Page 135 - Decoding Culture

128 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

Of course, Hall recognizes that semiotic frameworks of this kind
had already changed the ways in which analysts viewed mass
media 'content' - structuralist-inspired work on 'texts' was ample
testimony to that. In line with CCCS commitment to active agency
and ideological contest, however, he is more concerned with the
likely impact on our understanding of audiences, and the ways in
which they read and respond to media messages. Making use of
the analytic distinction between denotative and connotative mean­
ings (by then well known from Barthes' application of it in his early
semiology and in M y thologies) he relates ideology to the naturalized
codes through which connotative meanings are established: 'it is at
the connotative level of the sign that situational ideologies alter
and transform signification'. The sign, already coded at the deno­
tative level, interacts with the broader codes of a culture to 'take on
additional, more active, ideological dimensions' (ibid: 133). This, of
course, opens up potential for polysemy in that given signs may
play different connotative roles. But this is not, Hall (ibid: 134)
argues, a recipe for unrestrained significatory pluralism: [ clonno­
'
tative codes are not equal among themselves. Any society/culture
tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its classifications
of the social and political and cultural world. These constitute a
dominant cultural order.' We decode in terms of the 'mappings'
that are available to us, and these mappings constitute the basis for
ascribing 'dominant or preferred meanings'. Indeed, 'possible
meanings will be organised within a scale which runs from domi­
nant to subordinate' (Hall, 1997: 30).
In this way the structuralist concept of coding is yoked to an
account of culture and ideology in which there are 'structures in
dominance' and within which the 'struggle in ideology' is contin­
ued. Limits are set on the polysemic implications of structuralist
theories by postulating a social world in which there are dominant
ideologies through which hegemonic control is sought. But

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