Page 165 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Texts, readers, subjects*

Dave Morley

One major problem with the dominant theoretical position advanced by Screen is
that it operates with what Neale has characterized as an ‘abstract text-subject
relationship’. The subject is not conceived as already constituted in other
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discursive formations and social relations. Also, it is treated in relation to only
one text at a time (or, alternatively, all texts are assumed to function according to
the rules of a single ‘classic realist text’). This is then explicated by reference to
the universal, primary psychoanalytic processes (Oedipus complex, ‘mirror
phase’, castration complex and its resolution and so on), through which,
according to Lacan’s reading of Freud, ‘the subject’ is constituted. The text is
understood as reproducing or replaying this primary positioning, which is the
foundation of any reading.
Now, apart from the difficulty of trying to explain a specific instance of the
text/ reader relationship in terms of a universalist theory of the formation of
subjects-in-general, this proposition also serves to isolate the encounter of text
and reader from all social and historical structures and from other texts. To
conceptualize the moment of reading/viewing in this way is to ignore the constant
intervention of other texts and discourses, which also position ‘the subject’. At
the moment of textual encounter other discourses are always in play besides
those of the particular text in focus— discourses which depend on other
discursive formations, brought into play through ‘the subject’s’ placing in other
practices—cultural, educational, institutional. And these other discourses will set
some of the terms in which any particular text is engaged and evaluated. ‘Screen
theory’ may be assumed to justify its neglect of the interplay of other discourses
on the text/reader encounter by virtue of its assumption that all texts depend on
the same set of subject positions, constituted in the formation of the subject, and
therefore that they need be accorded no other distinctive effectivity of their own.
Here, however, we wish to put in question this assumption that all specific
discursive effects can be reduced to, and explained by, the functioning of a
single, universal set of psychic mechanisms.
Pêcheux has provided us with the useful and important concept of
interdiscourse. As explicated by Woods, he argues that:
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