Page 52 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

40 STUART HALL

It is precisely because language, the medium of thought and ideological
calculation, is ‘multi-accentual’, as Volosinov put it, that the field of the
ideological is always a field of ‘intersecting accents’ and the ‘intersecting of
differently oriented social interests’:

Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As
a result differently orientated accents intersect in every ideological
sign. Sign becomes the arena of the class struggle… A sign that has
been withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle—which, so
to speak, crosses beyond the pale of class struggle, inevitably loses
force, degenerating into allegory and becoming the object not of live
social intelligibility but of philological comprehension.
(Volosinov, 1973:23)

This approach replaces the notion of fixed ideological meanings and class-
ascribed ideologies with the concepts of ideological terrains of struggle and
the task of ideological transformation. It is the general movement in this
direction, away from an abstract general theory of ideology, and towards
the more concrete analysis of how, in particular historical situations, ideas
‘organize human masses, and create the terrain on which men move,
acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.,’ which makes the
work of Gramsci (from whom that quotation (1971) is taken) a figure of
seminal importance in the development of marxist thinking in the domain
of the ideological.
One of the consequences of this kind of revisionist work has often been
to destroy altogether the problem of the class structuring of ideology and
the ways in which ideology intervenes in social struggles. Often this
approach replaces the inadequate notions of ideologies ascribed in blocks
to classes with an equally unsatisfactory ‘discursive’ notion which implies
total free floatingness of all ideological elements and discourses. The image
of great, immovable class battalions heaving their ascribed ideological
luggage about the field of struggle, with their ideological number-plates on
their backs, as Poulantzas once put it, is replaced here by the infinity of subtle
variations through which the elements of a discourse appear spontaneously
to combine and recombine with each other, without material constraints of
any kind other than that provided by the discursive operations themselves.
Now it is prefectly correct to suggest that the concept ‘democracy’ does
not have a totally fixed meaning, which can be ascribed exclusively to the
discourse of bourgeois forms of political representation. ‘Democracy’ in the
discourse of the ‘Free West’ does not carry the same meaning as it does
when we speak of ‘popular-democratic’ struggle or of deepening the
democratic content of political life. We cannot allow the term to be wholly
expropriated into the discourse of the right. Instead, we need to develop a
strategic contestation around the concept itself. Of course, this is no mere