Page 117 - Decoding Culture

110 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

members of the CCCS as they sought to grapple with Screen's
forays into structuralism and psychoanalysis, then a convenient
place to embark upon an analytic dissection of the CCCS position
is in their response to Screen theory. On the face of it, the two
approaches had much in common. Both initially rejected the tradi­
tional mass culture condemnation of popular forms. Both sought to
work with and amend the tenets of historical materialism as they
(differently) perceived that mode of analysis. And both saw struc­
turalism as initiating a radical shift in theories of signification,
representation, and culture more generally. They parted ways,
however, in how they made the move from structuralism to post­
structuralism, the CCCS viewing Screen theory's growing
dependence on Lacanian concepts with considerable scepticism.
Hall (1980c) conceptualized this shift in terms of a transition from
what he called semiotics 1 to semiotics 2, the latter coming to
emphasize above all an attempt to theorize 'the subject' in psycho­
analytic terms. Semiotics 1 had focused upon the production of
meaning, and in so doing formed one of the major influences on
the CCCS as well as on Screen. Semiotics 2, however, espoused
additional theoretical and methodological positions that the CCCS
considered to be fundamentally at odds with its own developing
project.
These differences revolved around three interrelated themes,
all finally traceable to the CCCS' insistence on maintaining a dis­
tinctive explanatory role for the realm of the social. The first and
most profound disagreement directly reflected this basic ontolog­
ical difference between the two schools of thought. Screen, the
CCCS argument ran, gave ultimate primacy to psychoanalytic
'
processes, with the result, as Hall (1980c: 160) put it, that [ ejxcept
in a largely ritual sense, any substantive reference to social forma­
tion has been made to disappear'. Yet historical materialism, a
theoretical commitment presumed to be common to both

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