Chapter 17 - Perpetual Uncertainty of Cultural Life

Summary

This chapter discusses the parallels between metaphor and the sign applying to the extent that one accepts the temporal embeddedness of human meaning-making. By temporal embeddedness, it is meant that each experience humans have is made novel by its unique position within the temporal order. One situation in which the literal and imagined are allowed close company, and remain visible as they hold it, is the poem. The chapter turns to illustrate the poetic motion of the sign in more detail. Daniel describes feeling that his identity was a façade, a remainder left behind after years of draining emotional content out of experience. The 'literal' and 'imagined' can be seen as a dynamic field of analysis in socio-cultural psychology. In an ephemeral world, humans are doing something to organize experience, yet that organizer, the sign, itself bears the mark of the temporal flow, and perpetually transforming through those tensions.