Page 119 - Decoding Culture

1 1 2 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

concept of 'interdiscourse' and Ladau's non-Lacanian account of
interpellation, arguing for a notion of contradictory and unstable
processes of subject positioning which have to be understood in
variable social and historical contexts. Screen theory, he suggests
(ibid: 169), 'constantly elides the concrete individual, his/her con­
stitution as a "subject-for-discourse", and the discursive subject
positions constituted by specific discursive practices and opera­
tions'. Subjects, it must be recognized, have their own histories and
operate in concrete social circumstances.
This concern with multiple positioning leads immediately to the
second of the themes that characterize the CCCS response to
Screen theory: the opposition between textual determinacy and
textual polysemy. As we saw in Chapter 4, there is an unresolved
tension in later Screen theory between the desire to see 'texts' as
determining the subject positions from which they can be 'read' -
a view powerfully developed in the first phase of subject-positioning
theory - and a more typically post-structuralist emphasis on the
'productivity' of reading as that was conceptualized in, for example,
Barthes' work after S/Z. In the CCCS account, the significance of
this tension in Screen's position is played down. Screen theory is
seen as irreducibly text-<iriven, with the Lacanian apparatus used to
define fundamental unconscious processes of subject constitution
which are replayed in reader-text relations. 'But this,' Morley
(1980a: 167) argues, 'runs counter to two of the most important
advances previously established by structural linguistics: the
essentially polysemic nature of signs and sign-based discourses,
and the interrogative/expansive nature of all readings'.
Again we have no need to arbitrate this disputed interpretation
of Screen theory. All that needs noting is that the CCCS position
does indeed lean rather more toward viewing reader-text relations
in polysemic and interrogative terms than did their Screen con­
temporaries, a position that is hardly unexpected given the CCCS

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