Encoding, Decoding

1. Encoding, Decoding Stuart Hall

2. A Reminder • Apply the skills of citation and parenthetical documentation you learn today to your response paper for Stuart Hall.

3. Basic Elements in Semiotics • Sign • Signifier (the vehicle for signifying)意符 • Signified (the message) 意指 • Sender (producer) • Receiver • Swiss linguists Ferdinand de Saussure

5. The Picture as a Sign • Sign: 門上有一標示 • Signifier: 左右各有一圖案；上下端有文字 左邊圖案兩輪圈圈在上 右邊圖案兩輪圈圈在下 • Signified：圖案各代表男性與女性 • 下方文字左邊為英文女性之意 • 下方文字右邊為英文男性之簡寫 • 上方文字為廁所之意

7. Comment on traditional concept of mass-communication • It has been criticized for its linearity—sender/message/receiver • The absence of a structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations.

8. The four linked but distinctive moments • Production • Circulation • Distribution/consumption • Reproduction

9. Production • The basic grammar in production -----Technical infrastructure -----Relations of production -----Frameworks of knowledge B. The social framework within which production occurs • The raw material symbolic vehicles in the “discursive form” “encoded messages”

10. Circulation Ex. Television newscast The event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event.

11. Distribution/Consumption • Before this message can have an “effect,” satisfy a need or be put to use, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. • The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical.

12. Reproduction • The professional code, however, operates within the “hegemony”

13. The Open Social Framework of Communication • The message form is … at another stage, to be integrated into the social relations of the communication process as a whole, of which it forms only a part. • The audience reception and “use” are framed by structures of understanding as well as being produced by social and economic relations. • See picture on p. 94

14. Causes of “Distortions” or “Misunderstanding” • The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. • This arises from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange. • Hence the “relative autonomy,” but “determinateness,” of the entry and exit of the message in its discursive moments

15. Encoding / Decoding “Encoding” and “decoding” are two determinant moments.

16. Relatively Autonomous • If no “meaning” is taken, there can be no “consumption.” If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. • While each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment.

17. Denotation; Connotation; Ideology • Denotation字面意義 • Connotation內在(文化)意涵 • Ideology is often loaded in connotation • Ex. 玫瑰花: denotation: a flower • connotation: love; passion

18. Polysemy rather than pluralism • Receiver probably won’t get the exact message the sender wants to convey. But what the receiver perceives will not be anything possible, since both sides live in the same larger environment.

19. The way Stuart Hall supplements Althusser’s “Interpellation” • What other possibilities than “Interpellation”?

20. The three subject positions • Dominant-hegemonic • Negotiated • Oppositional

21. The semiotic approach in cultural studies • To investigate how a sign (social practice; social institution; value system; modes of behaviors . . . ) are encoded with certain meanings which we have been disciplined to take as natural but which is in fact charged with the dominant ideology. • Ex. Why do people oppose diverse family formation多元成家法案?