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76 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
Class does not coincide with the sign community i.e. with the community
which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological
communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same
language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every
ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of class struggle. (Vološinov,
1973, p. 23)

This was an important step: the ramifications are briefly traced through below.
But one could infer, immediately, two things from this. First, since ideology
could be realized by the semantic accenting of the same linguistic sign, it
followed that, though ideology and language were intimately linked, they could
not be one and the same thing. An analytic distinction needed to be maintained
between the two terms. This is a point which later theorists, who identified the
entry of the child into his/her linguistic culture as one and the same mechanism
as the entry of the child into the ideology of its society neglected to show. But
the two processes, though obviously connected (one cannot learn a language
without learning something of its current ideological inflexions) cannot be
identified or equated in that perfectly homologous way. Ideological discourses
can win to their ways of representing the world already-languaged subjects, i.e.
subjects already positioned within a range of existing discourses, fully-social
speakers. This underlined the necessity to consider, instead, the ‘articulation’ of
ideology in and through language and discourse.
Second, though discourse could become an arena of social struggle, and all
discourses entailed certain definite premises about the world, this was not the
same thing as ascribing ideologies to classes in a fixed, necessary or determinate
way. Ideological terms and elements do not necessarily ‘belong’ in this definite
way to classes: and they do not necessarily and inevitably flow from class
position. The same elementary term, ‘democracy’ for example, could be
articulated with other elements and condensed into very different ideologies:
democracy of the Free West and the German Democratic Republic, for example.
The same term could be disarticulated from its place within one discourse and
articulated in a different position: the Queen acknowledging the homage of ‘her
people’, for example, as against that sense of ‘the people’ or ‘the popular’ which
is oppositional in meaning to everything which connotes the élite, the powerful,
the ruler, the power bloc. What mattered was the way in which different social
interests or forces might conduct an ideological struggle to disarticulate a
signifier from one, preferred or dominant meaning-system, and rearticulate it
within another, different chain of connotations. This might be accomplished,
formally, by different means. The switch from ‘black=despised’ to ‘black =
beautiful’ is accomplished by inversion. The shift from ‘pig=animal with dirty
habits’ to ‘pig=brutal policeman’ in the language of the radical movements of the
1960s to ‘pig=male-chauvinist pig’ in the language of feminism, is a metonymic
mechanism—sliding the negative meaning along a chain of connotative
signifiers. This theory of the ‘no necessary class belongingness’ of ideological