ABSTRACT
This chapter examines semiotic and context perspectives of meaning in the light of the question of how it is that coherence is achieved in systems of signs, even where they are, as in ideologies, clearly contradictory. The connotative power of metaphorical language is seen as a key factor in integrating signs into discourse and also in understanding the materiality or real-world dimension of language. The connotative force that holds between the elements of the system is not akin to that which holds between the central symbolic element and the rest. When social systems succeed in conferring such identities on their individual subjects, the contradictions implicit in these identities are said to have been displaced or neutralised. The Laclau-Althusser formulations of the relationship between symbolic and social processes suggest the productivity of a Spinozist reading of Althusser. The similarities between structuralism and phenomenology should not be underestimated.
