Cultural Studies: Chapter 27

Since one of Hall's states aims is to unmask the power imbalances within society, he says the cultural studies approach is valid if it

"deconstructs" the current structure of a media research establishment that fails to deal with ideology

The fact that the media present a preferred interpretation of human events is no reason to assume that the audience will correctly

"take in" the offered ideology

Hall outlines three decoding options

(1) operating inside the dominant code - The media produce the message; the masses consume it. The audience reading coincides with the preferred reading. (2) Applying a negotiable code - The audience assimilates the leading ideology in general but opposes its application in specific cases. (3) Substituting an oppositional code - The audience sees through the establish- ment bias in the media presentation and mounts an organized effort to demythologize the news.

Cultural studies

A neo-Marxist critique that sets forth the position that mass media manufacture consent for dominant ideologies.

Hall's "optimism of the will"

Hall is determined to do everything he can to expose and alter the media's structuring of reality

Hall's "pessimism of the intellect"

Hall's belief that the powerless can't change the system with all the channels of mass communication in the unwitting service of the dominant ideology

Type of theory and tradition

Interpretive theory that follows the critical tradition

Stuart Hall

Jamaican-born emeritus professor of sociology at the Open University in the U.K. He attacks "mainstream" communication research that is empirical, quantitative, and narrowly focused on discovering cause-and-effect relationships. He doubts social scientists' ability to find useful answers to important questions about media influence.

Stuart Hall owes an intellectual debt to

Karl Marx. Marxism is at root a theory of economics and power. The Marxist golden rule suggests that he who has the gold, rules.

Instead, Hall adopts a

Marxism without guarantees. He realizes that his theory is not pure, but he'd rather be "right but not rigorous" than "rigorous but wrong"

Economic determinism

The belief that human behavior and relationships are ultimately caused by differences in financial resources and the disparity in power that those gaps create.

Democratic pluralism

The myth that society is held together by common norms such as equal opportunity, respect for diversity, one person-one vote, individual rights, and rule of law.

Discursive formation

The process by which unquestioned and seemingly natural ways of interpreting the world become ideologies.

Articulate

The process of speaking out on oppression and linking that subjugation with media representations; the work of cultural studies.

Hall emphasizes that media hegemony is not

a conscious plot, it's not overtly coercive, and its effects are not total

Hall suggests that hegemonic encoding occurs

all the time, though it's not a conscious plot

Winslow says a primary goal of ideological scholarship is to

bring comfort to the afflicted and [to] afflict the comfortable by questioning taken-for-granted assumptions, giving voice to the voiceless, and bringing in those on the margins of society.

Hall believes that the consent-making function of the mass media is to

convince readers and viewers that they share the same interests as those who hold the reins of power

Within the U.S., the vast majority of information we receive is produced and distributed by

corporations. Hall believes that corporate control of such influential information sources prevents many stories from being told.

The usual finding that media messages have little effect celebrates the political claim that

democracy works

Hall says people learn what signs mean through

discourse - through communication and culture. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings between the members of a society or group. To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world in ways that will be understood by each other.

Hall believes the mass media maintain the

dominance of those already in positions of power. Conversely, the media exploit the poor and powerless. He charges that the field of communication continues to be "stubbornly sociologically innocent." He is "deeply suspicious of and hostile to empirical work that has no ideas because that simply means that it does not know the ideas it has.

Hall doesn't subscribe to the hard-line brand of

economic determinism. He thinks that's too simple. He found that his physical appearance was often as important as his economic class in the way people reacted to him.

Hall believes the purpose of theory and research is to

empower people who live on the margins of society, people who have little say in the direction of their lives and who are scrambling to survive

Hall holds out the possibility that the powerless may be

equally obstinate (stubborn) by resisting the dominant ideology and translating the message in a way that's more congenial to their own interests

Discourse

frameworks of interpretation

Hall's most positive contribution to mass communication study is his constant reminder that it's

futile (useless) to talk about meaning without considering power at the same time

Hall draws upon Antonio Gramsci's concept of

hegemony to explain why the revolution Marx predicted hasn't occurred in any industrial society

Hall wants to

liberate people from an unknowing acquiescence to the dominant ideology of the culture. He places less emphasis on rationality and more emphasis on resistance. For him, the truth of cultural studies is established by its ability to raise our consciousness of the media's role in preserving the status quo

Critique

many women decried his relative silence on their plight as equal victims of the hegemony he railed against. The most often hear criticism of Hall's work is that he doesn't offer specific remedies for the problems he identifies.

Hall believes that mainstream mass communication research in the U.S. serves the

myth of democratic pluralism

Consistent with Marxist theory, he also insists that communication scholarship should examine

power relations and social structures

The broadcast and print media present a variety of ideas, but then they tend to

prop up the status quo by privileging the already-accepted interpretation of reality. The result is that the role of mass media turns out to be "production of consent" rather than a "reflection of consensus" that already exists

Luke Winslow claims that the representation of ordinary people on

reality TV offers its viewer more explicit guidelines for living than other television genres

Hall has worked to move the study of communication away from

relationship development, influence, media effects, and so on. He believes we should be studying the unifying atmosphere in which they all occur and from which they emanate - human culture.

Hall says that it is not enough that we

simply recognize that meaning is created in discourse. We must also examine the sources of that discourse, especially the originators or "speakers" of it.

Hall believes that typical research on individual voting behavior, brand loyalty, or response to dramatic violence fails to uncover the

struggle for power that the media mask. He thinks it's a mistake to treat communication as a separate academic discipline. Academic isolation tends to separate messages from the culture they inhabit. Therefore, Hall refers to his work as cultural studies rather than media studies

The ideological fight is a

struggle to capture language. Hall sees those on the margins of society doing semantic battle on a media playing field that will never be quite level

Hall believes the mass media provide

the guiding myths that shape our perception of the world and serve as important instruments of social control

Hall defines ideologies as

the mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the representation— which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works. Most of us are unaware of our ideologies and the tremendous impact they can have on our lives

Culture industries

the producers of culture; TV, radio, music, film, fashion, magazines, newspapers, etc.

In a capitalistic society,

the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Great wealth comes to the privileged few who did little to create it.

Hegemony

the subtle sway of society's haves over its have nots

Hall states that the primary function of discourse is

to make meaning

Hall and scholars who follow his lead wish to place the academic spotlight directly on the

ways media representations of culture reproduce social inequalities and keep the average person more or less powerless to do anything but operate within a corporatized, commodified world

The ultimate issue for cultural studies is not

what information is presented by whose information it is