Part 1 Making sense of social subjects - reflexivity, perception, praxis and the everybody: making sense; reflexivity; intersubjectivity; power, objectification, types and stereotypes; rationality and ideology critique; the gap between perception and practice in Merleau-Ponty. Part 2 The limits of the phenomenological perspective: communicative interaction in social theory; linguistic conventionalism and the Frege-Dummett critique. Part 3 Intersubjectivity and rationality: the taken-for-granted - aspect or domain of meaning?; reason, rationalization and common sense; Habermas, the life-world and resisting rationalization; Gramsci, common sense and the articulation of formal discourses; Quentin Skinner - text as action and contestation; Gadamer, dialogical understanding and the problem of general meetings; some consequences of dialogical method; rationality, modernity and situatedness. Part 4 From structuralism to phenomenology - connotation, denotation and meaning context: connotation and the coherence of discourse - the legacy of Althusser; Althusser, Spinoza and the discursivity of the real; ideology as lived experience; semiotic theories of meaning and the context issue; from connotation to sedimented meaning - Laclau, Jameson, Schutz; Ricoeur and semiotics - from metaphor to metaphysics; Ricoeur and substitution - Jakobson, Laclau, Mouffe; the theory of descriptions, denotation, connotation and the place of contradiction. Part 5 Sense and reference - the everyday as basis and critique of classification systems; Husserl and the life-world; Habermas; everyday objects - the irredeemably contextual nature of reference; a critique of discursive classification in Laclau and Mouffe; language or communicative practice? - a constitutive ambiguity in cultural commentary; the everyday as interruption and transfiguration; representation and the emergence of reference. Part 6 Discursive realism - self-referentiality and the depth of meaning: the problem of embodiment; alternatives to conventionalist accounts of the discursive. Part 7 Space, time and the everyday - Jameson and Osborne: Fredric Jameson - the semiotics of late capitalism; semiotics and the problem of closure; sense and referent; the historical referent - from Jameson to Gramsci; articulating the past; the historical past as sediment; Althusser and the conjunctural formulation of historical moments; capitalism, modernity and the significance of remembering; the politics of time.
