Page 168 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

TEXTS, READERS, SUBJECTS 157

specific ideological discourses. Laclau locates interpellation exclusively at the
level of the play in and struggle over discourses. Both locate ideological struggle
at the level of the interplay between the subject and the discursive.
The concept of contradictory interpellations can be employed to clarify and
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modify the sociological approach of Parkin and others, who refer to workers
who grant legitimacy to a ‘dominant ideology’ in the abstract but inhabit a
‘negotiated’ or ‘situationally defined’ ideology at the level of concrete practice.
That is, it can be used to clarify the problem of contradictory ideological
positions, and specifically forms of corporate or sectional class-consciousness,
without recourse to the premises of ‘false consciousness’. Parkin refers to this
evidence as showing ‘split levels of consciousness’. However, if we introduce
the concept of interpellation, we get rid of the presumption that there is a
prescribed, unitary, homogeneous form of class-consciousness. This allows us to
specify the articulation of different, contradictory subject positions or
interpellations, to which the same individual worker (a contradictory subject,
traversed by different discursive practices) is ‘hailed’: for example, he/she can be
interpellated as ‘national subject’ by the television discourses of the dominant
news media, but as ‘class/sectional’ subject by the discourses of his/her trade
union organization or co-workers. In this approach the relative dominance of
these contradictory interpellations and the political practices with which they are
articulated are not given elsewhere (for instance, at the level of the formation of
the subject) but vary with the conjuncture in which the subject is interpellated.
This stress on contradictory interpellations emphasizes the unstable,
provisional and dynamic properties of positioning, rather than falling (as Parkin
does, with his conception of ‘split levels of consciousness’) towards a static
sociological ascription. The latter simply separates out into fixed proportions—
where the subject identifies with the dominant discourses, and where he/she is in
potential opposition to them. Again, Laclau’s conception of the ideological work
of disarticulation—especially his argument about the way discourses can convert
opposition and contradiction into mere difference, thereby neutralizing a
potential antagonism—is of crucial relevance. The stress now falls on the
ideological process and struggle itself, thus making once more problematic a
prescribed text/reader/subject relation.
By ‘interdiscourse’ Pêcheux appears to mean the complex of discursive
formations in any society which provide already available subject positions (the
‘pre-constructed’) as a necessary category of their functioning. It is clear that the
concept of interdiscourse transforms the relation of one text/one subject to that of
a multiplicity of texts/subjects relations, in which encounters can be understood
not in isolation but only in the moments of their combination.
A further consideration, not taken into account in ‘screen theory’, is that
subjects have histories. If it is correct to speak not of text/subject but of texts/
subjects relations with reference to the present, it must also be the case that past
interpellations affect present ones. While these traditional and institutionalized
‘traces’ (to use Gramsci’s term) cannot in themselves determine present