Page 176 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

TEXTS, READERS, SUBJECTS 165

structuring and limiting effect on the repertoire of discursive or ‘decoding’
strategies available to different sectors of an audience. They will have an effect
on the pattern of the distribution of discursive repertoires. What is more, the key
elements of the social structure which delimit the range of competences in
particular audiences may not be referable in any exclusive way to ‘class’
understood in the economic sense. The key sites for the distribution of discursive
sets and competences are probably—following some of the leads of Bernstein
and Bourdieu—the family and the school—or, as Althusser (following Gramsci)
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argued, the family-school couplet. This is the key institutional site or
articulation for the distribution of ‘cultural capital’, in Bourdieu’s terms. Other
formations—for example, gender and immediate social context or cultural milieu
—may also have a formative and structuring effect, not only on which specific
discourses will be in play in any specific text/reader encounter, but also in
defining the range and the repertoire of performance codes. The distribution of
the discourses of the media and other cultural apparatuses will also have a
structuring effect on the differentiated discursive competences of socially
structured audiences.
This proposition now requires to be elaborated at a more concrete level. But
the direction in which further work must proceed is already clear. In effect, what
is required is to work through more fully the consequences of the argument that
the discourses mobilized by ‘readers’ in relation to any ‘text’ cannot be treated as
the effect of a direct relation between ‘discourses’ and ‘the real’. It must be
analysed, instead, in terms of the effects of social relations and structures (the
extra-discursive) on the structuring of the discursive space—that is, of the
‘interdiscourse’. These structured relations cannot produce ‘a reading’ (and no
other) in any specific instance. But they do exercise a limit on (that is, they
‘determine’) the formation of the discursive space, which in turn has a
determinate effect on the practice of readings at the level of particular text-reader
encounters. This approach undermines any notion of the automatic or
‘unquestioned performance of the subject by the text’—an approach which
merely replaces a sociological determinism by a textual one. It provides the
theoretical space in which the subject may be placed in some relation to the
signifying chain other than that of a ‘regulated process’.