ENCODING AND DECODING IN THE TELEVISION DISCOURSE

Paper for the Council Of Eur0pe Colloquy on "Training

In T'he Critical heading Of televisual language".
Organized by the Council & the Centre for ^ass C0mmuni-
-cation Research, University of ^eicester, September 1973

Stuart Hpii

^entr® for Cultural S-tudies

University of Birmingham
^dgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
 Two themes have been cited for this Colloquy: the highly focussed
theme concerning the nature of the 'televisual language', and the very
general and diffused concern with 'cultural policies and programmes'.
At first sight, these concerns seem to lead in opposite directions:
the first towards formal, the second towards societal and policy
questions. My aim, however, is to try to hold both concerns within a
single framework. My purpose is to suggest that, in the analysis of
culture, the inter-connection between societal structures and processes
and formal or symbolic structures is absolutely pivotal. I propose to
organize my reflections around the question of the encoding/decoding
moments in the communicative process: and, from this base, to argue
that, in societies like ours, communication between the production
elites in broadcasting and their audiences is necessarily a form of
'systematically distorted communication'. This argument then has a
direct bearing on 'cultural policies', especially those policies of
education, etc which might be directed to/ards 'helping the audience to
receive the television communication better, more effectively'. I
therefore want, for the moment, to retain a base in the semiotic/linguistic
approach to 'televisual language': to suggest, however, that this
perspective properly intersects, on one side, with social and economic
structures, on the other side with what Umberto Eco has recently called
'the logic of cultures' (l). This means that, though I shall adopt a
semiotic perspective, I do not regard this as indexing a closed formal
concern with the immanent organization of the television discourse
alone. It must also include a concern with the 'social relations' of
the communicative process, and especially with the various kinds of
'competences' (at the production and receiving end) in the use of that
language (2).

In his paper (3 ) Professor Halloran has properly raised the question

of studying "the whole mass communication process", from the structure of
the production of the message at one end to audience perception and 'use'
at the other. This emphasis on "the whole communicative process" is a
comprehensive, proper and timely one. However, it is worth reminding
ourselves that there is something distinctive about the product, and
the practices of production and circulation in communications which
distinguishes this from other types of production. The 'object' of
production practices and structures in television is the production
of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle, or rather sign-vehicles of a
specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or
 -2-

language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagraatic chains

of a discourse. The apparatus and structures of production issue,
at a certain moment, in the form of a symbolic vehicle constituted
within the rules of 'language*. It is in this 'phenomenal form' that
the circulation of the 'product' takes place. Of course, even the
transmission of this symbolic vehicle requires its material substratum -
video-tape, film, the transmitting and receiving apparatus, etc. It is
also in this symbolic form that the reception of the 'product', and its
distribution between different segments of the audience, takes place.
Once accomplished, the translation of that message into societal
structures must be made again for the circuit to be completed. Thus,
whilst in no way wanting to limit research to "following only those leads
which emerge from content analysis" Ur), we must recognize that the
symbolic form of the message has a priveleped position in the communica-
-tive exchange: and that the moments of 'encoding' and 'decoding',
though only 'relatively autonomous'in relation to the communicative pro-
-cess as a whole, are determinate moments. T^e raw historical event
cannot in that form be transmitted by, say, a television news-cast.
It can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of the televisual
language. In the moment when the historical event passes under the sign
of language, it is subject to all the complex formal 'rules' by which
language signifies. To put it paradoxically, the event must become a
'story' before it can become a communicative event. In that moment,
the formal sub-rules of language are 'in dominance', without, of course,
subordinating out of existence the historical event so signified, or the
historical consequences of the event having been signified in this way.
The 'message-form' is the necessary form of the appearance of the event
in its passage from source to receiver. Thus the transposition into and
out of the 'message-form' or the meaning-dimension (or mode of exchange
of the message) is not a random 'moment', which we can take up or ignore
for the sake of convenience or simplicity. The 'message-form' is a
determinate moment, though , at another level, it comprises the surface-
-movements of the communications system only, and requires, at another
stage, to be integrated into the essential relations of communication of
which it forms only a part.
From this general perspective, we may crudely characterise the
communicative exchange as follows. The institutional structures of
broadcasting, with their institutional structures and networks of
production, their organized routines and technical infrastructures,
 -3-

are required to produce the programme. Production, here, initiates the

message: in one sense, then, the circuit begins here. Of course, the
production pi-ocess is framed throughout by meanings and ideas: knowledge-
in-use concerning the routines of production, technical skills, pro-
-fessional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumpti-
-ons, assumptions about the audience, etc fram the passage of the
programme through this production structure. However, though the
production structures of television originate the television message,
they do not constitute a closed system. They draw topics, treatments,
agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, 'definitions of the
situation' from the wider socio-cultural and political system of which
they are only a differentiated part. Philip Elliott has expressed this
point succinctly in his discussion of the way in which the audience
is both the source and the receiver of the television message. Thus
circulation and reception are, indeed, 'moments' of the production pro-
-cess in television, and are incorporated, via a number of skewed and
structured 'feed-backs', back into the production process itself.
The consumption ox- reception of tho television message is thus itself a
'moment' of the production process, though the latter is "predominant"
because it is the "point of departure for the realisation" of the
message. Production and reception of the television message are, not,
therefore, identical, but they are related: they are differentiated
moments within the totality formed by the communicative process as a
whole.
-t a'certain point, however, the broadcasting structures must yield
©n encoded message in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institution-
-societal relations of production must pass into and through the modes of
a language for its product to be 'realized'. This initiates a further
differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse and language
operate. Before this message can have an 'effect' (however defined), or
satisfy a 'need' or be put to a 'use', it must first be perceived as a
meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded. It is this set of
de-coded meanings which 'have an effect', influence, entertain, instruct
or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional,
ideological or behavioural consequences. In a determinate moment, the
structure employs a code and yields a 'message': at another determinate
moment, the 'message', via its decodings, issues into a structure,
v/e are now fully aware that this re-entry into the structures of
audience reception and 'use' cannot be understood in simple behavoural

i
terms. 'Effects, uses, 'gratifications' are themselves framed by
structures of understanding, as well as social and economic structures
which shape its 'realisation' at the reception end of the chain, and
which permit the meanings signified in language to be transposed into
conduct or consciousness.

r
programme as

\
'meaningful' disoaurse

encoding decoding

meaning meaning
-structures 1 structures 11
/V

frameworks frameworks
of knowledge of knowledge
structures ->• structures
of production
-N
of production

technical technical
infrastructure infrastructure

^—

Clearly, /hat we have called meanings I and meanings II may not be

the same. They do not constitute an "immediate identity". The codes of
encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. The degrees of
symmetry - that is, the degrees of 'understanding' and 'misunderstanding'
in the communicative exchange depend both on the degrees of symmetry/
a-symmetry between the position of encoder-producer and that of the
decoder-receiver: and also on the degrees of identity/non-identity
between the codes which perfectly or imperfectly transmit, interrupt or
systematically distort what has been transmitted. The lack of 'fit'
between the codes has a great deal to do with the structural differences
between broadcasters and audiences: but ^^ also has something to do
with the a-symmetry bet een source and receiver at the moment of
transformation into and out of the 'message-form'. That is called
'distortion' or 'misunderstandings' arise precisely from the lack
of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange.
Once again, this defines the 'relative autonomy’ but 'determinateness'

I
 -5-

of the entry and exit of the message in its linguistic/raeaning form.

The application of this rudimentary paradigm has already begun to

transform our understanding of television 'content': and we are just
beginning to see how it might also transform our understanding of
audience reception and. response as well. Beginnings and endings have
been announced in communications research before, so we must be cautious.
But there seems some ground for thinking that a new and exciting phase in
audience research, of a uite new kind, may be opening up. it either end
of the communicative chain, the use of the semiotic paradigm promises to
dispel the lingering behaviourism which has dogged mass media research for
so long. Though we know the television programme is not a behavioural
input, like a tap on the knee-cap, it seems to have been almost impossible
for researchers to conceptualize the communicative process without lapsing
back into one or other variant of low-flying behaviourism. Je know, as
Gerbner has remarked, that representations of violence on the TV screen
'are not violence but messages about violence (5 ): but we have continued
to research the question of violence as if we were unable to comprehend
the epistemological distinction.

Let us take an example from the drama-entertainment area in television

and try to show how the recognition that television is a discourse, a
communicative not simply a behavioural event, has an effect on one
traditional research area, the television/violence relation (6). Take
the simple-structur, early (and now children's) TV Western, modelled on
the early Hollywood B-feature genre Restern: with its clear-cut, good/bad
Hanichean moral universe, its clear social and moral designation of
villain and hero, the clarity of its narrative line and development,
its iconographical features, its clearly-registered climax in the violent
shoot-out, chase, personal show-down, street or bar-room duel, etc. For
long, on both British and merican TV, this form constituted the predomi-
-nant drama-entertainment genre. In quantitative terms, such films/pro-
-grammes contained a high ratio of violent incidents, deaths, woundings,
etc. ..'hole gangs of men, whole troops of Indians, went down, nightly, to
their deaths. Researchers - Himmelweit among others - have, however,
suggested that the structure of the early TV/B-feature ■•'estern was
so clear-cut, its action so conventionalized, stylized, that most
children (boys rather earlier than girls, an interesting finding in
itself) soon learned to recognize and 'read' it like a 'game': a
'cowboys-and-Injuns' game. It was therefore further hypothesized that
westerns with this clarified a structure were less likely to trigger the
aggressive imitation of violent behaviour or other types of aggressive
'acting-out' than other types of programmes with a high violence ratio
which were not so stylized. But it is worth asking what this recognition
of the .Western as a 'symbolic game' means or implies.
It means that a set of extremely tightly-coded 'rules' exist whereby
stories of a certain recognizable type, content and structure can be
easily encoded within the western form, what is more, these ’rules of
encoding' were so diffused, so symmetrically shared as between producer and
audience, that the 'message' was likely to be decoded in a manner highly
symmetrical to that in which it had been encoded. This reciprocity of
codes is, indeed, precisely what is entailed in the notion of stylization
or 'conventionalization', and the presence of such reciprocal codes is,
of course, what defines or makes possible the existence of a genre. Such
an account, then, takes the encoding/decoding moments properly into account,
and the case appears an unproblematic one.
But let us take the argument a little further. Why and how do areas
of conventionalization arise (and disappear)? The Western tale, of course,
arose out of - though it quickly ceased to conform to - the real historical
circumstances of the opening up of the American west. In part, what the
production of the Western genre-codes achieved was the transfor-
-mation of a real historical West, selectively, into the symbolic or mythical
'West'. But why did this transformation of history into myth, by the
intervention of a stylized set of codes, occur, for our societies and times,
in relation to just this historical situation. This process, whereby
the rules of language and discourse intervene, at a certain moment, to
transform and 'naturalize’ a specific set of historical circumstances,
is one of the most important test-cases for any semiology which see3r_s to
ground itself in historical realities. We know, and can begin to sketch,
the elements which defined the operation of codes on history. This is the
archetypal American story, America of the frontier, of the expanding and
unsettled West, the 'virgin land' before law and society fully settle in,
still closer to Hature than to Law and order. It is the land of men, of
independent men, isolated in their confrontations with Wature or Evil:
and thus stories of masculine prowess, skill power and destiny: of men
'in the open air', driven to their destinies by inner compulsion and by
external necessity - by Bate, or by 'the things a man just has to do':
and thus a land where morality is inner-centered, and clarified - i.e.
fully objectivated not in speech but in the facticities of gesture, gait,
aress, ? :ar appearance A land where women are either subordinate
 “ 7
~

('./hether as 'little homebodies' or ladies from 'back hast'): or, if

somewhat more liberated - e.g. good/bad saloon girls - destined to be
inadvertently and conveniently shot or otherwise disposed of in the
penultimate reel: and so on. If we wanted to make a strict semiological
analysis, we could trace the specific codes which were used to signify
these elements within the surface-structures of particular films, plots,
programmes. What is clear is that, from this deep-structured set of
codes, extremely limited in its elements, a great number of surface
strings and transformations were accomplished: for a time, in film and
television, this deep-structure provided the taken-fcr-granted story-
of-all-stories, the paradigm action-narrative, the perfect myth,
I the semiotic perspective, of course, it is just this surface
variety on the basis of limited transformations which would define the
western as an object of study. ITor would the transformations which we
have witnessed since the early days be at all surprising, he can see,
and follow at least the basic methods which would be required for us
to account for the transformation of this simple-structure Western into
tiie psychological Western, the baroque western (Left Handed HUn?) , the
'end-of-the-lest' //astern, the comic western, the 1spaghetti' western,
even the Japanese and &6ng-Kong western, the 'parody' western (Butch
Cassidy?), paradoxically, the return-of-violence Western (The wild Bunch) ,
or the domestic, soap-opera western (the TV Virginian series) or the
Latin-American revolution western.. The opening sequence of a film like
Hud - one of the moment when the ’heroic' Jest begins to pass into the
'decline of the west', in which the 'hero' appears driving through that
familiar landscape in a Cadillac, or ./here the horse appears in the back
of an Cldsmobile truck, far from indexing the break-up/ of the code,
shows precisely how an opposite meaning can be achieved by the reversal
of a limited number of . 'lexical items' in the code, in order to achieve
a transformation in the meaning.
From this perspective, the prolonged preoccupation of ma SS ElGCi.io!
researchers with the issue of violence in relation to the western film
appears more and more arbitrary, bizarre. If we refuse, for a moment, to
bracket and isolate the issue of violence, or the violent episode from
its matrix in the complex codes governing the genre, he many other,
crucial kinds of meaning were in fact transmitted whilst researchers
were busy counting the bodies. This is not to say that violence was
not an element in the TV western, nor to suggest that there were not
quite complex codes regulating the ways in which violence could be
signified. It is to insist that what audiences were receiving was not
'violence’ but messages about violence. Once this intervening term
has been applied, certain consequences for research and analysis
follow: ones which irnevocafcly break up the smooth line of continuity
offering itself as a sort of 'natural logic', .hereby connections could
be traced between shoot-outs at the Ok Corral, and delinquents knocking
over old ladies in the street in Icunthorpe.
The violent element or string in the narrative structure of the
simple-structure western - shoot-out, brawl, ambush, bank-raid, fist-
fight, wounding, duel or massacre, like any other semantic unit in a
structured discourse cannot signify anything on its own. It can only
signify in terms of the structured meanings of the message as a whole.
Further, its signification depends on its relation - or the sum of the
relations of similarity and difference - with other elements or units.
Burgelin (?) has long ago, and definitively, reminded us that the violent
or mieked acts of a villain only mean something in relation to the
presence/absence, of good acts.
we clearly cannot draw any valid inferences from a simple
enumeration of his vicious acts (it makes no difference
whether there are ten or t ;enty of them) for the c m of
the matter obviously is: what meaning is conferred on the
vicious acts by the fact of their juxtaposition with the
single good action...one could say that the meaning of what
is frequent is only revealed by opposition to what is rare
...The whole problem is therefore to identify this rare
or missing item. Structural analysis provides a way of
approaching this problem which traditional content analysis
does .not.

Indeed, so tightly constructed was the rule-governed moral economy of

the simple-structure Western, that one good act by a 'villain' not only
could, but apparently had to lead to some modification or transformation
of his end. Thus, presence of numerous bad-violent acts (marked) /
absence of any good-redeeming act (unmarked) = unrepentant villain:
can be shot down, without excuse, in final episode and makes a brief
and 'bad' or undistinguished death (provided the hero does not shoot
the villain in the back, or unawares, and does not draw first). But,
presence of bad-violent acts (marked) / presence of single good-
redeeming act (marked) = possible salvation or regeneration of the
villain, death-bed reconciliation with hero or former cronies,
restitution to wronged community, at the very least, lingering and
'good' death. khat, we may now ask, is the meaning of 'violence'
when it only appears and signifies anything within the tightly-organized
moral economy of the Western?
lie have been arguing (a) the violent act or episode in a western
cannot signify in isolation, outside the structured field of meanings
which is the film or programme; (b) it signifies only in relation to
the other elements, and in terns of the rules and conventions which govern
their combination. vie must now add (c) thatthe meaning of such a violent
act or episode cannot be fixed, single and unalterable, but must be
capable of signifying different values depending on how and with what
it is articulated. As the signifying element, among other elements, in a
discourse, it remains polys eraic. Indeed, the way it is structured in its
combination with other elements serves to delimit its meanings within that
specified field, and effects a 'closure', so that a preferred meaning
is suggested. There can never be only one, single, univocal and determined
meaning for such a lexical item, but, depending on how its integration
within the code has been accomplished, its possible meanings will be
organized within a scale which runs from dominant to subordinate. And
this of course has consequences for the other - the reception - end of
the communicative chain: there can be no law to ensure that the receiver
will take the preferred or dominant meaning of an episode of violence
in precisely the way in which it has been encoded by the producer.
Typically, the isolation of the 'violent’ elements from the ■<estern
by researchers was made on the presumption that all- the other elements -
setting, action, characters, iconography, movement, codduct and appearance,
moral structure, etc - were present as so many inert supports for the
violence: in order to warrant or endorse the violent act. It is now
perfectly clear that the violence might be present only in order to
warrant or endorse the character, lie can thus sketch out more than one
possible path of meaning through the way in which the so-called 'content'
is organized by the codes. Take that ubiquitous semantic item of the
simple Aestern: hero draws his frun. faster than anyone else (he seems
always to have known how ) , and shoots the villain with bull's-eye aim.
To use Gerbner's term (8), what norm, proposition or cultural signi-
-fication is here signified? It is possible to decode this item thus:
"The hero figure knows how to draw his gun faster, and shoot better
than his enemy: when confronted by the villain, he shoots him dead with
a single shot". This might be called a 'behavioural' or 'instrumental'
interpretation. But - research suggests - this directly behavioural
'message' has been stylized and conventionalized by the intervention of
a highly organized set of codes and genre-conventions (a code-of-codes,

4
 -10

or meta-code). The intervention of the codes appear to have the effect

of neutralizing one set of meanings, while setting another in motion.
Or, to put it better, the codes effect a transformation and displacement
of the same denotative content-unit from one refc-rence-code to another,
thereby effecting a transformation in the signification. Berger and
Luckraann (9) have argued that 'habitualization' or ’sedimentation'
serves to routinize certain actions or meanings, so as to free the fore­
ground for now, innovative meanings. Turner (10) and others have shown
how ritual conventions redistribute the focus of ritual performances
from one domain (e.g. the emotional or personal) to another (e.g. the
cognitive, cosmological or social) domain. Freud (ll), both in his
analysis of ritualization in symptom-formation and in the dream-work,
has shown the pivotal position of condensation and displacement in the
encoding of latent materials and meanings through manifest symbolizations.
Bearing this in mind, we may speculativelt formulate an alternative
connotative 'reading' for the item. "To be a certain kind of man (hero)
means the ability to master all contingencies by the demonstration of
a practised and professional 'cool"'. This reading transposes the same
(denotative) content from its instrumental-behavioural connotative
reference to that of decorum, conduct, the idiom and style of (masculine)
action. The 'message' or the 'proposition', now, would be understood, not
as a message about 'violence' but as a message about conduct, or even
about professionalism, or perhaps even about the relation of professional­
ism to character. ;.nd here we recall Robert Ivarshow's intuitive observation
that, fundamentally, the Western is not 'about' violence but about
codes of conduct..

non-^enre genre

hero//villain hero//villein
I
quick draw quick draw
shoot-to-kill shoot-to-kill
I
[violence ] k [decorum]

1
norm: when challenged
i
norm: when challenged
shoot to kill without master contingencies
hesitation by 'professional
cool'
 -11-

I have been trying to suggest - without being able to take the

example very far - how an attention to the syrnbolic/linguistic/coded
nature of communications, far from boxing us into the closed and formal
universe of signs, precisely opens out into the area where cultural
content, of the most resonant but 'latent' kind, is transmitted: and
especially the manner in which the interplay of codes and content serve
to displace meanings from one frame to another, and thus to bring to the
surface in 'disguised' forms the repressed content of a culture. It
is worth, in this connection, bearing in mind Lco's observation that (12)
"Semiology shows us the universe of ideologies arranged in codes and
sub-codes within the universe of signs". My own view is that, if the
insights won by the advances in a semiotic perspective are not to be
lost within a new kind of formalism, it is increasingly in this direction
that it must be pushed, (l ^

Let us turn, nov;, to a different area of programming, and a different

aspect of the operation of codes. The televisual sign is a peculiarly
complex one, as we know. It is a visual sign with strong, supplementary
aural-verbal suppox-t. It is one of the iconic signs, in Peirce's sense,
in that, whereas the form of the written sign is arbitrary in relation
to its signified, the iconic sign reproduces certain elements of the
signified in the form of the signifier. As Peirce says, it "possesses
some of the properties of the thing or object represented" (l/i) . Actually,
since the iconic sign translates a three dimensional world into two
representational planes, its ’naturalism' with respect to the refei’ent
lies not so much at the encoding side of the chain, but rather in terms
of the learned perceptions with which the viewer decodes the sign. Thus,
as Leo has convincingly argued, iconic signs 'look like objects in the
real world', to put it crudely (e.g. the photograph or drawing of a
/cow/, and the animal /cow/), because they "reproduce the conditions of
perception in the receiver". (15 ). These conditions of 'recognition' in
the viewer constitute some of the most fundamental perceptual codes which
all culture-members share. Now, because these perceptual codes are so
widely shared, denotative visual signs probably give rise to less
'misunderstandings' than linguistic ones. A lexical inventory of the
English language would throw up thousands of words which the ordinary
speaker could not denotatively comprehend: but provided enough 'infor-
-nation' is given, culture-members would be able or competent to
decode, denotatively, a much wider range of visual signifiers. In this
sense, and at the denotative level, the visual sign is probably a more
 -12-

universal one than the linguistic sign. Vlhereas, in societies like ours,
linguistic competence is very unequally distributed as between different
classes and segments of the population (predominantly, by the family and
the education system), what we might call 'visual competence', atthe
denotative level, is more universally diffused, (it is worth reminding
ourselves, of course, that it is not, in fact, 'universal', and that we
are dealing with a spectrum: there are kinds of visual representation,
short of the 'purely abstract', which create all kinds of visual puzzles
for ordinary viewers: e.g. cartoons, certain kinds of diagrammatic
representation, representations which employ unfamiliar conventions,
types of hotcgraphic or cinematic cutting and editing, etc). It is
also true that the iconic sign may support 'mis-readings' simply because
it is so 'natural', so 'transparent'. Mistakes may arise here, not because
we as viewers cannot literally decode the sign (it is perfectly obvious
what it is a picture of), but because we are tempted, by its very
'naturalisation' to 'misread' the image for the thing it signifies (l6).
Ifith this important proviso, however, we would be surprised to find that
the. majority of the television audience had much difficulty in literally
or denotatively identifying what the visual signs they see on the screen
refer to or signify. heroas most people require a. lengthy process of
education in order to become relatively competent users of the language
of their speech community, they seem to pick up its visual-perceptual
codes at a very early age, without formal training, and are quickly
competent in its use.
The visual sign is, however, also a connotative sign, nd it is so
pre-eminently within the discourses of modern mass communication. 'The
level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference, of
its position in the various associative fields of meanings, is precisely
the point where the denoted sign intersects with the deep semantic
structures of a culture, and takes on an ideological dimension. In
the advertising discourse, for example, we might say that there is
almost no 'purely denotative' communication. Every visual sign in
advertising 'connotes' a quality, situation, value or inference which
is present as an implication or implied meaning, depending on the
connotational reference, .'e are all probably familiar with Barthes'
example of the /sweater/, which, in the rhetoric of advertising and
fashion, always connotes, at least, 'a warm garment' or 'keeping warm',
and thus by further elaboration, 'the coming of winter' or 'a cold day'.
In the specialised sub-codes of fashion, /’sweater/ may connote 'a
 -13-

fashionable style of haute couture’, or, alternatively, 'an informal style

of dress'. But, set against the right background, and. positioned in the
romantic sub-code, it may connote ’
"long autumn walk in the woods' (17) •
Connotational codes of this order are, clearly, structured enough to
signify, but they are more :open' or 'open-ended' than denotative codes.
That is more, they clearly contract relations with the universe of ideolo-
-gies in a culture, and with history and ethnography. These connotative
codes are the ’linguistic' means by which the domains of social life,
the segmentations of culture, power and ideology are made to signify.
They refer to the 'maps of meaning’ into which any culture is organized,
and those 'maps of social reality' have the whole range of social meanings,
practices and usages, power and interest 'written in' to them. Connoted
signifiers, Barthes has reminded us, "have a close communication with
culture, knowledge, history, and it is through then, so to speak, that
the environmental world invades the linguistic and semantic system. They
are, if you like, the fragments of ideology"'. (l8)
The denotative level oI "CllG "G0levisual sign may be bounded within
certain, very complex but limited or 'closed' codes. But
its donnotative level, though bounded, remains open, subject to the
formation, transformation and decay of history, and fundamentally poly-
semic: any such sign is potentially mappable into more than one connotative
configuration. 'Polysemy' must not, however, be confused with pluralism.
Connotative codes are not equal among themselves. Any society/culture
tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its segmentations, its
classifications of the social and cultural and political world, upon its
members. There remains a dominant cultural order, though it is neither
univocal nor uncontested. This question of the 'structure of dominance' in
a culture is an absolutely crucial point. We may say, then, that the
different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into connotative
domains of dominant or preferred meanings. hew, problematic or troubling
things and events, which breach our expectancies and run counter to our
1common-sense constructs', to our 'taken-for-granted1 knowledge of social
structures, must be assigned to their connotational domains before they
can be said to 'make sense': and the most common way of 'mapping them' is
to assign the new within some domain or other of the existing 'maps of
problematic social reality’. Be say dominan t , not 'determined', because it
is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within
more than one 'mapping'. But we say 'dominant' because there exist a
pattern of 'preferred readings', and these mappings both have the
institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them., and have

i
 -lQ~

themselwes become- institutionalized (19) • The domains of ’preferred raap-

-pings' have the whole social order embedded in them as a set of
meanings: practices and beliefs, the everyday knowledge of social
structures, of 'how things work for oil practical purposes in this
culture’, the rank order of power and interest, and a structure of
legitimations and sanctions. Thus, to clarify a 'misunderstanding' at
the denotative level, we need primarily to refer to the immanent world
of the sign and its codes. But to clarify and resolve 'misunderstandings'
at the level of connotation, we must refer, through the codes, to the
rules of social life, of history and. life-situation, of economic and
political power, and, ultimately, of ideology. Further, since these
connotational mappings are 'structured in dominance' but not closed,
the communicative process consists, not in the unproblematic assignment
of every visual item to its position within a set of prearranged codes,
but of performative rules - rules of competences: and use, of logics-in-uso
- which seel; to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another,
and rule items into and out of their appropriate meaning-sets. Formal
semiology has too often neglected this level of interpretive- w ork,
though this forms in fact the deep-structure of a great deal of broadcast
time in television, especially in the political and other 'sensitive
areas' of programming. Tn speaking of dominant meanings, then, we are not
simply talking about a one-sided process, which governs how any event
will be signified (we might think, for example, of the recent coup in
Chile): it also consists of the ’work' required to enforce, win plausibi­
l i t y for and command as legitimate a de-coding of the event within the
dominant definition in which it has been connotatively signified. Dr
Terni remarked, in his paper (20) that, "By the word reading we mean not
only the capacity to identify and decode a certain number of signs, but
also the subjective capacity to put them into a creative relation between
themselves and with other signs: a capacity which is, by itself, the
condition for a complete awareness of one's total environment". Our
only quarrel here is with the notion of "'subjective capacity", as if
the denotative reference of the televisual sign is an objective process,
but the connotational and c onnective level is an ind ividualized. and
private matter. Quite the opposite scorns to us to be the case . The
televisual process takes 1objective’ (i .e . sys teraic) responsibi■lity
precisely for the relations which disparate signs contract with one
another, and thus continually delimits and prescribes into what
“awareness of ones total environment" these items are arranged.

i
 - 13
-

This brings us, then, to the key question of 'misunderstandings'

between the encoders and decoders of the television messages and thus,
by a long but necessary detour, to the matter of 'cultural policies'
designed to 'facilitate better communication' 'make communication
more effective'. Television producers or 'encoders', who find their
message failing to 'get across’ are frequently concerned to straighten
out the kinks in the communicative chain, and thus to facilitate the
'effectiveness’ of their messages. great deal of research has been
devoted to trying to discover how much of the message the audience retains
or recalls, it the denotative level (if we can make the analytic distinction
for the moment), there is no doubt that some 'misunderstandings' exist,
though we have no real idea how widespread this is. ind we can see
possible explanations for it. The viewer does not 'speak the language',
figuratively if not literally: he or she cannot follow the complex logic
of argument or exposition: or the concepts are too alien: or the editing
(which arranges items within an expository logic or 'narrative', and thus
in itself proposes connections between discrete things) is too swift,
truncated, sophisticated; etc. it another level, encoders also mean
that their audience has 1|igde sense' of the message in a way different
from that intended, ./hat /really means is that viewers are not
operating within the dominant or preferred code. The ideal is the per-
-fectly transparent communication. Instead, what they have to
confront is the fact of 'systematically distorted communication'.
In recent years, discrepancies of thi.s kind are usually accounted
for in terms of individually 'aberrant' readings, attributed to 'selec-
-tivc perception'. 'selective perception' is the door via which, in
recent research, a residual pluralism is reserved within the sphere of
a highly structured, a-symmetrical cultural operation. Of course, there
will always be individual, private, variant readings, hut my own tentative
view is that 'selective perception' is almost never as selective, random,
or privatized, as the concept suggests. The patterns exhibit more
structuring and clustering than is normally assumed. .ny now approach
to audience studies, via the concept of 'de-coding' would have to begin
with a critique of 'selective perception' theory.
Eco has recently pointed to another, intermediary, level of
structuration, between competence in the dominant code, and 'aberrant'
individual readings: that level provided by sub-cultural formations.
But, since sub-cultures are, by definition, differentiated articulations
to specify ,
within a culture, it ii more useful/this mediation within a somewhat
different framework. (21)
 -16-

The very general typology sketched below is an attempt to reinterpret

the notion of ’misunderstandings' (which we find inadequate) in terms
of certain broadly-defined societal perspectives which audiences might
adopt towards the televisual message. It attempts to apply Gramsci's
work on 'hegemonic' and 'corporate' ideological formations (22) and
Parkin's recent work on types of meaning systems. I should like now
(adapting Parkin's schema) to put into discussion four 'ideal-type'
positions from which decodings of mass communications by the audience
can be made: and thus to re-present the common-sense notion of 'misunder-
-standings' in terms of a theory of 'systematically distorted communica-
-tions' (23 )•
Litoral 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. The first position we want to
identify is that of the dominant or hegemonic code. (There are, of course,
many different codes and sub-codes required to produce an event ’within the
dominant code), 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 sight say that the viewer is operating inside the dominant code.
This is the ideal-typical case of 'perfectly transparent communication', or
as close as we are likely to come to it 'for all practical purposes',
i'ext (here we are amplifying Parkin's model), we would want to identify
the professional code. This is the code (or set of codes, for we are here
dealing with what might be better called meta-codes) which the professional
broadcasters employ when transmitting a message which has already been
signified in a hegemonic manner. Tpe professional code is 'relatively
independent' of the dominant code, in that it applies criteria and opera-
-tions of its own, especially those of a technico-practical nature. The
professional code, however, operates within the 'hegemony' of the dominant
code. Indeed, it serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely
by bracketting the hegemonic quality, and operating with professional
codings which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and
presentational values, televisual quality, 'professionalism', etc. The
hegemonic interpretation of the politics of northern Ireland,
or the Chilean coup or the Industrial Relations Bill are given by political
elites: the particular choice of presentational occasions and formats,
the selection of personnel, the choice of images, the 'staging' of
 -17-

debates, etc are selected by the operation of the professional code. (2k)
How the broadcasting professionals are able both to operate with
'relatively autonomous1 codes of thair own, while acting in such a way
as to reproduce (not without contradiction) the hegemonic signification
of events is a complex matter which cannot be further spelled out here.
It must suffice to say that the professionals are linked with the
defining elites not only by the institutional position of breadcasting
itself as an 'ideological apparatus' (ip), but more intimately by the
structure of access (i.o. the systematic 'over-accessing' of elite
personnel and 'definitions of the situation' in television). It may even
be said that the professional codes serve to reproduce hegemonic defini-
-tions specifically by not overtly biassing their operations in their
direction: ideological reproduction therefore takes place here inadvertent-
-ly, unconsciously, 'behind men’s backs'. Of course, conflicts, contradic­
t i o n s and oven 'misunderstandings' regularly take place between the
dominant and the professional significations and. their signifying agencies.
The third position we would identify is that of the negotiated code or
position. Majority audiences probably understand quite adequately what has
been dominantly defined and professionally signified. The dominant
definitions, however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent
definitions of situations and events which are 'in dominance', and which
are global■ .Dominant definitions connect events, implicitly or explicitly,
to grand totalisations, to the great syntagmatic views-of-1he-world:
they take 'large views' of issues: they relate events to 'the national
interest' or to the level of geo-politics, even if they make these
connections in truncated, inverted or mystified ways. The definition of
a 'hegemonic' viewpoint is (a) that it defines within its terms the
mental horizon, the universe of possible meanings of a whole society or
culture; and (b) that it carries -with it the stamp of legitimacy - it
appears coterminous with what is 'natural', 'inevitable', 'to'en for
granted' about the social order. Decoding within the negotiated, version
contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it ackno led-
-ges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand signifi-
-cations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its
own ground-rules, it operates with 'exceptions* to the rule. It accords
the privcleged position to the dominant definition of events, whilst
reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to
'local conditions', to its own more corporate positions. This negotiated
version of the dominant ideology is thus shot through with contradic-
-tions, though these are only on certain occasions brought to full
 -18-

visibility. Negotiated codes operate through -./hat we might call particular

or situated logics*' and these logics arise from the differential position
of those who occupy this position in the spectrum, and from their
differential and unequal relation to power. The sihplest example of a
negotiated code is that which governs the response of a worker to the
notion of an Industrial delations Bill limiting the right to strike, or
to arguments for a wages-freeze. .it the level of the national-interest
economic debate, he may adopt the hegemonic definition, agreeing that
'we must all pay ourselves less in order to combat inflation', etc. This,
however, may have little or no relation to his willingness to go on strike
for better pay and conditions, or to oppose the Industrial Relations Bill
at the level of his shop-floor or union organization. T.
re suspect that
the great majority of so-called 'misunderstandings' arise from the dis-
juncturcs between hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated-corporate
decodings. It is just these mis-matches in the levels which most provoke
defining elites and professionals to identify a 'failure in communications'
Finally, it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the
literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine
to decode the message in a globally contrary way. He detotalizes the
message in the preferred code in order to retetalize the message within
some alternative frame ork of reference. This is the case of the viewer
who listens to a debate on the need to limit wages, but' who 'reads' every
mention of 'the national interest' as 'class interest'. He is operating
with what we must call an oppositiona1 code. One of the most significant
political moments (they also coincide with crisis-points within the
broadcasting organizations themselves for obvious reasons) is the point
when events which are normally signified ,and decoded in a negotiated way
begin to be given an oppositiobal reading.

The question of cultural policies now falls, awkwardly, into place,

.'/hen dealing with social communications, it is extremely difficult to
identify as a neutral, educational goal, the task of 'improving commu-
-nications' or of 'making communications more effective', at any rate
once one has passed beyond the strictly denotative level of the message.
The educator or cultural policy-maker is performing one of his most
partisan acts when he colludes with the re-signification of real
conflicts and contradictions as if they were simply kinks in the
communicative chain, denotative mistakes are not structurally significa­
nt. But connotative and contextual 'misunderstandings' are, or can be,
of the highest significance. To interpret what are in fact essential
elements in the systematic distortions of a socio-communications system
as if they technical faults in transmission is to misread a deep-structure
process for a surface phenomenon. The decision to intervene in order to
make the hegemonic codes of dominant elites more effective and transparent
for the majority audience is not a technically neutral, but s political
one. To ’misread' a political choice as a technical one represents a
type of unconscious collusion with the dominant interests, a form of
collusion to which social science researchers are all too prone. Though
the sources of such mystification are both social and structural, the
actual process is greatly facilitated by the operation of discrepant codes.
It would not be the first time that scientific researchers had 'unconscious-
-ly' played a part in the reproduction of hegemony, not by openly submitting
to it, but simply by operating the 'professional bracket'.

Stuart Hall
Centre For Cultural

Univorsity of. Sirmin g-

J -ham
Sdgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT

September 1975
 Notes & References

1. Umberto Eco, "Does The Public Harm Television?" Cyclostyled paper

for Italia Prize Seminar, Venice (1973).
2. C f : Dell Hymes' critique of transf ormational approaches to lan­
guage, via concepts of 'performance' and 'competence'in "On
Communicative Competence", in Sociolinguistics, ed. Pride & Holmes,
Penguin Education (1972)
3. J.D.Halloran, "Understanding 1elevision". Paper for Council of
Europe Colloquy. Leicester (1973)
4. Halloran, ibid.
5. Gerbner, et_ a l , Violence Tn TV Drama: A Study Of Trends & Symbolic
Functions. Annenberg School, Univ. of Pennsylvania. (1970)
6. This example is more fully discussed in Part II, "New Approaches
To Content", Violence In The TV Drama-Series. CCS Report to
Home Office Inquiry -*-nto TV/Violence, Centre for Mass Comm. llesear-
-ch. Shuttlev/orth, Camargo, Lloyd and Ball. Birmingham U. (Forth-
-coming).
7. O.Burgelin, "Structural Analysis & Mass Communica tions". Studies
In Broadcasting, No.6. Nippop. Hoso Kyokei. (1968)
8. For 'proposition-analysis', see Gerbner, "Ideological Perspectives
& Political Pendencies in News Reporting", Journalism Quarterly
4l (1964) and E.Sullerot, "Use -^tude ^e Presse..", ^emps Modernes
vol.XX, No 226 (1965 ). For 'norm-analysis', C f : uerbner, in
Violence &B The Pass Media, Task Force Report to ^isenhower Comm-
-ission on Causes & Prevention of Violence, US Printing Office (1969 )
9. Berger & Luckmann, Social Construction Of ^eality. Penguin (1971)
10. V.W.Turber, The Ritual Process, koutledge & Kegan Paul. (1969 )
11. Especially in Interpretation Of ^reams.
12. U.Eco, "Articulations of Cinematic L0he", Cjnemantics 1.
13. C f : developments of this argument in S.Hall, "Determinations Of xhe
Nev/s Photograph", WPCS 3 (CCS, 1972), and "Open & Closed Uses Of
Structuralism" (stencilled: CCS 1973).
14. C.3.Peirce, Speculative bremm?r
15. Eco, op.cit.
16. C f : S.Hall, "Determinations..", op.cit.
17. R.Barthes, "Rhetoric Of The Tmage". In Y/PCS 1. CCS, B'ham (1971)
18-g- R.Barthes, Elements Of Semiology. Cape (1967 )
19. C f : the section on "Codes Of Gonnotation", in S.Hall, op.cit., and
more generally, in "Deviancy, Politics & The ^edia'^n Social Gpntrol
Deviance & Dissent, ed. McIntosh & Rock. Tavistock (Forthcoming).
20. P.Terni. Memorandum. Council of M urope Colloquy, ^eciester. (1973)
22. Antonio Gremsci, Selections From Prison Notebooks, Lawrence &
Wishert (1971): and F.Parkin, Class inequality 8c'Political Order,
Mc^ibbon & Kee (1971)
21. Eco, "Does ,J-he Public Barm xelevision?" , op.cit.
23. Cf: J,Habermas, "Systematically distorted Communications", ^n
Recent Sociology 2 , ed. P.Dretzel. Collier-Macmillan (1970)
24. Cf: S.Hall, "External/lnternal dialectic n Broadcasting", in
Fourth Symposium On Broadcasting, Dept„ of Extra-t-1ural ^tudies,
uT of Manchester (1972)
2p. C f : L. Althusser, "Ideological '“’tate Apparatuses", in Lening. Philo-
-sophy. And Other Essays. New Left • D00hSo (1971).

( * Note that references 22 and 21 have been transposed)