Polysemy does not imply pluralism because cultures maintain dominant preferred meanings.
Evidence
“Polysemy” must not, however, be confused with pluralism. Connotative codes are not equal among themselves. Any society/culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its segmentations, its classifications of the social, cultural, and political world, upon its members. There remains a dominant cultural order , though it is neither univocal nor uncontested. This question of the “structure of dominance” in a culture is an absolutely crucial point. We may say, then, that the different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into connotative domains of dominant or preferred meanings . New, problematic, or troubling things and events, which breach our expectancies and run counter to our “common-sense constructs,” to our “taken-for-granted” knowledge of social structures, must be assigned to their connotational domains before they can be said to “make sense”: and the most common way of “mapping them” is to assign the new within some domain or other of the existing “maps of problematic social reality.” We say “dominant,” not “determined,” because it is always possible to order, classify, assign, and decode an event within more than one “mapping.” But we say “dominant” because there exists a pattern of “preferred readings,” and these mappings both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 802
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines the crucial distinction between polysemy and pluralism, introducing the concept of preferred or dominant meanings.
- XREF: This is Hall’s encoding/decoding theory, foundational to cultural studies; connects to later work by key thinkers like Fiske and Grossberg.
- SEED: A useful essay angle: how social media recommendation algorithms function as new institutional enforcers of dominant preferred meanings.