Page 118 - Decoding Culture

RESISTIN G THE O M I N ANT 1 1 1
D
approaches, required and proposed an understanding of the speci­
ficity of particular social forms at defined historical moments. To
the CCCS, therefore, the Lacanian turn in Screen theory was
entirely incompatible with this requirement of historical material­
ism. Screen theorists, of course, felt otherwise (Coward, 1977;
Coward and Ellis, 1977) but fortunately we have no need to arbi­
trate that dispute here. It is sufficient for present purposes to
recognize that the CCCS brought to bear a more direct and active
sense of the autonomy of the social world than that typically found
in Screen theory. This reflected a difference in intellectual inheri­
tance. Screen theorists embraced a whole range of influences from
modern European thought, incorporating a strong anti-humanist,
anti-empiricist and anti-sociological emphasis. In contrast, CCCS
thinking drew not only upon the more determinist elements in the
so-called 'structuralist' marxism of Louis Althusser, but also upon
the positive sense of social agency found both in the 'culture and
civilisation' tradition and in the work of Gramsci. Hence their insis­
tence upon the importance of an active social agent rather than a
reductive psychoanalytic 'subject'.
Inevitably, then, it was with Screen's development of subject
positioning theory that the CCCS critics were most at odds. In
Screen theory, Hall (1980c: 159) argued, 'attempt[s] to relate ide­
ologies to political and economic practices, to their functioning and
effectivity in specific social formations and in specific historical
conjunctures, have been translated on to the terrain of "the sub­
ject''', an achievement managed via a series of what were, to him,
illegitimate reductions. This is seen most clearly in the contrast
between the subject-in-general of Screen theory, constituted in
trans-historical and trans-cultural psychoanalytic processes, and
the specific historical subject, constituted through a variety of
potentially contradictory discursive interpellations. In developing
this aspect of their critique, Morley (1980a) draws on Pecheux's

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