”Encoding, Decoding in the
Television Discourse” (1973)
by Stuart Hall
•Hall (sociologist and cultural theorist), along with Richard
Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding
figures of (British) Cultural Studies or the so-called ”The
Birmingham School of Cultural Studies”.
•Member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS) at Birmingham University from 1964, the director of
the centre from 1968. The centre closed in 2002.
1
The basic structure of communication
• Linked but distinctive moments/practices in the process: (508)
- production
- circulation
- distribution
- consumption
- reproduction
• What kind of signifying model does Hall employ for his theory?
→ meanings and messages appear in the form of symbolic vehicles
constituted within the rules of ‘language’
e. g. historical event
→ first it must become a ”story” before it can become a communicative
event
→ the necessity of the ”message form”
• the communication process requires:
- material instruments/means
- social (production) relations
→ yet, the circulation and distribution (to different audiences) of the
product takes place in the discursive form
2
Characteristics of the communication process
• production constructs the message (509)
→ yet, it is not without its discursive aspect
→ it is framed by meanings and ideas
→ it is not a closed system
• What does the notion of a unclosed system mean?
- the wider socio-cultural and political structure influences (television)
discourse
→ the audience is both the source and the receiver of the television message
(Philip Elliott qtd. in Hall)
• What is the implication of this claim?
→ no transparent communication, no communication without
misunderstandings (515)
→ the production process incorporates the consumption or reception of the
messages, they become moments of the production itself (509)
→ this does not mean that production/encoding and reception/decoding
would be identical but they are related
• Distortions/misunderstandings arise from the lack of equivalence between
the two sides of the communicative exchange
3
Signs and their ideological value
Denotation
- literal meaning of a sign (512)
- universally recognised
- often confused with a natural sign (produced without the
intervention of a code; bears a causal relation to its object e. g.
the sign of thunder)
- at the denotative level the sign is fixed/closed/limited (512)
- yet, it is not outside ideology either → the ideological value is
fixed and it becomes natural and universal (512)
4
Signs and their ideological value
Connotation
-employed to refer to less fixed, more associative meanings
-more conventional
-more changeable
-at the connotative level the sign is more open, subject to more
active transformations (513)
• signs often combine both aspects (512)
• signs acquire their ideological value at the level of associative
meanings
• situational ideologies alter and transform signification at the
connotative level
• at the connotative levels signifiers have a close communication
with culture, knowledge, history
→ the environmental world invades the linguistic/semantic system
5
Dominant cultural order
→ structure of discourses in dominance (513)
• Social life appears in discursive domains
→ these are hierarchically organised into dominant or preferred meanings

institutional/political/ideological order is imprinted in the preferred
meanings
→ the preferred meanings become institutionalised themselves
→ the rank order of power and interest limits and sanctions ~ exclusion of
particular meanings
The significance of the performative rules (514)
→ actively enforces or pre-fer one semantic domain over another
→ it is a practice of interpretative work
→ it consists the work as legitimate a decoding of the event within the limit
of dominant definitions

What does this actually mean?
6