Page 108 - Decoding Culture

SITUATING SUBJECTS 101

ideological role of film. In the way in which it was adopted by
Screen theory it offered texts as capturing readers within ideology
by virtue of constituting them as subjects. Later Screen theory,
however, sought to build more on the processual aspects of
Lacanian thinking than on the restrictive, text-determinist frame­
work derived from Althusser, and it is certainly true that there are
aspects of Lacan's theory which can be used to examine the con­
stant play of signification in subject constitution. Arguably it is this
inflection of psychoanalytic theory which has become increasingly
prominent in more recent work on film spectatorship. Although
that development is beyond the scope of the present discussion
(for a good account see Mayne, 1993) I shall return to it in Chapter
6. There I shall examine the remarkable alliance between subject­
positioning theory and feminism which was first developed from
within Screen theory in Mulvey'S seminal paper 'Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema' (1975).

Texts, subjects, theories

Mulvey's essay appeared in Screen in autumn 1975 at a crucial
point in the journal's intellectual history. The very next issue was
to see a statement from four Editorial Board members taking issue
with the journal's burgeoning use of psychoanalytic concepts
(Buscombe et al. , 1975/76) and two issues after that the same four
resigned from the Board. Among the reasons that they gave were
the obscurity and inaccessibility of writing in Screen and its
'unsound and unproductive' political-<:ultural analysis (Buscombe et
al., 1976) . One issue later and the journal's associate editors had
gone, either voluntarily or by excision, leaving the field to Screen
theory's true believers. I mention these ancient dramas not to
make a point about the substance of what was at issue (though as

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