Page 109 - Decoding Culture

102 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE
an excised associate editor I felt then, as I do now, that the dis­
senters' position had some force to it) but to underline how
powerful were the intellectual disagreements of the time and how
all encompassing the theoretical commitments. Whether for or
against, participants in these disputes saw themselves as part of
the key cultural and political developments of the period. The
issues that concerned them may seem arcane now, but in the mid-
1970s they appeared vital to the further growth of film theory and
to cultural studies more generally.
So, indeed, it was to prove, in as much as Screen theory not
only originated the powerful 'subject-positioning' tradition in cul­
tural studies, with its reliance on the apparatus of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, but also provided the terms in opposition to which
a range of subsequent approaches to cultural analysis were formed.
Y e t it is still difficult to characterize Screen theory as a consistent
whole. Short textbook summaries, such as that in Turner (1990:
10&-109) , rightly focus upon the centrality of textual construction
of subjectivity to the theory, offering an account of culture in which
texts ideologically constrain their 'readers' by restricting the sub­
ject positions that they can occupy. But that is at best a tendency in
Screen theory, rather than an always completed achievement, and
right through the 1970s these ideas were worked at and amended
both within and beyond the pages of the journal. So, for example,
when John Ellis came to write the Introduction to the first collec­
tion of readings from Screen (published in 1977) he made much of
the lack of final closure in the kind of textual analysis found in S / Z
and the Cahiers d u Cinema account of Y o ung Mr Lincoln. The con­
ception of the productivity of the text,' he wrote, 'throws into doubt
whether there are any films which "unproblematically reproduce
dominant ideologies": the work of production is always a matter of
establishing positions rather than reproducing them.' This, he sug­
gested, had led some writers to think in terms of 'the constant

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