Encoding Decoding
10 Encoding/decoding*
Stuart Hall
Traditionally, masscommunications research has conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop. This model has been criticized for its linearity - sender/message/receiver for its concentration on the level of message exchange and for the absence of a structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations. But it is also possible (and useful) t o think of this process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments - production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction. This would be to think of the process as a ‘complex structure in dominance’, sustained through the articulation of connected practices, each of which, however, retains its distinctiveness and has its own specific modality, its own forms and conditions of existence. This second approach, homologous to that which forms the skeleton of commodity production offered in
Marx’s Grundrisse and in Grpital, has the added advantage of bringing out more sharply how a continuous circuit production-distribution-production can be sustained through a ‘passage of forms’.’ It also highlights the specificity of the forms in which the product of the process ‘appears’ in each moment, and thus what distinguishes discursive ‘production’ from other types of production in our society and in modem media systems.
The ‘object’ of these practices is meanings and messages in the form of signvehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication or language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discoune. The apparatuses, relations and practices of production thus issue, at a certain moment
(the moment of ‘production/circulation’) in the form of symbolic vehicles constituted within the rules of ‘language’. It is in this discursive form that the circulation of the ‘product’ takes place. The process thus requires, at the
Stuart Hall
Traditionally, masscommunications research has conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop. This model has been criticized for its linearity - sender/message/receiver for its concentration on the level of message exchange and for the absence of a structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations. But it is also possible (and useful) t o think of this process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments - production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction. This would be to think of the process as a ‘complex structure in dominance’, sustained through the articulation of connected practices, each of which, however, retains its distinctiveness and has its own specific modality, its own forms and conditions of existence. This second approach, homologous to that which forms the skeleton of commodity production offered in
Marx’s Grundrisse and in Grpital, has the added advantage of bringing out more sharply how a continuous circuit production-distribution-production can be sustained through a ‘passage of forms’.’ It also highlights the specificity of the forms in which the product of the process ‘appears’ in each moment, and thus what distinguishes discursive ‘production’ from other types of production in our society and in modem media systems.
The ‘object’ of these practices is meanings and messages in the form of signvehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication or language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discoune. The apparatuses, relations and practices of production thus issue, at a certain moment
(the moment of ‘production/circulation’) in the form of symbolic vehicles constituted within the rules of ‘language’. It is in this discursive form that the circulation of the ‘product’ takes place. The process thus requires, at the