even consider giving it a more careful write up just yet, though surely I should do that stuff (superego would agree).

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.