Page 173 - Decoding Culture

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

social activity; but it also reflects and refracts that activity in an
ongoing circle of production and reproduction.
In the first two decades of cultural studies' growth, it was the
constraining aspects of culture that were to the analytic fore. In
part that was a consequence of the contingent connection forged
between various forms of 'new' marxism and the emergent cul­
tural studies of the late 1960s, but it also reflected structuralism's
own conceptual imperatives. Without first establishing the system­
atic structuring capacities of semiotic systems one could not hope
to go on to examine those systems in use, and the codes through
which langue functioned had to be understood before it was possi­
ble to approach questions of diversity and polysemy in parole.
Accordingly, a 'top-down' approach to culture, one in which social
agents were largely on the receiving end of cultural determination,
was always the most likely initial model in structuralist-influenced
cultural studies. Add to that a marxisant concern with the role of
ideology in sustaining capitalist social and economic structures,
and we find the distinctive forms of post-structuralism that charac­
terize the theoretical traditions associated with Screen theory and
the CCCS. In these traditions, as they were initially formulated at
least, culture is all but exhausted by its ideological function.
This reduction of culture to ideology, and the concomitant
emphasis on its presumed power to constrain and control individ­
uals, was also apparent in the first feminist interventions in cultural
studies, particularly in their concern to document patriarchal ide­
ology in action. However, as we saw in the last chapter, the
underlying tension between structural constraint and active agency
becomes increasingly prominent in feminist cultural studies, not
least because the evident pleasures afforded to women by
'women's culture' were unintelligible within the terms of conven­
tional ideology theories - they could only be dismissed as 'false
consciousness'. Hence feminism's ongoing interest in such topics

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