Presentation on Stuart Halls Encoding and Decoding

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Presentation on Stuart Halls Encoding/Decoding:

Hall, Stuart, Encoding/Decoding in Stuart Hall et al. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language (New York: Routledge, 1980) 128-138.

Hall starts by emphasizing that the customary study on communication has been censured for being too linear by deducing communication as “sheer circulation circuit” (129). He affirms that a better advancement conceptualized by Marx, is a single one that entails more typical aspects of communication so that the traditional model of sender to messenger to receiver need to substituted with a new approach of (production -circulation) to distribution-consumption to reproduction. Fundamentally to the new approach is a “sophisticated structure in dominance” (130) since every factor though linked, is very distinct from another and dictates at that particular moment within the communication process. He also observes that the model highlights what makes discursive production vary from other kinds of production. Impacted by Althusser, Hall stresses that the connotation obtained from the media system is reliant on the “operation of codes in the syntagmatic framework of a discourse” (132). Conversely, the media communication is prearranged in an identical system of signs that involves both parole and langue.

Encoding and decoding are thus primary processes within the communicative exchange. The meaning in its ordinary form should be encoded by the source and the receiver decodes it in order to produce a symbolic exchange. The convention of language preponderates in every process, regardless of the fact that every process happens at fixed or determinate moments. Since the broadcaster makes conjectures about the addressees in sending message, Hall agrees with the standpoint that the addressee is paradoxically both the receiver and the source of the message.

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” July Monday, 2011.http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture‐ industry.htm (accessed 11/07/2011).

This work remains an orthodox denunciation of artistic industry. This is a socialistic advancement to the cultural commodities industrializations. Adorno and Hokheimer take the view that “shift of the cultural development from the artisanal phase to the industrial phase resulted in society losing its ability to promote true individuality and freedom, and also the capability to embody actual situation of existence” (16). According to the two, the contemporary cultural production delivers standardized commodities to satisfy the great requirement of the capitalistic economy.