Page 128 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Encoding/decoding*

Stuart Hall

Traditionally, mass-communications 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) 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
second approach, homologous to that which forms the skeleton of commodity
production offered in Marx’s Grundrisse and in Capital, has the added advantage
of bringing out more sharply how a continuous circuit—production-distribution-
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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 modern media systems.
The ‘object’ of these 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
discourse. 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
production end, its material instruments—its ‘means’—as well as its own sets of
social (production) relations—the organization and combination of practices
within media apparatuses. 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 discourse 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