Page 111 - Decoding Culture

104 D E C O D I N G C U L TU RE

social interests, then that would lead to identification of specific
social consequences and, therefore, provide a basis for critical
political analysis. In Screen theory however, as we have seen, the
preferred theory of ideology was derived from Althusser's 'ideol­
ogy-in-general', a version of the concept which set aside the
'sectional interests' aspect of the loose usage (for Althusser that
was a matter for the analysis of ideologies) in favour of a highly gen­
eralized account of the unavoidable construction of subjects within
ideology. In this view, people were 'interpellated' by systems of dis­
course, constituted as subjects by the cultural materials that they
encountered, 'always-already' positioned by the ideologies in which
they found themselves caught.
In its original form this account conceived social agents as, more
or less, victims of ideology, and as it was applied in Screen theory it
led toward an analysis of reader-text relations which was pro­
foundly text-driven. Films, like cultural texts more generally, were
seen to constrain readers, to provide an inscribed subject position
ensuring that the text was understood in specific ways. In such a
model it is difficult to conceptualize independence or resistance on
the part of readers; there appears little room for negotiation or
ambiguity. As Turner (1990: 107) concisely puts it: 'in Screen
theory, texts always and irresistibly tell us how to understand
them', and even the rather more positively disposed Lapsley and
Westlake (1988: 52) observe that in the Althusserian phase of
Screen theory 'the central emphasis throughout was on the text's
power to determine the subject's response'. The degree to which
this tendency is ameliorated by the turn toward psychoanalytic
concepts is neither clear nor agreed. Lapsley and W e stlake follow
up their above observation by invoking Heath's Lacanian-influ­
enced later concern with 'a dialectic of the subject' in which, as
they summarize it, 'meaning and subjectivity come into being
together, each engendering the other in a process of endless

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