Rhetoric in Popular Culture by Barry Brummett

Author:Barry Brummett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-05T13:31:59.253822+00:00

Subject Positions

Another important part of the meanings of texts, also referred to in Chapter 3, is the subject position. Subject positions can now be linked with our discussion of preferred or oppositional readings; the two concepts are connected. Just as every text has a preferred reader that it implies or “calls to” (or, in Althusser’s terms, interpellates), so there can often be subversive, negotiated, or oppositional subject positions. Marxist critics try to discover the kinds of roles or characters, or subject positions, that are most strongly suggested by texts, but they also try to identify the resources within texts and within people’s experiences that would enable the construction of inflected or oppositional subject positions.

For example, there is clearly a preferred way to read NFL football games: you think they are important, you follow all the statistics, you understand when drama and conflict arise. But there is also a preferred subject position for NFL football games. We may call this position “the fan.” To make NFL football work for you, you have to take on that role. Think about the different patterns of talking, moving, and dressing that you enter into when you become a fan. But not everyone can be a fan. Some people hate NFL football, and so if they were forced to watch a game, they would take a subversive subject position, one of skepticism and grumpiness. Their reading of the text would likewise be oppositional, seeing the game not as a heroic contest but as a lot of huffing and puffing and running around to no great purpose. Subject positions and readings go hand in hand.

From our discussion of subject positions and readings, it should already be clear to whom The Wizard of Oz “calls.” It is easiest to watch the movie as an honest, hard worker, as one who admires fair dealing and openness, as one who values doggedness and determination, and as a good citizen who obeys even unjust authority. From that subject position, one does not find it strange that Dorothy risks her life to earn passage back to the dreary workaday world of Kansas. That subject position makes it easy to despise the false Wizard at the end. The “good citizen” subject called to by this film will go along reluctantly with the decision to hand Toto over to Miss Gulch, while hating Miss Gulch for throwing her weight around. The “good citizen” will not be surprised when Dorothy and her companions sorrowfully turn to leave the Wizard’s palace after first being rudely turned away. Much of the rhetoric of the film lies in these subject positions; they were recognizable to much of the film’s original audience and easy for these people to step into. The preferred readings of the text felt comfortable for many people, and the meanings found in those readings were easily accepted by them.

There is much more to Marxist rhetorical criticism than we have space to explore here. The Marxist critic is concerned with the ways in which popular

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