What is the signifier and the signified?

Jacques Lacan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Jacques Lacan answers

The distinction is not Saussure's to keep. I took it from him and modified it, and the modification is the argument. Two networks, then, and they do not overlap. The first — the signifier — is a synchronic structure: each element functions not by what it is but by what it is not, by its difference from every other element in the system.¹ Distribution alone governs this level, from the phoneme up through the compound expression.

Nothing positive, nothing substantial; pure relation. The second network — the signified — is diachronic, the set of concretely pronounced discourses across time, which reacts back upon the first even as the first governs its pathways.² But here is where Saussure's diagram becomes questionable: he imagined a correlation between the two fluxes sufficient to cut them both into units simultaneously, the word emerging at the intersection of sound and meaning.

I do not accept that.³ What the clinical and the historical evidence shows is that beneath the same signifiers, meanings shift — across time, across usage, across the subject's own history — and no one-to-one correspondence between the two systems can be established.⁴ The signified is not the thing in its raw state, already given and waiting for a label.

Meaning is human discourse insofar as it always refers to another meaning, never to a pure indication of reality.⁵ Signification comes about only on the basis of taking things as a whole — it always exceeds what it leaves indeterminate, and its mainspring cannot be grasped at the level where signification secures its ordinary redundancy.⁶ This is why, in my schema, I write the bar between S and s differently from the way Saussure drew his diagram.

The two lines — the signifying chain, permeable to metaphor and metonymy down to the phonemic level, and the line of rational everyday discourse with its fixed points already integrated by usage — go in opposite directions, because they slide over one another.⁷ They intersect, but the intersection is not given in advance; it is produced, retroactively, by the signifier's own movement.

The signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole.⁸ What this means for the clinic is not incidental. The unconscious is structured, woven, chained, meshed by language — and in it the signifier plays not an equal role to the signified but the fundamental one.⁹ A delusion is not noise from outside the system; it is a production of that system, subject to the same laws of substitution and combination.

To treat it otherwise — to read it as a raw eruption of the real, untouched by the order of the signifier — is to have already abandoned the Freudian discovery before the session has begun.

Sources

1. The first network, that of the signifier, is the synchronic structure of the language material in so far as in that structure each element assumes its precise function by being different from the others; this is the principle of distribution that alone governs the function of the elements of the language.

   Écrits, A Selection, Sheridan Translation, p. 95

2. The second network, that of the signified, is the diachronic set of the concretely pronounced discourses, which reacts historically on the first, just as the structure of the first governs the pathways of the second.

   Écrits, A Selection, Sheridan Translation, p. 95

3. M. de Saussure thinks that what enables the signifier to be cut up is a certain correlation between the signifier and the signified. Obviously, for it to be possible to cut the two of them up together there must be a pause. This diagram is questionable.

   Seminar III, The Psychoses, p. 127

4. Underneath the same signifiers there have been over the course of time these shifts which prove that no one-to-one correspondence between the two systems can be established.

   Seminar III, The Psychoses, p. 127

5. signification comes about only on the basis of taking things as a whole. Its mainspring cannot be grasped at the level at which signification usually secures its characteristic redundancy, for it always proves to exceed the things it leaves indeterminate within it.

   The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis, p. 362

6. What dominates here is the unity of signification, which turns out to never come down to a pure indication of reality, but always refers to another signification.

   The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis, p. 362

7. The other line [from right to left] is the line of rational discourse, into which a number of reference points or fixed things are already integrated... They go in opposite directions, for the simple reason that they slide over one another.

   Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious, pp. 17–18

8. The signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole.

   The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis, p. 362

9. The unconscious is fundamentally structured, woven, chained, meshed, by language. And not only does the signifier play as big a role there as the signified does, but it plays the fundamental role.

   Seminar III, The Psychoses, p. 127