Page 171 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

160 MEDIA STUDIES

agenda of issues and themes, premises and propositions which are visible/
invisible; or a repertoire of questions (proposing answers) which are asked/not
asked. This matrix of propositions constitutes it as a relatively coherent space of
operations. A problematic can define the dominant or preferred themes of a text.
But texts may also be structured by more than one problematic, though one or a
restricted set will tend to be in dominance.
Neale employs ‘mode of address’ specifically with reference to the positioning
of the subject:

To speak of representation in discourse in relation to ideology is also to
speak of subject positions: each discursive representation constitutes a
subject position, a place for the production and configuration of meaning,
for its coherence, or, occasionally, for its critical rupture….

but, he adds, ‘they are not necessarily marked by a single, specific mode of
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address’. The term may, however, be more usefully defined in relation to all
those discursive operations which seek to establish and define the form of the text/
reader relation. But we must beware of arguing that the positions of knowledge
inscribed in the textual operations are obligatory for all readers. We must also
distinguish between the positions which the text prefers and prescribes in its
discursive operations and the process by which concrete individuals, already
constituted as ‘subjects’ for a multiplicity of discourses, are (successfully or
inadequately) interpellated by any single text. Individuals are not merely
‘subjects’ for/by leave of a single text. A successfully achieved ‘correspondence’
must be understood as an accomplishment, not a ‘given’. It is the result of an
articulation: otherwise it could not be disarticulated.
‘Screen theory’ constantly elides the concrete individual, his/her constitution
as a ‘subject-for-discourse’, and the discursive subject positions constituted by
specific discursive practices and operations. These need to be kept analytically
distinct, otherwise we will fail to understand the relation subjects/texts within the
terms of a ‘no necessary correspondence’. Of course, specific combinations—
for example, between specific problematics and specific modes of address—may
exist historically as well secured, dominant or recurring patterns in particular
conjunctures in definite social formations. These may be fixed in place by the
institutionalization of practices within a particular site or apparatus (for example,
Hollywood cinema). Nevertheless, even these correspondences are not ‘eternal’
or universal. They have been secured. One can point to the practices and
mechanisms which secure them and which reproduce them, in place, in one text
after another. Unless one is to accept that there is no ideology but the dominant
ideology, which is always in its appointed place, this ‘naturalized’
correspondence must constantly be deconstructed and shown to be a historically
concrete relation. It follows from this argument that there must be different
‘realisms’, not a single ‘classic realist text’ to which all realist texts can be