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culture; and (b) that it carries with it the stamp of legitimacy—it appears
coterminous with what is ‘natural’, ‘inevitable’, ‘taken for granted’ about the
social order. Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of
adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the
hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a
more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules—it
operates with exceptions to the rule. It accords the privileged position to the
dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more
negotiated application to ‘local conditions’, to its own more corporate positions.
This negotiated version of the dominant ideology is thus shot through with
contradictions, though these are only on certain occasions brought to full
visibility. Negotiated codes operate through what we might call particular or
situated logics: and these logics are sustained by their differential and unequal
relation to the discourses and logics of power. The simplest example of a
negotiated code is that which governs the response of a worker to the notion of
an Industrial Relations Bill limiting the right to strike or to arguments for a
wages freeze. At the level of the ‘national interest’ economic debate the decoder
may adopt the hegemonic definition, agreeing that ‘we must all pay ourselves
less in order to combat inflation’. This, however, may have little or no relation to
his/her willingness to go on strike for better pay and conditions or to oppose the
Industrial Relations Bill at the level of shop-floor or union organization. We
suspect that the great majority of so-called ‘misunderstandings’ arise from the
contradictions and disjunctures between hegemonic-dominant encodings and
negotiated-corporate decodings. It is just these mismatches in the levels which
most provoke defining elites and professionals to identify a ‘failure in
communications’.
Finally, it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and
the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a
globally contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in
order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference.
This is the case of the viewer who listens to a debate on the need to limit wages
but ‘reads’ every mention of the ‘national interest’ as ‘class interest’. He/she is
operating with what we must call an oppositional code. One of the most
significant political moments (they also coincide with crisis points within the
broadcasting organizations themselves, for obvious reasons) is the point when
events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be
given an oppositional reading. Here the ‘politics of signification’—the struggle
in discourse—is joined.