Page 170 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

158 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural
relations.
The text is never isolatable; it is ‘always caught in the network of the
chains of signification which over-print it, inscribing it into the currency of
our discourses’ (1984b). We can deconstruct any text, disseminating and
fragmenting its meaning into its different contexts and codes, displacing
any claim it makes to ‘have’ a meaning. Yet, particular texts are
consistently read with the same meanings, located within the same codes,
as if they were written there for all to see. Thus, every sign must be and is
made to mean. There is no necessary correspondence between sign and
meaning; every sign is ‘multiaccentual’. Culture is the struggle over
meaning, a struggle that takes place over and within the sign. Culture is
‘the particular pattern of relations established through the social use of
things and techniques’ (1984a).
But it is not only the sign that must be made to mean, it is the world as
well. For meaning does not exhaust the social world: for example, ‘Class
relations do not disappear because the particular historic cultural forms in
which class is “lived” and experienced at a particular period, change’
(1984a). Culture is the site of the struggle to define how life is lived and
experienced, a struggle carried out in the discursive forms available to us.
Cultural practices articulate the meanings of particular social practices and
events; they define the ways we make sense of them, how they are
experienced and lived. And these already interpreted social practices can be,
in turn, articulated into even larger relations of domination and resistance.
It is here—in the question of the relations between discourses and the
realities they purport to represent—that Hall locates the question of
ideology.
Ideology is articulated (constructed) in and through language but it is
not equivalent to it. There is, in fact, no necessary correspondence between
a text and its politics, which is always a function of its position within an
ideological field of struggle, the struggle to achieve an equivalence between
language and reality. Particular ideological practices are not inscribed with
their politics, any more than particular social identities are inscribed with
their ideologies ‘on their backs’. Practices do not intrinsically belong to any
political position or social identity; they must be articulated into it. The
meaning and political inflection of, for example, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, or
‘black’, or of a particular media practice, technology or social relationship
are not guaranteed by its origin in a particular class struture. It is always
capable of being de-articulated and re-articulated; it is a site of struggle.
Hall (1981) writes that

The meaning of a cultural form and its place or position in the
cultural field is not inscribed inside its form. Nor is its position fixed