"Cultural studies has argued that language is not a neutral medium for the formation of meanings and knowledge about an independent object world ‘existing’ outside of language. Rather, it is constitutive of those very meanings and knowledge. That is, language gives meaning to material objects and social practices that are brought into view by language and made intelligible to us in terms that language delimits. These processes of meaning production are signifying practices. In order to understand culture, we need to explore how meaning is produced symbolically in language as a ‘signifying system’

http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/45137_Barker.pdf