Page 142 - Decoding Culture

RESISTIN G THE D O M I N ANT 135

effectiveness of a dominant ideology, despite their evident concern
with human agency and the 'struggle in discourse'. In this respect,
it must be said, they reflected the widespread commitment to dom­
inant ideology arguments in the marxist theorizing of the period.
Yet, as Abercrombie et al. (1980) forcefully argue, while still seek­
ing to retain a broad historical materialist position, this
presumption is theoretically problematic and empirically inade­
quate.
Some of the consequences of presupposing a dominant ideology
will have been apparent in this chapter's discussion of the CCCS
attempt to focus semiotic accounts of signification through the lens
provided by hegemony theory. We saw how that framework neces­
sitated a concept of 'preferred' or 'dominant' reading if the
conjunction of structuralist analysis of signification and Gramscian
marxism was to be maintained. We also saw how the concept of
'preferred reading' restricted the capacity of analyses cast in its
terms to grapple with the conjoint issues of polysemy and the con­
stitutive role played by social agents in the construction of
meaning. This does not mean, of course, that questions about ide­
ology and domination are unimportant or inappropriate. It
suggests, rather, that what Abercrombie (1990) calls 'textual ide­
ology' (that encoded in the text), 'ideology setting' (the processes
whereby a text is encoded with ideology) and the 'ideological
effect' (on audiences, securing domination) are connected only
contingently. '[I]ncoherence, diversity and pluralization character­
ize all three moments of the ideological process, making each
difficult to secure. This makes the proper articulation of textual ide­
ology, ideology setting and ideological effect, necessary for popular
culture to be in any sense ideological, even more difficult to secure.
There is no principle that organizes the three moments' (ibid: 222).
In the 1980s difficulties such as these led cultural studies away
from the concept of (dominant) ideology and toward new ways of

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