Andrea and Adare, Week 7

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Vocabulary/Key Terms

  • Periodization
  • Popular
  • Culture
  • Denotative and Connotative Signs
  • Encoding and Decoding
  • Naturalized Codes
  • Discursive Knowledge
  • High and Popular Culture
  • Black Popular Culture

Hall, Stuart. 1999. "Encoding, Decoding." Pp. 507-17 in The Cultural Studies         Reader: 2nd (Second) edition, edited by S. During. London: Routledge.

Main Points

Purpose of the Paper

  • Written to criticize the linear nature of mass communications sender message receiver model as it leaves out complex structure. Hall suggests that we look at the moments in the message process instead: production (where encoding happens), circulation (how folks perceive the sign), distribution, consumption (decoding starts here), and reproduction (reaction to the intended message and assessment of the message).
  • This process will help us understand the discursive form of the message (hoe others are talking about the media producing a message) and get away from just understanding what the message sender wants us to understand. It's great fro analytical purposes and help us get away from essentializing and totalizing conclusions as well because people just don't mindlessly take in messages. They come with different information and background and may have different codes to decode messages
    • Hall makes a note about content analysis that is similar to Burke's (2016).

    Codes and Signs
    • A sign goes through this process within a society that places meanings or codes on that sign. The sender may pull from these codes to make a sign and produce a certain message tat would make sense to the receiver (encode), as these signs would have no meaning without those codes.
    • Denotative Sign: Descriptive sign. You can see what the sign is physically. There may only be one denotative sign.
    • Connotative Sign: Ideologically, what the sign may mean. You bring in interpretation, idea, and your understandings (that you pull from your codes) to give a sign it meaning. There is inequality in connotative signs. This is how we can have dominant cultural understanding and meanings but not determinate meanings (Hall 1999:513).
    • Naturalized codes started as connotative but may seemingly (not actually) become denotative and naturalized through constant association and widespread acceptance and convention of that code onto a certain sign,
    3 Hypothetical Positions in Decoding
    • Dominant-hegemonic decoding: Get the message and 100% agree with it
      • this may happen if the encoder and decoder share the same codes
    • Negotiated Decoding: You like the larger message, but there are parts you can't get down with.
      • the same words may be used, but the meaning may be different . Lamont's work on the Dignity of Working Men (1992) illustrates this nicely.
    • Oppositional decoding: you get the message and don't agree with it.
      • Counter framing (Fegan 2020)
      • Where the struggle for discourse happens (Hall 1999: 517)
    Communication Process
    [image]

    Questions
    1. Do you believe that there are only three ways in which people can decode? If you believe there should be more, what should be added and why? Should there be more of a typology for encoding as well?
    2. Methods: Some folks have criticized the encoding section of the model, saying that it assumes the latent meaning is automatically encoded in a dominant position. How can predicted dominant reading be established ? How do we know that we have found it or if we're placing it there ourselves (Moores 1993)? Can this be a limitation of content analysis?
    3. How does Hall's encoding/decoding model help you make sense of the complex dynamics of meaning-making in contemporary culture? How much did it help inform your research, if at all?
    Hall, Stuart. 1996. "What is the 'black' in Black Popular Culture?" in Stuart          Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies edited by K.-H. Chen and D.              Morley. Routledge.

    Main Points
    • Hall argues against essentialism and emphasizes black popular culture's negotiated, hybrid nature, rooted in historical experiences and struggle, not nature, biology, or genetics (Hall 1996:475)
    • "What we are talking about is the struggle over cultural hegemony, which is these days waged as much is popular culture as anywhere else...cultural hegemony isn't about pure victory or pure domination...it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture" (Hall 1996).
      • Shift from totalizing essentialism to autonomy and constructivism through a dialogic approach, which is important for social movement and activism largely. He warns against essentialist views of race and ethnicity, highlighting how they can reinforce conservative and oppressive conditions.
        • if something is natural, then you can't fix it.
      • Hall recognizes that it is more difficult for seemingly contradicting cultures and identities to be recognized and moved into dominant spaces because of the lack of support, the fact that these signs are heavily regulated, and once these groups are made known, they are subjected to the same action of being put in a box ("what replaces invisibility is a kind of carefully regulated, segregated visibility" Hall 1996:493)
    • US Black folks are connected through their shared experience of living in the US, and there are certain dominant codes that folks adhere to, which will make it where Black folks may share some experiences, but Black folks aren't a monolith as experiences cultural codes, and identities have differing effects.
    Bringing it back to popular culture
    • Hall advocated for a dialogical approach to black popular culture by emphasizing the dynamic relationship and response to other cultural discourses, including the mutual influences between black and white cultures
    • popular culture is a mythic place "It's a theatre of popular fantasies" (Hall 1996:499).
    • "Black popular culture should be viewed as contradictory and diverse, not constructed with single binaries." (or vs. and) Popular culture is a space for homogenization, so black culture is contradictory. It cannot just be explained as black vs. white. high vs. low. There is no pure Black culture. Black culture is a hybrid, to being with. The marker of difference.
      • This is how we are able to have diversity in Black communities. Black nerds, Afro punks, Black British, ect.
    Questions
    1. Popular culture was once seen as the subordinate culture, a place for alternative culture to exist in opposition to high culture, but now that it is the dominant culture, it has changed. It now has more power than high culture (Hall 1996:472)
      1. Has popular culture become the new high culture? Cultural Omnivores argument (Peterson and Kern 1996; Bryson 1996).
    2. I understand, and like the concept of black popular culture just being anything that oppositional to popular culture however, I feel like it makes it difficult to study things like Black cultural capital. How can we answer things like Black cultural capital without reverting to essentialism?
    Media Example!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5D2RvIQwQE

    🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞

    Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular"

    Response

    When reading this chapter, I honestly was not able to pinpoint the exact location where thesis/main idea is. I normally look for an "I argue"-type statement, but couldn't find one. What I was able to gather though was:

    The various definitions of "popular" or in some cases what "popular" is not and that when you "popular" and "culture" together it is "horrendous" (227).

    Popular has 3 defining moments in the text:

    1. Things are popular because lots of people engage with or consume a type of media (231). This is the commercial definition of the term, and although Hall is ultimately dissatisfied with it he doesn't completely ignore this definition
      1. when the commercial definition is used it implies that the mass of the working class who make up part of the popularity are somehow in a state of "false consciousness", and according to Hall this passive view of the people is deeply "unsocialist"
      2. Hall then asks, "can we get around this problem without dropping the inevitable and necessary attention to the manipulative aspect of a great deal of commercial popular culture?"
    2. The next definition is descriptive. "all those things that "the people" do or have done" (234). This definition aligns with an anthropological view of culture. Hall also takes issue with this definition.
      1. it is too descriptive and everything that people do can fall into this definition of popular.
      2. From what is could understand what Hall wants to distinguish between the popular that belongs to the elite and what sits in the margins
    3. the definition he settles on is "the activities which have their roots in the social and material conditions of particular classes; which have been embodied in popular  traditions and practices (235).
    Thoughts and Questions

    First, after Hall settles on his definition of popular how then are we to differentiate between culture vs recreation (229)? Second, after Hall discusses his definition for popular, he says "It looks at the process by which  these relations of dominance and subordination are articulated" (235). How do words like "process" and "play" inform the way we understand Hall's methods/approaches? How is performance or embodied practice at play here?

    Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry"

    Response

    Thesis/Main Idea

    Adorno and Horkheimer are meditating on "a vision of society that has lost its capacity to nourish freedom and individuality--as well as the ability to represent the real conditions of existence" (405).

    • The text states right in the beginning that all media is the same and it is merely reproduced over and over again.
    • They critique the "technological explanation" which suggests that because millions of people are a part of this culture industry it "inevitably" would become automated because producers use "identical goods" to serve "identical needs." Their response is that the technological rationale is domination

    While I might not have understood everything that was happening in the Adorno and Horkheimer piece I used a reading strategy that helped not get so distracted. In the second half of the piece they always come back to the phrase "(In) the culture industry..."
    • 411 - "In the culture industry the notion of genuine style..."
    • 412 - "In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes..."
    • 412 - "The culture industry perpetually cheats it consumers of what is perpetually promises."
    I would love to hear from folks some examples of what they think Adorno Horkheimer would consider products of the culture industry." While I do agree that some things are constantly reproduced in what seems like an endless cycle, I do think there is something a little unsettling about how totalizing their argument is. If nothing is new, is there a way to find way to create something or will that "something new" ultimately be absorbed by the industry as they suggest? Is agency and individuality possible from this Adorno Horkheimer perspective?

    Media Example!

    "any trace of spontaneity is absorbed by talent scouts." This reminded me of a person who went viral on TikTok and now works for PBS! 




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