Page 174 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

TEXTS, READERS, SUBJECTS 163

individuals do have different relations to sets of discourses, in that their
position in the social formation, their positioning in the real, will determine
which sets of discourses a given subject is likely to encounter and in what
ways it will do so. 23

Willemen here returns to the agenda—but now from a position within ‘the
discursive’ —a set of questions about the relations between the social position of
‘the reader’ and discursive formations. These questions, in a more ‘sociological’
form, were at the centre of Bernstein’s early work and that of Bourdieu and
24
Baudelot and Establet. Their disappearance from the discussion is, no doubt,
attributable to that general critique of ‘sociological approaches’ common in
‘screen theory’. Though basically correct, this has sometimes been taken to
extreme lengths, where the mere ascription of the qualifier ‘sociological’ is
enough to consign a text so stigmatized to the scrap-heap of theory. Bernstein
25
did invite criticisms by the overly deterministic way in which the relation
between class and language was posed in his early work. The position was
extensively criticized, and there has been some modification on his part since
26
then. The terms of the argument can be extensively faulted. But the questions
addressed are not without their ‘rational core’. Willemen argues that ‘the real
determines to a large extent the encounter of/with discourses’. Neale observes
27
that ‘audiences are determined economically, politically and ideologically’. 28
The basic problem with the sociological formulations is that they presumed a too
simple, one-to-one correspondence between social structure and discourse: they
treated language as ascribed by and inscribed in class position. Thus, as Ellis
remarked, ‘it is assumed that the census of employment category carries with it
both political and ideological reflections’. This position cannot be defended or
29
sustained. It is based on a too simple notion of how classes are constituted, and
on the ascription of fixed ideologies to whole classes. There is no conception of
signifying practices, their relative autonomy and specific effects.
The weaknesses in the position need not be elaborated at length. Class is not a
unitary category with effective determination at the level of the economic only.
There is no simple alignment between the economic, the political and the
ideological in the constitution of classes. Classes do not have fixed, ascribed or
unitary world views. In Poulantzas’s phrase, they do not carry their world views
around like number plates on their backs. Laclau argues that even ‘ideological
30
elements, taken in isolation, have no necessary class connotation and this
connotation is only the result of the articulation of those elements in a concrete
31
ideological discourse’ and the articulation of these discourses with class
practices in specific conjectures.
Much the same problems beset Parkin’s formulations, which on other grounds
32
were highly suggestive. Parkin’s dominant, negotiated and oppositional
‘meaning systems’ provided a useful point of departure for early work on
‘decoding’. But his framework, too, can be faulted on the grounds outlined
33
above. Simply, he proposed that a given section of the audience ‘either shares,