ABSTRACT
The shiftiness of representations is essential to language, the condition of shared meaning. In any language, there is a pile of possible substitutes for a given word or concept, but only one is meant in a given communication: tree, sapling, bush, hedge, plant. Each word, as Saussure says, binds concept with acoustic image, but the value that each word takes is because it is part of system that allows discriminations to be made. The work of social life is always a writing of and on the personal and the anonymous lives of people. It is in that most general sense an ethnography that may or may not yet be conscious of itself as such. By exploring the concept of real in the relation between representation and thing represented, between experience of being and the semblant to be played, the work of creating objects and subjects through the powers of living beings is radically presented.
