Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.
Traces … were self-sufficient. Signs implied the ruin of this self-sufficiency by subordinating traces to objects. Signifers go even farther: signifiers are not dependent upon merely one object but upon every other signifier. For this reason, it is not entirely appropriate to speak of a signifier “referring” to other signifiers: it does not refer to them as a sign refers to an object. Rather, all other signifiers absorb it, and its particularity is always vanishing because of this absorption.
What is being described in this movement from traces to signs to signifiers is a movement from the self-sufficiency of the trace to the referential structure of the sign to the radical difference constitutive of the signifier. Of course, this radical difference could just as well be called a “hyper referentiality” … A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).
The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and unlike the trace, it is not self-sufficient but hyper-referential (29).
Although there may never be a strict union of signifier and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be. In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning (30).
… signifiers are not signs. They originate in a destruction of the one-to-one reference that is constitutive of signs. Also signifiers are constituted by difference, and their uniqueness consists of their difference from other signifiers … A signifier is moreover, meaningless. … So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier. According to Lacan, signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signfiiers (30).
This unfixed meaning effect or signified effect is produced by an interaction of signifiers with each other in what Lacan calls … a signifying chain (30).
A signifiying chain is nothing other than a succession of signifiers.