Bonnie Dow, Stuart Hall, and the Determination of Meaning

We have read two rather complex essays at the beginning of our Communication Criticism course. They invite re-reading and reflection to understand what they are trying to express. Both are writing to much broader intellectual currents and political/academic conjunctures than we have time to explore in total. But both are exploring how meaning is determined in a text: Dow makes the case for a rhetorical approach to the meaning of a text during an age of audience research; while Hall explores how power relations influence how texts might be encoded or decoded.

DOW’S RHETORIC

Dow offers a series of definitions in the introduction to her 1996 book, Prime Time Feminism.

CRITICISM. Dow writes extensively on criticism and the role of a critic - from a rhetorical perspective. She views criticism as an argument that assumes an audience: “it attempts to persuade, and that its ‘truths’ are social, reflecting what we agree to believe, based on the evidence and our interpretation of it, at a particular point in time” (p. 3). Dow views, 

“criticism as an argumentative activity in which the goal is to persuade the audience that their knowledge of a text will be enriched if they choose to see a text as the critic does, while never assuming that the particular ‘way of seeing’ is the only or best way to see that text” (p. 4)

TEXT. For Dow, a text is the artifact - the thing that is analyzed. As a rhetorical critic, Dow approaches texts (however determined) in relation to “contextual concerns” such as previous depiction of a subject, secondary texts, industrial or commercial logics, expectations attached to genres or narrative routines, etc. Texts, from a rhetorical perspective, try to influence audiences - about the meaning of the message!

AUDIENCE. Dow directly confronts audience research that Hall’s essay inspired, but acknowledging power and polysemy. She defines polysemy as a texts’s “capacity to invite different meanings from different viewers” (p. 10) but writes that she is more likely to encounter polyvalence, which is “the process through which audience receive essentially similar messages from television texts but may evaluate those meanings differently depending on their value systems” (p. 12)

THEORY. Dow values theory for its ability to explain or provide a vocabulary for meaning-making. 

HALL’S ENCODING/DECODING

We can understand Hall’s “Encoding, Decoding” essay as a theory about the meaning of texts, with consideration of the full circuit of meaning: production/encoding, texts, and reception/decoding. 

In Hall’s essay, readers are introduced to a way of understanding the circuit of communication as “a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments - production, circulation, distribution, consumption, reproduction” (p. 508). In other words, the circuit of communication can be understood as a complex structure in dominance - where distinct but connected practices (production, text, reception) were messages and meanings are negotiated.

“We must recognize that the discursive form of the message has a privileged position in the communication exchange.. and that the moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’, though only ‘relatively autonomous in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments” (p. 508)

Hall offers a very nuanced general perspective, which he calls, “crude” to lay out some of the complexity in the encoding process: 

“The institutional structures of broadcasting, with their practices and networks of production, their organized relations and technical infrastructures, are required to produce a program. Production, here, constructs the message. In one sense, then, the circuit begins here. Of course, the production process is not without its ‘discursive’ aspect: it, too, is framed through by meanings and ideas: knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, historically defined technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audiences and so on to frame the constitution of the program through its production structure” (p. 509). 

While reception is itself a distinct moment, the production has more determining power because it is “point of departure for the realization of the message” (p. 509).\

Drawing on semiotics, Hall writes that “there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code” (p. 511). We can understand a code as a basic unit of meaning-making. 

Of course, we may not share the same codes - such a language - to understand messages from the encoding context to the decoding context. When codes operate a connotative level, they are more open to polysemy, but Hall reminds us, not pluralism. Codes, Hall writes, “are not equal among themselves. Any society or culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its classifications of the social and cultural and political world…. A dominant cultural order…. Organized into dominant or preferred meanings.” Hall continues, 

“we say ‘dominant,’ 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 exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’; and these both have the instititional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized” (p. 513)

Ultimately, Hall suggests that there is no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding, “the former can attempt to ‘pre-fer’ but cannot prescribe or guarantee the latter.” Hall proposes three hypothetical positions for decoding moving images:

DOMINANT-HEGEMONIC, when the viewer operates inside the dominant code.

NEGOTIATED reads the dominant meaning but contains a mixture of restricted, negotiated or oppositional elements. 

OPPOSITIONAL codes operate in such a way that viewers decode the message in a contradictory way

There are many online study aids for this seminal essay. I think David Morely’s summary is especially clear: