The Past Tense of Meaning (Lost and Gained in Historical Translations)

Abstract

We have managed to arrive at the question of the past of meaning without having given a definition of ‘the meaning of meaning’.¹ However, the introduction to the cultural and historical background of contemporary management of meaning (as outlined in the previous chapter) had to precede a more analytical approach. Otherwise two important points would have been compromised. Cold War influences would have been reduced to third-rate stage props in a drama populated by rational knowledge producers and those producers themselves would have become ghosts in an organizational machine defined piecemeal. Management of meaning would have been defined at the outset. Its definition would have been tacitly chosen as a preferred mode of creating/inventing or discovering/detecting a meaning. Following an introduction which places our discussion in a historical context, we can proceed forewarned that the meaning of meaning is itself a hotly debated issue. How do we go about it? First, we have to keep in mind that social locations or contexts — which provide the ‘scaffolding’ for meaning under construction — can move and change:

Part of what gives cultural practice its potency is the ability of actors to play upon the multiple meanings of symbols — thereby redefining situations in ways that they believe will favor their purposes. Creative cultural action commonly entails the purposeful or spontaneous importation of meanings from one social location or context to another.

(Sewell, 2005, p. 168)