stuart hall representation theory explained
“Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs, but that of war and battle. Among other things, ‘Encoding/decoding’ sheds light on why divergent readings of the same media event occur by exploring the ideological role of the media and the extent to which it governs meanings and gives rise to alternative ones. The term ultimately reveals encoding and decoding as ‘an asymmetrical and non-equivalent process’ in which ‘the former can attempt to “prefer” but cannot prescribe or guarantee the latter, which has its own conditions of existence’ (E/D:135). . According to Hall: “Constructivists do not deny the existence of the material world. The negotiated position: a contradictory position where the viewer has the potential to adopt and oppose the dominant televisual codes. Stuart Hall: Representation Theory The idea of adultery or cheating is something that people may not want to see a woman doing because they would like to think that women are the innocent and fragile whereas the men are meant to be the ones who are made out to be the bad people sustains the overall theme by continuing our exploration of representation as a concept and a practice - the key first 'moment' in the cultural circuit. (E/D: 132). Audiences can no longer be seen as passively absorbing the fixed meanings planted there by the producer, ‘decoding’ must necessarily involve a struggle over meaning which is dependent upon the social position of the viewer. (Karim 2002: 129). Camera crews were present at the World Trade Center in New York some fifteen minutes after the first plane hit the North Tower. London: Tavistock. The author’s intended meanings/messages have to follow these rules and conventions in order to be shared and understood (Hall, 1997). .’(E/D: 130): A raw historical event cannot, in that form, be transmitted by, say, a television newscast. In doing so, he saved language from the status of a mere transparent medium between things and meaning. It must also include a concern with the ‘social relations’ of the communicative process.(E/D73:1). . Hall has been the first to point out in this context, that they ‘need to be empirically tested and refined’ (E/D: 136). Language does not reflect the real, but constructs or ‘distorts’ it on our behalf. However, it is not the material world which conveys meaning: it is the language system or whatever system we are using to represent our concepts. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. The oppositional position: ‘One of the most significant political moments’ (E/D: 138) for Hall, where the viewer recognises the dominant televisual codes and opposes them. ‘Encoding/decoding’ arises primarily from Hall’s reservations about the theories of communication underpinning mass communications research. Nevertheless, the meanings ‘9/11’ generated did not spontaneously flow from that moment of encoding in isolation. It is important to note that language is completely arbitrary, often bearing little resemblance to the things to which they refer. A term that proved especially influential in the work of Hall and the CCCS. Stuart Hall's REPRESENTATION theory (please do not confuse with RECEPTION) is that there is not a true representation of people or events in a text, but there are lots of ways these can be represented. For all its ‘realism’ and emphasis on ‘the facts’, the documentary form still has to communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of tv) that both distorts the intentions of producers and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience. He called this rule-governed structure “la langue,” and referred to individual language acts as “la parole” (Culler, 1976). Interview with Gunther Kress. For Hall, this communication process is too neat: ‘the only distortion in it is that the receiver might not be up to the business of getting the message he or she ought to get’ (RED: 253). In our minds, we organize, cluster, arrange and classify different concepts and build complex schema to describe the relations between them (Hall, 1997). Althusser argues that while the economic always determines the superstructure in some way, it is not necessarily dominant. But if we think of the visual representation of a cow in a manual on animal husbandry – and, even more, of the linguistic sign ‘cow’ – we can see that both, in different degrees, are arbitrary with respect to the concept of the animal they represent. . These four stages in Hall (1980) model are explained thus; Production – This is where the encoding or the construction of a message begins. Often associating particular races with a particular class. For instance, despite its chaotic, unprecedented feel, the production of ‘9/11’ drew upon the pre-existing routines and rules set in place by what Hall calls ‘institutional structures of broadcasting’. The worker may agree such a freeze is in the national interest and therefore adopt the dominant-hegemonic position. Hall’s concern with the social and political dimensions of communication is apparent from the very beginning of his essay, which proposes an alternative to the ‘sender–message–receiver’ model of communication based on Marx’s theory of commodity production. The Greek word ‘mimesis’ is used for this purpose to describe how language imitates (or “mimics”) nature. The sense of tragedy surrounding the event was highlighted in media coverage showing the traumatised reaction of audiences in Europe and America as they received the news. Bearne, E. (2005). The book itself is transportable and no longer tied to its immediate context of production, which was an important criterion for Lankshear and Knobel’s definition. Meaning is multiple rather than singular: the ‘work’ of the audience is not to discover a true, core meaning which has been embedded at the heart of the message, rather the audience generates meaning with a degree of ‘relative autonomy’. Reception theory as developed by Stuart Hall asserts that media texts are encoded and decoded. However, and in stark contrast to these scenes of mourning, the media also screened footage of people in Palestine apparently celebrating the news. It is the difference between Red and Green which signifies – not the colours themselves, or even the words used to describe them (Hall, 1997). Hall is very closely identified in media studies with an approach known as “cultural studies,” and he starts with one of its central concepts: representation. The dominant-hegemonic position: where the viewer decodes the message in terms of the codes legitimated by the encoding process and the dominant cultural order. Constructionist Theory of Representation in Language and ... Another instance was given by Geraghty, (2005) who explained social constructionist theory of representation at play using a photograph. Stuart Hall’s theory of Cultural Identity. Gee, J.P. (2008). Hall is ultimately more interested in the political than the linguistic implications of media messages, a fact he foregrounds in the 1973 version of ‘Encoding/decoding’: though I shall adopt a semiotic perspective, I do not regard this as indexing a closed formal concern with the immanent organisation of the television discourse alone. In this context the ‘already constituted sign’ of the producer is ‘potentially transformable into more than one connotative configuration’ (E/D: 134) by the consumer. The essay is conventionally viewed as marking a turning point in Hall’s and the CCCS’s research, towards structuralism, allowing us to reflect on some of the main theoretical developments at Birmingham. . The constructionist approach (sometimes referred to as the constructivist approach) recognizes the social character of language and acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning (Hall, 1997). It must therefore be questioned and replaced with ‘good sense’. This is an actual instance of oppositional reading. Alternative, if subordinate, accounts of ‘9/11’ did appear in which America’s less than ‘civilised’ foreign policy was cited in relation to the attack. The news cannot be given to us in the form of a pure or ‘raw’ event, but is subject to the ‘formal rules’ (Saussure’s langue) of the governing system of language. This is not to say that authors can go making up their own private languages; communication – the essence of language – depends on shared linguistic conventions and shared codes within a culture. Semiotics is the study of signs in a culture (culture as language), though the semiotic approach doesn’t consider how, when or why language is used. 2. 4.6 out of 5 stars. Meaning is made through the fact that it represents wild roses – even though I could have chosen any other wild rose plant from which to take my representative sample. Our aim is to deepen our understanding of what representation is and how it works. Hall announces at this point that language is ‘multi-accentual’: ‘the sign is open to new accentuations and . -British communications scholar -Editor of Representation: Cultural Representations & Signifying Practices -Culture is now an important subject in the human sciences Literal: Pharrell is wearing a headdress on the cover of Elle UK Connotative: Pharrell is a http://bit.ly/1P4GcrEAnother dive into media theory, this we take a look at how we see, view, and interpret media. In the final chapter of Mythologies, ‘Myth today’, and in Elements of Semiology, Barthes elaborates on the terms ‘connotation’ (a sign’s associated meanings) and ‘denotation’ (a sign’s literal meanings). “Saussure’s great achievement was to force us to focus on language itself, as a social fact; on the process of representation itself; on how language actually works and the role it plays in the production of meaning. However, different audience members will decode the media in different ways and possibly not in the way the producer originally intended. . The coverage was also over determined by the larger circuit of communication within which it was articulated. (E/D: 135). Another point to make about Hall’s positions is that they don’t refer to the ‘personal’ (mis)readings of isolated viewers.