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TEXTS, READERS, SUBJECTS 159

that it is the ‘multi-accentuality of the sign’ which makes it possible for
discourse to become an ‘arena of struggle’. What we may call the ‘reality effect’
is not the product of the required reduplication of the empiricist subject in the
discourse of realism but the effect of an achieved alignment between subjects
and texts which the discourse itself accomplishes. ‘The ruling class tries to
impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or
drive inward the struggle between social value judgements which occurs in it, to
make the sign uniaccentual’. 9
Even in the case of the ‘classic realist text’, the subject positions inscribed by
the text, as a condition of its intelligibility, may be inhabited differently by
subjects who, in the past (as the result of interpellations by other texts/discourses/
institutions) or in the present, are already positioned in an interdiscursive space.
It does not follow that because the reader has ‘taken the position’ most fully
inscribed in the text, sufficient for the text to be intelligible, he/she will, for that
reason alone, subscribe to the ideological problematic of that text. The text may
be contradicted by the subject’s position(s) in relation to other texts,
problematics, institutions, discursive formations. This means that we must
establish a distinction between inhabiting inscribed subject positions, adopting an
ideological problematic and making a dominant reading of a text. We cannot,
then, assume that one text inscribes a required subject, but only that specific text/
subject relations will depend, in part, on the subject positions given by a
multiplicity of texts that produce (and have produced) contradictory
‘subjectivities’ which then act on and against each other within ‘the space of the
subject’.
Neale draws an important distinction between ideological problematic and
10
mode of address. His examination of the two Nazi propaganda films Der Ewige
Jude and Jud Suss suggests that they both share broadly the same ideological
problematic but differ in their modes of address. ‘If Der Ewige Jude, then, can be
seen to share with Jud Suss a common problematic in terms of race, order and
their representation, it nonetheless articulates that problematic in a different way:
it has a different mode of textual address’. Neale extends this argument to take into
account the effect of the interdiscursive; thus

address is not synonymous with textual address…although the latter can be
analysed and has an effectivity; particular positions and modalities of
position are a product of textual address in conjunction with the immediate
discourses that necessarily surround it within the apparatuses that support
it, and…these in turn owe their character, the particular modalities of
position that they produce in interaction with a text, to ideological practices
—the state of ideological struggle— within the conjuncture as a whole. 11

Ideological problematic, here, must be understood not as a set of contents but
rather as a defined set of operations: the way a problematic selects from,
conceives and organizes its field of reference. This is constituted by a particular