Signs stay vital only through class struggle over their meaning.

Evidence

Cultural struggle, of course, takes many forms: incorporation, distortion, resistance, negotiation, recuperation. Raymond Williams has done us a great deal of service by outlining some of these processes, with his distinction between emergent, residual, and incorporated moments. We need to expand and develop this rudimentary schema. The important thing is to look at it dynamically: as a historical process. Emergent forces reappear in ancient historical disguise; emergent forces, pointing to the future, lose their anticipatory power, and become merely backward looking; today’s cultural breaks can be recuperated as a support to tomorrow’s dominant system of values and meanings. The struggle continues: but it is almost never in the same place, over the same meaning or value. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1016 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Culture is not already permanently inscribed with the conditions of a class before that struggle begins. The struggle consists in the success or failure to give “the cultural” a socialist accent. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1021 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with … the totality of users of the same sets 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 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 A sign that has been withdrawn from the pressure of the social struggle—which so to speak crosses beyond the pale of the social struggle—inevitably loses force, degenerating into an allegory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. This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crisis or revolutionary change. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1015 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

Related

• No cultural form permanently expresses any class until struggle gives it that accent (similarity 0.84)
• Contested signs stay politically alive while unchallenged ones decay into allegory. (similarity 0.84)
• Class conflict extends into language itself through competing accents on every sign (similarity 0.83)
• The same sign carries differently oriented class accents simultaneously (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural symbols carry no fixed meaning; meaning shifts with the social field (similarity 0.82)
• Signs are multi-accented arenas where classes struggle over meaning (similarity 0.80)
• Ideological signs carry opposing class accents and become sites of struggle (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Culture acquires class meaning only through present political struggle #corroborates (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1021
• Cultural struggle shifts positions, never staying over the same meaning #corroborates (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1016
• Ideological signs carry opposing class accents and become sites of struggle #expands (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1015
• Ideological change happens through class struggle, not through ideas alone #corroborates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1130
• Common sense can be worked upon to transform it into conscious class struggle #expands (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 628
• Working-class culture emerges from its material conditions combined with class struggle #corroborates (0.60)