Semiotics for Beginners

Semiotics for Beginners

Daniel Chandler

Encoding/Decoding

Structuralist semioticians tend to focus on the internal structure of

the text rather than on the processes involved in its construction or

interpretation. Where those working within this tradition do theorize

beyond the text, they tend to argue that communication (particularly

mass communication) is a primary process of reality construction

and maintenance whereby positions of inequality, dominance and

subservience are produced and reproduced in society and at the same

time made to appear 'natural'. The 'New Critics', W K Wimsatt and

M C Beardsley, whilst not structuralists, advanced the formalist

argument that meaning lay within the text and defined as 'the

affective fallacy' the notion that the meaning of a poem depended on

the 'subjective' responses of the reader, which they saw as 'a

confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it

does)' (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1954, 21). Such accounts tend towards

'textual determinism', assuming that texts are invariably read much

as was intended by their makers, leaving little scope either for

contradictions within and between texts or for variations amongst

their interpreters. Monolithic theories of this kind ignore what

Saussure had referred to as 'the role of signs as part of social life'

(Saussure 1983, 15; Saussure 1974, 16).



Contemporary semioticians refer to the creation and interpretation of

texts as 'encoding' and 'decoding' respectively. This unfortunately

tends to make these processes sound too programmatic: the use of

these terms is of course intended to emphasize the importance of the

semiotic codes involved, and thus to highlight social factors. For

semioticians, there is no such thing as an uncoded message, so that -

for those who argue that all experience is coded - even 'encoding'

might be more accurately described as 'recoding' (Hawkes 1977,

104, 106, 107). In the context of semiotics, 'decoding' involves not

simply basic recognition and comprehension of what a text 'says' but

also the interpretation and evaluation of its meaning with reference

to relevant codes. Where a distinction is made between

comprehension and interpretation this tends to be primarily with

reference to purely verbal text, but even in this context such a

distinction is untenable; what is 'meant' is invariably more than what

is 'said' (Smith 1988, Olson 1994). Everyday references to

communication are based on a 'transmission' model in which a

sender transmits a message to a receiver - a formula which reduces

meaning to 'content' which is delivered like a parcel (Reddy 1979).

This is the basis of Shannon and Weaver's well-known model of

communication, which makes no allowance for the importance of

social contexts and codes (Shannon and Weaver 1949).



Whilst Saussure's model of oral communication is (for its time)

innovatingly labelled as a 'speech circuit' and includes directional

arrows indicating the involvement of both participants (thus at least

implying 'feedback'), it too was nevertheless a linear transmission

model (albeit a 'two-track' one). It was based on the notion that

comprehension on the part of the listener is a kind of mirror of the

speaker's initial process of expressing a thought (Saussure 1983, 11-

13; Saussure 1974, 11-13; Harris 1987, 22-25, 204-218). In this

model there is only the briefest of allusions to the speaker's use of

'the code provided by the language', together with the implicit

assumption that a fixed code is shared (Saussure 1983, 14; Saussure

1974, 14; Harris 1987, 216, 230).



In 1960 another structural linguist - Roman Jakobson (drawing on

work by Bühler dating from the 1930s) - proposed a model of

interpersonal verbal communication which moved beyond the basic

transmission model of communication and highlighted the

importance of the codes and social contexts involved (Jakobson

1960). He noted elsewhere that 'the efficiency of a speech event

demands the use of a common code by its participants' (Jakobson &

Halle 1956, 72). He outlines what he regards as the six 'constitutive

factors... in any act of verbal communication' thus:



The addresser sends a message to the addressee. To be

operative the message requires a context referred to ('referent'

in another, somewhat ambivalent, nomenclature), seizable by

the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being

verbalized, a code fully, or at least partially, common to the

addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and

decoder of the message); and finally, a contact, a physical

channel and psychological connection between the addresser

and the addressee, enabling both of them to stay in

communication. (Jakobson 1960, 353)



Jakobson proposed that 'each of these six factors determines a

different function of language' (ibid.):



Oriented

Type Function Example

towards



referential context imparting information It's raining.



It's bloody pissing down

expressive addresser expressing feelings or attitudes

again!



Wait here till it stops

conative addressee influencing behaviour

raining!



establishing or maintaining Nasty weather again,

phatic contact

social relationships isn't it?



referring to the nature of the This is the weather

metalingual code

interaction (e.g. genre) forecast.



It droppeth as the gentle

poetic message foregrounding textual features

rain from heaven.









This model avoids the reduction of language to 'communication'.

Referential content is not always foregrounded. Jakobson argued that

in any given situation one of these factors is 'dominant', and that this

dominant function influences the general character of the 'message'.

For instance, the poetic function (which is intended to refer to any

creative use of language rather than simply to poetry) highlights 'the

palpability of signs', undermining any sense of a 'natural' or

'transparent' connection between a signifier and a referent.

Jakobson's model demonstrates that messages and meanings cannot

be isolated from such constitutive contextual factors. In its

acknowledgement of social functions this is a model which is

consonant with the structuralist theory that the subject (here in the

form of the 'addresser' and the 'addressee') is constructed through

discourse.

Whilst these earlier models had been concerned with interpersonal

communication, in an essay on 'Encoding/Decoding' (Hall 1980,

originally published as 'Encoding and Decoding in Television

Discourse' in 1973), the British sociologist Stuart Hall proposed a

model of mass communication which highlighted the importance of

active interpretation within relevant codes. Justin Wren-Lewis insists

that Hall's model, with its emphasis on coding and decoding as

signifying practices, is 'above all, a semiological conception' (Wren-

Lewis 1983, 179). Hall rejected textual determinism, noting that

'decodings do not follow inevitably from encodings' (Hall 1980,

136). In contrast to the earlier models, Hall thus gave a significant

role to the 'decoder' as well as to the 'encoder'.



Hall referred to various phases in the Encoding/Decoding model of

communication as moments, a term which many other commentators

have subsequently employed (frequently without explanation). John

Corner offers his own definitions:



 the moment of encoding: 'the institutional

practices and organizational conditions

and practices of production' (Corner 1983,

266);

 the moment of the text: 'the... symbolic construction,

arrangement and perhaps performance... The form and content

of what is published or broadcast' (ibid., 267); and

 the moment of decoding: 'the moment of reception [or]

consumption... by... the reader/hearer/viewer' which is

regarded by most theorists as 'closer to a form of

"construction"' than to 'the passivity... suggested by the term

"reception"' (ibid.).



Hall himself referred to several 'linked but distinctive moments -

production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction'

(Hall 1980, 128) as part of the 'circuit of communication' (a term

which clearly signals the legacy of Saussure). Corner adds that the

moment of encoding and that of decoding 'are socially contingent

practices which may be in a greater or lesser degree of alignment in

relation to each other but which are certainly not to be thought of...

as 'sending' and 'receiving' linked by the conveyance of a 'message'

which is the exclusive vehicle of meaning' (Corner 1983, pp. 267-8).



Mass media codes offer their readers social identities which some

may adopt as their own. But readers do not necessarily accept such

codes. Where those involved in communicating do not share

common codes and social positions, decodings are likely to be

different from the encoder's intended meaning. Umberto Eco uses

the term 'aberrant decoding' to refer to a text which has been

decoded by means of a different code from that used to encode it

(Eco 1965). Eco describes as 'closed' those texts which show a

strong tendency to encourage a particular interpretation - in contrast

to more 'open' texts (Eco 1981). He argues that mass media texts

tend to be 'closed texts', and because they are broadcast to

heterogeneous audiences diverse decodings of such texts are

unavoidable.



Stuart Hall stressed the role of social positioning in the interpretation

of mass media texts by different social groups. In a model deriving

from Frank Parkin's 'meaning systems', Hall suggested three

hypothetical interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text

(Parkin 1972; Hall 1973; Hall 1980, 136-8; Morley 1980, 20-21,

134-7; Morley 1981b, 51; Morley 1983, 109-10):



 dominant (or 'hegemonic') reading: the reader fully shares the

text's code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading

(a reading which may not have been the result of any

conscious intention on the part of the author(s)) - in such a

stance the code seems 'natural' and 'transparent';

 negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text's code

and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes

resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own

position, experiences and interests (local and personal

conditions may be seen as exceptions to the general rule) -

this position involves contradictions;

 oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') reading: the reader, whose

social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation

to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but

does not share the text's code and rejects this reading,

bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical,

feminist etc.) (e.g. when watching a television broadcast

produced on behalf of a political party they normally vote

against).

This framework is based on the assumption that the latent meaning

of the text is encoded in the dominant code. This is a stance which

tends to reify the medium and to downplay conflicting tendencies

within texts. Also, some critics have raised the question of how a

'preferred reading' can be established. Shaun Moores asks 'Where is

it and how do we know if we've found it? Can we be sure we didn't

put it there ourselves while we were looking? And can it be found by

examining any sort of text?' (Moores 1993, 28). Some theorists feel

that the concept may be applied more easily to news and current

affairs than to other mass media genres. David Morley wondered

whether it might be the 'reading which the analyst is predicting that

most members of the audience will produce' (Morley 1981a, 6). John

Corner argues that it is not easy to find actual examples of media

texts in which one reading is preferred within a plurality of possible

readings (Corner 1983, 279). As Justin Wren-Lewis comments, 'the

fact that many decoders will come up with the same reading does not

make that meaning an essential part of the text' (Wren-Lewis 1983,

184). And Kathy Myers notes, in the spirit of a post-structuralist

social semiotics, that 'it can be misleading to search for the

determinations of a preferred reading solely within the form and

structure' of the text (Myers 1983, 216). Furthermore, in the context

of advertising, she adds that:



There is a danger in the analysis of advertising of assuming

that it is in the interests of advertisers to create one 'preferred'

reading of the advertisement's message. Intentionality

suggests conscious manipulation and organization of texts and

images, and implies that the visual, technical and linguistic

strategies work together to secure one preferred reading of an

advertisement to the exclusion of others... The openness of

connotative codes may mean that we have to replace the

notion of 'preferred reading' with another which admits a

range of possible alternatives open to the audience. (Myers

1983, 214-16)



Just as a reductive reading of Hall's model could lead to the

reification of a medium or genre, it could also encourage the

essentialising of readers (e.g. as 'the resistant reader') whereas

reading positions are 'multiform, fissured, schizophrenic, unevenly

developed, culturally, discursively and politically discontinuous,

forming part of a shifting realm of ramifying differences and

contradictions' (Stam 2000, 233).



Despite the various criticisms, Hall's model has been very

influential, particularly amongst British theorists. David Morley

employed it in his studies of how different social groups interpreted

a television programme (Morley 1980). Morley insisted that he did

not take a social determinist position in which individual 'decodings'

of a text are reduced to a direct consequence of social class position.

'It is always a question of how social position, as it is articulated

through particular discourses, produces specific kinds of readings or

decodings. These readings can then be seen to be patterned by the

way in which the structure of access to different discourses is

determined by social position' (Morley 1983, 113; cf. Morley 1992,

89-90). Morley's point about differential access to discourses can be

related to to the various kinds of 'capital' outlined by Pierre Bourdieu

- notably 'cultural capital' (to which Bourdieu relates the

construction of 'taste') and 'symbolic capital' (communicative

repertoire). An 'interpretative repertoire' (Jonathan Potter, cited in

Grayson 1998, 40) is part of the symbolic capital of members of the

relevant 'interpretative community' and constitutes the textual and

interpretative codes available to them (which offer them the potential

to understand and sometimes also to produce texts which employ

them). Morley added that any individual or group might operate

different decoding strategies in relation to different topics and

different contexts. A person might make 'oppositional' readings of

the same material in one context and 'dominant' readings in other

contexts (Morley 1981a, 9; Morley 1981b, 66, 67; Morley 1992,

135). He noted that in interpreting viewers' readings of mass media

texts attention should be paid not only to the issue of agreement

(acceptance/rejection) but to comprehension, relevance and

enjoyment (Morley 1981a, 10; Morley 1992, 126-7, 136).



The interpretation of signs by their users can be seen from a semiotic

perspective as having three levels (loosely related to C W Morris's

framework for branches of semiotics):



 syntactic: recognition of the sign (in relation to other signs);

 semantic: comprehension of the intended meaning of the sign;

 pragmatic: interpretation of the sign in terms of relevance,

agreement etc.

(See also Goldsmith 1984, 124, although she makes different

distinctions)



The most basic task of interpretation involves the identification of

what a sign represents (denotation) and may require some degree of

familiarity with the medium and the representational codes involved.

This is particularly obvious in the case of language, but may also

apply in the case of visual media such as photographs and films.

Some would not grant this low-level process the label of

'interpretation' at all, limiting this term to such processes as the

extraction of a 'moral' from a narrative text. However, David Mick

and Laura Politi take the stance that comprehension and

interpretation are inseparable, making an analogy with denotation

and connotation (Mick & Politi 1989, 85).



Justin Wren-Lewis comments that 'given the wealth of material

using semiological tools for the analysis of film and television, it is

remarkable that so little work has been done on the practice of

decoding' (Wren-Lewis 1983, 195). Whilst social semiotics stakes a

claim to the study of situated semiotic practices, research in this area

is dominated by ethnographic and phenomenological methodologies

and is seldom closely allied to semiotic perspectives (though there is

no necessary incompatibility). A notable exception is the research of

David Mick in the field of advertising (Mick & Politi 1989,

McQuarrie & Mick 1992, Mick & Buhl 1992).