Cultural Studies also considers forms and practices as zones or sites of contestation and conflict in the sense that many meanings claim to be the correct description. Dominant groups pick out those that serve their interests and therefore they have the power to name these and also to devise mechanisms and regulated ways to make their descriptions stick. These versions of the world work not necessarily because these are the best versions or descriptions of reality. How is this related to language? Barker clarifies:

“ Further, the signifying practices of language endow material objects and social practices with meanings that are brought into view and made intelligible to us in terms which language delimits. Language structures which meanings can or cannot be deployed under determinate circumstances by speaking subjects. As such, language is implicated in forms of power, with cultural politics operating at the level of signification and text.”

But culture is not a trap of language and labels. There are ways to come out of this and those are also the concerns of Cultural Studies. One would have to acknowledge the fact that change can be achieved and it can be brought only by imagining that there may be other possible ways and descriptions / discourses. We should be able to visualize that the world can be different and only this can bring change.

The first step towards this is to imagine alternative possibilities. The second way is re-description. As we have mentioned earlier, culture is regulated maps of meaning, it is discursive and a matter of the play and criss-crossing of discourses. Therefore, we have to begin to re-describe. The new ways of looking at things like reality, gender, caste, race, sexuality or class, will enable us to come out of the culture-language trap.

The third way is re-signification. Saussure had also agreed that signs are accepted because there are some correspondences which are maintained by convention. But people, cultures, ways of life, realities of oppression and domination are not simply signs. That is why at times it is very important to re-signify things.

The fourth way is recognizing the politics of the signifier. Assigning signifiers and their meanings is not wholly arbitrary from the point of view of politics. Recognizing that power and politics are involved in the signification process is another way in which change or coming out of the language-culture trap is possible. The final way is social contradiction. There are some contradictory forces in our cultural and social lives and the recognition of social contradiction helps us out of the trap.