Week 7 Questions (Crossley)

 Encoding and Decoding

Hall suggests, "we must recognize that the discursive form of the message has a privileged position in the communicative exchange..., and that the moments of 'encoding' and 'decoding', though only 'relatively autonomous' in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments." (Hall, 91) How can we create the meaning we want to convey in the larger discourse? I mean, if we need meaning to create consumption, how do we steer the ship, so to speak in the direction we want it to move? How do we take back that power or are we powerless against the hegemonic state?

What is this 'black' in Black Popular Culture

"The moment the signifier 'black' is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct. In addition, as always happens when we naturalize historical categories (think about gender and sexuality), we fix that signifier outside of history, outside of the change, outside of political intervention" (Hall, 472) 

Not a question but an observation....  this is especially poignant considering the erasure of DEI and all its implications with this new administration. The idea translates well into understanding how the naturalization of categories such as race, sex, or gender in our immediate vicinity, reduces human beings to that either/or category, disallowing the grey space in which much of the world lives.  Such a tactic denies authenticity to those who live in-between two extreme spaces.  Naturalization seems to come naturally until we remind ourselves of the fluidity of humanity and that occupied spaces are not right vs. wrong but a spectrum of existence.