Reflections upon the encoding/decoding model

From Driscollwiki

Jump to: navigation, search


Hall, S. (1989) Reflections upon the encoding/decoding model: An interview with Stuart Hall. In J. Cruz & J. Lewis (Eds.), Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception (pp. 253-274). Boulder:Westview Press.

Contents

Context?

  • "Encoding/decoding" written in 1980

Methodological

  • "Slightly polemical"
  • Responding to traditions in mass comm: content analysis, effects
    • Against "unilinearity", "one-directional flow"
  • Trying to think through the message as "complex structure"
    • Reconsidering the apparent simplicity of "reception"

Political

  • "Meaning is not fixed"
    • Always "multilayered", "multireferential" (254)

Theoretical

  • Beginnings of structuralism, semiotics
  • Impact of early Barthes
    • Elements of Semiology, S/Z
  • Also, Levi-Strauss
    • "recovery of the model of the Saussarian language"
  • Opening up Marxism from economics/politics to culture
    • Considering the construction, reconstruction of meaning (254)
    • Meanings "contested" and "established"
    • Re: Hall, S. (1974) "Notes on the Reading of Marx's '1857 Introduction'."
      • "Marx's most [...] elaborated [...] methodological text" (254)
    • Attention to "circuits of production" rather than deterministic "relations of production" (255)
      • "Articulation" : production/consumption/realization/reproduction (255)

Similar work of the time

False consciousness?

"I really have never been much attracted by the full-blown notion of false consciousness. I've always thought that there is something deeply troubling about wrong about it, including the fact that nobody confesses themselves to being in false consciousness. It's always somebody else. [...] You can't win with false consciousness." (256-7)

On Baudrillard

"It is true that with Reagan the bark was perhaps bigger than the bite; but there was a bite as well, and the rest of the world bloody knows it. [...] it may be an account of how some Americans now feel at the edge of their world, but I don't think that the whole of the world is like that." (257)

Layers of significance

Cultural/ideological ground

  • Continuous, endless process
  • Signification and resignification
  • There will always be:
    • Ideology
    • Economy
    • Politics (259)

Practical encoding

  • Creative industries
  • Specific attention of enc/dec model

Confusion: reproduction v repetition

  • Confusing in English
  • "Mere repetition" would be "dominant ideology kind of pops into the [tv] program and out into the decoding" (260)
  • "Reproduction" depends on the notion that every meaning is a "total act of production" (260)
    • Saying something "new" is really a transformation of what pre-exists
    • "Get rid of the notion of any originating moment" ... "we are in history already (260)

Preferred meanings

  • Preferred meanings are part of encoding
  • Preferred readings are also limited by the "universe" of the encoding
    • Although there is agency, the reader is subject to the power imbalance by which the encoder has the "apparatus" to create + circulate media artifacts (261)
    • But there are many meanings, so encoding + power cannot "wipe out all the other possible meanings"
    • Never full successful but an exercise of power
    • An "attempt" to "hegemonize the audience reading" (262)
    • Not simply the intent of producer b/c producer is "constrained by his institutional setting" (262)

Deferred meaning

  • Preferring cannot "stop or fix" a text
    • "Meaning is infinitely deferred (in a Derridean sense)" (263)
  • "Ideology cuts the infinite semiosis of language [because] ideology wants to make a particular meaning" (263)
  • Derrida says "erasure": "the point at which the play of differences must be erased in order for a center to be constituted" (264)
  • Critic can turn ideology back into language, playful

Not a pure deconstructionist

  • Like Gramsci, "every deconstruction is a reconstruction" (264)
    • As opposed to an "entirely depoliticized, formalized" American strain of deconstruction

Decoding: preferred, negotiated, oppositional

  • Seeking nuanced "in between" to "very determinist" political formulations of false v. revolutionary consciousness (265)
  • Negotiated readings of some degree, "most of us", "most of the time"

Position of critic

  • Critic is also locked into decoding
  • No simple way to retrieve the "preferred reading" or "preferred meaning"
    • Even the act of investigating is a decoding
  • Critic must attempt to be "open-ended", "neutral" (266)
    • Try to suppress your own reading, "you are already inside meaning" (266)
"The objectivity of social science research is always in quotation marks. It's the aspiration to theory, but it stops before theoretical practice." (269)

Understanding / interpreting

  • Distinct only in discussion of the circuit
    • "Analytically separate"
  • In "reality", practice, they are not separate, "they only exist already in articulation" (269)
  • "Communities of interpretation"
    • Readings are formed amid institutions: families, states, corps, etc.
    • These institutions might share certain frameworks for reading, interp (270)
  • Difficult to identify groupings of readers from typical sociological categories (271)
    • "intepretive readings may overcut" most of these

Cultural studies: from comm to literary theory

  • Barthes work is pivotal
    • From effects to textuality
    • Beginnings of poststructuralism
  • Couldn't get funding for encoding/decoding empirical project
    • Comparably easier for effects-based research
    • Early projects: Morley's Nationwide and Brunsden's soap opera

Future work in Enc/Dec

  • Decoding is rooted in "cognitive decentered subject"
    • Whereas Barthes Pleasures of the Text suggests more broad textuality
    • Psychoanalysis and the subconscious, gender positioning, political ideology
    • Hard to assess pleasure empirically via behavior (273)
  • We know more about meaning but have even more difficulty capturing it in empirical study
  • Thus the model requires a lot of additional work before it could be used as the basis of an empirical research
Retrieved from "http://www.kevindriscoll.org/wiki/Reflections_upon_the_encoding/decoding_model"
Personal tools