Encoding and decoding in the television discourse

Two themes have been cited for this Colloquy: the highly focussed theme concerning the nature of the ‘televisual language’, and the very general and diffused concern with ‘cultural policies and programmes’. At first sight, these concerns seem to lead in opposite directions: the first towards formal, the second towards societal and policy questions. My aim, however, is to try to hold both concerns within a single framework. My purpose is to suggest that, in the analysis of culture, the inter-connection between societal structures and processes and formal or symbolic structures is absolutely pivotal. I propose to organize my reflections around the question of the encoding/decoding moments in the communicative process: and, from this base, to argue that, in societies like ours, communication between the production elites in broadcasting and their audiences is necessarily a form of ‘systematically distorted communication’. This argument then has a direct bearing on ‘cultural policies’, especially those policies of education, etc which might be directed towards ‘helping the audience to receive the television communication better, more effectively’. I therefore want, for the moment, to retain a base in the semiotic/linguistic approach to ‘televisual language’: to suggest, however, that this perspective properly intersects, on one side, with social and economic structures, on the other side with what Umberto Eco has recently called ‘the logic of cultures’.1 This means that, though I shall adopt a semiotic perspective, I do not regard this as indexing a closed formal concern with the immanent organization of the television discourse alone. It must also include a concern with the ‘social relations’ of the communicative process, and especially with the various kinds of ‘competences’ (at the production and receiving end) in the use of that language.2