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STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 87

have been publicly aired at the Council of Europe Colloquy at the Leicester
Centre for Mass Communication Research in September 1973. This early
version of the model is almost entirely ‘semiotic’ in its intellectual
structure, and to the extent that it deals with ‘ideology’ it locates the
question in terms of differential decodings, particularly at the level of the
necessary polysemic nature of connotation:
Literal or denotative ‘errors’ are relatively unproblematic. They
represent a kind of noise in the channel. But ‘misreadings’ of a
message at the connotative or contextual level are a different matter.
They have, fundamentally, a societal, not a communicative, basis.
They signify, at the ‘message’ level the structural conflicts,
contradictions and negotiations of economic, political and cultural
life…. 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 coded, we might say that the viewer is operating inside the
dominant code.
(Hall, 1973:16)

This is clearly a ‘Barthesian’ theory of the function of the mass media and
it was to be much modified in subsequent versions.
One element which is missing from all of the versions is any theoretical
account of the process of encoding. In the first version, this took the form
of simply bracketing out the problem of the social processes of television
production on the grounds that these ‘at a certain moment…[issue] in the
form of symbolic vehicles constituted within the rules of “language”’ (Hall,
1973:3). None of the later versions made any substantial additions to this
area. This model thus followed the Althusserian prescription to concentrate
upon ‘the particular essences of the specific elements of the superstructure’
very closely. Since there was no attempt to demonstrate how the dominant
ideological encoding of television discourse might be related to the
structure of society, this model escaped by default the charge that it
operated with a reductionist theory of culture.
The problematic aspects of the Althusserian legacy surfaced in the other,
decoding, moment of the theory. Althusser’s treatment of ideology had two
important features. He argued that ideology was always embedded in what
he termed ‘ideological state apparatuses’. While there were problems with
what he included in the list of such apparatuses, the proposition that the
mass media or the education system functioned primarily but not
exclusively through ideology could command widespread support. Much
more contentious was the proposition that ideology was fundamentally an
unconscious operation which was constituted through the entry of the
subject into language. In order to speak, the individual had to negate itself