Page 85 - Cultural Theory

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••• Chris Rojek •••

ideology. For if identity is permanently ‘under erasure’ the notion of the ideological
determination of subjectivity cannot be tenable.
This relaxation in the concept of ideological work is not evident in the writings
produced in the Birmingham golden age. For example, the encoding–decoding was
a preliminary attempt to explore the colonization of ideology in the sphere of an
increasingly significant feature of public information and opinion in societies based
around systems of mass communication: the media message (Hall 1973). The origins
of the model were partly polemical, in as much as it was intended to critique the
dominant behaviourist model of mass communications research of the day, which
Hall took to be enshrined in the Centre of Mass Communications Research at the
2
University of Leicester. Hall was concerned to establish the case that reception isn’t
a transparent and open-ended link in the communication chain. He contended that
media messages are embedded with presuppositions and unreflected beliefs that pre-
dispose audiences to follow ‘preferred readings’ of media messages. Hall sought to
replace the idea that the media message is a reflection of reality and replace it with
the proposition that the media message inflects popular consciousness in ideologi-
cally approved directions. The media ‘effect’ is theorized as putting a particular gloss
on reality that creates a virtuous circle between constructed messages and preferred
readings. This is the meaning attributed to ‘encoding’ and it implicates broadcasters
as being ideologically implicated in reproducing a particular version of social reality.
Hall is also concerned to challenge the behaviourist model of the audience as a blank
subject and to replace it with the notion of ‘the active audience’. The work was pub-
lished at a moment when Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological approach was
being widely debated by sociologist’s. Garfinkel’s contention that mainstream social sci-
ence produced a model of man as a ‘cultural dope’ may have influenced Hall. Be that as
it may, the concept of decoding is designed to highlight the capacity of the audience to
actively treat media messages as alienable from their life experience and conditions of
life and hence, subject them to critical or oppositional readings.
The encoding/decoding model was one of the first productions from the Birmingham
Centre to create national and international interest. It was widely, and mistakenly
seen as a contribution to mass communications research per se. In fact it expressed
Hall’s deeper concern with elucidating how ideology ‘cuts’ into language and,
through this interpellates subjectivity. Hall maintained that the central agent in the
process of both ordering subjectivity and achieving socialist transformation is the
state. Interestingly, Birmingham analysis was almost exclusively confined to the case
of the British state. Although the significance of globalization receives proper atten-
tion in the ‘New Times’ thesis in the 80s, comparative analysis was never very promi-
nent in the considerations of the Centre during its hay-day.

The Representative-Interventionist State

In an important paper (1984) Hall submits that the shift from the laissez faire to the
representative-interventionist state in Britain started in the 1880s. Indeed the period

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