Page 172 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

TEXTS, READERS, SUBJECTS 161

assimilated. And there is no necessary correspondence between these realisms
and a particular ideological problematic.

Individuals, subjects, ‘subjects’

In an important contribution Paul Willemen has identified an unjustified
conflation, in a great deal of ‘screen theory’, between the subject of the text and
the social subject. He argues:

There remains an unbridgeable gap between ‘real’ readers/authors and
‘inscribed’ ones, constructed and marked in and by the text. Real readers
are subjects in history, living in social formations, rather than mere
subjects of a single text. The two types of subject are not commensurate.
But for the purposes of formalism, real readers are supposed to coincide
with the constructed readers. 13

Hardy, Johnston and Willemen also mark the distinction between the ‘inscribed
reader of the text’ and the ‘social subject who is invited to take up this
14
position’. More recently Christine Gledhill has opened up this question of the
psychoanalytic and the historical ‘subject’; in response Claire Johnston, who
15
retains a firm base in the psychoanalytic framework, has also called for
a move away from a notion of the text as an autonomous object of study and
towards the more complex question of subjectivity seen in historical/social
terms. Feminist film practice can no longer be seen simply in terms of the
effectivity of a system of representation, but rather as a production of and by
subjects already in social practices, which always involve heterogeneous and
often contradictory positions in ideologies. 16
In their earlier paper Hardy, Johnston and Willemen proposed a model of
‘interlocking’ subjectivities’, caught up in a network of symbolic systems, in
which the social subject
always exceeds the subject implied by the text because he/she is also placed by
a heterogeneity of other cultural systems and is never coextensive with the
subject placed by a single fragment (i.e. one film) of the overall cultural text. 17
The subjects implied/implicated by the text are thus always already subject
within different social practices in determinate social formations—not simply
subjects in ‘the symbolic’ in general. They are constituted by specific, historical
forms of sociality:

this subject, at its most abstract and impersonal, is itself in history: the
discourses …determining the terms of its play, change according to the
relations of force of competing discourses intersecting in the plane of the
subject in history, the individual’s location in ideology at a particular
moment and place in the social formation. 18