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The foundational status of a theory of signs for institutions of social polity— governmental, pedagogic—has been recognized since at least Plato. The justification of a “natural” linkage between the forms of human articulation and expression and the governing systems of meaning and truth has been a preeiminent concern of philosophies of language from antiquity through, at least, the eighteenth century. In aesthetics the authority of the principle of mimesis may be seen as a parallel and reinforcing philosopheme.

Recent theorists—e.g., Louis Marin, Fredric Jameson, Ernesto Laclau—have increasingly focused on the way institutional forces not only create and control the signs that shape our perceived environment but also seek to persuade us that these signs are natural in origin and absolute in their authority. Their work traces the erosion of an ontology of nature — of “the great chain of being” in Lovejoy’s sense—at the level of institutions of pedagogy, of art, of social governance.