Page 112 - Decoding Culture

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SITUATING SUB E CTS 105
dialectic' (ibid: 53) . This they believe to be part of a significant
move away from the restrictions of the Althusserian view of ideol­
ogy and subject constitution. Others less friendly to the Screen
project - for example those working within the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s, such as Hall
(1980c) and Morley (1980a) - are not convinced that psychoana­
lytic concepts are adequate to this task. For them, the
psychoanalytically based account of the constitution of the subject
is insufficient to comprehend 'particular discourses or historically
specific ideologies in definite social formations' (Hall, 1980c: 161).
Unable to handle social variation in the operation of ideology and
subjectivity, the psychoanalytic framework tends instead to reduce
it to supposedly universal processes.
It is this charge of misleading reductionism that is most com­
monly (and most persuasively) levelled at Screen theory's use of
the psychoanalytic perspective. It is not hard to see why. Although
Lacan's structuralist adaptation of Freudian thought does make
radical changes in some areas, it still uses concepts which by their
very nature refer to essentially trans-cultural processes. The
mirror stage, Oedipal relations, castration anxiety, Name-of-the­
Father, the Phallus as signifier, all this familiar apparatus presumes
to identify aspects of human subject formation which operate
regardless of specific social circumstances. Such universal claims
are, of course, fundamental to the psychoanalytic project.
Inevitably this gives rise to a marked tension between psychoana­
lytic theories and those more sociological or historical perspectives
within which socio-cultural variation is a defining feature.
Sometimes this can be a constructive tension, as it arguably was in
the work of the Frankfurt School. But for that to be so, it is first
necessary that the concepts derived from each theoretical 'side' are
conceived as non-reductive and so open to comparative judgement
and, if necessary, mutual modification. In the case of Screen theory

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