ABSTRACT
It seems that media and film studies are still subject to the kind of oscillation described in Chapter 1. At one moment the field is dominated by a theory (such as ‘uses and gratifications’ in recent years) which holds the media to have little or no direct ‘effect’ on its audiences, and at the next moment the pendulum swings towards the dominance of a theory (such as that developed in Screen more recently) of the near total effectivity of the text, in their terms, in the ‘positioning of the subject’. In order to escape from this oscillation we need to develop a theory which gives due weight to both the ‘text’ and ‘audience’ halves of the equation.
