Page 115 - Decoding Culture

108 DECODING CULTURE

theory and theorizing. Not, it should be noted, 'theory' in the
instrumentalist sense of that term where theories are always seen
as essentially provisional instruments for understanding the real
world, frameworks always open to revision in the light of evidence
or competition from other candidate theories. The tacit epistemol­
ogy of Screen theory was much grander than that. It adopted from
both Althusser and psychoanalysis a fundamentally conventionalist
practice in which theorizing is all-encompassing, a source of terms
within which the world is both constituted and understood as a
totality. Theory here becomes a kind of belief system which unites
evaluation and interpretation into the moment of theorizing. Once
the framework is accepted, those features of the phenomenal world
which are capable of assimilation are incorporated; those which are
not are simply excluded. This use of theory - as a kind of inter­
pretative, philosophical world-view - continues to inform cultural
studies to the present day, even if the specific terms employed are
no longer those advanced in the pages of Screen in the 1970s. It too
is part of the Screen theory inheritance.

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