“Wrestling with the Angels”: Stuart Hall's Theory and Method

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall made multiple and significant methodological and theoretical contributions during the years he directed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This essay highlights, critiques, and shows the continuing value and relevance of two works. Hall's (1975) Introduction to Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935-1965 is an excellent example of an early methodological intervention by Hall. It remains a highly useful manual for discourse analysis. Hall's pioneering 4-part model of encoding and decoding is used to illustrate a major theoretical intervention. Hall wrote “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” in 1973 for students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The 1980 version is shorter and its politics somewhat tamed but even so it justifiably inspired considerable work on the articulation of producer and audience work.

KEYTERMS:

• Cultural studies
• encoding and decoding
• textual analysis
• oppositional readings

Notes

1. The introduction is available online, including at http://www.brown.uk.com/brownlibrary/SMITH.htm. Because quotes are from this version, page numbers are not used here.

2. A few of these came in meta-methodological articles, such as Fürsich's (2009) defense of textual analyses: she says studying underlying ideological and cultural assumptions “involves a prolonged engagement (‘the long preliminary soak’)” (p. 240).

3. Notably, also in 1975 James Carey's more elaborate comparison of transmission and ritual approaches first appeared in Communication.

4. Failure to consider alternative theories and interpretations is, in my view, the most common error in textual analysis.

5. Hall borrowed the term sedimentation from Alfred Schutz, and then Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality (1966).

6. Asking editors about this is futile, Hall added, because journalists are unlikely to recognize such assumptions, just as other individuals seldom recognize their own psyches.

7. These came together in Morley and Brunsdon's The Nationwide Television Studies (1999).

8. Barbie Zelizer's (2004) frequent references to Hall and E/D are another kind of evidence of his importance.

9. Much of the U.S. audience work focuses on popular culture. A reviewer for this essay put it nicely: “Certainly these incorporated political issues, but they often lost the focus on ideology and activism that Hall and the CCCS group always maintained.”