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74 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
win credibility. This reintroduced both the notion of ‘differently oriented social
interests’ and a conception of the sign as ‘an arena of struggle’ into the
consideration of language and of signifying ‘work’.
Althusser, who transposed some of this kind of thinking into his general theory
of ideology, tended to present the process as too uni-accentual, too functionally
adapted to the reproduction of the dominant ideology (Althusser, 1971). Indeed,
it was difficult, from the base-line of this theory, to discern how anything but the
‘dominant ideology’ could ever be reproduced in discourse. The work of
Vološinov and Gramsci offered a significant correction to this functionalism by
reintroducing into the domain of ideology and language the notion of a ‘struggle
over meaning’ (which Vološinov substantiated theoretically with his argument
about the multi-accentuality of the sign). What Vološinov argued was that the
mastery of the struggle over meaning in discourse had, as its most pertinent effect
or result, the imparting of a ‘supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign,
to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgements
which occurs in it, to make the sign uni-accentual’ (1973, p. 23). To go back for
a moment to the earlier argument about the realityeffect: Vološinov’s point was
that uni-accentuality—where things appeared to have only one, given,
unalterable and ‘supraclass’ meaning—was the result of a practice of closure: the
establishment of an achieved system of equivalence between language and reality,
which the effective mastery of the struggle over meaning produced as its most
pertinent effect. These equivalences, however, were not given in reality, since, as
we have seen, the same reference can be differently signified in different
semantic systems; and some systems can constitute differences which other
systems have no way of recognizing or punctuating. Equivalences, then, were
secured through discursive practice. But this also meant that such a practice was
conditional. It depended on certain conditions being fulfilled. Meanings which
had been effectively coupled could also be un-coupled. The ‘struggle in
discourse’ therefore consisted precisely of this process of discursive articulation
and disarticulation. Its outcomes, in the final result, could only depend on the
relative strength of the ‘forces in struggle’, the balance between them at any
strategic moment, and the effective conduct of the ‘politics of signification’. We
can think of many pertinent historical examples where the conduct of a social
struggle depended, at a particular moment, precisely on the effective dis-
articulation of certain key terms, e.g. ‘democracy’, the ‘rule of law’, ‘civil
rights’, ‘the nation’, ‘the people’, ‘Mankind’, from their previous couplings, and
their extrapolation to new meanings, representing the emergence of new political
subjects.
The third point, then, concerned the mechanisms within signs and language,
which made the ‘struggle’ possible. Sometimes, the class struggle in language
occurred between two different terms: the struggle, for example, to replace the
term ‘immigrant’ with the term ‘black’. But often, the struggle took the form of a
different accenting of the same term: e.g. the process by means of which the
derogatory colour ‘black’ became the enhanced value ‘Black’ (as in ‘Black is