ABSTRACT
Probably the most important question, the question within which other topics are framed, concerns the way meaning is produced or constructed socially and it is in the first of the series of publications referred to that the process of communication, of 'making sense'. The contextual is already embedded in subjectivity and it is then via 'unconscious' or 'informal social knowledge' that the conscious self grasps an object. The reader will have noted some tensions in the readings of reflexivity in the Culture, Media and Identities series but also the proximity of phenomenological sociology and structuralist ideas in positing identification as a process involving oppositions, and in a 'dethroning' and relegating of the conscious subject to the role of a reader/communicator already positioned by semantic networks it inhabits. Whilst the notion of praxis incorporates a dialectic of action and cognition, Merleau-Ponty does not theorise the nature of the relationship between them.
