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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 61

Foucault when, in contradiction to these words, he then closes down his perspective to
interpret all power relations ‘in terms of the general form of war’. This might be useful
to balance a tradition for studying power in terms of contracts and rights, but it seems
more justifiable – and in line with Foucault’s own apparent intentions – to admit that
several levels and aspects of analysis may be needed, rather than again reducing power
relations to one single privileged form. And since all forms of resistance make use of the
power resources available to those who resist dominance, economic, political and
symbolic resistance can be related to the corresponding forms of power.
Consumers might for instance manifest their resistance to economic power by their
purchasing activities or by boycotts, and citizens might mobilize against political deci-
sions or symbolically respond to dominant media texts with refusal, oppositional read-
ings or alternative textual production. This also implies that different forms of power and
resistance intersect, like when economic dominance is met with political or symbolic
resistance. But in some instances the immanent relationship between power and resist-
ance might go even further. For example, resistance might conceal power demands or
even be combined with the exertion of power. As Paul Willis showed in Learning to
Labour, resistance along one dimension may sometimes contribute to consolidating and
reproducing existing structures of power in other dimensions, by the glorification of
certain aspects of subordinated social positions and the reproduction of limitations that
restricts the potential emancipation of the resisting act. 45 In Willis’s case, the working-
class lads’ resistance to the school’s middle-class values led to a triple reproduction of
prevalent power orders, combining a misogynic fear of women, a xenophobic repudia-
tion of immigrant ethnic groups and an anti-intellectual refusal of reflection.
Power and resistance flow through many kinds of social agencies, including insti-
tutions, communities and individual subjects. They are immanent in economic and
political, as well as social and cultural fields. Each such power/resistance instance may
be investigated in similar ways as media use, asking, who resists what, how, why and
with which results, i.e. analysing different agents, targets, means, causes/intentions
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and effects of resistance. To some extent, this is what we will do in our last chapter.
Communication and power are deeply imbued in one another, and there are
several attempts in media and cultural studies to understand their intersection. Based
on his model of encoding and decoding, Stuart Hall showed how power and resist-
ance operate in media use. He distinguished three hypothetical decoding positions: a
dominant-hegemonic, a negotiated and an oppositional one. 47 The sender has full
power over the receiver – and resistance is thus absent – when for example a televi-
sion viewer is operating inside the ‘dominant code’, faithfully reproducing the
meaning structures intentionally encoded by the media industrial producer.
Resistance manifests itself when audiences use either an openly ‘oppositional’ or a
more compromising ‘negotiated code’ to decode the meanings of the received media
messages. The interpretations of media messages may thus not coincide with the
intentions of those who produce them. In many forms of communication, including
the arts, this is the intended rule rather than a sign of failure or resistance. Still, Hall’s
reasoning is valid for many conventional forms of mass-media use.

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