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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
translated set of instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture as a
text constructed purely for our amusement.
The notion that the human subject is ‘constituted’ (constructed)
by pre-given structures (such as texts) is a general feature of structuralism.
It constitutes a radical opposition to the liberal humanist
(or ‘bourgeois’) stance which presents society as ‘consisting of “free”
individuals whose social determination results from their pre-given
essences like “talented”, “efficient”, “lazy”, “profligate”, etc.’
(Coward and Ellis 1977, 2). The French neo-Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser (1918–90) was the first ideological theorist to give
prominence to the notion of the subject. For him, ideology was a
system of representations of reality offering individuals certain
subject positions which they could occupy. He famously declared
that ‘what is represented in ideology is . . . not the system of real
relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary
relation of these individuals to the real relations in which they
live’ (Althusser 1971, 155). Individuals are transformed into subjects
through the ideological mechanism which he called interpellation
(Althusser 1971, 174).
The Althusserian concept of interpellation is used by Marxist
media theorists to explain the political function of mass media texts.
According to this view, the subject (viewer, listener, reader) is constituted
by the text, and the power of the mass media resides in their
ability to position the subject in such a way that their representations
are taken to be reflections of everyday reality. Such structuralist
framings of positioning reflect a stance of textual determinism which
has been challenged by contemporary social semioticians who tend
to emphasize the ‘polysemic’ nature of texts (their plurality of meanings)
together with the diversity of their use and interpretation by
different audiences (‘multiaccentuality’). However, a distinction may
be appropriate here between message and code. While resistance at
the level of the message is always possible, resistance at the level
of the code is generally much more difficult when the code is a
dominant one. The familiarity of the codes in realist texts (especially
photographic and filmic texts) leads us to routinely ‘suspend our
disbelief’ in the form (even if not necessarily in the manifest