1. "Encoding, Decoding" is such a pleasant read and particularly its model of the movements of meaning as related to signs was of interest. One quote interests me above all: "the event must become a 'story' before it can become a communicative event" (Hall 92) which displays the syntagmatic pressures implicit in the intention to communicate. Beyond the linguistic elements of the speech act which composes the communicative act, there is a narratological sub-logic which is coded not only into the act as a performance but into its concept. If we are to take communication as an implicit element of all linguistic acts (spoken, written, etc.), then one must recognize that discourse is not just an ideational collection and history, but a narrative being written, one beholden to narratological paradigms and conventions. This then forces one to ask what implications are present in the coalescence between language and narrative? Secondly, if narrative structures normally require and anticipate an ending, a completion of the story, then could such a narrative anticipation inform our desires in theory and in general thinking for an end, for a completion of an idea when one can never exist?
2. Horkheimer and Adorno state "A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself" (H and A 407) because of the hold technology has over both economics and culture due to technology's role in the dictation of labor and subsequent products (both purely object commodities and cultural commodities). However, despite their references to cars and other mechanical entities, a technological rationale is any rationale predicated on any artifice or tool. A car is technology, so is language which is where my criticism of this claim comes in. Language as an ever-developing entity and technology is simultaneously a rationale which is the most domineering and the most liberatory. This is due to the simultaneous movements of language naturalization and the recognition of linguistic arbitrariness (in regard to denotative actions such as defining which are inherently arbitrary due to the inherent distance between the conceptual definition and the real phenomenon). This being said, is this contradictory nature not necessarily true to all technology through cultural slippages and counter-hegemonic appropriations of not only technology but technological culture and discourse?
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