Page 179 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

168 LANGUAGE

We have many ways of describing, both by learned rules…and by certain
kinds of response, in gesture, language, image…This vital descriptive
effort—which is not merely a subsequent effort to describe something
known, but literally a way of seeing new things and new relationships—
has often been observed by artists, yet it is not the activity of artists alone.
The same effort is made not only by scientists and thinkers, but also, and
necessarily, by everyone. The history of a language is a very good example
of this, for the ways in which language changes, to amend old descriptions
or accommodate new ones, are truly social, in the most ordinary business of
living. 2
Language is seen as important in Williams’s definition of culture as ‘a whole
way of life’. Yet in a sense it is precisely this way of defining culture as a ‘vital
descriptive effort’, a ‘way of seeing…things and…relationships’, that has
hindered the development of a specific theoretical interest in language and
signifying practices within Cultural Studies which would pay attention to the
way meaning is constructed and communicated. In both Hoggart’s and
Williams’s early work we find a shared problematic: culture is inherently
meaningful, and meanings are rooted in practical social experience. What this
principally involves is an expressive theory of language in which, while
linguistic meanings can be referred to the reality they ‘describe’, they remain
rooted in essentially subjective acts of perception and creativity. In this view,
linguistic utterances can be read back, or ‘interpreted’, in terms of their founding
‘structures of feeling’, as in Hoggart’s argument that:

We have to try to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see
through the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be
the opposite of the statements themselves), to detect differing pressures of
emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances. 3

It is in this ‘seeing through’ to the real meaning that the linguistic level or
signifier of the utterance disappears: it becomes transparent.
Our criticism here of the absence of attention to the specificity of modes of
signification within the early work of Hoggart and Williams is intended as one
explanation of the development of interest in semiological approaches to
signifying practices at the Centre. This has run alongside, and is separate from,
ethnographically based work on the cultural tradition, popular culture and
subcultures. We recognize that both Hoggart and Williams have done much
valuable work on the historical analysis of specific signifying practices, in a way
which raises important questions absent from much of the structuralist-based
theory which we go on to look at in this chapter. We intend therefore to return to
problems of theory and historically specific analysis in our conclusion.