Page 135 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

124 ENCODING/DECODING

assign and decode an event within more than one ‘mapping’. But we say
‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’; and these both
have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have
11
themselves become institutionalized. The domains of ‘preferred meanings’
have the whole social order embedded in them as a set of meanings, practices
and beliefs: the everyday knowledge of social structures, of ‘how things work for
all practical purposes in this culture’, the rank order of power and interest and the
structure of legitimations, limits and sanctions. Thus to clarify a
‘misunderstanding’ at the connotative level, we must refer, through the codes, to
the orders of social life, of economic and political power and of ideology.
Further, since these mappings are ‘structured in dominance’ but not closed, the
communicative process consists not in the unproblematic assignment of every
visual item to its given position within a set of prearranged codes, but of
performative rules—rules of competence and use, of logics-in-use—which seek
actively to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another and rule items
into and out of their appropriate meaning-sets. Formal semiology has too often
neglected this practice of interpretative work, though this constitutes, in fact, the
real relations of broadcast practices in television.
In speaking of dominant meanings, then, we are not talking about a one-
sided process which governs how all events will be signified. It consists of the
‘work’ required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a
decoding of the event within the limit of dominant definitions in which it has
been connotatively signified. Terni has remarked:

By the word reading we mean not only the capacity to identify and decode
a certain number of signs, but also the subjective capacity to put them into
a creative relation between themselves and with other signs: a capacity
which is, by itself, the condition for a complete awareness of one’s total
environment. 12

Our quarrel here is with the notion of ‘subjective capacity’, as if the referent of a
televisional discourse were an objective fact but the interpretative level were an
individualized and private matter. Quite the opposite seems to be the case. The
televisual practice takes ‘objective’ (that is, systemic) responsibility precisely for
the relations which disparate signs contract with one another in any discursive
instance, and thus continually rearranges, delimits and prescribes into what
‘awareness of one’s total environment’ these items are arranged.
This brings us to the question of misunderstandings. Television producers who
find their message ‘failing to get across’ are frequently concerned to straighten
out the kinks in the communication chain, thus facilitating the ‘effectiveness’ of
their communication. Much research which claims the objectivity of ‘policy-
oriented analysis’ reproduces this administrative goal by attempting to discover
how much of a message the audience recalls and to improve the extent of
understanding. No doubt misunderstandings of a literal kind do exist. The viewer