Page 169 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

158 MEDIA STUDIES

interpellations, they do constitute the well established elements of the
interdiscourse and frame successive new encounters. Gramsci speaks of the
weight of traditional elements and Laclau of the ‘relative continuity’ of popular
traditions. Indeed, Laclau may not have gone far enough in examining how these
elements of the ‘pre-constructed’ may help to delay and impede the process of
articulating/disarticulating the existing interpellative structures of ideological
discourses. Consequently, he may offer a picture of too ‘open’ a struggle
between discourses which is not sufficiently attentive to the weight of traditional
elements.
Since ‘screen theory’ does not make any distinction between how the subject
is constituted as a ‘space’ and specific interpellations, it deduces ‘subjects’ from
the subject positions offered by the text and identifies the two. Thus the ‘classic
realist text’ recapitulates, in its particular discursive strategies, the positions in
which the subject has been constituted by the ‘primary’ processes. There is a
fixed identity and perfect reciprocity between these two structures, which in
‘screen theory’ are, in effect, one and the same structure. The ‘realist text’ is
therefore not so much ‘read’ as simply ‘consumed/appropriated’ straight, via the
only possible positions available to the reader—those reinscribed by the text.
This forecloses the question of reading as itself a moment in the production of
meaning. In the ‘screen theory’ account this moment is doubly determined—by
the primary subject positions which inscribe the subject in a relation of
empiricist to knowledge/language and by those positions as they are reinscribed
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in the text through the strategies of realism. Since these are posed as very
general mechanisms, ‘screen theory’ is not required to address either the
possibility of different, historically specific ‘realisms’ or the possibility of an
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inscribed realist reading being refused. Readers here appear merely as the
bearers or puppets of their unconscious positionings, reduplicated in the structure
of the realist discourse (singular). But this runs counter to two of the most
important advances previously established by structural linguistics: the
essentially polysemic nature of signs and sign-based discourses, and the
interrogative/expansive nature of all readings. In many ways ‘screen theory’,
which insists on the ‘productivity of the text’, undermines that concept by
defining the ‘realist text’ as a mere replay of positions established elsewhere.
In contradiction to this argument, we would still want to retain some of the
ideas expressed through the concept of ‘preferred readings’. This suggests that a
text of the dominant discourse does privilege or prefer a certain reading. We
might now expand this to say that such texts privilege a certain reading in part by
inscribing certain preferred discursive positions from which its discourse appears
‘natural’, transparently aligned to ‘the real’ and credible. However, this cannot
be the only reading inscribed in the text, and it certainly cannot be the only
reading which different readers can make of it. The theory of the polysemic
nature of discourse must hold to the possibility of establishing an articulation
between the ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ circuits, but it should not adopt a position
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of a ‘necessary correspondence’ or identity between them. Vološinov insists