Page 175 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

164 MEDIA STUDIES

partly shares or does not share the dominant code in which messages are
transmitted’. He related these fairly unproblematically to class position, defined
in a sociological manner. This formulation was useful in the preliminary work of
establishing, in a hypothetical-deductive manner, the presence of different and
variable ‘decoding’ positions. (These, of course, then required further refinement
and concrete exemplification.) Now the definition of a range of possible
‘decoding’ positions is not undermined by the objections advanced earlier. What
is undermined is the simple ascription of these positions to classes as such or,
alternatively, the deduction of them from socio-economic positions in some prior
manner. Parkin did himself identify the category of ‘negotiated code’, the
amplification of which has potentially fruitful uses in the analysis of sectional or
corporate class-consciousness. He also identified the possibility of ‘contradictory’
meaning systems. But he did not take this finding, which undermined the
ascriptive nature of his basic framework, far enough. In fact, there are no simple
meaning systems but a multiplicity of discourses at play in a social formation.
These discourses have varied sources of origin—they cannot be attributed to
classes as such. There is no unproblematic link between classes and meaning
systems. Different discursive positions need to be analysed in terms of their
linguistic and discursive characteristics and effects.
However, the essentialism and class-reductionism which tends to characterize
this position has generally been countered by its simple opposite or inversion: the
premise, in essence, of an absolute autonomy, and the assumption that any
relationship between discursive formations and class formations must be, by
definition, ‘reductionist’. This is not acceptable either. The problem can only be
resolved if we are able to think through the full implications of two apparently
contradictory propositions: first, discourses cannot be explained by or reduced to
classes, defined exclusively at the level of the economic; second, nevertheless,
‘audiences are determined economically, politically and ideologically’. The first
proposition suggests that classes, understood economically, will not always be
found ‘in place’ in their proper discursive position. The second proposition,
however, insists that the economic and political constitution of classes will have
some real effectivity for the distribution of discourses to groups of agents. (We
deal here exclusively with the question of the reduction of discourses to classes.
But it must be remembered that other structures and relations—for example,
those of gender and patriarchal relations, which are not reducible to economic
class—will also have a structuring effect on the distribution of discourses.)
In short, the relation classes/meaning systems has to be fundamentally
reworked by taking into account the full effectivity of the discourse level.
Discursive formations intervene between ‘classes’ and ‘languages’. They
intervene in such a way as to prevent or forestall any attempt to read the level of
the operation of language back in any simple or reductive way to economic
classes. Thus we cannot deduce which discursive frameworks will be mobilized
in particular reader/text encounters from the level of the socio-economic position
of the ‘readers’. But position in the social structure may be seen to have a