Contested signs stay politically alive while unchallenged ones decay into allegory.

Evidence

Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes the arena of the class struggle. This social multi-accentuality of the ideological sign is a very crucial aspect. By and large, it is thanks to this intersecting of accents that a sign maintains its vitality and dynamism.… A sign that has been withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle—which, so to speak, crosses beyond the pale of the class struggle—inevitably loses force, degenerating into allegory and becoming the object not of a live social intelligibility but of philological comprehension. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 918

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘multi-accentuality of the ideological sign’ — the Bakhtinian/Voloshinov thesis that signs carry class-differentiated accents.
• XREF: Connects to hegemony theory and to Hall’s argument elsewhere that ideology works through struggle over meaning; also resonates with Raymond Williams’s ‘keywords’ project.
• SEED: Potential essay: why words that lose their contestation (like ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ in settled contexts) become lifeless philological objects rather than live political instruments.