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Encoding/decoding*
肌肉紧张Stuart Hall
减肥饮食Traditionally, mass-communications rearch has conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop. This model has been criticized for its linearity—nder/message/receiver—for its concentration on the level of message exchange and for the abnce of a structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations. But it is also possible (and uful) to 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 cond approach, homologous to that which forms the skeleton of commodity production offered in Marx’s Grundris and in Capital, has the added advantage of bringing out more sharply how a continuous circuit—production-distribution-production—can be sustained through a ‘passage of forms’.1 It also highlights t
he 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 modern media systems.
cs龙珠The ‘object’ of the practices is meanings and messages in the form of sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication or language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discour. The apparatus, 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 production end, its material instruments—its ‘means’—as well as its own ts of social (production) relations—the organization and combination of practices within media apparatus. But it is in the discursive form that the circulation of the product takes place, as well as its distribution to different audiences. Once accomplished, the discour must then be translated—transformed, again—into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. If no ‘meaning’ is taken, there can be no ‘consumption’. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. The value of this approach is that while
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each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated. Since each has its specific modality and conditions of existence, each can constitute its own break or interruption of the ‘passage of forms’ on who continuity the flow of effective production (that is, ‘reproduction’) depends. Thus while in no way wanting to limit rearch to ‘following only tho leads which emerge from content analysis’,2 we must recognize that the discursive form of the message has a privileged position in the communicative exchange (from the viewpoint of circulation), and that the moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’, though only ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments. A ‘raw’ historical event cannot, in that form, be transmitted by, say, a television newscast. Events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of the televisual discour. In the moment when a historical event pass under the sign of discour, it is subject to all the complex formal ‘rules’ by which language signifies. To put it paradoxically, the event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event. In that moment the formal sub-rules of discour are ‘in dominance’, without, of cour, subordinating out of existence the historical event so signified, the social relations in which the rules are t to work or the social and political conquences of the event having been signified in this way. The ‘message form’ is the necessary ‘form of appearance’ of the event in its passage from source to receiver. Thus the transposition into a
nd out of the ‘message form’ (or the mode of symbolic exchange) is not a random ‘moment’, which we can take up or ignore at our convenience. The ‘message form’ is a determinate moment; though, at another level, it compris the surface movements of the communications system only and requires, at another stage, to be integrated into the social relations of the communication process as a whole, of which it forms only a part.
From this general perspective, we may crudely characterize the television communicative process as follows. The institutional structures of broadcasting, with their practices and networks of production, their organized relations and technical infrastructures, are required to produce a programme. Using the analogy of Capital, this is the ‘labour process’ in the discursive mode. Production, here, constructs the message. In one n, then, the circuit begins here. Of cour, the production process is not without its ‘discursive’ aspect: it, too, is framed throughout by meanings and ideas: knowledge-in-u concerning the routines of production, historically defined technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience and so on frame the constitution of the programme through this production structure. Further, though the production structures of television *This article is an edited extract from ‘Encoding and Decoding in Television Discour’, CCCS Stencilled Paper no. 7.
诗与胡说
MEDIA STUDIES119 originate the television discour, they do not constitute a clod system. They draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience,‘definitions of the situation’ from other sources and other discursive formations within the wider socio-cultural and political structure of which they are a differentiated part. Philip Elliott has expresd this point succinctly, within a more traditional framework, in his discussion of the way in which the audience is both the ‘source’ and the ‘receiver’ of the television message. Thus—to borrow Marx’s terms—circulation and reception are, indeed, ‘moments’ of the production process in television and are reincorporated, via a number of skewed and structured ‘feedbacks’, into the production process itlf. The consumption or reception of the television message is thus also itlf a ‘moment’ of the production process in its larger n, though the latter is ‘predominant’ becau it is the ‘point of departure for the realization’ of the message. Production and reception of the television message are not, therefore, identical, but they are related: they are differentiated moments within the totality formed by the social relations of the communicative process as a whole.
At a certain point, however, the broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discour. The institution-societal relations of production must pass under the discursive rules of language for its product to be ‘realized’. This initiates a further differentiated mom
超买超卖ent, in which the formal rules of discour and language are in dominance. Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘u’, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discour and be meaningfully decoded. It is this t of decoded meanings which ‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural conquences. In a ‘determinate’ moment the structure employs a code and yields a ‘message’: at another determinate moment the ‘message’, via its decodings, issues into the structure of social practices. We are now fully aware that this re-entry into the practices of audience reception and ‘u’ cannot be understood in simple behavioural terms. The typical process identified in positivistic rearch on isolated elements—effects, us, ‘gratifications’—are themlves framed by structures of understanding, as well as being produced by social and economic relations, which shape their ‘realization’ at the reception end of the chain and which permit the meanings signified in the discour to be transpod into practice or consciousness (to acquire social u value or political effectivity).
Clearly, what we have labelled in the diagram ‘meaning structures 1’ and ‘meaning structures 2’ may not be the same. They do not constitute an ‘immediate identity’. The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. The degrees of symmetry—that is, the degrees of ‘under
standing’and ‘misunderstanding’ in the communicative exchange—depend on the degrees of symmetry/asymmetry (relations of equivalence) established between the positions of the ‘personifications’, encoder-producer and decoder-receiver. But this in turn depends on the degrees of identity/non-identity between the codes
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which perfectly or imperfectly transmit, interrupt or systematically distort what has been transmitted. The lack of fit between the codes has a great deal to do with the structural differences of relation and position between broadcasters and audiences, but it also has something to do with the asymmetry between the codes of ‘source’ and ‘receiver’ at the moment of transformation into and out of the discursive form. What are called ‘distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ ari precily from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange. Once again, this defines the ‘relative autonomy’, but ‘determinateness’, of the entry and exit of the message in its discursive moments.
The application of this rudimentary paradigm has already begun to transform our understanding of the older term, television ‘content’. We are just beginning to e how it might also transform our understanding of audience reception,‘reading’ and respon as well. Beginnings and endings have been announced in communications rearch before, so we must be cautious. But there ems some ground for thinking that a new and exciting pha in so-called audience rearch, of a quite new kind, may be opening up. At either end of the communicative chain the u of the miotic paradigm promis to dispel the lingering behaviourism which has dogged mass-media rearch for so long, especially in its approach to content. Though we know the television programme is not a be
havioural input, like a tap on the knee cap, it ems to have been almost impossible for traditional rearchers to conceptualize the communicative process without lapsing into one or other variant of low-flying behaviourism. We know, as Gerbner has remarked, that reprentations of violence on the TV
淡泊名利的事例screen ‘are not violence but messages about violence’:3 but we have continued to
rearch the question of violence, for example, as if we were unable to comprehend this epistemological distinction.
悼念亲人的句子MEDIA STUDIES121 The televisual sign is a complex one. It is itlf constituted by the combination of two types of discour, visual and aural. Moreover, it is an iconic sign, in Peirce’s terminology, becau ‘it posss some of the properties of the thing reprented’.4 This is a point which has led to a great deal of confusion and has provided the site of inten controversy in the study of visual language. Since the visual discour translates a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional planes, it cannot, of cour, be the referent or concept it signifies. The dog in the film can bark but it cannot bite! Reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discour. Discursive ‘knowledge
’ is the product not of the transparent reprentation of the ‘real’ in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions. Thus there is no intelligible discour without the operation of a code. Iconic signs are therefore coded signs too—even if the codes here work differently from tho of other signs. There is no degree zero in language. Naturalism and ‘realism’— the apparent fidelity of the reprentation to the thing or concept reprented—is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the ‘real’. It is the result of a discursive practice.
Certain codes may, of cour, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed—the effect of an articulation between sign and referent—but to be ‘naturally’ given. Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a ‘near-universality’ in this n: though evidence remains that even apparently ‘natural’ visual codes are culture-specific. However, this does not mean that no codes have intervened; rather, that the codes have been profoundly naturalized. The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and ‘naturalness’of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in u. They produce apparently ‘natural’ recognitions. This has the (ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are prent. But we must not be f宝剑锋
ooled by appearances. Actually, what naturalized codes demonstrate is the degree of habituation produced when there is a fundamental alignment and reciprocity—an achieved equivalence— between the encoding and decoding sides of an exchange of meanings. The functioning of the codes on the decoding side will frequently assume the status of naturalized perceptions. This leads us to think that the visual sign for ‘cow’ actually is (rather than reprents) the animal, cow. But if we think of the visual reprentation of a cow in a manual on animal husbandry—and, even more, of the linguistic sign ‘cow’—we can e that both, in different degrees, are arbitrary with respect to the concept of the animal they reprent. 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, and the conventionalism of discours requires the intervention, the support, of codes. Thus Eco has argued that iconic signs ‘look like objects in the real world becau they reproduce the conditions (that is, the codes) of perception in the viewer’.5 The ‘conditions of perception’ are, however, the result of a highly coded, even
