ABSTRACT
When audiences are understood as textual subjects, as in MacCabe’s work, they are seen as relatively powerless and inactive and MacCabe and others such as Heath developed this view into the orthodoxy of screen theory. But a few dissenting notes were struck in the pages of Screen and a number of writers such as Morley (1980b), Willeman (1978), and Neale (1977) began to challenge this view of the subject, particularly by insisting on the difference between the socially and the textually produced subjects. The social subject has a history, lives in a particular social formation (a mix of class, gender, age, region, etc.), and is constituted by a complex cultural history that is both social and textual. The subjectivity results from “real” social experience and from mediated or textual experience. The actual television viewer is a primarily social subject. This social subjectivity is more influential in the construction of meanings than the textually produced subjectivity which exists only at the moment of reading.
