The World of the Text

A figure is a way of making sense of the world, a way of patterning or rhythmming reality and language does this. But our rituals and habits also do this - they create patterns and rhythms out of time and out of space that help us to make sense of ourselves and the world. And so artifacts also have this figuring function and figures then is an umbrella term for all of these different things. So it's that lived experience sense that I mean when I say that figures cohere to form a particular world. The third thing that you raised in your question was the idea of social theory. And I think you can understand a particular social theory as presenting a particular world to be lived in