Encoding, Decoding
I wonder, what would Stuart Hall say about poetry? Is poetry simply a code among others within the cultural object we call “a poem,” or is there something deeper happening in the way poems elicit, shuffle, and resist normative coding by their iffy semantic construction? Poetry, seen as a genre, seems to be full of cultural objects for which meaningful discourse is difficult to decode—or to put it another way, decoding is the entire work (and unwork) of reading the poem.
Deconstructing the Popular
I see in this essay a vital tool for thinking through the process of proletarianization—that is, not just the transformation of the proletariat/the popular in the context of reform vs. tradition, but the transformation which occurs when more and more people—people with their own cultures and notions of not being ‘of the masses’—are nonetheless captured by the system of capitalist dominance and, behind their ideological blindness, taken advantage of just like the rest of us. In this way, can we think of the influx of ‘desk worker’ shows like The Office, Big Bang Theory, and others, as an expression of the repression-like difficulty people have in identifying as proletarian? Does the satire inherent in such shows, in some way, conceal a deeper resentment?
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