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THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND IDEOLOGY 149

Screen marked the passage of that journal from the earlier debates on ‘realism’ to
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a full-blown Lacanian position. It ought to be said that ‘screen theory’ is far
more than an attempt to supplement existing theories of language, representation
and ideology by developing the neglected area of ‘the subject’. In effect, all
preceding theories have been substantively reworked and/or displaced by the
deployment of Lacan’s propositions. The premises of historical materialism, for
example, which attempt to relate ideologies to political and economic practices,
to their functioning and effectivity in specific social formations and in specific
historical conjunctures, have been translated on to the terrain of ‘the subject’. We
would argue that this is accomplished through a series of reductions: the
unconscious process through which ‘the subject’ is constituted is also—it is
proposed—the process which constitutes ‘the subject’ in language. It is also the
same as that which constitutes ‘the subject’ for ideology. First a series of
homologies, then a series of identities give these apparently distinct (if related)
levels a single and common source and foundation. The ‘politics’ of ideological
struggle thus becomes exclusively a problem of and around ‘subjectivity’ in the
Lacanian sense.
‘Screen theory’ is therefore a very ambitious theoretical construct indeed—for
it aims to account for how biological individuals become social subjects, and for
how those subjects are fixed in positions of knowledge in relation to language
and representation, and for how they are interpellated in specific ideological
discourses. This theory is then lopped back to the earlier concerns with ‘realism’.
Most filmic texts are held to operate within the conventions and practices of
‘realism’: they are said to be governed by the rules of the classic realist text (in
the singular). The classic realist text sets the viewers in a position of transparent
and unproblematic knowledge in relation to their representations of ‘the real’,
which they actually produce but which they appear only (naturally) to reflect.
They therefore depend on an empiricist relation to knowledge. But—so the
argument runs—this is because the rules and conventions of the classic realist
text recapitulate and replay the basic positions of ‘the subject’, already fixed by
unconscious processes in the early stages of its formation.
This theory gives texts a central place. Texts do not express a meaning (which
resides elsewhere) or ‘reflect reality’: they produce a representation of ‘the real’
which the viewer is positioned to take as a mirror reflection of the real world:
this is the ‘productivity of the text’, discussed more fully below. However, this
‘productivity’ no longer depends in any way on the ideological effectivity of the
representations produced, nor on the ideological problematics within which the
discourse is operating, nor on the social, political or historical practices with
which it is articulated. Its ‘productivity’ is defined exclusively in terms of the
capacity of the text to set the viewer ‘in place’ in a position of unproblematic
identification/ knowledge. And that, in turn, is founded on the process of the
formation of the subject. Within this framework, then, the functioning of
language, the practices of representation and the operations of ideology are all
explained by reference to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It follows that all