Class conflict extends into language itself through competing accents on every sign

Evidence

Sign becomes an arena of class struggle.… By and large it is thanks to this intersecting of accents that a sign maintains its vitality and dynamism and the capacity for further development. A sign that has been withdrawn from the pressure of the social struggle—which so to speak crosses beyond the pale of the social struggle—inevitably loses force, degenerating into an allegory and becoming the object not of live social intelligibility but of philosophical comprehension.… The ruling class strives to impart 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 unaccentual. In actual fact, each living ideological sign has two faces, like Janus. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current truth must inevitably sound to many people as the greatest lie. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1015

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the Voloshinov/Bakhtin theory of the sign as multi-accentual — a foundational concept for understanding Hall’s theory of ideological struggle.
• XREF: Connects to Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and to Gramsci’s hegemony theory that Hall builds on throughout these essays. — connects to: Regional accents are erased through class-aspirational self-suppression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1348