Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

One of my academic heroes, media theorist Stuart Hall died Monday at the age of 82. He was diabetic and had been ill for some time. Hall was born in Jamaica, came to England in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar, and stayed on as the leader of the Cultural Studies movement. From 1964-1979, he was the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. He taught at the Open University from 1979 until his retirement in 1997. He was the founding editor of the New Left Review.

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Generally speaking, cultural studies is about how people are taught to categorize one another by nationality, class, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Hall was one of the first scholars to take popular culture seriously. We do not perceive the world directly, but through the lens of media representations. A lot of what seems to us to be “common sense” is actually the opinions and perspectives of our culture transmitted through the media. The “common sense” viewpoint is usually motivated by social class interests that attempt to manipulate our consciousness for ideological reasons. Cultures conceal their ideologies, however, behind a veil of “nature,” claiming that their own cultural practices are “natural” and everyone else's is “unnatural.” (“Of course” Santa Claus is a White man.)

Hall originated the encoding-decoding model. This model proposes that the mass media audience is not passive, but actively participates in understanding and interpreting the text. Messages are constructed (encoded) by media producers and interpreted (decoded) by audiences. Since every media text is polysemic, or many-layered, there is considerable variability in how a message can be decoded. Hall divides readings of a text into three broad categories. Think, for example, of a television commercial.

1. The preferred, dominant or hegemonic reading is one in which the audience fully accepts the producer's message. The reader accepts the dominant ideology and “buys” the product.
2. An oppositional or resistant reading is one in which the reader uses an alternative frame of reference to decode the message in a totally contrary way. The reader challenges the dominant ideology, for example, by thinking that all advertisements are lies.
3. A negotiated reading is a mixture of acceptance and rejection of the preferred meaning that was encoded in the text.

A key concept in Hall's theory is representation. The media do not reflect the real world, they represent (or “re-present”) it. Prior to Hall, the older view was that media representations can be compared to reality, and any discrepancy between the two constitutes media bias. But Hall questioned whether politically-charged events have any reality independent of the media. What is the “true meaning” of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Both sides watch the same newscast and see it as biased against them. Hall would argue that there is no fixed meaning of the conflict, and no way of reaching consensus on what would be an unbiased representation.

Hall's theory was that the true meaning of an object or event is determined largely by how it is representated, or as he says, the representations are constitutive of the event. Media practices serve to define reality for us. The mass media are owned and controlled by a small number of giant corporations. The people who direct these corporations attempt to fix meaning for their own ends and interests. Collectively, our representations of the external world constitute ideology—the set of beliefs and values by which people make sense of the world they live in. The dominant ideology is the version of events used by the ruling class to maintain or improve their social position, which is, of course, the representation of the world presented by the corporate media.

Examples are easy to find. What the media define as realistic public policy is actually only a small segment of what is possible, a segment defined by the space between our center-right political party (called “Democrats”) and our far right party (“Republicans.”) Social class differences, when discussed at all, are presented as justified by the superior abilities and effort of the rich. Social problems such as crime and poverty are seen as caused by personal defects of the individual, rather than by situations or structural arrangements. Personal problems are “solved” through purchase of a consumer product, as when loneliness is cured by mouthwash. Entertainment is used as a distraction from depressing life circumstances. A person with no personal power can still get satisfaction by watching the Steelers beat the crap out of their opponent on a Sunday afternoon.

Not surprisingly, Hall was particularly interested in how Black people are represented in the media, and wrote about the culural, political and economic interests that are served by creating irrational fear of young Black men, i.e., the “prison-industrial complex.” Although people can always talk back to the media, Hall saw media representations as a highly effective way of controlling thoughts and behavior, often leading to a false consciousness in which people vote in ways that are contrary to their self-interest.

Representation and the Media is a 55-min. video about Hall's theories that is available in four parts on You Tube. However, poor picture quality makes it difficult to watch. Here is a trailer for a more recent video about Hall, not available on the internet.

You might be interested in this brief 2012 interview segment in which he was asked to evaluate Obama's presidency.

You may also be interested in reading:

Motivated Reasoning

The Job Killers, Part 1

Breathing While Black