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66 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
old expression—real because it is ‘real’ in its effects. It has also become a site of
struggle (between competing definitions) and a stake—a prize to be won—in the
conduct of particular struggles. This means that ideology can no longer be seen
as a dependent variable, a mere reflection of a pre-given reality in the mind. Nor
are its outcomes predictable by derivation from some simple determinist logic.
They depend on the balance of forces in a particular historical conjuncture: on
the ‘politics of signification’.
Central to the question of how a particular range of privileged meanings was
sustained was the question of classification and framing. Lévi-Strauss, drawing
on models of transformational linguistics, suggested that signification depended,
not on the intrinsic meaning of particular isolated terms, but on the organized set
of interrelated elements within a discourse. Within the colour spectrum, for
example, the range of colours would be subdivided in different ways in each
culture. Eskimos have several words for the thing which we call ‘snow’. Latin
has one word, mus, for the animal which in English is distinguished by two
terms, ‘rat’ and ‘mouse’. Italian distinguishes between legno and bosco where
English only speaks of a ‘wood’. But where Italian has both bosco and foresta,
German only has the single term, wald. (The examples are from Eco’s essay,
‘Social life as a sign system’ (1973)). These are distinctions, not of Nature but of
Culture. What matters, from the viewpoint of signification, is not the integral
meaning of any single colour-term,—mauve, for example—but the system of
differences between all the colours in a particular classificatory system; and
where, in a particular language, the point of difference between one colour and
another is positioned. It was through this play of difference that a language
system secured an equivalence between its internal system (signifiers) and the
systems of reference (signifieds) which it employed. Language constituted
meaning by punctuating the continuum of Nature into a cultural system; such
equivalences or correspondences would therefore be differently marked. Thus
there was no natural coincidence between a word and its referent: everything
depended on the conventions of linguistic use, and on the way language
intervened in Nature in order to make sense of it. We should note that at least
two, rather different epistemological positions can be derived from this
argument. A Kantian or neo-Kantian position would say that, therefore, nothing
exists except that which exists in and for language or discourse. Another reading
is that, though the world does exist outside language, we can only make sense of
it through its appropriation in discourse. There has been a good deal of
epistemological heavy warfare around these positions in recent years.
What signified, in fact, was the positionality of particular terms within a set.
Each positioning marked a pertinent difference in the classificatory scheme
involved. To this Lévi-Strauss added a more structuralist point: that it is not the
particular utterance of speakers which provides the object of analysis, but the
classificatory system which underlies those utterances and from which they are
produced, as a series of variant transformations. Thus, by moving from the
surface narrative of particular myths to the generative system or structure out of