Page 120 - Decoding Culture

RESISTIN G THE O M I N ANT 1 1 3
D
commitment to a concept of active agency. This commitment did
not always sit easily with their avowed historical materialism, how­
ever, and the Centre expended much intellectual energy in trying
to chart a safe marxist passage between the Scylla of textual deter­
minism and the Charybdis of productive reading. This led them
toward the concept of 'preferred reading' in an attempt to retain a
Gramscian concern with ideological dominance and hegemony.
' [ A] text of the dominant discourse does privilege or prefer a certain
reading,' Morley (ibid) suggests, immediately after castigating
Screen theory for losing sight of the polysemic emphases central to
structuralism. Although this was to prove a difficult claim to sus­
tain in the context of the CCCS' empirical work, their evident
desire to maintain a socially determining concept of ideology was
to be formative in much of the Centre's thinking.
This, the third theme, is perhaps best caught in the expression
'struggle in ideology'. For the CCCS the operation of ideology,
while real enough in its consequences, is never an automatic
process of subject constitution or, indeed, of any other irresistible
mechanism. Dominant ideologies can always be confronted; read­
ings always contested. The significance of culture, therefore, is
that it is a vital terrain on which the struggle between domination
and resistance is fought. Screen's strongly text-driven analysis and
.
their use of Lacanian concepts makes it 'impossible to construct . .
an adequate concept of "struggle" in ideology' (Hall, 1980c: 161).
The work of ideology is precisely that; it must be worked at if it is
to function, negotiated in a context of potentially contradictory
interpellations, polysemic signs and multiple readings. The relation
between classes, discursive formations and ideology is far more
complex than Screen's concepts can encompass, and much of the
CCCS project of the late 1970s and the 1980s seeks to theorize
this relation more adequately.
It is to this project that we must now turn - the CCCS attempt to

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