Hall’s Audience Reception Theory (Model of Encoding and Decoding)

Cultural studies is a discursive formation that has multiple discourses, histories, and trajectories. It has no simple origins as much of the work of cultural studies has always existed and already been present:

[Cultural Studies] is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past… It had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention (Hall, 1992, p. 99). ³⁷

While the trajectories and discourses individuals encounter in the course of apprehending cultural studies may differ and vary, the premise and the foundation upon which the purpose of cultural studies is built hits one focal point: the relationship of mass media and the audience and the messages that come in between, also known as the audience reception theory. This theory assumes that when readers interpret messages, there is interaction between them and the text.

Reception theory not only observes audience’s responses and reactions to cultural products as they process and interpret the meanings, but also, on a bigger scale, looks at the long-term effects of these cultural products on national identity.

Hall’s audience reception theory becomes a full picture, a completed puzzle, with his model of encoding and decoding; using this model, Hall proposes that every media source has an embedded message, which is interpreted by the audience in his or her unique way. In his model of encoding and decoding, Hall (1980) suggests a four-stage theory of communication:

production, circulation, use (also known as distribution or consumption), and reproduction. Each stage is “relatively autonomous from others,” meaning that the coding of a message controls its reception, but not transparently as each stage has its own determining limits and possibilities (During, 1999).

Hall argues that what is stable in cultural studies is a “Gramscian understanding of conjuctural knowledge,” which

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is situated in, and applicable to, “specific and immediate political or historical circumstances as well as an awareness that the structure of representations which form culture’s alphabet and grammar and instruments of social power, requiring critical and activist examination” (During, 1999, p. 97).

Hall (1980) pictures the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit, linked by sender, message, and receiver, specifically in this order. The model of encoding and decoding is processed by the following steps: the sender, which is often the producer or the creator, yields encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institution-societal relations of production passes under the discursive rules of language for the product to be realized. Before this message can have an effect, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse to be decoded. This set of decoded meanings, which have an effect or influence, bring about complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological, or behavioral consequences. Then in a determinate moment, “the structure employs a code and yields a message; at another determinate moment, the “message,” through decoding, issues into the structure of social practices.”

Hall expands his theory on encoding and decoding even further, by identifying three hypothetical positions from which decodings of a media discourse may be constructed. The first hypothetical position is that of the dominants-hegemonic position. In this position, when the viewer takes the connoted meaning from a media text and decodes the message in terms of reference code the message has been encoded, the viewer is “operating inside the dominant code” - this is the position which the senders/producers, say television broadcasters, assume when encoding a message which has already been signified in a hegemonic mode.

The second position is the negotiated position. Decoding messages within this position consists of a mixture of “adaptive and oppositional elements”: it acknowledges the “legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions” to make the grand significations, while it makes its own ground rules.

The third position refers to the oppositional code, in which a viewer understands both the literal and the connotative inflection, but decodes the message in a contrary way, by

“[detotalizing] the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework or reference.”

Hall’s model of encoding and decoding, processed in three stages - first is the moment of production, through which producers encode narratives and meaning, second is the text, where meanings are embodied, and then finally, third is the moment of reception, when the audience or the spectator read and decode the meanings - becomes significant method of textual analysis in all media texts, including feminist movies, the focus of this dissertation. As Gledhill (1988) points out, gender representation is at the heart of cultural negotiation in the feminist film analysis.

While film theory suggests how narrative, visual and melodramatic pleasures are organized round this symbol, feminist cultural history also shows that the figure of woman cannot be fixed in her function as patriarchal value. The ‘image of woman’ has also been a site of gendered discourse, drawn from the specific socio-cultural experiences of women and shared by women, which negotiates a space within, and sometimes resists, patriarchal domination […] When popular cultural forms, operating within a melodramatic framework, attempting to engage contemporary discourses about women or draw on women’s cultural forms in order to renew their gender verisimilitude and solicit the recognition of a female audience, the negotiation between ‘woman’ as patriarchal symbol and woman as generator of women’s discourse is intensified (Gledhill, 1988, p. 177).

CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

-Albert Einstein