Page 82 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

ENLIGHTENMENT (THE)

Hall conceives of the process of television encoding as an articulation of the
linked but distinct moments of production, circulation, distribution and
reproduction each of which have their specific practices which are necessary to the
circuit but which do not guarantee the next moment. In particular, the production 59
of meaning does not ensure consumption of that meaning as the encoders might
have intended because television texts are polysemic. In short, television messages
carry multiple meanings and can be interpreted in different ways. That is not to say
that all the meanings are equal among themselves, rather, the text will be
‘structured in dominance’ leading to a ‘preferred meaning’, that is, the one the text
guides us to.
Here the audience is conceived of as socially situated individuals whose readings
will be framed by shared cultural meanings and practices. To the degree that
audiences partake of cultural codes in the same way as producers/encoders they will
decode messages within the same framework. However, where the audience is
situated in different social positions (for example, class and gender) with different
cultural resources, the audience is able to decode programmes in alternative ways.
Hall proposed a model of three hypothetical decoding positions:

• The dominant-hegemonic decoding, which accepts the ‘preferred meanings’ of
the text.
• A negotiated code, which acknowledges the legitimacy of the ‘preferred
meanings’ in the abstract but makes its own rules and adaptations under
particular circumstances.
• An oppositional code, where people understand the preferred encoding but
reject it and decode in contrary ways.

David Morley’s research into the audience for the British news ‘magazine’
programme Nationwide published in 1980 was based on Hall’s encoding–decoding
model and gave empirical backing to it. For example, it was argued that dominant
decodings had been made by a group of conservative print managers and bank
managers while negotiated readings were made by a group of trade union officials.
The latter’s readings remained negotiated rather than oppositional because they
were specific to a particular industrial dispute while remaining within the general
discourse that strikes were a ‘bad thing for Britain’. According to Morley,
oppositional decodings were made by a group of shop stewards whose political
perspective led them to reject wholesale the discourses of Nationwide and by a group
of black further education students who felt alienated from the programme by
virtue of its perceived irrelevance to their lives.
Links Active audience, code, consumption, hermeneutics, semiotics, television

Enlightenment (the) A stance in European philosophy that can be explored through
the writings of key seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers such as
Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume and Bacon. Enlightenment thinkers valued the power of
reason – especially science – to demystify the world over and against superstition,