ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the active and determining power of the symbolic order within discourse, in the form of a real signifying structure that is ordered by the signifier and opposed to a signified that is not exactly real, but rather imaginary, as well as passive and determined. When being signifierized, the so-called signified reality is absorbed into discourse and becomes a new signifier of the signifying social structure. The imaginary reality of the signified is overdetermined, as an effect of discourse, by the concerted symbolic action of the signifiers. From the nothingness of a pre-discursive real thing, the overdetermination entails adiscursive causation and construction of a supposed mental reality, which is habitually taken as the entire reality. In Jacques Lacanian Discourse Analysis, this overdetermining capacity of signifiers justifies a choice of complexity, flexibility, probability, uncertainty, and undecidability. In Lacanian signifierization, what is signifierized acquires the unintelligible material form of an unconscious signifier without conscious signification.
