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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 75

Beautiful’). In the latter case, the struggle was not over the term itself but over its
connotative meaning. Barthes, in his essay on ‘Myth’, argued that the associative
field of meanings of a single term—its connotative field of reference—was, par
excellence, the domain through which ideology invaded the language system. It
did so by exploiting the associative, the variable, connotative, ‘social value’ of
language. For some time, this point was misunderstood as arguing that the
denotative or relatively fixed meanings of a discourse were not open to multiple
accentuation, but constituted a ‘natural’ language system; and only the
connotative levels of discourse were open to different ideological inflexion. But
this was simply a misunderstanding. Denotative meanings, of course, are not
uncoded; they, too, entail systems of classification and recognition in much the
same way as connotative meanings do; they are not natural but ‘motivated’
signs. The distinction between denotation and connotation was an analytic, not a
substantive one (see Camargo, 1980; Hall, 1980a). It suggested, only, that the
connotative levels of language, being more open-ended and associative, were
peculiarly vulnerable to contrary or contradictory ideological inflexions.

Hegemony and articulation

The real sting in the tail did not reside there, but in a largely unnoticed extension
of Vološinov’s argument. For if the social struggle in language could be
conducted over the same sign, it followed that signs (and, by a further extension,
whole chains of signifiers, whole discourses) could not be assigned, in a
determinate way, permanently to any one side in the struggle. Of course, a native
language is not equally distributed amongst all native speakers regardless of
class, socio-economic postion, gender, education and culture: nor is competence
to perform in language randomly distributed. Linguistic performance and
competence is socially distributed, not only by class but also by gender. Key
institutions—in this respect, the familyeducation couple—play a highly
significant role in the social distribution of cultural ‘capital’, in which language
played a pivotal role, as educational theorists like Bernstein and social theorists
like Bourdieu have demonstrated. But, even where access for everyone to the
same language system could be guaranteed, this did not suspend what Vološinov
called the ‘class struggle in language’. Of course, the same term, e.g. ‘black’,
belonged in both the vocabularies of the oppressed and the oppressors. What was
being struggled over was not the ‘class belongingness’ of the term, but the
inflexion it could be given, its connotative field of reference. In the discourse of
the Black movement, the denigratory connotation ‘black=the despised race’
could be inverted into its opposite: ‘black=beautiful’. There was thus a ‘class
struggle in language’; but not one in which whole discourses could be
unproblematically assigned to whole social classes or social groups. Thus
Vološinov argued: