Page 158 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Recent developments in theories of language
and ideology: a critical note*

Stuart Hall

In recent years the two journals Screen and Screen Education (sponsored by the
Society for Education in Film and Television) have provided the base for the
development of a set of challenging hypotheses about the relationship between
language, ideology and ‘the subject’. Though principally relating to film texts
and practices, this theory has far-reaching implications for the analysis of all
signifying practices, as well as for the debates on the problem of language/
ideology and representation. This body of work (hereinafter, for convenience,
‘screen theory’) draws extensively on recent French theoretical writing in a
number of different fields: film theory (early semiotics, the work of Christian
Metz, the debates between the journals Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinétique), the
theory of ideology (Althusser), the psychoanalytic writings of the Lacan group,
and recent theories of language and discourse (Julia Kristeva, the ‘Tel Quel’
group, Foucault). It has also been strongly influenced by the critique of
‘realism’, defined as the dominant filmic practice in the cinema: this critique
originates in Brecht’s work and the Brecht- Lukács debate and, to some extent, in
the Russian formalists. It has recently much developed in both the theory and the
practice of avant-garde cinema. ‘Screen theory’ has reworked and expanded
these theories through a series of wide-ranging articles. The problematic which
they have been elaborating now constitutes the dominant point of departure in
film studies and in the debates around the relation of discourse and ideology.
‘Screen theory’ originates in the break which the structural linguistics of
Saussure first made with earlier theories of language and which was developed
into a general paradigm for the study of signifying systems by Lévi-Strauss and
the early Barthes. This is the point of departure for early semiotics. But the real
theoretical distinctiveness of ‘screen theory’ arises from the further break
between what, for convenience, may be called semiotics 1 and semiotics 2 (for
an elaboration of this distinction, see pages 36–7). Crudely, the argument is that
semiotics 1 was correct in its attempts to identify signification as a practice for
the production of meaning, as against earlier theories which assumed that
‘reality’ was somehow transparently reflected in language. It also advanced the
field considerably by dethroning the position of the integral Cartesian subject—
the authorial ‘I’, assumed to be both the source and the guarantor of the ‘truth’ of
any enunciative statement—in favour of an analysis pitched at the level of the