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Unlike the Frankfurt school that highlights the governing properties of culture, Hall focuses on the taken for granted aspect of communication -- the audience. The audience interprets codes that may contain different meanings from the ones sent from the producers. Moreover, the distortions and misunderstandings are situated in the "structural differences of relation and position … Continue reading Encoding, Decoding and Representation

As someone not particularly well acquainted with the romance novel (especially the 1980s romance novel) I was intrigued by Radway's article on women who read romances, as well as the implications and interconnections between genre and audience. What I understand to be one of the appeals of the romance in this study is how similar … Continue reading Reading Romance

Most contemporary cultural anthropologists would be loath to tell you that we study ‘culture’. This aversion to ‘culture’ is a relatively new disposition in the discipline; it resulted from a series of debates and public disavowals that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s. While there is by no means a consensus that ‘culture … Continue reading — Meanwhile in Cultural Anthropology — Culture is Cancelled

The two excerpts assigned from Whitney Phillips’ book This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things were funny, shocking, upsetting, and insightful. One grappled with some loose characteristics of the online troll and trolling behavior; one reflects on how to conduct research on a phenomenon where our “subjects” are anonymous and deceptive (it is challenging … Continue reading Phillips: Labour and Play

On the topic of interactivity, I have been reflecting about the concept of Bandersnatch and the particular message that its producers encoded. Even though Bandersnatch was the first Netflix interactive film, it is definitely not the first film that tried interactivity, and this format of "pick a choice and change the storyline" has been a … Continue reading Interactive Films and the Semblance of Free Will

Since class on Wednesday, I’ve been thinking and reading more about Hall’s conception of encoding and decoding. In particular, I was finding it difficult to articulate the distinction between these terms and those that I’m more familiar with in the literary studies field: intention and interpretation.  Authorial intention is often seen as difficult to access … Continue reading Encoding and intention

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 … Continue reading Decoding Meaning in Medieval Motets

As we discussed briefly in class, Williams suggests that television turns the conversation into a medium unto itself. I‘d like to chew through this a little bit here. Though Williams derides the sub-genre of the talkshow as comprised of “contrived“ conversation, he‘s generally hopeful:  There are times in other kinds of discussions when a new … Continue reading Conversation as medium and the geometry of desire

In the first chapter of Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige argues that subcultures use style as a means of resistance against societal norms and expectations. Already-coded materials are reappropriated from mainstream culture to create an often fragmentary and contradictory set of ever-evolving practices (gestures, clothing, etc.). These practices constantly change because they are … Continue reading Style and Genre?

In class Wednesday we touched on Stuart Hall's somewhat cautious critique of the institutionalization of Cultural Studies. Hall writes: "Some time ago, looking at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken American literary studies, in its formalist mode, I tried to distinguish the extremely important theoretical … Continue reading Hall and the narrative of the “deconstructive deluge”