Hall, Stuart

Stuart Hall (1932–) is a British cultural theorist, critic, and political strategist whose work centers on intersections between culture, society, and power and the resultant meanings within texts that members of a culture consider as common sense. Hall is one of the most influential theorists responsible for the definition and institutionalization of cultural studies as a separate academic discipline and one of the key figures of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, England, where work in this area was pioneered notably during the 1970s. Hall argues that cultural forms, articulated as texts in mass-media artifacts, convey a preferred or dominant meaning, notably regarding representations of race, culture, ethnicity, and, related to these, gender. Hall sees the technological and social changes of the late 20th century combined with the development of global information and media systems as making even more important the study of their effects on cultural difference and identity.

For Hall, there is no separation between power, culture, and the self. Meanings conveyed by advertisements, film, and television are encoded by their producers as a discourse based on assumptions of what a culture considers important and correct. How these meanings become inculcated into the media products consumed by audiences serves as the foundation for Hall's encoding/decoding model of the communication process, his treatment of cultural hegemony as a process whereby dominant viewpoints become so, and the underlying concept of self versus the “Other” as the basis for stereotyping.

In Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Hall proposes that the mass communication process reflected in television production—and which defines the elements of cultural studies—involves the creation of a message (encoding), which he terms a sign-vehicle, and the reception of that message by audience members (decoding). Borrowing from past theorists, Hall notes that the audience serves as both the source and the receiver of a message, because the creators of that message already are members of the same culture as those they are targeting; for shared meaning to occur, the “cultural circuit” must be completed so that the meaning encoded by a message sender is decoded correctly by the receiver. In this sense, the dominant, or “preferred,” meaning of a signifying element (either visual or linguistic) is that suggested by the encoder (who works within an institutional structure), although not the one necessarily always decoded by the receiver.

Hall's encoding/decoding model positions meaning—within cultural forms and artifacts—as a product of power and domination, of ideology, popular consciousness, and common sense. The latter two reflect hegemony, which Hall defines as the taken-for-granted knowledge of social structures. Rather than depending on a monolithic, permanent means of control by those in power, hegemony is grounded in a combination of force and consent and remains open to contradictory ideologies (or counter hegemony) and resistance. For Hall, cultural hegemony has to be actively won and secured; it does not result in pure victory or domination, but rather concerns the shifts in the balance of power in relations within [Page 158]a culture. Thus, within the cultural circuit, mass media tend to reproduce a society's ideological field and, in so doing, its structure of domination.

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