Vie En Societe

Hall begins by pointing out that traditionally, mass-communications research has

“conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop”

(128). This model has been criticized for its “linearity – sender/message/receiver – for its

concentration on the level of message exchange and for the absence of a structured

conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations” (128). Good

Marxist, or more accurately, good Structuralist Marxist that he is at this stage of his

career, Hall suggests that it is possible to conceptualise this process, rather, in an

Althusseran fashion, that is

in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of

linked but distinctive moments - production, circulation, distribution /

consumption, reproduction. This would be to think of the process as a

'complex structure in dominance', sustained through the articulation of

connected practices, each of which, however, retains its distinctiveness and

has its own specific modality, its own forms and conditions of existence.

(128)

Hall’s goal is to analyse what “distinguishes discursive ‘production’ from other types of

production in our society” (128).

The 'object' of the practices referred to above, Hall argues, is “meanings and

messages in the form of sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of

communication or language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain

of a discourse” (128). The apparatuses, social relations and practices of production which

comprise a social formation together inform, he argues, the precise form of the “symbolic

vehicles constituted within the rules of 'language'” (128) in this way. It is in this

“discursive form” (128) that the circulation of the 'product' (any message) takes place.

The process of signification thus requires “at the production end, its material instruments -

its 'means' - as well as its own sets of social (production) relations - the organization and

combination of practices within media apparatuses” (128). However, it is

in the discursive form that the circulation of the product takes place, as well

as its distribution to different audiences. Once accomplished, the discourse

must then be translated - transformed, again - into social practices if the

circuit is to be both completed and effective. If no 'meaning' is taken, there

can be no 'consumption'. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has

no effect. (128)

Hall warns that

while each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a

whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is

articulated. Since each has its specific modality and conditions of existence,

each can constitute its own break or interruption of the 'passage of forms' on

whose continuity the flow of effective production (that is, 'reproduction')

depends. (129)

Hall stresses that while the content of a message is important, it is vital to

“recognize that the discursive form of the message has a privileged position in the

communicative exchange (from the viewpoint of circulation), and that the moments of

'encoding' and 'decoding', though only 'relatively autonomous' in relation to the

communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments” (129). For this reason, a

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 02C 2

“'raw' historical event cannot, in that form, be ' transmitted” (129) by, say, a television

newscast for the simple reason that events can only be signified, in this example, “within

the aural-visual forms of the televisual discourse.

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