Interpretation can never to definitive because of ambiguity.Meaning is deferred because relationship between intent and meaning is skewed by figures of rhetoric or signification in the poems.Draw attention to rhetorical structures/strategies – draws attention to force of signifier.Poetry of SM is a signifying system – relies on free play of language, displacement of meanings.It is a Signifier that wreaks havoc on the Signified.Signifying Monkey is a vehicle for narration – figure of an oral writing within black vernacular language rituals.Black rhetorical tropes of Signifyin: marking, loud-talking, calling out (of one’s name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens, and so on.Signfiyin is the black trope of tropes – the figure for black rhetorical figures.Bakhtin: double-voiced word: inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which already has (and reclaims) its own orientation.Signification: luxuriates in free play of associated rhetorical and semantic relations.signification: depends for order and coherence on the exclusion of unconscious associations of a given word.Signifyin is the chaos of “associative relations,” which can be seen as the playful puns on a word that occupies the paradigmatic axis of language and which a speaker draws on for figurative, but often humorous substitutions that tend to function to name a person or a situation in a telling manner.Signification remains homophonically identical: 1) to show that a simultaneous but negated parallel universe exists within the larger white discursive universe 2) to argue that black-white differences are most poignant at the level of meaning (“signification”).Standard English: signification = signifier = conceptīlack vernacular: Signification = rhetorical figures Black vacated their signifier “signification” and substituted as its concept a signified that stands for the system of rhetorical strategies peculiar to their own vernacular tradition.This term existed in black vernacular for 200 years before, at least.Standard English signification: the meaning a term conveys or is intended to convey (Saussure).Argument over nature of the sign: black vernacular discourse proffering its critique of the sign as the difference that blackness makes within the larger political culture and its historical unconscious.Confrontation of two discursive universes: black and white linguistic circles.

Black “Signification” and English “signification” are a relation to difference inscribed in a relation of identity.Will define a carefully structured system of rhetoric, traditional Afro-American signification, and show how a figure becomes a trope of literary revision.

Gates the signifying monkey