Page 184 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE STUDIES AT THE CENTRE 173

Here Chambers is developing the analysis of the ‘social practices of news
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production’, which was initiated by Stuart Hall and the Media Group. In this
analysis the formal linguistic processes of signification are situated within social
practices, involving complex configurations of commercial, technical and
editorial criteria (‘news values’). Although this relies on a concept of language as
denotation, where the meaning of the ideological signifier is fixed a priori within
the linguistic chain, we can recognize here the beginnings of a wider theory of
‘signifying practice’, within a theory of ideology, related to other material
practices in the social formation:

Newspapers trade in stories. But though the need to harness a multitude of
different stories and images to the profitable exchange of news values is
‘determining in the last instance’, this economic motive never appears on
its own. The ideological function of the photographic sign is always hidden
within its exchange value. The news/ideological meaning is the form in
which the sign-vehicles are exchanged. Though the economic dialectic,
here as elsewhere, determines the production and appropriation of
(symbolic) values, it is ‘never active in its pure state’. The exchange value
of the photographic sign is, thus, necessarily over-determined. 15

It was in the context of this work on denotation and connotation in relation to the
media that a ‘Language and Ideology’ Group was formed in 1975. It took as its
object theories of language since Saussure. This included formalist linguistics,
Barthes’s early work on myths, Benveniste, the neo-semiology of the ‘Tel Quel’
group (later Barthes, Kristeva, Sollers) and Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of
language which underpins much of the work of the ‘Tel Quel’ group. It also
included Derrida’s critique of Saussure, Marxist theories of language and
ideology (Marx, Stalin, Vološinov, Althusser) and historically specific
approaches to language through Foucault’s theory of discursive formations.
Saussure’s theory of language and the analytical model of denotation/
connotation, which Barthes developed on the basis of Saussure’s system, were
seen as posing two main problems for an adequate theorization of language.
These were, first, the question of the way in which meaning is fixed within
language (can we assume already constituted denotative signs which are then
subject to multiple connotations?). This question is part of the wider issue of the
degree of autonomy which we would wish to ascribe to the language system as
such: can it be abstracted out from speech acts, and how far has it, even as a
system, a historically specific character? Is it, indeed, theoretically viable to
posit a level of denotative meaning in the analysis of language? The other main
problem, which had a strong political as well as a theoretical dimension, was the
question of the role of the speaking subject within language and, by extension,
within ideology and politics, including sexual politics. The sociolinguistic
tradition had posed the question of the speaking subject within a
phenomenological framework—that is, the subject was seen as an intentional