In Inga Muscio's book entitled "Cunt" she talks a lot about humans, women in particular, tearing other women down through the use of unannounced codes. This sparked my interest again into Stuart Hall's essay on encoding and decoding and the use of language to do this. I searched for some connection to what Muscio was pointing out but had a hard time grasping what Hall was saying and putting it into actual viable words for myself.
Hall says this: "The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical.....that is, the degreees of "understanding" and "misunderstanding" the communicative exchange - depend on the degrees of symmetry established between the positions of the....encoder....and decoder." There is not always a clear code, we have instituted our own unique codes for our individual situations and these may only be known to certain people inside of our chosen social groups. Muscio's entire point is this small section of Hall's essay! We all have our own set of unique codes and thus our own set of biases and judgements. What is acceptable to me may not be acceptable to me. The problem with this is that as human beings we judge each other based on these rules and codes inside of our own minds and not the codes inside of the person in question's mind.
I think for the first time I have actually connected this theory to my everyday life. I walk down the street and without thinking I instantly sum people up according to my personal standards of beauty, to my personal standards of activity, to my personal standards of dress. I am reading (decoding) what another individual is doing based on the codes I have created in my small social group. It's not quite fair is it? Codes get misinterpreted and this in turn creates division amongst people. I guess what I am really grasping at here is this idea that somehow codes have forever separated us. It is obvious in terms of language barriers and things of that nature but it took a lot of work for me to relate it back to unconscious thoughts about people I may not even know.
2 comments:
Although I completely understand your point that we all have our own codes--to a certain degree--I have to ask the question, where did those codes come from? Despite the subtle differences between our "individual" codes, the dominant code has undeniably attributed a far larger portion of the codes that we live by than any individual learning or thought process. It is not until later in life, after we have absorbed the dominant codes that we can re-evaluate them in ways that break from the dominant connotations. Use the word "bitch" for example. I bet that until any of us came across women's studies/gender theory, we would have never thought to reconceptualize the word and the taken-for-granted in our society connotation of it. So yes, we do judge people based on our own codes, but our own codes are not really our own.
Yes, I see your point. We do not really own our codes but perhaps certain people have created their own. Is it a code that I can say "cunt" and not have it mean something awful? We have reclaimed this word and thus in my social group it is a code of sorts. I cannot say this is actually a code but perhaps? We do absolutely judge people based on these codes and whether they are really "ours" or someone else's I guess the main point is that we judge based on codes whether or not they are really our own.....it's just that they are probably not the person we are judging's codes.
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