Page 110 - Decoding Culture

SITUATING SUBJ ECTS 103

repositioning of a (non-unitary, radically heterogeneous) subject'
(Ellis, 1977: n.p.). Whatever else it may be, this is hardly the lan­
guage to be expected from a simple model of ideological constraint
through subject positioning. It is, rather, the product of a constantly
developing body of thought which at any given moment was com­
posed of elements that did not necessarily sit entirely easily with
each other.
In this context, then, there is no doubt that the proponents of
Screen theory were fully aware that there were complex interactive
processes involved in the relations between 'readers', 'texts' and
ideology; to suggest otherwise (as some accounts have) is to per­
petrate something of a calumny upon the journal's work. Even so,
the theoretical and methodological choices that were made in con­
structing Screen theory inevitably had consequences for quite how
those processes were to be understood and, therefore, set limits
upon the ways in which the relationship between texts and readers
could be conceptualized. Let us examine some of those limits by
drawing together Screen theory's concept of ideology, its emphasis
on psychoanalytic theory, its understanding of the subject, and its
conception of reader-text relations. Though this may be a some­
what artificial synthesis, a convenient fabrication that never quite
existed in this form, it will serve to suggest the broad thrust of
Screen theory's ontological and theoretical commitments.
We must begin with ideology, which was a key concept in
British cultural studies generally in the 1970s, so much so that one
retrospective observer (Carey, 1989: 97) noted that 'British cul­
tural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more
accurately as ideological studies for they assimilate, in a variety of
complex ways, culture to ideology'. At its least elaborated, this
meant that a loose concept of ideology was widely seen as a useful
way to frame cultural analysis, both socially and politically. If forms
of culture could be shown to be 'ideological', to serve particular

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