ABSTRACT
Prior to Stuart Hall’s Model of Encoding–Decoding, accounts of the encoding and decoding of media texts tended to be structured in accordance with a ‘transmission model’ of communication, whereby a sender transmits a message to a receiver who is viewed as interpreting the message largely as intended by its producer. In a clear nod to pioneering semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure’s turn of the twentieth-century notion of the ‘speech circuit’, and drawing from Marx’s discussion of commodity production, Hall produces a model that he calls the ‘circuit of communication’. The institution-societal relations of production must pass under the discursive rules of language for its product to be ‘realized’. This initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse and language are in dominance. The televisual sign is a complex one. It is itself constituted by the combination of two types of discourse, visual and aural.
