Page 114 - Decoding Culture

SITUATING SUBJECTS 107

Although I have deliberately framed those questions rhetori­
cally, as we shall see in later chapters they have proved real enough
in the subsequent development of cultural studies. Screen played a
hugely significant part in setting the terms within which such ques­
tions could be posed, and, because of the intellectual force with
which Screen theorists developed their position, they obliged aspir­
ing opponents to grapple with issues which otherwise might not
have come to the fore. That is very much to their credit. By the end
of the 1970s, however, the journal's period of ascendancy was over,
and the focus for the now rapidly growing cultural studies move­
ment shifted elsewhere. But Screen theory has left its mark,
indirectly in shaping a series of concerns with textuality and sub­
jectivity that others were to take up in different ways, and more
directly in initiating the use of psychoanalytic theory in the analy­
sis of culture. In so doing they developed one strand of the kind of
'top-down' thinking which was to prove so important in the forma­
tion of cultural studies, in this particular variation emphasizing the
power of ideological constraint over social agents as that was chan­
nelled through psychoanalytic processes. There is a certain irony
here. Post-structuralism is distinctive in its movement away from
the more formal and mechanistic applications of the Saussurian
langue/parole model toward a concept of the 'productivity' of the
text. Yet its specific realization in Screen theory, where it is medi­
ated through selected aspects of the work of Althusser and Lacan,
sees that productivity primarily in relation to the textual constitu­
tion of subjects and not in the diverse ways in which agents actually
read and use texts.
Finally, and apart from these matters of theoretical substance,
Screen theory also had a less obvious but nonetheless significant
impact on the epistemological presuppositions that informed the
growth of cultural studies. This was perhaps the first body of coher­
ent cultural studies thinking to put such a distinctive emphasis on

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