Hall’s work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the socio-cultural production more of “consent” and “coercion”.) For Hall, culture was not something to simply appreciate or study, but a “critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled”.[47]

Hall became one of the main proponents of reception theory, and developed the theory of encoding and decoding. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text—social control. Crime statistics, in Hall’s view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to “police the crisis”. The media play a central role in the “social production of news” in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.[48]

In his 2006 essay “Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement”, Hall also interrogates questions of historical memory and visuality in relation to photography as a colonial technology. According to Hall, understanding and writing about the history of black migration and settlement in Britain during the postwar era requires a careful and critical examination of the limited historical archive, and photographic evidence proves itself invaluable. However, photographic images are often perceived as more objective than other representations, which is dangerous. In his view, one must critically examine who produced these images, what purpose they serve, and how they further their agenda (e.g., what has been deliberately included and excluded in the frame). For example, in the context of postwar Britain, photographic images such as those displayed in the Picture Post article “Thirty Thousand Colour Problems” construct black migration, blackness in Britain, as “the problem”.[49] They construct miscegenation as “the centre of the problem”, as “the problem of the problem”, as “the core issue”.[49]

Hall’s political influence extended to the Labour Party, perhaps related to the influential articles he wrote for the CPGB’s theoretical journal Marxism Today (MT) that challenged the left’s views of markets and general organizational and political conservatism. This discourse had a profound impact on the Labour Party under both Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, although Hall later decried New Labour as operating on “terrain defined by Thatcherism”.[39]

Encoding and Decoding Model

Main Article: Reception Theory

Hall presented his encoding and decoding philosophy in various publications and at several oral events across his career. The first was in “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973), a paper he wrote for the Council of Europe Colloquy on “Training in the Critical Readings of Television Language” organized by the Council and the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester. It was produced for students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Paddy Scannell explains: “largely accounts for the provisional feel of the text and its ‘incompleteness'”.[50] In 1974 the paper was presented at a symposium on Broadcasters and the Audience in Venice. Hall also presented his encoding and decoding model in “Encoding/Decoding” in Culture, Media, Language in 1980. The time difference between Hall’s first publication on encoding and decoding in 1973 and his 1980 publication is highlighted by several critics. Of particular note is Hall’s transition from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to the Open University.[50]

Hall had a major influence on cultural studies, and many of the terms his texts set forth continue to be used in the field. His 1973 text is viewed as a turning point in Hall’s research toward structuralism and provides insight into some of the main theoretical developments he explored at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Hall takes a semiotic approach and builds on the work of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco.[51] The essay takes up and challenges long held assumptions about how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication.[52] “The ‘object’ of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse.”[53]

According to Hall, a message “must be perceived as meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded” before it has an “effect”, a “use”, or satisfies a “need”.[54] There are four codes of the encoding/decoding model of communication. The first way of encoding is the dominant (i.e. hegemonic) code. This is the code the encoder expects the decoder to recognize and decode. “When the viewer takes the connoted meaning … full and straight … and decodes the message in terms of the reference-code in which it has been coded, … [it operates] inside the dominant code.”[55] The second way of encoding is the professional code. It operates in tandem with the dominant code. “It serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketing the hegemonic quality, and operating with professional codings, which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and presentational values, televisual quality, ‘professionalism’ etc.”[55] The third way of encoding is the negotiated code. “It acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground-rules, it operates with ‘exceptions’ to the rule.”[56] The fourth way of encoding is the oppositional code, also known as the globally contrary code. “It is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way.”[57] “Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), or satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded.”[54]

For example, a documentary film on asylum seekers that aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight does not guarantee that audiences will feel sympathetic. Despite being realistic and recounting facts, the documentary must still communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of TV) that simultaneously distorts the producers’ intentions and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience.[52]

Distortion is built into the system, rather than being a “failure” of the producer or viewer. There is a “lack of fit”, Hall argues, “between the two sides in the communicative exchange”—that is, between the moment of the production of the message (“encoding”) and the moment of its reception (“decoding”).[52] In “Encoding/decoding”, Hall suggests media messages accrue common-sense status in part through their performative nature. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of “9/11” (as an example; there are others like it), a culturally specific interpretation becomes not only plausible and universal but elevated to “common sense”.[52]

Views on Cultural Identity and the African Diaspora

In his influential 1996 essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, Hall presents two different definitions of cultural identity.

In the first definition, cultural identity is “a sort of collective ‘one true self’ … which many people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.”[58] In this view, cultural identity provides a “stable, unchanging and continuous frame of reference and meaning” through the ebb and flow of historical change.[58] This allows the tracing back the origins of descendants and reflecting on the historical experiences of ancestors as a shared truth.[59] Therefore, blacks living in the diaspora need only “unearth” their African past to discover their true cultural identity.[59] While Hall appreciates the good effects this first view of cultural identity has had in the postcolonial world, he proposes a second definition of cultural identity that he views as superior.

Hall’s second definition of cultural identity “recognizes that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather – since history has intervened – ‘what we have become’.”[60] In this view, cultural identity is not a fixed essence rooted in the past. Instead, cultural identities “undergo constant transformation” throughout history as they are “subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power”.[60] Thus Hall defines cultural identities as “the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.”[60] This view of cultural identity was more challenging than the previous due to its dive into deep differences, but nonetheless it showed the mixture of the African diaspora. In other words, for Hall cultural identity is “not an essence but a positioning”.[61]

Presences

Hall describes Caribbean identity in terms of three distinct “presences”: the African, the European, and the American.[62] Taking the terms from Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, he describes the three presences: “Présence Africaine”, “Présence Européenne”, and “Présence Americaine”.[62] “Présence Africaine” is the “unspeakable ‘presence’ in Caribbean culture”.[62] According to Hall, the African presence, though repressed by slavery and colonialism, is in fact hiding in plain sight in every aspect of Caribbean society and culture, including language, religion, the arts, and music. For many black people living in the diaspora, Africa becomes an “imagined community” to which they feel a sense of belonging.[59]

However, Hall points out, there is no going back to the Africa that existed before slavery, because Africa too has changed. Secondly, Hall describes the European presence in Caribbean cultural identity as the legacy of colonialism, racism, power and exclusion. Unlike the “Présence Africaine”, the European presence is not unspoken even though many would like to be separated from the history of the oppressor. But Hall argues that Caribbeans and diasporic peoples must acknowledge how the European presence has also become an inextricable part of their own identities.[59] Lastly, Hall describes the American presence as the “ground, place, territory” where people and cultures from around the world collided.[63] It is, as Hall puts it, “where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West”, and also where the displacement of the natives occurred.[63]

Diasporic Identity

Because diasporic cultural identity in the Caribbean and throughout the world is a mixture of all these different presences, Hall advocated a “conception of ‘identity’ that lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity”.[64] According to Hall, black people living in diaspora are constantly reinventing themselves and their identities by mixing, hybridizing, and “creolizing” influences from Africa, Europe, and the rest of the world in their everyday lives and cultural practices.[65] Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all cultural identity for diasporic people, but rather a multiplicity of different cultural identities that share both important similarities and important differences, all of which should be respected.[59]

Difference and Difference

In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, Hall sheds light on the topic of difference within black identity. He first acknowledges the oneness in the black diaspora and how this unity is at the core of blackness and the black experience. He expresses how this has a unifying effect on the diaspora, giving way to movements such as negritude and the pan-African political project. Hall also acknowledges the deep-rooted “difference” within the diaspora as well. This difference was created by destructive nature of the transatlantic slave trade and the resulting generations of slavery. He describes this difference as what constitutes “what we really are”, or the true nature of the diaspora.[59] The duality of such an identity, that expresses deep unity but clear uniqueness and internal distinctness provokes a question out of Hall: “How, then, to describe this play of ‘difference’ within identity?”[66] Hall’s answer is “Différance”. The use of the “a” in the word unsettles us from our initial and common interpretation of it, and was originally introduced by Jacques Derrida. This modification of the word difference conveys the separation between spatial and temporal difference, and more adequately encapsulates the nuances of the diaspora.