Page 161 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

150 MEDIA STUDIES

ideological struggle must take place, also, at the level of ‘the subject’ (since this
is where the relation of ‘the subject’ to ideology is constituted and is the
mechanism through which ideology functions) and is confined to disrupting the
forms of the discourse which recapitulate those primary positions.
This ambitious theory, with its aim to resolve a host of problems
unsatisfactorily dealt with in classical Marxist theory, has been forcefully
advanced and expounded with considerable sophistication. Nevertheless, it is
open to a number of criticisms which have not so far been adequately met. These
may be briefly summarized as follows.
1 The theory is substantiated by, first, establishing a series of homologies—
‘ideology is structured like a language’, ‘the unconscious is structured like a
language’ and so on—which are then declared to be not just ‘like’ each other but
actually ‘the same’: constituted in the same moment by the same unconscious
mechanisms. This movement from homology to identity is a dubious procedure
and has not so far been adequately defended.
2 These processes are all declared to be ‘the same’. But one of them is given
exclusive explanatory power over all the others. It is the psychoanalytic process
by which ‘the subject’ is constituted in the ‘symbolic’ which explains how
language/ representation function (in any/every other instance). Specific
discourses or representations appear to require no other conditions of existence
or further premises to be explained and have no other determinate effectivity.
But this form of psychoanalytic reductionism seems to ‘resolve’ the problems of
semiotics 1 simply by inverting them. What in Saussure was explained by
practices wholly exclusive of ‘the subject’ is now—by a simple inversion—
explained exclusively at the level of ‘the subject’. Except in a largely ritual sense,
any substantive reference to social formation has been made to disappear. This
gives ‘the subject’ an all-inclusive place and Lacanian psychoanalysis an
exclusive, privileged, explanatory claim.
3 This relates to the ‘in-general’ form of the argument. The mechanisms which
Freud and Lacan identify are, of course, universal. All ‘subjects’ in all societies
at all times are unconsciously constituted in this way. The formation of ‘the
subject’ in this sense is trans-historical and trans-social. It is a theory of the
universal ‘contradictory’ subject—different from ‘the subject’ of classical
philosophy in being intersected by contradiction and unconsciously constituted,
but similar to it in the transcendental/universal form in which it is predicated. It
is, of course, difficult, if not impossible, to square this universal form of
argument with the premises of historical materialism, which requires us always
to attend to the pertinent differences —Marx’s differentia specificae, which
differentiate one modality of individualism from another—which historicizes the
different forms of subjectivity and which needs a reference to specific modes of
production, to definite societies at historically specific moments and
conjunctures. The two kinds of theory are conceptually incompatible in the form
of their argument. This has not prevented ‘screen theory’ from claiming that its