Page 90 - Decoding Culture

SITUATI G SUBJECTS 83
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of possibilities to be excavated in terms of a fluid network of codes.
Secondly, the reader, or, rather, the process of readership, takes its
place at the conceptual heart of the enterprise. I stress 'reader­
ship' here because the term 'reader' already hypostasizes a subject,
an 'I' outside the text, and it is against such fixed ideas of subjec­
tivity that Barthes and other 'post-structuralists' counterpose their
views. Thirdly, the attribution of meaning is seen as a constant
process of (re)construction among the play of signifiers, texts end­
lessly open to a plurality of readings and re-readings, none of them
privileged as first or last. Text, subject, plurality: in these three we
see both a denial and an extension of structuralism. A denial in the
sense of discarding the semiological project, the goal of uncovering
an underlying formal system which mechanistically enables social
agents to use and understand signs. An extension in as much as
texts, subjects and their conjoint plurality are constituted within the
conceptual field of those earlier structuralist perspectives. In that
respect, these are indeed post-structuralist texts and subjects.
How does this move manifest itself in cultural studies?
Unevenly, certainly, and in the first instance very much within the
field of film theory. We saw in Chapter 2 how film became a focus
for those especially concerned to develop a different approach to
popular culture to that found in traditional mass culture perspec­
tives. Unsurprisingly, then, it was in relation to the task of
theorizing film 'language' that first semiology and then various
post-structuralist innovations entered the English-speaking world
of cultural studies. Peter Wollen (1969a, 1969b) played an impor­
tant part in this development, both in his own writings and in his
influence upon the emergence of the journal Screen as a crucial
locus for theoretical debate. For much of the 1970s - but espe­
cially during the first five years - Screen served as a channel
through which the latest (post-) structuralist thinking was brought
to the attention of British and American film scholarship. Not only

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