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118 ENCODING/DECODING

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 whose
continuity the flow of effective production (that is, ‘reproduction’) depends.
Thus while in no way wanting to limit research to ‘following only those leads
2
which emerge from content analysis’, 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 discourse. In
the moment when a historical event passes under the sign of discourse, 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 discourse are ‘in
dominance’, without, of course, subordinating out of existence the historical
event so signified, the social relations in which the rules are set to work or the
social and political consequences 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 and 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 comprises 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 sense, then, the circuit begins
here. Of course, the production process is not without its ‘discursive’ aspect: it,
too, is framed throughout by meanings and ideas: knowledge-in-use 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 Discourse’,
CCCS Stencilled Paper no. 7.