Using Stuart Hall’s Encoding-Decoding Model

Hall’s communication model was developed to map the production and reception of mass media texts. Hall refers to the mass-communications process as an Althusserian

“complex structure in dominance” (2001,167) and characterises the

mass-communications process as a structure produced and sustained by the articulation of linked but distinctive “moments”, which in Hall’s typology are production-

circulation – distribution/consumption – reproduction. The objects of these practices are meanings and messages in the form of sign-vehicles, which are organised through the “operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discourse” (2001, 167).

Although Hall begins by stating that his intention is to produce a model of

communication which is not as linear as mathematical and positivist models of communication usually are, his conception of the sign-vehicle comprises a linear syntagmatic chain.

At the production end of the mass communication model, the process requires material instruments and social production relations. The circulation of the product takes place through the discursive form of the product. The discourse must then be transformed into social practices if the circuit is to be completed and meaning is to be made. Each moment is, in articulation, necessary to the circuit as a whole, but no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated. Hall uses the Gramscian term “articulation” to mean the temporary linking together of

discursive elements. Articulation is a connection that can make a unity of discursive elements under certain conditions. It suggests expression, representation and conjunction. Hall writes of articulation that,

You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? The so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be re-articulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness’. The ‘unity’

which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily be connected. (Hall, 1996, 141)

In his use of the term “discourse” Hall signals that his approach to discourse and articulation is Foucauldian. In Foucauldian terms discourse signifies not only the textual object but also the operations of power and control through localised

institutions and practices. While Foucault himself rejected the label “structuralist” to describe his project, in the use of this vocabulary, Hall adopts a discursive mode which tends towards being structuralist and idealist. It is structuralist and idealist because the emphasis is on linkages and articulations of the sign-vehicles, which have minimal connection with human agents of production, despite the reference in

“Encoding/Decoding” to material professional practices. In “Encoding/Decoding”, Hall refuses the idea that the world is made from text, but something of the post-structuralist theories of language and communication, so popular at the time of the writing of “Encoding/Decoding”, is to be found in his essay, particularly in his discussions of the texts which bracket authorship out of the frame.

Hall explicitly cites Capital as the analogous model for his encoding/decoding approach, specifically the notion of commodity production and consumption. The institutionalised practices of television become the “labour process” in the discursive mode. Encoding meaning takes place within a set of related processes and practices, both material and ideological. Technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions frame the constitution of the “programme”.

Topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel and views about the audiences are all drawn from the wider socio-cultural and political structure within which the processes and practices of mass communication operate. Hall was trying to construct a

communication model within which reception becomes more active, so that the

consumption of the text is also in itself a “moment”, which is the point of departure for the meaning of the text. It is important to acknowledge that unlike some other cultural theorists of the same historical juncture, Hall was not prepared to suggest that reception and creation of meaning is entirely constructed through the process of reading by individual readers. The encoded message forms parameters, which contain expectations about meaning, and set limits on reading practices, although aberrant reading practices are always possible.

The broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of meaningful discourses. At this point in the essay Hall uses the Althusserian concept of “structure in dominance” to argue that at this moment in the communication process the formal rules of discourse and language are dominant. The message must then be “appropriated as meaningful discourse” before it can be decoded. It is the set of “decoded meanings which “‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or

behavioural consequences” (2001, 168). The set of encoded meaning structures may not be the same as the set of decoded meaning structures. Encoding and decoding may not be symmetrical. Symmetry and asymmetry, Hall argues, depend on the degree of fit between the codes, which “perfectly or imperfectly transmit, interrupt or systematically distort what has been transmitted” (2001, 168)

Hall argues that television is an iconic sign, and that it seems so natural that it is difficult to remember it is a two dimensional sign, a mediated discourse, not the referent itself. It may be useful at this point to remember Hodge and Kress’s argument that iconic and indexical signs can be a matter of judgement. Hall suggests that the

differences between “denotation” and “connotation” are useful concepts for analysis, but that they do not exist in the real world, where the sign always bears with it its associative aspects. He argues that denotation too, is ideological. Indeed in the iconic sign, it is so much so that the iconic sign appears “natural”. But for Hall, it is at the level of associative signs, of connotations, that we can begin to see in Volosinov’s terms, the struggle over meanings – “the class struggle in language” (2001, 171).

The sign, although bounded at the connotative level, is more open to active transformations because of its polysemic nature. However, Hall argues that any society tends to impose its classifications of the social, cultural and political, which constitute a dominant cultural order. This imposition is neither unequivocal nor is it uncontested: Hall and the Birmingham School’s approach to cultural theory was influenced by their use of Gramsci’s model of hegemony and its always oppositional counter-hegemony. This notion of the “dominant” is related to the notion of

“preferred readings”, and “these both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalised” (2001, 172).

When television producers “fail” to get their message across, what they mean is that the audience has failed to take the meaning that the broadcasters intended.

Moving on from this argument, Hall distinguished between three theoretically possible decoding positions. These are the:

• Dominant-hegemonic position: “When the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast or current affairs programme full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been

encoded, we might say that the viewer is operating inside the dominant code”

(2001, 174).

• Negotiated code or position: “decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the

legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules – it operates with exceptions to the rule. It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to local conditions, to its own more corporate positions” (2001, 175).

• Oppositional code: “Finally it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contradictory way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference. This is the case of the viewer who listens to a debate on the need to limit wages but ‘reads’ every mention of ‘national interest’ as ‘class interest” (2001, 175).

In Hall’s model, the real event is mediated through signifying practice, to become the message in the form of a discursive product. Hall cannot dispense with linearity altogether because he has to acknowledge that the message is constructed from syntagmatic chains of signs. The message is material, in the form of the television programme, and is constructed by concrete professional broadcasters working within

discursive and material rules, regulations, codes, conventions and assumptions. At the moment of production, institutional practices and discursive knowledge form the

“structure in dominance”; at the moment of the text, discursive forms predominate; at the moment of decoding, reception and interpretation by the viewer dominates.

Hall seems to suggest that messages are transparent and open to a variety of decoding positions, or subject to (consciously determined) aberrant readings. There is no question of indeterminacy within the text. It may be that this is particularly true of media news messages, given their purpose and their institutional and technical

production infrastructure. The decoding positions within this model move from consent through to dissent. The producer of the message wants the decoder to interpret the message exactly as intended by the producer. The producer wants to construct an ideal and transparent communicative process. Within the dominant-hegemonic position the reception of the message is full and straight, with the decoder working within the dominant code.

Despite the structuralist language and the potential for a reductive reification of the text, there is implicit in this framework recognition of the materiality of the message in the form of the broadcast text, and recognition that human agents both produce and receive the message. Hall also emphasises the communicative framework through which meaning is made and interpretation occurs.

A communication model through which to map intertextuality was needed for the current study. Hall’s model is more appropriate than either the mathematical models of communication theorists or the positivist needs-gratification models of media theorists because Hall’s model emphasises active reception. While Jakobson’s

communication model is particularly useful for analysing levels of meaning within the message, it does not focus on reception (Jakobson, 1960). The current study takes empirical data, in the form of data relating to Troubles Fiction novels, and reads the products of the “authors-as-producers” against a novel adaptation of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to analyse specific diachronic transformations emerging in and through popular culture genres.

In the adapted model, three categories are used to describe the relationship of specific novels to earlier novels. These categories are:

• Replication: this category is used to describe specific novels which adhere closely to the conventions of Troubles genre identified through an

examination of the earliest texts. This category includes many of the Troubles thrillers. The heroes tend to be members of the British Security Services, villains are IRA operatives, and women are depicted as girlfriends or victims.

• Modification: this category is used to describe specific novels which generally adhere to the conventions of Troubles genre novels identified through an examination of the earliest texts, but which display specific differences. It is possible to discern ideological shifts through the fiction of the Troubles. In particular, post-Hunger Strike novels begin to question the role of the British Security Services.

• Challenge: this category is used to describe specific novels that do not adhere to the conventions of the Troubles genre but construct alternative

representations. Within this category are also included novels which critique

conventional representations. This category is much smaller than the other two.

Syntagms and paradigms operating as pre-texts were mapped out to form a “base-line” snapshot view of the content of Troubles genre. Subsequent texts were mapped against this base-line using the categories described above.

The pitfalls of trying to decide which interpretation is the dominant

interpretation of a text are acknowledged, as is Hall’s counter-argument that texts are structured in such a way that leads to a preferred reading or the meaning intended by the producers. This issue is of concern to cultural and critical theorists interested in meaning and interpretation of cultural products who debate how far the construction of meaning is dependent on interpretation by the reader.

The question of how determined a set of reading positions underpins Roland Barthes’ distinction between readerly texts and writerly texts (Barthes, 1973) and is echoed in Eco’s distinction between open and closed texts (Eco, 1981). The issue of freedom for interpretation on the part of the reader partly relates to issues about human agency and ideological determination, both in relation to the author and in relation to the reader. For Umberto Eco, although there is a range of reading positions open to any material reader, the text itself frames a reading position, or range of reading positions, accessible through reading the text (Eco, 1981). Arguably the issue of tight coding of signifying practices is driven at some level by the function of the text, with some texts being more ideologically motivated than others (politicians’

speeches, preachers’ sermons). These types of texts are monologic in character and

are often the product of concrete subjects who police the logonomic system, yet even these texts are related to previous works, and contemporary works, and are

constructed for the consumption and interpretation by specific audiences.

For Volosinov, “any utterance, no matter how weighty and complete in and of itself, is only a moment in the continuous process of verbal communication. But that continuous verbal communication is, in turn, itself only a moment in the continuous, all-inclusive, generative process of a given social collective” (Volosinov, 1986, 95) (original emphases). Dialogic codes, amongst which Bahktin includes the novel form, possess the potential for dissension, opposition, and negotiation within the group to be recognised through specific signifying practices (Hodge and Kress, 1988, 83). The degree to which a specific text encodes dialogic signifying practices is determined by its relationship to the ideologies of the dominant group.

The modification of Hall’s model facilitates a relational analysis of specific novels in the data set. The assumption underpinning the study is that the data set would demonstrate that genre formation operates diachronically through small shifts and changes in the codes and conventions, instantiated through individual novels. It was also anticipated that at any given historical moment, there will be sense of the codes and conventions appropriate to that given moment that will be shared by a number of novelists operating at that given moment, within the same logonomic framework. It is perhaps this sense of syntagmatically appropriate codes and

conventions that Raymond Williams points to through his formulation of the concept of “structures of feeling”. Williams shares with Stuart Hall a commitment to

emancipatory critical cultural studies, and an interest in the operation of cultural

change. Although his emergent-dominant-residual model, which was designed to work at the level of epochal change, is not an appropriate theoretical tool to utilise in this study, which is concerned with change operating at a micro-level, the concept of structures of feeling can be used to interpret the data set.