Page 130 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

MEDIA STUDIES 119

originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed 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 expressed 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 itself. The consumption or
reception of the television message is thus also itself a ‘moment’ of the
production process in its larger sense, though the latter is ‘predominant’ because
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 discourse. 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 moment, in which the formal
rules of discourse and language are in dominance. Before this message can have
an ‘effect’ (however defined), satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be
appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. It is this
set of decoded meanings which ‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct or
persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or
behavioural consequences. 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 ‘use’ cannot
be understood in simple behavioural terms. The typical processes identified in
positivistic research on isolated elements—effects, uses, ‘gratifications’—are
themselves 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 discourse to be
transposed into practice or consciousness (to acquire social use 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 ‘understanding’
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