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does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument
or exposition, is unfamiliar with the language, finds the concepts too alien or
difficult or is foxed by the expository narrative. But more often broadcasters are
concerned that the audience has failed to take the meaning as they—the
broadcasters—intended. What they really mean to say is that viewers are not
operating within the ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ code. Their ideal is ‘perfectly
transparent communication’. Instead, what they have to confront is
‘systematically distorted communication’. 13
In recent years discrepancies of this kind have usually been explained by
reference to ‘selective perception’. This is the door via which a residual pluralism
evades the compulsions of a highly structured, asymmetrical and non-equivalent
process. Of course, there will always be private, individual, variant readings. But
‘selective perception’ is almost never as selective, random or privatized as the
concept suggests. The patterns exhibit, across individual variants, significant
clusterings. Any new approach to audience studies will therefore have to begin
with a critique of ‘selective perception’ theory.
It was argued earlier that since there is no necessary correspondence between
encoding and decoding, the former can attempt to ‘pre-fer’ but cannot prescribe
or guarantee the latter, which has its own conditions of existence. Unless they are
wildly aberrant, encoding will have the effect of constructing some of the limits
and parameters within which decodings will operate. If there were no limits,
audiences could simply read whatever they liked into any message. No doubt
some total misunderstandings of this kind do exist. But the vast range must contain
some degree of reciprocity between encoding and decoding moments, otherwise
we could not speak of an effective communicative exchange at all. Nevertheless,
this ‘correspondence’ is not given but constructed. It is not ‘natural’ but the
product of an articulation between two distinct moments. And the former cannot
determine or guarantee, in a simple sense, which decoding codes will be
employed. Otherwise communication would be a perfectly equivalent circuit, and
every message would be an instance of ‘perfectly transparent communication’.
We must think, then, of the variant articulations in which encoding/decoding can
be combined. To elaborate on this, we offer a hypothetical analysis of some
possible decoding positions, in order to reinforce the point of ‘no necessary
correspondence’. 14
We identify three hypothetical positions from which decodings of a televisual
discourse may be constructed. These need to be empirically tested and refined.
But the argument that decodings do not follow inevitably from encodings, that they
are not identical, reinforces the argument of ‘no necessary correspondence’. It
also helps to deconstruct the common-sense meaning of ‘misunderstanding’ in
terms of a theory of ‘systematically distorted communication’.
The first hypothetical position is that of the dominant-hegemonic position.
When the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast or
current affairs programme full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of
the reference code in which it has been encoded, we might say that the viewer is