Signs are multi-accented arenas where classes struggle over meaning

Evidence

“Class,” Volosinov observed, does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. 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it is thanks to this intersecting of accents that a sign maintains its vitality and dynamism.… A sign that has been withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle—which, so to speak, crosses beyond the pale of the class struggle—inevitably loses force, degenerating into allegory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: The concept of ‘multi-accentuality’ — crucial to Hall’s theory of ideology — is defined here via Volosinov.
• XREF: connects to: A class becomes a people when its name outweighs its concept. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 362