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Since the symbolic order is necessarily so central to any language-oriented discussion, we need also to be aware of its conceptual genealogy, the sources upon which Lacan drew for his basic formulations of the symbolic’s structure and functions. The first of these influences is the structural anthropology of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose conceptions of society and social functions as symbolic structures and functions form the ground on which Lacan erected his conception of a symbolic order (Evans 201). More than simply borrowing the concept of a symbolic function from Lévi-Strauss and Mauss, however, Lacan adapted wholesale the informing principles of their approach, "prais[ing] Marcel Mauss for having shown that ‘the structures of society are symbolic’" (Evans 201) in the body of his most famous collection of work, Écrits. This open acknowledgment of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss as influences both broadens our understanding of how Lacan conceived of the symbolic order and opens the way for considering other important points of reference in situating it.
Indeed, it is precisely in Lacan’s adaptation of Lévi-Strauss that we find Ferdinand de Saussure, the next major influence on the conception of the symbolic:
Lacan takes from Lévi-Strauss the idea that the social world is structured by certain laws which regulate kinship relations and the exchange of gifts (see also Mauss, 1923). The concept of the gift, and that of a circuit of exchange, are thus fundamental to Lacan’s concept of the symbolic (S4, 153-4, 182).
Since the most basic form of exchange is communication itself (the exchange of words, the gift of speech; S4, 189), and since the concepts of law and of structure are unthinkable without language, the symbolic is essentially a linguistic dimension. (Evans 201)
Lacan’s conception of the symbolic as "essentially a linguistic dimension" draws heavily on Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified such that the symbolic is the realm of the signifier while the imaginary is the realm of the signified. The key aspect of Saussure’s conception of this relationship is that the link between any given signifier and signified is arbitrary. Signifiers only gain value (i.e. content or a claim to a particular signified) in the process of opposition and relation to other signifiers. Since the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, the only way any kind of stability can be obtained is if the signifier habitually associated with a particular signified retains its claim through a process of differentiation not from other signifieds, but from other signifiers – it asserts its claim to meaning not by declaring a positive connection to the signified, but by declaring a negative relationship to all other signifiers.16 And since direct access to the signified (the imaginary) of any given signifier is either impossible or incommunicable, we are restricted to the endless play of signifiers as we try to use language to manage our world, an approach which is suprisingly effective given the arbitrariness of the signifier/signified connection in any given instance.17 Lacan’s conception of the symbolic, though it is informed by this concept in its totality, focuses on the realm of the signifier, locating the signified in the imaginary and that which is excluded from this binary in the real.
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f. 3. Lacan's Philosophy of Language
