In this case, I would use the term 'referents':

http://books.google.com/books?id=V8Asq0j6DlAC&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8...

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Note added at 25 mins (2009-03-01 19:09:37 GMT)
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The point is that the reader brings to bear his/her understanding of the world from a cultural point of view on the text - he/she sees the text through his/her own eyes with all the experience of the world that he/she has accumulated through his/her cultural, racial, educational background. The discrete bits of knowledge that this comprises are the referents - the things a person refers to in order to understand the world, or in this case, the text.

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Note added at 31 mins (2009-03-01 19:16:23 GMT)
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http://books.google.com/books?id=Vk2Vq-KuQjkC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7...

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1320431

Conceptual Wave artist Haim Steinbach can really be described as a curator or ethnographer more so than a craftsman. But in an era in which appropriation still remains the dominant form of expression, perhaps there's no real distinction between the act of discovery and the act of creation. In the Matrix 217 exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, "Work in Progress: Objects for People -- Snapshots," Steinbach both meets and upends all Duchampian expectations of his work.

While his signature method of creating art from existing objects -- hence, the comparison to Duchamp that both admirers and detractors inevitably draw -- still looms over the pieces, Steinbach's arrangements pay painstaking heed to the spatial dimensions of identity. Steinbach is an artist whose minimalistic installations are both ordinary and ethnographic. He isn't particularly invested in wowing audiences with shock value or inventiveness, but rather, in revealing the cultural and ritualistic fetishes that lurk behind objects as unassuming and pedestrian as a nail file or a pair of sneakers.

Since the heyday of Steinbach's career, back in the late 1970s, his shows often have featured piles of borrowed objects from friends and family, placed like window display items atop shelves or in antiseptic-looking rooms. Tubes of lipstick stand apathetically astride notebooks full of impassioned love letters, and oftentimes, Steinbach's displays have included videotaped footage of the objects' owners, speaking of their own relationship to the items. Accordingly, Steinbach has continuously been cornered into the same box as artists like Duchamp, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger or Peter Halley, who all use object appropriation to their own ends. What's unique about Steinbach's work is that he so radically redefines the status of objects in art by using the objects as cultural referents. Where other artists have used objects as components of a larger message or critique, Steinbach's immaculate arrangements are, quite simply, signifiers of personal and social identity.
http://www.sfstation.com/haim-steinbach-at-berkeley-art-muse...

I hope this helps, Louise - you've got yourself a tough text there.

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Note added at 16 hrs (2009-03-02 11:20:16 GMT) Post-grading
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Thanks for the points, Louise