How to Build a Better Monster

Encoding/Decoding

This week I enjoyed Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” – a piece that offers a lovely continuation of Barthes’s work with semantics. In this article, Hall explores the relationship between encoding and decoding messages and explains how television audiences interpret television in their own ways, in ways that are either similar to or different from that of the producers. When the decoder reads the message as the encoder intended it, the encoder (the television producer, in the case) has been successful. If there is a “misunderstanding,” Hall says that it results from a lack of equivalence between the encoder and decoder.

The source of miscommunication is language itself, or more precisely, its codes. Words are elusive by nature; their “meaning” hinges on “dictionary definitions” that are shared by most people (denotation) as well as on connotation, the more personalized meaning people apply to words. Hall cites an by Barthes that illustrates the difference between denotation and connotation. According to Barthes, the denotation of sweater is always “a warm garment.” However, its connotation(s) may vary. To one person, a sweater can signal the approach of cold weather; to another, it may be more closely associated with working in retail, or with Mr. Rodgers, or with walks in the park. The list of connotations could go on and on, but the key words in understanding language (as well as Barthes) are “signal” and “sign.”

Television producers often assume that certain words and visuals are understood by all. “Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a ‘near-universality’ in this sense,” Hall writes, “though evidence remains that even apparently ‘natural’ visual codes are culture-specific.” Therefore, when television producers employ images that they believe are naturally recognizable, they are not, as Hall points out, natural. Instead, these images (and their multiple “meanings”) remind us of NEAR-universality of such images. Meaning is never fixed, even when it may appear to be set in stone.

Television is relatively fixed on the denotative level, but its connotative level is much more open. Therefore, audiences are more likely to interpret messages (or decode) in a way that may be unsatisfactory to the encoder (the television producer). Still, there are still some restrictions on connotations; otherwise, audiences could “see” or decode absolutely anything from Television Show X, when it is completely NOT concerned with Y. Imagine, for example, someone watching Dallas and saying that it was “really about” Heinz Ketchup. As a literature major, I would never want to discourage interpretation. I’ve had plenty of experiences where people have shrugged off my own readings (“What the heck do horror movies have to do with feces? Kate, you’re a sicko.”). However, my readings were based on theory, research, and close reading. The message I read was informed by applicable material. THERE MUST BE a limit to connotations and therefore to understanding, or to our making of meaning.

Hall continues by explaining that there are three “relationships” between encoders and decoders, and therefore three ways that decoding can be made. First, there is the dominant-hegemonic position, in which the television viewer takes the connoted meaning of the television program and decodes it in accordance with its intended meaning. In this case, the view is said to be “operating inside the dominant code,” as it is reading and encoding along the same lines as the television producer (decoder). Secondly, there exists the negotiated position, where the majority of the audience understand most of what has been defined and signified in the television program. In this position, the definitions set forth by the encoder express dominant or global issues; the decoder adapts to these dominant meanings while also adjusting the global issues to a local condition. Consequently, this position is both in accordance with and in opposition to the encoder. The last relationship that Hall proposes is the oppositional code. In this position, the decoder reads the preferred code or message and reconfigures it with an alternative code. The oppositional decoder would be someone who reads a story on taxation and substitutes the phrase “national interest” with “class interest.” In this last relationship, the meaning as it was originally encoded is completely dismantled and received in a new format.