Page 19 - Decoding Culture

12 DECODING CULTURE

the beginning of the 1970s it was clear that 'structuralism' alone
was insufficient. Although it had provided a method of analysis
appropriate for a cultural studies with ambitions to examine a wide
range of forms of culture, that analysis was now in need of theo­
retical and empirical integration into a larger account of. the
contexts of communication.
The search for that larger account is reflected here, as it was
elsewhere, in the move from 'structuralism' to 'post-structuralism',
and it was to generate the basic theoretical terms in which the
nascent discipline would come into its own. It is at this point in my
narrative that we reach a major parting of the ways in cultural stud­
ies. One form of post-structuralism - that associated with the
journal Screen and referred to here as 'Screen theory' - would
embrace an essentially psychoanalytic approach to the constitu­
tion of subjectivity, while a second - developed mainly in the work
of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies - would lean on
Gramscian theories of hegemony in their analysis of the social and
historical role of cultural forms. Both positions saw ideology as a
key concept and both laid claim to historical materialism as an
informing perspective. But the modes of analysis to which their dif­
ferent post-structuralisms gave rise would develop into two
contrasting approaches to cultural studies.
In Screen theory (the main focus of Chapter 4) the key ideas
were derived from Althusser's theory of ideology and focused upon
the capacity of texts and discourses to position 'readers' as partic­
ular subjects. By being constituted as a certain kind of subject by
cultural materials, an individual was caught within ideology.
Accordingly, texts were to be analysed with a view to uncovering
these processes of 'interpellation': the ways in which our sense of
ourselves as distinctive subjects was constructed through and by
the systems of discourse that made up our culture. How best to the­
orize such processes of subject constitution? For Screen theory it

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