Page 83 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 73
system of narration, ‘what was already known’, ideological discourses both
warranted themselves in and selectively reproduced the common stock of
knowledge in society.
Because meaning no longer depended on ‘how things were’ but on how things
were signified, it followed, as we have said, that the same event could be
signified in different ways. Since signification was a practice, and ‘practice’ was
defined as ‘any process of transformation of a determinate raw material into a
determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour,
using determinate means (of “production”)’ (Althusser, 1969, p. 166), it also
followed that signification involved a determinate form of labour, a specific
‘work’: the work of meaningproduction, in this case. Meaning was, therefore,
not determined, say, by the structure of reality itself, but conditional on the work
of signification being successfully conducted through a social practice. It
followed, also, that this work need not necessarily be successfully effected:
because it was a ‘determinate’ form of labour it was subject to contingent
conditions. The work of signification was a social accomplishment—to use
ethnomethodological terminology for a moment. Its outcome did not flow in a
strictly predictable or necessary manner from a given reality. In this, the
emergent theory diverged significantly, both from the reflexive or referential
theories of language embodied in positivist theory, and from the reflexive kind
of theory also implicit in the classical Marxist theory of language and the
superstructures.
Three important lines of development followed from this break with early
theories of language. Firstly, one had to explain how it was possible for language
to have this multiple referentiality to the real world. Here, the polysemic nature of
language—the fact that the same set of signifiers could be variously accented in
those meanings—proved of immense value. Vološinov put this point best when
he observed:

Existence reflected in the sign is not merely reflected but refracted. How is
this refraction of existence in the ideological sign determined? By an
intersecting of differently oriented social interests in every ideological sign.
Sign becomes an arena of class struggle. This social multi-accentuality of
the ideological sign is a very crucial aspect…. A sign that has been
withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle—which, so to speak,
crosses beyond the whole of the class struggle—inevitably loses force,
degenerates into allegory, becoming the object not of a live social
intelligibility but of a philological comprehension. (Vološinov, 1973, p.
23)

The second point is also addressed as an addendum, in Vološinov’s remark.
Meaning, once it is problematized, must be the result, not of a functional
reproduction of the world in language, but of a social struggle—a struggle for
mastery in discourse—over which kind of social accenting is to prevail and to