The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (...

This paper traces the way discourses within early years policy and practice impose meanings onto the signifier ‘play’. Drawing on Bernstein’s conceptualisation of recontextualising strategies, we explore how these meanings regulate troubling excesses in children’s ‘play’. The analysis foregrounds an underlying question about the hold the signifier ‘play’ maintains within discourses that appear ...

One of the distinctive features of multilingual Jewish cultures is the interpretation of a sacred Hebrew signifier by its phonic identity or proximity to a signifier in another language. This essay demonstrates the cultural creativity that might inhere in such “mistakes,” providing examples from three different periods—rabbinic, Hebrew-Yiddish European culture, and modern Israeli Hebrew. I n th...

Time and object are elements of the meta-structure of our knowledge, yet in conflict with the general change in the world. Time and object are shown to be products of our decomposition of change. Accordingly, there are no objects (and subjects) in the world: the object is the concept and its meaning is its relative position in the structure of knowledge. Thus, the referent is the concept and pe...

A schema’s role is to mediate and adjudicate between human and machine semantics; recognizing this can help us manage our schemas better. Some practitioners work solely with an operational semantics, according to which the meaning of a tag is what we want it to cause the processing software to do with the data. A better understanding is reached if we adopt the structuralist view that a sign is ...

Recursion or self-reference is a key feature of contemporary research and writing in semiotics. The paper commences by focusing on the role of recursion in poststructuralism. It is suggested that much of what passes for recursion in this field is in fact not recursive all the way down. After the paradoxical meaning of radical recursion is adumbrated, topology is employed to provide some example...

signifier of difference whose function—and this is crucial—is to give a per-