Page 243 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

232 ENGLISH STUDIES

cipher, assumed and untheorized. Two tendencies play into this: a notion of the
reader as wholly and inflexibly constituted elsewhere, and a contrasted but, in
effect, similar view of the reader as a mere effect of the text. Neither position is
worthless, but neither will do as it stands, since both reduce the process of
reading to the mechanical reproduction of elements always already composed, in
either the text or the ‘subject’.
One of the central concepts, and one of the most subject to vagueness or
confusion, is the concept of the ‘reader’. The distinction offered by Naumann
between (1) recipient—the actual historical reader, (2) addressee—the author’s
conception of whom s/he is addressing/will be read by, and (3) reader—a formal,
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textual-defined entity, may provide a conceptual basis for considering how
existing theories attempt to think the text-reader nexus.
On the face of it, Althusser’s notion of interpellation, as elaborated by Laclau,
seems to encompass all three versions of the ‘reader’: the recipient constituted as
addressee through the interpellation or ‘hailing’ of ideological discourse. It
provides what looks like an overall theory of discourse, in so far as Laclau
writes: ‘what constitutes the unifying principle of an ideological discourse is the
“subject” interpellated and thus constituted through the discourse’. 23
Furthermore, Laclau’s insistence on the plurality of ideologies, and hence of
interpellations, is valuable. Individuals are not interpellated as subjects once and
for all, but rather dispersed across a range of successive and simultaneous
interpellations (legal, familial, political and so on). Literary texts certainly allude
to these ideologies and so evoke interpellative transactions negotiated elsewhere.
But the real problem of employing the notion of interpellation in a theory of
reading lies in the danger of equating literature as a specific cultural practice with
the concept of ‘ideological discourse’ (which, of course, neither Althusser nor
Laclau actually does). The notion of interpellation as applied to a theory of
reading provides no distinction, but rather a conceptual slide between, the
concept of the ‘subject interpellated’ and thus constituting ‘the unifying principle
of an ideological discourse’ and the historical subject involved in the practice of
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reading. Furthermore, the notion of interpellation fails to come to grips with the
specificity of literary practice as a second-order system of signification whose
raw material is language and which is therefore, in a sense, constituted by its
own ‘problematic’.
It is, however, significant that attempts to erect theories of reading on the basis
of a notion of literature as a specific, basically self-referencing, conventionalized
form of linguistic practice will tend to see reading as the performance of a
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‘literary competence’, or or to envisage literary criticism as the ‘reconstruction
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of a horizon of expectations’: theories in which the reader is little more than an
extrapolated ensemble of literary sensibilities. Thus, according to Culler,
the question is not what actual readers happen to do but what an ideal
reader must know implicitly in order to read and interpret works in ways