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“(…) Such path-shaping is mediated semiotically as well as materially. Crises encourages semiotic as well as strategic innovation. They often prompt a remarkable proliferation of alternative visions rooted in old and new semiotic systems and semiotic orders. Many of this will invoke, repeat or re-articulate established genres, discourses and styles; other may develop, if only partially, a “poetry for the future” that resonates with new potentialities (Marx, 1852/ 1996, pp. 32-34). With the proliferating alternatives, if any, is eventually retained and consolidated is mediated in part through discursive struggles to define the nature and significance of the crisis and what might follow from it. If the crisis can be interpretated as a crisis in the existing economic order, then minor reforms and passive revolution will first be attempted to re-regularize that order. If this fails and/ or if the crisis is already interpreted initially as a crisis of the existing economic order, a discursive space is open to explore more radical changes. In both cases conflicts also concern how the costs of crisis-management get distributed and the best policies to escape from the crisis.

In periods of major social reestructuring, diverse economic, political and sociological narratives may intersect as they seek to give meaning to current problems by construing them in terms of past failures and future possibilities. Different social forces in the private and public domains propose new visions, project, programmes, and policies and a struggle for hegemony grows. The plausibility of these narratives and their associated strategies and projects depends on their resonance (and hence capacity to reinterpret and mobilize) with the personal (included shared) narratives of significant classes, strata, social categories, or groups affected by the postwar ecomnomic and political order. Moreover, although many plausible narratives are possible, their narrators will not be equally effective in conveying their messages and securing support for the lessons they hope to draw. This will depend on the prevailing ‘web of interlocution’ and its discursive selectivities, the organization and operation of the mass media, the role of intellectuals in public life, and the structural biases and strategically selective operations of various public and private apparatus of economic, political and ideological domination. Such concerns take us well beyond a concern of narrativity and/ or the constraint rooted in specific organizational or institutional genres, of course, into the many extra-discursive conditions of narrative appeal and of stable semiotic orders. That these institutional and meta-narratives have powerful resonance does not mean that they should be taken at face value. All narratives are selective, appropiate some arguments, and combine them in specific ways. In this sense, then, one must consider what is left unstated or silent, what is repressed or suppressed in official discourse”

(Bob Jessop, “Critical semiotic analysis and cultural political economy”, Critical Discourse Studies, v. 1 (2), october 2004, pp.167-168; las negritas son mías). La referencia a Marx (1852/ 1996): El dieciocho brumario de Luis Bonaparte.