Stuart Hall - Encoding/Decoding

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Media and Cultural Theory 2010

 

Stuart Hall’s work follows in the footsteps Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. And, like Althusser, Hall could be described as a Structural Marxist in the sense that his work sets out to uncover the ideological structures within media representations of reality. Janet Woollacott argues that Hall’s analysis of the media’s signification practices adopts Althusser’s notion of the media ‘as an ideological state apparatus largely concerned with the reproduction of dominant ideologies’ (Woollacott 1982: 110). However, Hall also challenges the traditional concept of mass communication as the linear route between sender/ message/receiver, and in doing so opens up the possibility for consumer resistance. In other words, his theory suggests that consumers of media texts produce meanings other than those that are intended or ‘preferred’ by the media producer.

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Encoding/Decoding (1973) explores the structural mismatch between sender and receiver. Hall argues for a new model of the mass communications process as a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction (Hall, 1973, 128–138). He places particular emphasis on the audience and the relationship between structure and agency in which he challenges previous conceptions of the audience as a ‘passive’ element within an uninterrupted circuit of communication’. Shannon and Weaver (1949), for example, produce a model, which doesn’t allow for the influence of social contexts in ‘re-producing’ meanings in decoding the message:

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1. An information source, which produces a message.

2. A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals.

3. A channel, to which signals are adapted for transmission.

4. A receiver, which ‘decodes’ (reconstructs) the message from the signal.

5. A destination, where the message arrives.

 

NOISE interference with the message travelling along the channel, which may lead to the signal received being different from that sent.

 

From Shannon and Weaver (1949), Transmission Theory of Communication.

 

Noise is described as that which interferes with the message as it travels along its channel: for example, static interference on a telephone or TV signal. Thus it is seen as external to an otherwise unhindered process. Hall, however, argues that whilst this model is fine for interpreting communications technology, it does not take into account the fact that each stage of the process exists as a discreet moment within a social context. Furthermore, he suggests that both the transmitter/encoder and receiver/decoder are shaped the most by this discursive dimension, and are therefore the most important elements within the chain. He argues that events cannot be ‘transmitted’ in their existing form, only ‘signified within the aural-visual forms of the televisual discourse’ (Hall, 1973). And it is this discourse, which shapes the form via the language of signification as a necessary stage of the communication process. Therefore, for Hall, ‘the event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event’ (Hall, 1973).

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For  Hall, the slippage between the message that is encoded and that which is received once decoded is a result of the mismatch or ‘structural differences’ between broadcaster and audience, ‘encoder’ and ‘decoder’. He indicates that ‘noise’ – ‘distortions’, interferences and misinterpretations – ‘arise from… the lack of equivalence between the two sides of the communicative exchange’ (Hall, 1973,). However, the key problem from a Marxist perspective is that the ideologies or ‘codes’ of the ruling classes have become ‘naturalized’ within the universal signification of the media; in effect concealing the signifying practices responsible for this. In other words, by resembling what we already know and accept, media representations evade critique. In a sense, the media’s re-productions of events are ‘encoded’ with instructions of how they should be received or ‘decoded’. However, these meanings are so universally accepted that the message – for example, people in Africa are starving – appears as the source or what Lash (1994) refers to as the ‘signal’; thus shared meanings have already been produced for the audience and are assimilated without question (Lash, 1994, 138).

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If we take this at face value, then the net result is a ‘literal’ signifier or that which no longer produces connotative meanings. Yet, in reality, the connotative meaning is not beamed subliminally into the minds of the audience but is often produced via the discursive practices and situated ideologies of the social world. Therefore, for Hall, audiences will always find unintended connotations in the process of ‘decoding’ signifiers. Likewise, while the majority of an audience will loosely accept the hegemonic or ‘preferred’ meaning supplied by the producer, adapting slightly to fit their situated worldview (what Hall terms the ‘negotiated reading’), a minority will reject the ‘preferred reading’ altogether and instead engender a counter-hegemonic or ‘oppositional reading’.