69249454-chandler-semiotics

TEXTUAL INTERACTIONS 189
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content). Recognition of the familiar (in the guise of the natural)
repeatedly confirms our conventional ways of seeing and thus reinforces
our sense of self while at the same time invisibly contributing
to its construction. ‘When we say “I see (what the image means)”
this act simultaneously installs us in a place of knowledge and slips
us into place as subject to this meaning . . . All the viewer need do
is fall into place as subject’ (Nichols 1981, 38). Falling into place
in a realist text is a pleasurable experience which few would wish
to disrupt with reflective analysis (which would throw the security
of our sense of self into question). Thus we freely submit to the
ideological processes which construct our sense of ourselves as freethinking
individuals.
A primary textual code involved in the construction of the
subject is that of genre. Genres are ostensibly neutral, functioning
to make form (the conventions of the genre) more transparent to
those familiar with the genre, foregrounding the distinctive content
of individual texts. Certainly genre provides an important frame of
reference which helps readers to identify, select and interpret texts
(as well as helping writers to compose economically within the
medium). However, a genre can also be seen as embodying certain
values and ideological assumptions and as seeking to establish a
particular worldview. Changes in genre conventions may both reflect
and help to shape the dominant ideological climate of the time. Some
Marxist commentators see genre as an instrument of social control
which reproduces the dominant ideology. Within this perspective, the
genre is seen as positioning the audience in order to naturalize the
reassuringly conservative ideologies which are typically embedded
in the text. Certainly, genres are far from being ideologically neutral.
Different genres produce different positionings of the subject which
are reflected in their modes of address. Tony Thwaites and his
colleagues in Australia note that in many television crime dramas in
the tradition of The Saint, Hart to Hart, and Murder, She Wrote,
Genteel or well-to-do private investigators work for the
wealthy, solving crimes committed by characters whose social
traits and behaviour patterns often type them as members of