Signifying. In opening this text with the term signifying, it is less the adjectival mode that I want to focus on but rather the verb (in its gerundial mode) or, more precisely, the processual and productive aspect of an apparently self-evident and minor operation and its political relevance. Signifying will in the following be introduced not as something that could possibly as well be avoided but rather as the inevitable production of meaning that is intrinsic to representation and articulation and, most notably, to perception – hereby performing a constitutive function for producing reality. It is not merely in revealing constructions of reality as necessarily hegemonic that I will ascertain a crucial reference to the contestability of constructions of reality but particularly in analyzing the reason why that which is produced as reality can never be anything else but the preliminary outcome of hegemonic negotiation processes.