Distinguishing ‘no fixed meaning’ from ‘no meaning at all’ is crucial

Evidence

Let’s take Baudrillard’s argument about representation and the implosion of meaning. This seems to rest upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of things: things are just what is seen on the surface. They don’t mean or signify anything. They cannot be “read.” We are beyond reading, language, meaning. Again I agree with Baudrillard’s attempt to contest the old manifest/latent type of hermeneutic analyses; this stands in his work as the base/superstructure does in Foucault’s—that which has to be contested and displaced. Aboveand underground is not a very useful way of thinking about appearance in relation to structural forces. Perhaps I ought to admit that some of the tendencies in Cultural Studies did go that way: phenomenal form/real relation, despite all qualifications, did suggest that the surface of things was only important insofar as you penetrated it to the underlying rules and codes. So Baudrillard is quite right returning us to what there is, the facticity of life, the surface, the spectacle, et cetera. Politically, in England, it has come to connote a certain kind of “realism” on the Left which argues that you can’t always go behind what the masses manifestly think that what they really think: you also have to recognize the validity of how they do make sense of the world. But I think Baudrillard’s position has become a kind of super-realism, taken to the nth degree. It says that, in the process of recognizing the real, there is nothing except what is immediately there on the surface. Of course, in so-called postmodern society, we feel overwhelmed by the diversity, the plurality of surfaces which it is possible to produce, and we have to recognize the rich technological basis of modern cultural production which enables us endlessly to simulate, reproduce, reiterate, and recapitulate. But there is all difference in the world between the assertion that there is no one, final, absolute meaning—no ultimate signified, only the endlessly sliding chain of signification, and on the other hand, the assertion that meaning does not exist. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 724

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions Hall’s key distinction: contestable/plural meaning (which he accepts) versus the denial that meaning exists at all (Baudrillardian super-realism, which he rejects) — the boundary of his own semiotic position.
• XREF: Connects to the postmodernism debate in Against Postmodernism critique of ‘endless sliding chain of signification’ claims.