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208 LANGUAGE

as we have seen, subject positionality becomes crucial, as, for example, in
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Barthes’s later work on literature (S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text) or as in the
sort of film analysis developed in the journal of the Society for Education in Film
and Television, Screen, over the last few years. The main problem with these
forms of textual analysis, from our perspective, has already been indicated: their
failure to pay due attention to the material, social practices which help to
structure different forms of signifying practice. We would argue, as a general
principle, that consideration of these factors is an important element in any attempt
at the historically specific analysis of signifying practices.
It can be argued that the roots of semiological approaches in Saussure’s
general linguistic theory, with his primary division of language into the language
system (langue) and the spoken utterance (parole), has enabled the development
of forms of textual analysis which propose to tackle ideology purely at the level
of general theoretical systems. If, with Foucault, we are critical of the notion of
general theories and would insist on historical specificity at all levels of analysis,
what then constitutes the specificity of language as a relatively autonomous
structure? We certainly cannot simply reverse the problem and reduce language
to the social practices within which specific forms of signification are located (for
example, the technical determinants on film or televisual discourses).
In attempting to think about what constitutes the specificity of language
structures, located within historically specific, social practices, it seems to us that
we have much to learn from the forms of general theory outlined in this chapter.
The most we can do here, is indicate what we consider to be important starting-
points and why we think so, since the choice of theoretical models—though
governed, we would argue, by criteria of adequacy in terms of their analytic and
explanatory power—are also necessarily the subject of a political choice. Thus,
for example, we would insist on the inadequacy of transparent readings of
language. Such readings mask both the socio-ideological determinants of
signification and the linguistic specificity (in terms of subject positionality and
the fixing of meaning) whereby discursive practices operate and common-sense
ideologies are ‘lived’ and represented in a variety of cultural practices. Such
cultural practices consist of apparently ‘spontaneous’ forms of consensual shared
meanings and values, which appear, to individual speaking subjects, to be given
as a priori, denotative meanings but which are, in fact, socially and historically
constructed. We would argue that the questions of subject positionality and
representation (that is, how meanings are ideologically fixed in language) are
central; but that also there is a need for attention to language in cultural analysis
which goes beyond general positions on subjectivity and representation. Here we
feel the need for a form of sociolinguistics which would pay attention to both
language structure and usage in historically specific locations, thereby opening
up the area of the language of continually repositioned, speaking subjects within
the symbolic order, thought historically to be a particular formation of social
practices and discourses. Thus while decentring the subject as the source and
guarantee of meaning, we would want to look at the range of socially and