Encoding isinformationThe process of converting from one form or format to another is also calledComputer programming languageOfcodeIt is called code for short.To program words, numbers or other objects into numbers by a predetermined method, or to convert information and data into specified electric pulse signals.Encoded inelectronic computer、television, remote control and communication.Coding is the process of transforming information from one form or format to another.decode, is the inverse of codingprocess。
Birmingham School Angela Mcrobbie, the core member of theThatcherism'Authoritative populism';as well asMulticulturalism。”As far as Hall is concerned, his cultural theory works and outstanding achievements came out repeatedly when he was the second director of the Birmingham Contemporary Culture Research Center (CCCS). During this period, Hall led the "Media Group" to conduct a profound analysis of mass culture and media represented by television, and successively published Culture, Media and "Ideology", "Deconstructing the" Mass "Notes "," Coding and decoding of TV discourse "and other famous articles.Hall insisted on the left-wing Marxist position and tried to use Althusser's ideology theory to explain the daily political media practice, especially the relationship between the media, the state and politics.This paper discusses Hall's theoretical contributions to cultural studies from three aspects: deconstruction of the "mass", encoding/decoding, media, politics and ideology.
characteristic
1、 Hall Deconstructs "Volkswagen"
In his "Notes on Deconstructing the" Masses ", Hall took social relations as the starting point of mass culture." In the long period of transformation to agricultural capitalism and the subsequent process of the formation and development of industrial capitalism, the culture of workers, the working class, and the poor continued to struggle for a long time or a short time. "In Hall's view," the masses "often became social" reform "It is required that they meet the best interests of the ruling class.Hall's popular culture is quite different from Williams' extremely romantic description of "being owned, enjoyed and used by the people". Hall focuses on defining "popular culture" from social relations.
Hall has deconstructed the different definitions of "mass culture" in three levels around the word "mass": first, the market or commercial definition of "mass culture", that is, groups of people listen to them, buy them, read them, consume them, and seem to enjoy them.Hall believes that this definition is associated with the manipulation and belittling of the public. The public is no different from "hooligans" and is a group of cultural fools living in "false consciousness".Hall opposed this homogeneous and descriptive definition. "In the final analysis, it is a view that does not belong to socialism to regard the public as a completely passive peripheral force." Secondly, popular culture refers to everything that "the public" is doing or has done, which is close to the concept of "anthropology" of the public - the culture, social habitsCustoms and folkways, that is, "something that marks a special way of life." Hall believes that this definition is too descriptive, and the boundary between popular culture and non popular culture is very blurred.Finally, it is also the definition advocated by Hall himself: to define "mass culture" with the continuous tension of relationship, influence, confrontation, etc., and focus on the relationship between mass culture and ruling culture.Hall pointed out that the principle of constructing the "mass" is the tension and opposition between the elite or dominant culture in the central position and the "marginal" culture, which distinguishes between "mass culture" and "non mass culture","I believe that there is a continuous and certainly unequal struggle initiated by the mainstream culture, which constantly wants to destroy or reorganize the popular culture, and to surround and limit the definition and form of the popular culture within the more inclusive scope of the ruling form... This is the dialectic of the cultural struggle... along the complex route of confrontation and acceptance, rejection and surrenderThe field of transformation has become a continuous battlefield. "Obviously, Hall's main concern when investigating mass culture is the relationship between cultures and hegemony.
Hall consciously insisted on using Marxist methods to define popular culture, specifically explaining the rule from the perspective of classIdeological cultureThe struggle and compromise of the control and the ruled class against this cultural control can reveal the shadow of Gramsci's hegemonic theory.AndFrankfurt SchoolDifferent views simply regard mass culture as spiritual opium, Hall emphasizes the two-way operation of cultural hegemony control and anti control.So what is the relationship between mass culture and commerce?Hall believes that there is no complete, real and self-sufficient mass culture, and mass culture must exist in the network of cultural power and governance, as well as inextricably linked with commerce.
Hall's description of mass culture can be said to be a rewriting of Williams' classic definition of "culture is the overall way of life" in the context of culturalism. Hall is more willing to express culture as a way of struggle, and explain mass culture in the dialectics of cultural struggle.At the same time, Hall opposes the establishment of a universal mass aesthetics and believes that mass culture is in the field of cultural struggle, and its position is changing and flowing.Hall's interpretation of mass culture reflects the left-wing Marxist position and style of typical Birmingham culturalism: mass culture is an arena for the oppressed culture and the excluded class to oppose power domination, which is not simply a place to show mature socialist culture, but socialism is expected to be established in this field.The importance of popular culture lies in that it is one of the places where socialism may be established.
To sum up, Hall has always adhered to the Marxist position, and his analysis of mass culture is full of cultural politics. Because of the introduction of Gramsci's hegemonic theory, Hall regards mass culture as a place of flow and struggle.Hall's theory of mass culture has two aspects of significance: first, it refutes the elitism style of the Frankfurt School that blindly treats mass culture as cultural industry and regards it as spiritual garbage, and at the same time, it avoids falling into the overly empirical and homogeneous description of mass culture by Williams and others;Secondly, it influenced the subsequent populist cultural theorist John Fiske's "mass culture resistance theory", and provided a theoretical paradigm for the study of mass culture in other countries.
2、 Hall's encoding/decoding mode
From the perspective of "technology determinism", Canadian communication scholar McLuhan prophetically put forward such famous concepts as "global village", "media is information", "media is an extension of people", "hot media and cold media", and initiated the research of media culture in the era of electronic communication.In contemporary western countries, the media has become the "fourth political institution" in parallel with the judiciary, legislation and administration.It is generally believed that,Mass communicationThere are two paradigms with media research: one is the positivist school that rose in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and the representative figures are Lasswell, Schram, Lazarsfield, etc.Lasswell put forward the famous "five W" communication mode in his article "The Structure and Function of Communication", that is, who, what to say, through what channels, to whom and what effects to achieve.The "five W" model outlines the linear model of "sender information receiver" in positivist communication research;The other is the critical paradigm created by the Frankfurt School, which emphasizes the ideological effect criticism of the media. Although the British School of Cultural Studies does not agree with the Frankfurt School's persistent devaluation of the social function of the media (such as Marcuse's "one-sided man"), it still follows its path of ideological criticism.
As a communication and cultural research scholar, Hall attaches great importance to the study of media. "The difficult choice between good and bad, essence and inferior does not exist in the difference of modern communication forms, but exists in the media." Hall's reputation in media culture research is based on the encoding/decoding model he created.The coding/decoding theory first appeared in the form of a manuscript in September 1973, when Hall submitted a speech at the conference entitled Coding and Decoding of Television Discourse. Because of its novelty and novelty, which is different from the positivist communication mode, the speech aroused great response at the conference, and then was included in Culture, Media, Language as a single paper,Finally, it was published under the title of Coding and Decoding.
In the article "Coding, Decoding", influenced by the value cycle theory of Marxist political economy, Hall put forward the four stage theory of information exchange: production, circulation, distribution/consumption and reproduction.These four links are the circular process of information dissemination. Each link is connected, but it maintains relative autonomy.Hall believes that in the process of information circulation, meaning is transmitted in the form of symbols. This process depends not only on technology and material tools, but also on the respective social relations between the sender and receiver of information.The traditional research model of mass communication "was criticized because it only focused on the level of information exchange and failed to regard different moments as a structural concept of a complex relationship structure." In fact, due to the different social characteristics and knowledge backgrounds of information receivers, they must have different interpretations when receiving information.Hall takes broadcasting as an example to illustrate the asymmetry of codes between "information source" and "receiver".What they really want to say is that TV viewers are not moving within the 'dominant' or 'selected' code range. They expect 'completely clear communication', but they have to face 'systematically distorted communication'. "The asymmetry of symbols between weak coding and decoding is rooted in the structural differences between the sender and receiver of information in terms of cultural relations, social backgrounds, status and interests, including ideological operation and media cultural hegemony.
Hall proposed three "hypothetical positions" to describe the various decoding processes of discourse.The first hypothetical position is the preferred reading/specific reading/hegemonic reading position. The purpose of communication is to realize the communication between communicators and audiences with the same meaning.The ideal mode of communication for news communicators in this position is "completely clear communication", that is, the audience decodes within the scope of the dominant code, and the way and process of information interpretation completely conform to the expectations set at the encoding time.However, the realization of this expectation depends on the covert operation of the media.Hall pointed out pointedly: "The hegemonic interpretation of Northern Ireland's policy, or Chile's coup, or the Industrial Relations Act, was mainly formulated by political and military elites: through the operation of professional codes, the selection and combination of specific selection of broadcast occasions and styles, selection of staff, selection of images, and on-site debate."The second position is the negotiated or corporate position.Hall quotes Gramsci's hegemonic thought: "Decoding in a coordinated view contains a mixture of compatible factors and antagonistic factors: it recognizes the legitimacy of the hegemonic definition aimed at forming a grand meaning (abstract). However, at a more limited, situational (positioning) level, it formulates its own basic rules - operating according to exceptions from the rules." Here,Hall saw the two-way operation of containment and control in the encoding decoding process.The third position is the counter hegemonic position.Hall believes that although mainstream ideological discourse has the priority of interpretation in the dominant media text, it does not mean that all audiences will automatically make this choice. The social situation of the decoder will encourage them to adopt different attitudes to treat the same media text.As a result, as Hall has analyzed, worker audiences tend to decode the "national interests" encoded by mainstream media about the "necessity of wage restriction" into class interests.This position is critical and resistant.
Hall's coding/decoding model has two theoretical contributions to media culture research: on the one hand, the coding/decoding model shows the fusion and break with the two research paradigms in media research before it. While surpassing the linear communication model of positivism "sender information receiver", it also subverts the negative audience theory of the Frankfurt SchoolThe introduction of symbols, power, and social relations into media studies marks the beginning of a new era of Marxist media theory based on structuralism and semiotics;On the other hand, Hall's three "hypothetical positions" provide a theoretical framework for the analysis of the audience of ethnography in media research. David Morley, a colleague of Hall and a famous critic, used Hall's model to analyze the audience of ethnography in the news program "All over the country"It can also be called the classic work of using Hall model to analyze the media audience.
Of course, Hall's coding/decoding model has also encountered criticism and challenges recently. Hall himself has also reflected on the coding/decoding theory: "I once wanted to get rid of the origin of those ideas. We are already in history, so the discourse is also disorderly. But the coding theory is not from the outside. I made a mistake, just marking the top half of the chart.If you want to read the whole content, you must draw a circle diagram to show it.Therefore, I must understand how decoding enters the practice and discourse system of journalists' topic selection. "The author believes that Hall's cultural theory is based on the representation theory, which always emphasizes meaning, and the encoding/decoding mode is no exception;Due to too much persistence in meaning, attention to more macro factors (such as economic factors) is often ignored.If we introduce Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital and use the possession of cultural capital to analyze the audience's decoding position, it will be more convincing in theory and more practical.We should keep in mind Grosberg's advice that cultural research is increasingly away from the economy, which is a dangerous signal.
Theory application
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Media, Politics and Ideology
Stuart Hall is listed as one of the most important communication scholars in the 20th century in many communication works today, especially in college textbooks such as Mass Communication.The author believes that Hall's analysis of mass culture and mass media (television, radio, newspapers) is full of Marxist criticism and has made great contributions to the critical paradigm of communication.However, Xiang Zhuang wielded his sword with the intention of Peigong.Through Hall's analysis of the media, it can be clearly seen that Hall's real intention is to take the media as a cultural form, and from the perspective of left-wing Marxist theorists, to gain insight into the political functions and ideological effects of this cultural form.Therefore, Hall's media analysis is more inclined to cultural politics, with a series of theories on culture, cultural research, joint theory, ideology and so on presented here, forming a "polyphonic" spectacle.
When analyzing Hall's Culture, Media and "Ideology" Effect, John Docker, an Australian scholar of cultural studies, pointed out that the article "focuses on Marxist theoretical issues, and the media only discusses them at the end".In fact, Culture, Media and "Ideology" Effect can be regarded as the representative work of Hall's media analysis,It uses Gramsci's hegemonic thought and Althusser's ideological theory to analyze the media in contemporary capitalist countries:"In the 20th century, the mass media colonized the cultural and ideological fields so successfully that they established leadership, hegemony and domination at one fell swoop. The responsibility of the media now is to provide the image, information and knowledge of the groups and classes that are related to their own lives and the lives of other groups. They are intertwined in our seemingly dazzling modern life as a whole.".Hall's theoretical perspective is Gramscian. He believes that the media, like family, church and school, is the mechanism by which the upper class ruling machine of the bourgeoisie implements its ideological hegemony.This argument is obviously quite different from Habermas's so-called "the space of media operation is the public sphere." In Hall's view, the kind of hypothetical democratic public space is like a mirage, and the real mechanism of media operation depends on the hegemony and struggle of ideology.
When talking about mass media, Hall first refuted popular media theories such as "conspiracy theory", "substitution theory" and "resignation theory".At that time, some leftist theorists took it for granted that there was a collusive relationship between broadcasters and politicians to cover the eyes of the audience and all voters.Hall doesn't think so.And quoted Althusser's“Ideology State Machine”The article thinks that the relationship between television and the government is relatively autonomous, and media practitioners operate according to their own professional codes. Even for state-owned news organizations like the BBC, their journalists are not directly responsible to politicians, except for special emergencies.McRobbie called Hall's focus on the discussion of media, power and ideology "a micro political analysis", a "complex unity".
McRobbie is here《The purpose of cultural research》It lists Hall's cultural theory as the first chapter, and focuses on Hall's theories of media, politics and ideology.We can borrow McRobbie's eyes to have a bird's eye view of Hall's cultural and political analysis of the media:
First of all, Hall absorbed Althusser's ideology state machine theory.According to Althusser, the ideological role of the media is to restore and maintain the existing class relations.Hall clearly integrated Gramsci's cultural hegemony in his elaboration, and believed that the goal of the media to "restore and maintain the existing class relations" never existed, and there was always the possibility of new disintegration.Therefore, there is no fixed relationship between the media and politics,The relationship between the media and politics is similar to that between neutral countries and politics: "Politicians are required to abide by media rules, and the media are also required to guard against accusations of selectivity and prejudice. By 'live broadcasting' or 'using their own words' to politicians, we can create a seemingly neutral space."The media has become the arena for political disputes among all parties in contemporary capitalist countries, where various ideologies and power struggles are staged.On the one hand, media organizations are always adjusting their positioning to adapt to the changes and trends of the political culture in power. Hall cited the process of the BBC building its identity as a national cultural institution,"... By organizing them into a single 'voice', the standards and values of the dominant class culture are maintained, and the 'different voices' of other classes and regions are included into its organic joint framework.bbcIt is not only a 'national institution', but also an institution of the people. It was once closely related to the fate and future of all British people. "On the other hand, due to the change of the power balance between politics and the media, the media shows a trend of "depoliticization".Hall keenly observed the marginalization of political television. "Due to fierce competition, commercial profits, and more irregularities in operation, current affairs television has gradually become marginalized to cater to entertainment, which is called 'factual television'."
Secondly, through his attention to the "moral panic" caused by the "folk devil" in "Policing the Crisis", and his criticism of Thatcher ism in the late 1980s, Hall pointed out with originality that the mass media is responsible for transforming mainstream ideology into popular idioms, so as to achieve the purpose of disciplining the people.Hall has always focused on cultural politics in his criticism of the Thatcher government, including the later Blair government, and created "authoritative populism" (that is, capitalism, as an economic system, not only serves wealth or the middle class, but also works for ordinary people;Ordinary people can also become profiteers and investors in new privatized public facilities, that is, to rebuild hegemony by winning the approval of civilians). During the Thatcher administration, British media organizations reported from time to time that Mrs. Thatcher spoke from the standpoint of the working class and complained with the working class about the overly bureaucratic leftists, trade unions and local governments,Concerned about the lives of ordinary people, promised to move towards a welfare state, and so on.Hall is soberly aware that the essence of capitalist media is to live or culture ideology, and the essence of Thatcherism is to rebuild its political hegemony by winning the approval of civilians.
To sum up, Hall studied mass media from the perspective of politics and ideology, and created a cultural and political paradigm for media research. Hall's analysis of media is not a condescending sociological criticism of empty talk. He always insists on putting media in the scope of politics and ideology to explore its significance and effect,His media culture theory further deepened the political color of the academic trend of cultural research.
