Another point to make about Hall’s positions is that they don’t refer to the ‘personal’ (mis)readings of isolated viewers. When the images of two aeroplanes crashing into the World Trade Center were transmitted to a global audience on 11 September 2001,the meaning of the event seemed abundantly clear to all. No form of thought could claim absolute truth, because “truth” was all relative; knowledge, linked to power, can make itself true. If in the West the ‘preferred’ meaning and reading of‘9/11’ was of a ‘tragic’ event, it was a ‘signified’ that was not set in stone or uncontested. The three different positions outlined above are best understood as part of a continuum across which viewers move, rather than separate, static points of view that the audience take up or reject once and for all. As we will see, Hall is especially interested in the way different audiences generate rather than discover meaning. Words mean only what their author intends them to mean. Where to ‘receive’ has passive connotations in mass communications research, marking the end of the communication process, to consume is an active process leading to the production, or ‘reproduction’ of meaning. In this book, Hall clarified the connection between culture and representation as follow:culture is about shared meaning, people share meaning by language, in language we use signs and symbols, those symbols can be sounds, written words, images, musical notes, even objects, finally composition the ideas and feelings.One of the major subjects in the book is examining stereotyping and how this practice CriticismStuart Hall … Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Language does not reflect the real, but constructs or ‘distorts’ it on our behalf. Hall is very closely identified in media studies with an approach known as “cultural studies,” and he starts with one of its central concepts: representation. The news cannot be given to us in the form of a pure or ‘raw’ event, but is subject to the ‘formal rules’ (Saussure’s langue) of the governing system of language. a chair, a flower, a tangerine), or they may be abstract things that we cannot directly see, feel, or touch (e.g. Language can include written or spoken words, but it can also include visual images, gestures, body language, music, or other stimuli such as traffic lights (Hall, 1997). For Hall, ‘preferred meanings’ are always contested and open to transformation in this way. A term that proved especially influential in the work of Hall and the CCCS. Desks, formal dress codes and postures, for instance are all ‘signs’ within television news used to convey or ‘signify’ values such as ‘authority’, ‘trustworthiness’, ‘seriousness’ and ‘objectivity’. Saussure. Events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of the televisual discourse. At the connotative level however, the ‘language’ of its advertising reveals associations that are marked by class and by ideology and which we may either agree or disagree with. Home › Cultural Studies › Analysis of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding, By Nasrullah Mambrol on November 7, 2020 • ( 1 ). (1976). What is being proposed here is an articulated model of communication in which meaning does not reside at, nor can be guaranteed by, any particular moment of the circuit. Stuart Hall – Key Points
Hall emphasises the importance of visual representation – the image seems to be the prevalent sign of late modern culture.
Representation – to present/to depict.
The word suggests something was there already and has been represented by the media.
Representation as that which stands in for something else.
Representation is the way in which meaning is given to the things which are depicted that stand in for something.<… Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory 1. According to Hall: “Constructivists do not deny the existence of the material world. This new form of cinema is considered as the visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean subjects – “ blacks” of the diasporas of the West- the new post colonial subjects. In a culture, language tends to operate across larger units of analysis – narratives, statements, groups of images, and whole discourses which operate across a variety of texts and areas of knowledge (Hall, 1997). My wild rose clipping, for example, serves as a material “signifier” to represent the concept of “wild rose-ness” (the idea) through its physiological differences to the other plants contained in the book. Morley tested the hypothesis of dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings by screening an episode of the show to different audiences grouped in terms of class, occupation, race, and so on. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. ‘Relative autonomy’ implies that ideology has a degree of freedom from the economic. For Hall, this communication process is too neat: ‘the only distortion in it is that the receiver might not be up to the business of getting the message he or she ought to get’ (RED: 253). Tele-exotica (2020) Protected Cityscapes Rotterdam (2019) WdKA Makes A Difference (2017) On Classification (2016) Cultural Diversity Totebag (2015) Jazz Festival Delft (2012) Jazz Festival Delft (2011) Production process has its own "discursive" aspect, as it is also framed by meanings and ideas; by drawing upon society's dominant ideologies, the creator of the message is feeding off of society's beliefs, and values. He called this rule-governed structure “la langue,” and referred to individual language acts as “la parole” (Culler, 1976). London: Fontana. Different spectators will decode the text in different ways, not always in the way the producer intended. London: Tavistock. pp. Brighton: Harvester. Camera crews were present at the World Trade Center in New York some fifteen minutes after the first plane hit the North Tower. Here Hall distances himself from the behavioural science of mass communications theory (where the viewer’s response is ‘like a tap on the knee cap’ (E/D: 131), an instinctive reaction), from the language-centred abstractions of structuralism, and from the expressive view of culture in culturalism. Following Saussure, Hall highlights the arbitrary nature of the sign, the fact that though the relation between signifier and signified and between visual signs and ‘things’ seems natural, it is, in fact, conventional. The articulation of an arbitrary sign – whether visual or verbal – with the concept of a referent is the product not of nature but of convention . Preferred meanings rely upon ‘common-sense’ or ‘taken-for-grantedness’ and reflect the ‘dominant cultural order’, which imposes and validates ‘its classification of the social and cultural and political world’ (E/D:134). A Freudian concept Althusser used to great effect in ‘Contradiction and over-determination’, an essay in For Marx. So, producers try to ‘fix’ a meaning (or way of understanding) people or events in their texts. There are two major variants of the constructionist approach: the semiotic approach, which was largely influenced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the discursive approach, which is associated with French philosopher Michel Foucault. With reflective approach to representation, language is said to function like a mirror; it reflects the true meaning of an object, person, idea or event as it already exists in the world. In his interview with Eve Bearne, Gunther Kress argues that literacy is “that which is about representation” (Kress, in Bearne, 2005, p. 288). Nov 4, 2020 - In this video, aimed at A-level media studies students and teachers, I explain Stuart Halls ideas about representation, including hegemony, stereotypes and r... .. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of ‘9/11’ (and others like it within the media) a culturally specific reading is rendered not simply plausible and universal, but common-sense. However, this may have little bearing on her decision to strike at shop-floor or union level. In doing so, he saved language from the status of a mere transparent medium between things and meaning. Althusser argues that while the economic always determines the superstructure in some way, it is not necessarily dominant. The dominant-hegemonic position: where the viewer decodes the message in terms of the codes legitimated by the encoding process and the dominant cultural order. Gee, J.P. (2008). in Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses, 3rd edition. ‘Terrorism’ and ‘civilisation’ were encoded and (presumably frequently) decoded as common-sense terms within these discourses. (Note: although meanings can be stabilized within a culture, they are never finally fixed. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent. In this context the ‘already constituted sign’ of the producer is ‘potentially transformable into more than one connotative configuration’ (E/D: 134) by the consumer. London Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage in association with the Open University. Among other things, ‘Encoding/decoding’ sheds light on why divergent readings of the same media event occur by exploring the ideological role of the media and the extent to which it governs meanings and gives rise to alternative ones. As described in the previous section, the “real world” itself does not convey meaning. 5.0 out of 5 stars. 26(3):287-299. http://bit.ly/1P4GcrEAnother dive into media theory, this we take a look at how we see, view, and interpret media. There is a ‘lack of fit’ Hall suggests ‘between the two sides in the communicative exchange’ (E/D: 131), between the moment of the production of the message (‘encoding’) and the moment of its reception (‘decoding’). Just because a documentary on asylum seekers aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight, does not guarantee its audience will view them sympathetically. The book itself is transportable and no longer tied to its immediate context of production, which was an important criterion for Lankshear and Knobel’s definition. Titled 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse', Hall's essay offers a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. Because “literacy” implies something that is mediated through text, in my previous post I questioned the idea of what constitutes a “text.” After further consideration, I feel that representation is the key; therefore, for the purposes of this post I have decided to pursue representation a bit further. . . As Stuart Hall describes: “Trees would not mind if we used the word SEERT – ‘trees’ written backwards – to represent the concept of them… it is not at all clear that real trees know that they are trees, and even less clear that they know that the word in English which represents the concept of themselves is written TREE whereas in French it is written ARBRE! He describes his theory as the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language, signs and images which stand for or represent things Where at the denotative level, ideological meaning appears relatively fixed, the connotative level is a significant site of ideological intervention and contestation because its ‘fluidity of meaning and association can be more fully exploited and transformed’ (E/D: 133). This breaks with the mechanistic move from base to super structure associated with ‘deterministic’ versions of Marx. 15-64. Our aim is to deepen our understanding of what representation is and how it works. He showed, instead, that representation was a practice.” (Hall, 1997, p. 34). This ‘lack of fit’ is crucial to Hall’s argument. Such opposing reactions by different audiences to media coverage of the same event, suggested the collapse of the twin towers had no single meaning. . Essential Essays (Two-volume set): Foundations of Cultural Studies & Identity and Diaspora (Stuart Hall: Selected Writings) Stuart Hall. Hall’s concern with the social and political dimensions of communication is apparent from the very beginning of his essay, which proposes an alternative to the ‘sender–message–receiver’ model of communication based on Marx’s theory of commodity production. Alternatively, this would be the British Muslim viewer who responds to news of ‘9/11’ by condemning the ‘terrorist attack’ on America, while protesting against the construction of Islam as ‘uncivilised’ and the subsequent racial abuse directed at Western Muslims. The second strike and its aftermath were broadcast live on television giving the event a certain immediacy as it unfolded before our eyes. . These codes are culturally constructed and stabilize meanings within different languages and cultures. At the denotative level there is a general agreement about the meaning of a sign. Meaning is made through the fact that it represents wild roses – even though I could have chosen any other wild rose plant from which to take my representative sample. Foucault, M. (1980). Where the ‘receiver’ represented the end of the line in mass communications research, for Hall ‘consumption determines production just as production determines consumption’ (RED: 255). Therefore from this perspective, going back to my previous post, my little book of plant pressings may in fact be considered a text since each little plant was chosen as a representative of an entire species. Hall goes on to associate the confusion of the culturally constructed sign with a naturally given or universal referent with the confusion in linguistic theory between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. The essay is conventionally viewed as marking a turning point in Hall’s and the CCCS’s research, towards structuralism, allowing us to reflect on some of the main theoretical developments at Birmingham. The twin towers emerged as polysemic, or multi-accentual signs following ‘9/11’, connoting, on the one hand, advanced democratic civilisation and, on the other, oppressive neocolonial capitalism. According to this model, the sender creates the message and fixes its meaning, which is then communicated directly and transparently to the recipient. The most influential of these ‘tests’ and ‘refinements’ have been carried out by one of Hall’s former students, David Morley. The examples used by Hall to illustrate his model indicate that he is thinking in Marxist/class terms (‘the workers’). sustains the overall theme by continuing our exploration of representation as a concept and a practice - the key first 'moment' in the cultural circuit. As far as they are concerned, it could just as well be written COW or VACHE or indeed XYZ” (Hall, 1997, p. 21). Moreover, the finite number of meanings the televisual message is capable of generating are ‘not equal among themselves’ (E/D: 134) and therefore it would be a mistake, Hall insists, to confuse polysemy with ‘pluralism’ (which implies free, democratic choice). The coverage was also over determined by the larger circuit of communication within which it was articulated. Partly in order to ‘deconstruct the common-sense meaning of “misunderstanding”, Hall closes his essay by outlining three hypothetical positions from which decodings might be made. This is why Hall’s consumer is also a producer. It is the difference between Red and Green which signifies – not the colours themselves, or even the words used to describe them (Hall, 1997). (E/D: 132). . Paperback. But if we think of the visual representation of a cow in a manual on animal husbandry – and, even more, of the linguistic sign ‘cow’ – we can see that both, in different degrees, are arbitrary with respect to the concept of the animal they represent. Hall is ultimately more interested in the political than the linguistic implications of media messages, a fact he foregrounds in the 1973 version of ‘Encoding/decoding’: though I shall adopt a semiotic perspective, I do not regard this as indexing a closed formal concern with the immanent organisation of the television discourse alone. Stuart Hall's REPRESENTATION theory (please do not confuse with RECEPTION) is that there is not a true representation of people or events in a text, but there are lots of ways these can be represented. These four stages in Hall (1980) model are explained thus; Production – This is where the encoding or the construction of a message begins. Rather, it is the act of viewing that releases its signifying potential. Social and linguistic conventions change over time as cultures evolve). System of Representation (2019+2020) Cultural Diversity calls for equity (2017) Embrace The Miscellaneous (2015+2016) Design & Research. Saussure referred to the form, or the language used to refer to a concept, as “the signifier,” and the corresponding idea it triggered in your head (the concept) as “the signified.” Together, these constituted “the sign,” which he argued “are members of a system and are defined in relation to the other members of that system” (Culler, 1976, p. 19). In addition to these material structures, the encoding of ‘9/11’ was shaped by journalistic discourses on ‘violence, terrorism, and Islam’ that had been circulating in the West for ‘the last three decades’(E/D: 102).Within this context it is possible to make sense of Hall’s point that encoding is the point of entry into the discursive realm of communication, as well as a ‘moment’ constructed by the material context of production in which it occurs. Common-sense then clearly performs an important ideological role in relation to the maintenance of hegemony, as Hall notes: It is precisely its [common-sense’s] ‘spontaneous’ quality, its transparency, its ‘naturalness’, its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or correction, its effect of instant recognition . Subscribe Today! Hall goes on to associate the confusion of the culturally constructed sign with a naturally given or universal referent with the confusion in linguistic theory between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. Stuart Hall is Professor of Sociology at the Open University in England and, for the last thirty years, has been at the forefront of work concerning the media’s role in society. Saussure believed that language was a rule-governed system that could be studied with the law-like precision of a science (deemed “structuralism”). 4.6 out of 5 stars. $30.13. Finally, it should be noted that Hall’s positions are hypothetical, they are not intended as prescriptive templates for studies of actual audiences. Basically, where traditionally the meaning of the media message was viewed as static, transparent and unchanging throughout the communication process, Hall argues that the message sent is seldom (if ever) the one received and that communication is systematically distorted. Reception theory as developed by Stuart Hall asserts that media texts are encoded and decoded. The theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer meaning that whoever produces the text fills the product with values and messages. The moments of encoding and decoding are also the points, respectively, of entrance into and exit from the systems of discourse. Meaning is always produced within language; it is the practice of representation, constructed through signifying. Similarly, the individual news ‘item’ does not provide a window onto the actual historical event, but must transform it into a ‘story’. Representation Theorists • Important figure, but not the most exciting. Representation is a complex business and, especially when dealing For Hall, they are ideological positions concerning particular social groups. enters fully into the struggle over meaning – the class struggle in language’ (E/D: 133). (CMIE: 325). Stuart Hall: Representation Theory The idea of adultery or cheating is something that people may not want to see a woman doing because they would like to think that women are the innocent and fragile whereas the men are meant to be the ones who are made out to be the bad people In order to illustrate these abstract theories of articulation, we will consider in more detail the specific moments of encoding and decoding, using media coverage of ‘9/11’ as an example. Codes govern the translation between concepts and language. love, war, culture). In ‘Encoding/decoding’, Hall suggests media messages accrue a common-sense status in part through their performative nature. THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION Stuart Hall 1 REPRESENTATION, MEANING AND LANGUAGE In this chapter we will be... 2. Hall announces at this point that language is ‘multi-accentual’: ‘the sign is open to new accentuations and . Semiotics is the study of signs in a culture (culture as language), though the semiotic approach doesn’t consider how, when or why language is used. The news images of Palestinians apparently celebrating the collapse of the twin towers powerfully exposed that ‘tragedy’ was not an intrinsic or fixed meaning of the event. What Saussure failed to address, however, were questions related to power in language (Hall, 1997). Power/Knowledge. The negotiated position: a contradictory position where the viewer has the potential to adopt and oppose the dominant televisual codes. What matters instead is that they are different and can be distinguished from one another. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes representation as the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language, signs and images which stand for or represent things (Hall, 1997). In order to produce meaning, signifiers have to be organized into a system of differences (Hall, 1997). Hall gives the example of a worker’s response to reports of a pay freeze. The constructionist approach (sometimes referred to as the constructivist approach) recognizes the social character of language and acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning (Hall, 1997). While clearly television news is not literally ‘language’, the fact that it is a highly coded, or ‘conventional’ discourse makes the analogy a productive one. each has its specific modality and condi-tions of existence’ (E/D: 128–9). 2.1 Representation and identity A Cultural theorist, also a leading figure of the development of media and cultural studies, Stuart Hall’s cultural representation theory is very representative and has a significant impact in the field of cultural studies. 3. “Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs, but that of war and battle. Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist who emphasised the importance of cultural representation in the media. The sense of tragedy surrounding the event was highlighted in media coverage showing the traumatised reaction of audiences in Europe and America as they received the news. . . Multi-accentuality has important implications for decoding because if we accept Volosinov’s theory then the ‘reception’ of the television message is likely to be more contested than it first appeared. This model moves in a linear fashion from the ‘sender’ through the ‘message’ to the ‘receiver’. Stuart Hall's Representation Theory ... Stuart Hall's Representation Theory Explained! Audiences can no longer be seen as passively absorbing the fixed meanings planted there by the producer, ‘decoding’ must necessarily involve a struggle over meaning which is dependent upon the social position of the viewer. ‘Encoding/decoding’ opens with an account of the conventional model of communication to be found within mass communications research. Nevertheless, the meanings ‘9/11’ generated did not spontaneously flow from that moment of encoding in isolation. -British communications scholar -Editor of Representation: Cultural Representations & Signifying Practices -Culture is now an important subject in the human sciences Literal: Pharrell is wearing a headdress on the cover of Elle UK Connotative: Pharrell is a 1. The intentional approach argues the opposite, suggesting that the speaker or author of a particular work imposes meaning onto the world through the use of language. Determination is present in this model, but only in the ‘last instance’. North America had become the tragic victim of a terrorist attack. Chapter 1: Representation, meaning and language. They may be constructed from physical, material objects that we can perceive through our senses (e.g. . In this circuit the ‘sender’ has become a ‘producer’ and the ‘receiver’ a ‘consumer’. Adopting an Althussereanvocabulary within this context, Hall suggests encoding and decoding are over-determined, relatively autonomous moments. (1997). ... Stuart Hall describes identity as a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. Hall has been the first to point out in this context, that they ‘need to be empirically tested and refined’ (E/D: 136). Hall’s essay challenges all three components of the mass communications model, arguing that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. Michel Foucault used the word “representation” to refer to the production of knowledge (rather than just meaning) through the use of discourses (rather than just language) (Foucault, 1980). Although these models represent the culmination of my understanding, I thought it would be helpful to begin with these models and then proceed to deconstruct and explain them throughout the post. Therefore, going back to my plant pressings dilemma, I am now inclined to argue that my book of plant clippings is in fact a text. This would be an example of ‘perfectly transparent’ communication: the viewer who watches dominant European or American news coverage of ‘9/11’ and draws the common-sense conclusion that the event is nothing more than a terrorist attack on the ‘civilised world’. Society constructs a ‘dominant cultural order’ (E/D: 134) that generates what Hall terms ‘preferred meanings’. This ‘ethnographic’ approach revealed that audience responses are highly contradictory and are not rigidly determined by class or social position. Audience reception theory; audiences read/understand a particular text according to their cultural upbringing. Foucault, M. (1972). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture, Media and Identities series) Stuart Hall. The following two graphics provide a visual model for the way I have come to understand representation through various readings (most notably, those by cultural theorist Stuart Hall). Meaning is multiple rather than singular: the ‘work’ of the audience is not to discover a true, core meaning which has been embedded at the heart of the message, rather the audience generates meaning with a degree of ‘relative autonomy’. For all its apparent immediacy, what viewers of the ‘9/11’ coverage saw that day was not the unreconstructed event, but an ‘aural-visual’ discourse: the selective combination of care-fully edited amateur video, eyewitness accounts and reporters’ narratives in order to produce a ‘story’. It is important to note that language is completely arbitrary, often bearing little resemblance to the things to which they refer. The term ultimately reveals encoding and decoding as ‘an asymmetrical and non-equivalent process’ in which ‘the former can attempt to “prefer” but cannot prescribe or guarantee the latter, which has its own conditions of existence’ (E/D:135). This model comprises a number of what Hall terms ‘moments’ (such as circulation and distribution) but is primarily concerned with the points of production/encoding and consumption/decoding.
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Hall emphasises the importance of visual representation – the image seems to be the prevalent sign of late modern culture.
Representation – to present/to depict.
The word suggests something was there already and has been represented by the media.
Representation as that which stands in for something else.
Representation is the way in which meaning is given to the things which are depicted that stand in for something.<… Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory 1. According to Hall: “Constructivists do not deny the existence of the material world. This new form of cinema is considered as the visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean subjects – “ blacks” of the diasporas of the West- the new post colonial subjects. In a culture, language tends to operate across larger units of analysis – narratives, statements, groups of images, and whole discourses which operate across a variety of texts and areas of knowledge (Hall, 1997). My wild rose clipping, for example, serves as a material “signifier” to represent the concept of “wild rose-ness” (the idea) through its physiological differences to the other plants contained in the book. Morley tested the hypothesis of dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings by screening an episode of the show to different audiences grouped in terms of class, occupation, race, and so on. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. ‘Relative autonomy’ implies that ideology has a degree of freedom from the economic. For Hall, this communication process is too neat: ‘the only distortion in it is that the receiver might not be up to the business of getting the message he or she ought to get’ (RED: 253). Tele-exotica (2020) Protected Cityscapes Rotterdam (2019) WdKA Makes A Difference (2017) On Classification (2016) Cultural Diversity Totebag (2015) Jazz Festival Delft (2012) Jazz Festival Delft (2011) Production process has its own "discursive" aspect, as it is also framed by meanings and ideas; by drawing upon society's dominant ideologies, the creator of the message is feeding off of society's beliefs, and values. He called this rule-governed structure “la langue,” and referred to individual language acts as “la parole” (Culler, 1976). London: Fontana. Different spectators will decode the text in different ways, not always in the way the producer intended. London: Tavistock. pp. Brighton: Harvester. Camera crews were present at the World Trade Center in New York some fifteen minutes after the first plane hit the North Tower. Here Hall distances himself from the behavioural science of mass communications theory (where the viewer’s response is ‘like a tap on the knee cap’ (E/D: 131), an instinctive reaction), from the language-centred abstractions of structuralism, and from the expressive view of culture in culturalism. Following Saussure, Hall highlights the arbitrary nature of the sign, the fact that though the relation between signifier and signified and between visual signs and ‘things’ seems natural, it is, in fact, conventional. The articulation of an arbitrary sign – whether visual or verbal – with the concept of a referent is the product not of nature but of convention . Preferred meanings rely upon ‘common-sense’ or ‘taken-for-grantedness’ and reflect the ‘dominant cultural order’, which imposes and validates ‘its classification of the social and cultural and political world’ (E/D:134). A Freudian concept Althusser used to great effect in ‘Contradiction and over-determination’, an essay in For Marx. So, producers try to ‘fix’ a meaning (or way of understanding) people or events in their texts. There are two major variants of the constructionist approach: the semiotic approach, which was largely influenced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the discursive approach, which is associated with French philosopher Michel Foucault. With reflective approach to representation, language is said to function like a mirror; it reflects the true meaning of an object, person, idea or event as it already exists in the world. In his interview with Eve Bearne, Gunther Kress argues that literacy is “that which is about representation” (Kress, in Bearne, 2005, p. 288). Nov 4, 2020 - In this video, aimed at A-level media studies students and teachers, I explain Stuart Halls ideas about representation, including hegemony, stereotypes and r... .. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of ‘9/11’ (and others like it within the media) a culturally specific reading is rendered not simply plausible and universal, but common-sense. However, this may have little bearing on her decision to strike at shop-floor or union level. In doing so, he saved language from the status of a mere transparent medium between things and meaning. Althusser argues that while the economic always determines the superstructure in some way, it is not necessarily dominant. The dominant-hegemonic position: where the viewer decodes the message in terms of the codes legitimated by the encoding process and the dominant cultural order. Gee, J.P. (2008). in Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses, 3rd edition. ‘Terrorism’ and ‘civilisation’ were encoded and (presumably frequently) decoded as common-sense terms within these discourses. (Note: although meanings can be stabilized within a culture, they are never finally fixed. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent. In this context the ‘already constituted sign’ of the producer is ‘potentially transformable into more than one connotative configuration’ (E/D: 134) by the consumer. London Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage in association with the Open University. Among other things, ‘Encoding/decoding’ sheds light on why divergent readings of the same media event occur by exploring the ideological role of the media and the extent to which it governs meanings and gives rise to alternative ones. As described in the previous section, the “real world” itself does not convey meaning. 5.0 out of 5 stars. 26(3):287-299. http://bit.ly/1P4GcrEAnother dive into media theory, this we take a look at how we see, view, and interpret media. There is a ‘lack of fit’ Hall suggests ‘between the two sides in the communicative exchange’ (E/D: 131), between the moment of the production of the message (‘encoding’) and the moment of its reception (‘decoding’). Just because a documentary on asylum seekers aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight, does not guarantee its audience will view them sympathetically. The book itself is transportable and no longer tied to its immediate context of production, which was an important criterion for Lankshear and Knobel’s definition. Titled 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse', Hall's essay offers a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. Because “literacy” implies something that is mediated through text, in my previous post I questioned the idea of what constitutes a “text.” After further consideration, I feel that representation is the key; therefore, for the purposes of this post I have decided to pursue representation a bit further. . . As Stuart Hall describes: “Trees would not mind if we used the word SEERT – ‘trees’ written backwards – to represent the concept of them… it is not at all clear that real trees know that they are trees, and even less clear that they know that the word in English which represents the concept of themselves is written TREE whereas in French it is written ARBRE! He describes his theory as the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language, signs and images which stand for or represent things Where at the denotative level, ideological meaning appears relatively fixed, the connotative level is a significant site of ideological intervention and contestation because its ‘fluidity of meaning and association can be more fully exploited and transformed’ (E/D: 133). This breaks with the mechanistic move from base to super structure associated with ‘deterministic’ versions of Marx. 15-64. Our aim is to deepen our understanding of what representation is and how it works. He showed, instead, that representation was a practice.” (Hall, 1997, p. 34). This ‘lack of fit’ is crucial to Hall’s argument. Such opposing reactions by different audiences to media coverage of the same event, suggested the collapse of the twin towers had no single meaning. . Essential Essays (Two-volume set): Foundations of Cultural Studies & Identity and Diaspora (Stuart Hall: Selected Writings) Stuart Hall. Hall’s concern with the social and political dimensions of communication is apparent from the very beginning of his essay, which proposes an alternative to the ‘sender–message–receiver’ model of communication based on Marx’s theory of commodity production. Alternatively, this would be the British Muslim viewer who responds to news of ‘9/11’ by condemning the ‘terrorist attack’ on America, while protesting against the construction of Islam as ‘uncivilised’ and the subsequent racial abuse directed at Western Muslims. The second strike and its aftermath were broadcast live on television giving the event a certain immediacy as it unfolded before our eyes. . These codes are culturally constructed and stabilize meanings within different languages and cultures. At the denotative level there is a general agreement about the meaning of a sign. Meaning is made through the fact that it represents wild roses – even though I could have chosen any other wild rose plant from which to take my representative sample. Foucault, M. (1980). Where the ‘receiver’ represented the end of the line in mass communications research, for Hall ‘consumption determines production just as production determines consumption’ (RED: 255). Therefore from this perspective, going back to my previous post, my little book of plant pressings may in fact be considered a text since each little plant was chosen as a representative of an entire species. Hall goes on to associate the confusion of the culturally constructed sign with a naturally given or universal referent with the confusion in linguistic theory between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. The essay is conventionally viewed as marking a turning point in Hall’s and the CCCS’s research, towards structuralism, allowing us to reflect on some of the main theoretical developments at Birmingham. The twin towers emerged as polysemic, or multi-accentual signs following ‘9/11’, connoting, on the one hand, advanced democratic civilisation and, on the other, oppressive neocolonial capitalism. According to this model, the sender creates the message and fixes its meaning, which is then communicated directly and transparently to the recipient. The most influential of these ‘tests’ and ‘refinements’ have been carried out by one of Hall’s former students, David Morley. The examples used by Hall to illustrate his model indicate that he is thinking in Marxist/class terms (‘the workers’). sustains the overall theme by continuing our exploration of representation as a concept and a practice - the key first 'moment' in the cultural circuit. As far as they are concerned, it could just as well be written COW or VACHE or indeed XYZ” (Hall, 1997, p. 21). Moreover, the finite number of meanings the televisual message is capable of generating are ‘not equal among themselves’ (E/D: 134) and therefore it would be a mistake, Hall insists, to confuse polysemy with ‘pluralism’ (which implies free, democratic choice). The coverage was also over determined by the larger circuit of communication within which it was articulated. Partly in order to ‘deconstruct the common-sense meaning of “misunderstanding”, Hall closes his essay by outlining three hypothetical positions from which decodings might be made. This is why Hall’s consumer is also a producer. It is the difference between Red and Green which signifies – not the colours themselves, or even the words used to describe them (Hall, 1997). (E/D: 132). . Paperback. But if we think of the visual representation of a cow in a manual on animal husbandry – and, even more, of the linguistic sign ‘cow’ – we can see that both, in different degrees, are arbitrary with respect to the concept of the animal they represent. Hall is ultimately more interested in the political than the linguistic implications of media messages, a fact he foregrounds in the 1973 version of ‘Encoding/decoding’: though I shall adopt a semiotic perspective, I do not regard this as indexing a closed formal concern with the immanent organisation of the television discourse alone. Stuart Hall's REPRESENTATION theory (please do not confuse with RECEPTION) is that there is not a true representation of people or events in a text, but there are lots of ways these can be represented. These four stages in Hall (1980) model are explained thus; Production – This is where the encoding or the construction of a message begins. Rather, it is the act of viewing that releases its signifying potential. Social and linguistic conventions change over time as cultures evolve). System of Representation (2019+2020) Cultural Diversity calls for equity (2017) Embrace The Miscellaneous (2015+2016) Design & Research. Saussure referred to the form, or the language used to refer to a concept, as “the signifier,” and the corresponding idea it triggered in your head (the concept) as “the signified.” Together, these constituted “the sign,” which he argued “are members of a system and are defined in relation to the other members of that system” (Culler, 1976, p. 19). In addition to these material structures, the encoding of ‘9/11’ was shaped by journalistic discourses on ‘violence, terrorism, and Islam’ that had been circulating in the West for ‘the last three decades’(E/D: 102).Within this context it is possible to make sense of Hall’s point that encoding is the point of entry into the discursive realm of communication, as well as a ‘moment’ constructed by the material context of production in which it occurs. Common-sense then clearly performs an important ideological role in relation to the maintenance of hegemony, as Hall notes: It is precisely its [common-sense’s] ‘spontaneous’ quality, its transparency, its ‘naturalness’, its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or correction, its effect of instant recognition . Subscribe Today! Hall goes on to associate the confusion of the culturally constructed sign with a naturally given or universal referent with the confusion in linguistic theory between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. Stuart Hall is Professor of Sociology at the Open University in England and, for the last thirty years, has been at the forefront of work concerning the media’s role in society. Saussure believed that language was a rule-governed system that could be studied with the law-like precision of a science (deemed “structuralism”). 4.6 out of 5 stars. $30.13. Finally, it should be noted that Hall’s positions are hypothetical, they are not intended as prescriptive templates for studies of actual audiences. Basically, where traditionally the meaning of the media message was viewed as static, transparent and unchanging throughout the communication process, Hall argues that the message sent is seldom (if ever) the one received and that communication is systematically distorted. Reception theory as developed by Stuart Hall asserts that media texts are encoded and decoded. The theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer meaning that whoever produces the text fills the product with values and messages. The moments of encoding and decoding are also the points, respectively, of entrance into and exit from the systems of discourse. Meaning is always produced within language; it is the practice of representation, constructed through signifying. Similarly, the individual news ‘item’ does not provide a window onto the actual historical event, but must transform it into a ‘story’. Representation Theorists • Important figure, but not the most exciting. Representation is a complex business and, especially when dealing For Hall, they are ideological positions concerning particular social groups. enters fully into the struggle over meaning – the class struggle in language’ (E/D: 133). (CMIE: 325). Stuart Hall: Representation Theory The idea of adultery or cheating is something that people may not want to see a woman doing because they would like to think that women are the innocent and fragile whereas the men are meant to be the ones who are made out to be the bad people In order to illustrate these abstract theories of articulation, we will consider in more detail the specific moments of encoding and decoding, using media coverage of ‘9/11’ as an example. Codes govern the translation between concepts and language. love, war, culture). In ‘Encoding/decoding’, Hall suggests media messages accrue a common-sense status in part through their performative nature. THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION Stuart Hall 1 REPRESENTATION, MEANING AND LANGUAGE In this chapter we will be... 2. Hall announces at this point that language is ‘multi-accentual’: ‘the sign is open to new accentuations and . Semiotics is the study of signs in a culture (culture as language), though the semiotic approach doesn’t consider how, when or why language is used. The news images of Palestinians apparently celebrating the collapse of the twin towers powerfully exposed that ‘tragedy’ was not an intrinsic or fixed meaning of the event. What Saussure failed to address, however, were questions related to power in language (Hall, 1997). Power/Knowledge. The negotiated position: a contradictory position where the viewer has the potential to adopt and oppose the dominant televisual codes. What matters instead is that they are different and can be distinguished from one another. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes representation as the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language, signs and images which stand for or represent things (Hall, 1997). In order to produce meaning, signifiers have to be organized into a system of differences (Hall, 1997). Hall gives the example of a worker’s response to reports of a pay freeze. The constructionist approach (sometimes referred to as the constructivist approach) recognizes the social character of language and acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning (Hall, 1997). While clearly television news is not literally ‘language’, the fact that it is a highly coded, or ‘conventional’ discourse makes the analogy a productive one. each has its specific modality and condi-tions of existence’ (E/D: 128–9). 2.1 Representation and identity A Cultural theorist, also a leading figure of the development of media and cultural studies, Stuart Hall’s cultural representation theory is very representative and has a significant impact in the field of cultural studies. 3. “Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs, but that of war and battle. Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist who emphasised the importance of cultural representation in the media. The sense of tragedy surrounding the event was highlighted in media coverage showing the traumatised reaction of audiences in Europe and America as they received the news. . . Multi-accentuality has important implications for decoding because if we accept Volosinov’s theory then the ‘reception’ of the television message is likely to be more contested than it first appeared. This model moves in a linear fashion from the ‘sender’ through the ‘message’ to the ‘receiver’. Stuart Hall's Representation Theory ... Stuart Hall's Representation Theory Explained! Audiences can no longer be seen as passively absorbing the fixed meanings planted there by the producer, ‘decoding’ must necessarily involve a struggle over meaning which is dependent upon the social position of the viewer. ‘Encoding/decoding’ opens with an account of the conventional model of communication to be found within mass communications research. Nevertheless, the meanings ‘9/11’ generated did not spontaneously flow from that moment of encoding in isolation. -British communications scholar -Editor of Representation: Cultural Representations & Signifying Practices -Culture is now an important subject in the human sciences Literal: Pharrell is wearing a headdress on the cover of Elle UK Connotative: Pharrell is a 1. The intentional approach argues the opposite, suggesting that the speaker or author of a particular work imposes meaning onto the world through the use of language. Determination is present in this model, but only in the ‘last instance’. North America had become the tragic victim of a terrorist attack. Chapter 1: Representation, meaning and language. They may be constructed from physical, material objects that we can perceive through our senses (e.g. . In this circuit the ‘sender’ has become a ‘producer’ and the ‘receiver’ a ‘consumer’. Adopting an Althussereanvocabulary within this context, Hall suggests encoding and decoding are over-determined, relatively autonomous moments. (1997). ... Stuart Hall describes identity as a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. Hall has been the first to point out in this context, that they ‘need to be empirically tested and refined’ (E/D: 136). Hall’s essay challenges all three components of the mass communications model, arguing that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. Michel Foucault used the word “representation” to refer to the production of knowledge (rather than just meaning) through the use of discourses (rather than just language) (Foucault, 1980). Although these models represent the culmination of my understanding, I thought it would be helpful to begin with these models and then proceed to deconstruct and explain them throughout the post. Therefore, going back to my plant pressings dilemma, I am now inclined to argue that my book of plant clippings is in fact a text. This would be an example of ‘perfectly transparent’ communication: the viewer who watches dominant European or American news coverage of ‘9/11’ and draws the common-sense conclusion that the event is nothing more than a terrorist attack on the ‘civilised world’. Society constructs a ‘dominant cultural order’ (E/D: 134) that generates what Hall terms ‘preferred meanings’. This ‘ethnographic’ approach revealed that audience responses are highly contradictory and are not rigidly determined by class or social position. Audience reception theory; audiences read/understand a particular text according to their cultural upbringing. Foucault, M. (1972). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture, Media and Identities series) Stuart Hall. The following two graphics provide a visual model for the way I have come to understand representation through various readings (most notably, those by cultural theorist Stuart Hall). Meaning is multiple rather than singular: the ‘work’ of the audience is not to discover a true, core meaning which has been embedded at the heart of the message, rather the audience generates meaning with a degree of ‘relative autonomy’. For all its apparent immediacy, what viewers of the ‘9/11’ coverage saw that day was not the unreconstructed event, but an ‘aural-visual’ discourse: the selective combination of care-fully edited amateur video, eyewitness accounts and reporters’ narratives in order to produce a ‘story’. It is important to note that language is completely arbitrary, often bearing little resemblance to the things to which they refer. The term ultimately reveals encoding and decoding as ‘an asymmetrical and non-equivalent process’ in which ‘the former can attempt to “prefer” but cannot prescribe or guarantee the latter, which has its own conditions of existence’ (E/D:135). This model comprises a number of what Hall terms ‘moments’ (such as circulation and distribution) but is primarily concerned with the points of production/encoding and consumption/decoding.
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