Although I am hesitant to engage in any sort of analysis that may be deemed anachronistic, I would like to use this space as an opportunity to explore the potential resonances of Stuart Hall’s process of encoding and decoding with the complicated relationship between the sacred and the secular in the collection and distribution of medieval motets (a common form of vocal music during the Middle Ages). I am often struck by homologies between pre- and post-modern thought, and Hall’s comments on the distinction between polysemy and pluralism struck a chord (pun intended) with a discussion in one of my music courses on the interconnectivity of the sacred and the secular in twelfth century vocal music.
The motet generally contains a tenor, often the lowest voice in the score, that draws verbatim from liturgical chants. Then, two or three voices layer on top, usually superimposing melodies from popular songs with lyrics referring to pastoral stock characters in the vernacular (most often, French). Around the twelfth century, the cult of Marian devotion became increasingly prevalent, and, consequently, so too did elaborate wordplay and musical allusions cross-references folk mythology and Biblical imagery. Should these works be read as sacred or secular? Did such a binary even exist for the imagined audience listening to these motets? Does the folk character Marion automatically equate to the Biblical Mary?
Unlike the iconic televisual sign, music is often considered to align with Pierce’s indexical sign. Both mediums, however, transmit messages through their respective semiotic systems that mediate reality (511). Music especially lends itself to issues of connotation and interpretation; its meaning making only exists at the associative level (512). Hall suggests that the struggle over meanings at the connotative level reflect the class struggle in language, and I cannot help but think to the sacred/secular power divide inherent in motet interpretation. Polysemy and pluralism, Hall notes, are not equivalent, but there does exist a dominant meaning that is performatively enforced (514). We cannot overlook that these morally ambiguous motets were transcribed by elite, literate clerics to be performed by an even smaller subset of musically literal clerics as mass entertainment and edification, which is emblematic of Hall’s dominant-hegemonic position (515).
Since this is a course on digital media, I hope I have not gone too far astray by considering the extremely low-tech medieval manuscript. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on other potential resonances between the pre- and post-modern technological innovation and cultural dissemination.
Politics of Media 
I think this comparison between music and television as semiotic systems is very provocative! I’m particularly interested in the notion that music as semiosis is a kind of indexical connotation. Hall notes in the Coding/Decoding essay that one of the most preoccupying aspects of television as medium has to do with its iconicity–the fact that the sign resembles the signified in some fundamental way. The filmic image’s iconicity, per Hall, lends itself to a ‘naturalization’ of the relationship between sign and signified, thereby collapsing the sign’s connotative potential into a naturalized denotation. Since it is precisely the connotative gap between code/decode, sign/signfied, that Hall sees as the space for a kind of ‘semio-politics’, the potential collapse of the connotative into naturalized, iconic resemblance is preoccupying. Music, on the other hand, if we are to take it as primarily indexical and connotative, represents a different possibility altogether! The comparison of the two media seems like it might reveal a lot about the advantages and limits of Hall’s theory.
More food for thought: I think that most Peircean semioticians would argue that what appear as a straight iconic/symbolic/indexical relationships are typically underwritten by further layers of iconic/symbolic,indexical relationships; e.g. the indexical relation between a number on a thermometer and the temperature of water is underwritten by the symbols of numbers. I wonder if maybe that space between different mutually-underwriting layers of signification might constitute what Hall might think of as another space for political intervention. It seems like your proposed comparative case might shed some light on that as well!
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