Page 183 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

172 LANGUAGE

The difference between the linguistic and the connotative sign is not
between ‘intentional’ and ‘non-intentional’, but a difference founded on
the varying degrees of openness operating in the different planes’ systemic
organization…They are both dependent on awareness of the extra-systemic
referent to which both systems ultimately refer in the decoding of their
respective signs and the realization of the meaning of those signs. 11
The theoretical weakness of this position is that it seems to return to a pre-
semiological concept of meaning as a transparent reflection of a taken-for-
granted ‘material world’. As John Ellis points out in a brief reply to Chambers:
In this formulation, language is a mere doubling of the real world,
coextensive with it and expressing it without problems…. To concentrate
on ‘concrete’ objects like this is an oversimplification that even intelligent
idealists find hard to bear…a word like ‘labour’ or ‘struggle’ does not have
such a clear, self-evident meaning, and in such cases it is obvious that the
‘referent’ and the signifier are equally caught in a process of
conceptualization. 12
Chambers’s position is actually contradictory, since he is at times himself
working within a semiological problematic. In some of his formulations the
‘material world’ is not simply ‘out there’, to be reflected in a signifying system.
It is, rather, part of the constitution of signifying practices themselves. This
perspective seems to recognize a material construction of ideologies, within
social institutions, which require socially defined subjective ‘interpretations’. As
Chambers puts it:
I would suggest it to be extremely naive to understand ideology as
something imposed from above. Ideology has to negotiate a path through
the differential social totality in order to win consensus, and it arises within
social relationships and particular practices. For instance, whilst waiting at
the barber’s, I am given a copy of Paris-Match to read. This is not a pure
moment, but occurs in the ‘common-sense’ world of everyday experiences
that forms the framework for my interpretations. My perceptive and
cognitive faculties, which are not neutral, but socially and culturally
acquired, recognize a French soldier saluting a French flag. Thus my
perception of that photograph is grounded in norms of societal
expectancies. Secondly, my ‘reading’ of it is further demarcated. It is not
any photograph but the cover of Paris-Match; a specific practice with its
own ideological configurations (‘newsworthiness’, captions, touching up
photos, etc.). It is in the space between the sedimented perceptual
appropriation and the contextualized reading that the hegemonic ideology
passes ‘as though behind men’s backs’. 13