Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding" Thoughts to get you started...

Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding";
Here's a nice, albeit long, introduction to semiotics
Mary Klages' introduction to the Swiss Linguist, Ferdinand de Sassure, is good and concise.

Hall. "Encoding/Decoding"
Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932. A trained sociologist, he, along with Hoggart and Williams, was instrumental in developing the Birmingham School for Cultural Studies. Hall has been placed within a post-Gramscian Marxist school, and, as one critic points out, "[c]ertainly Hall's relation to the marxist tradition is, and always has been both a complex and creative (if necessarily troubled) one" (Morley 15). He emphasizes the materialities of power and inequality and thus, is dissatisfied with any form of "idealist" analysis (ibid., 15).

The essay you read for today is "Encoding/Decoding", a seminal work in mass communication. It provides a much needed intervention in the field of mass communication, especially in regard to the relationship between the producer and the consumer. Drawing upon the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Sassure, and structuralism, Hall develops a theory that challenges the assumption that there is a direct correlation between the producer (encoder) and the consumer (decoder). Rather, he argues, that "[r]eality exists outside language, but it constantly mediated by and through language; and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse" (Hall 166-7). Thus, knowledge is discursive, and relies upon a system of signs, coded signs and iconic signs.

Here is where we can see the influence of Sassure. Sassure, in his book, Course in General Linguistics discusses how reality and our interpretation of it relies upon the linguistic sign. For him, the linguistic unit is "a double entity [... united by] not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image" (65-6).


As you can see from the image above, the signifier (sound-image) and the signified (concept) unite to form a sign, which he uses to designate the whole. Two important points to note on the relationship between the signifier and the signified: 1) the relationship between them is arbitrary. For example, when we see a picture of a tree, we then utter the word tree to name it; the relationship between them could just as easily have been the picture of a tree and the sound n-u-n. Following this, the nature of the sign itself is arbitrary. The second principle he makes is that the signifier is linear. He argues that "The signifier, being auditory, in unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics: a) it represents a span and b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line.

Now that we've taken an important detour through Saussearean linguistics, let's turn to Hall's arguments in the essay. He discusses how the naturalization of coded signs in mass communications produce "apparently 'natural' recognitions" (167). This prevents the ways in which we can analyze the ideological effects of these codes. Remember, Hall is interested in the concept of hegemony, particularly the ways in which consent is integral to the social construction of hegemonic systems. What does this mean in the relations between the visual medium and the audience?

This should help you get started in reading the essay and finding some key points. I want you to examine closely his discussion on connotation/denotation, polysemy, and signs as "maps of social reality" (169).
- What is the difference between coercion and consent (go back to the Gramsci piece we read for last time) and think about the value of such work upon Hall's essay.
-what is the relationship between the visual and the audience? How, where, who constructs meaning?