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The Popular_Abby Escatel

This week we read about what constitutes popular culture and the various processes involved in meaning making/reception. 

In Hall's "encoding/decoding" essay, we are offered a breakdown of the communicative events that encompass the productions and consumption of mass produced messaging (specifically with television). Hall unpacks the various levels of meaning and how those meanings are often overdetermined by historical and contextual "complex structures of dominance." He attempts to delink the naturalization of codification between encoding/decoding, by highlighting the interconnected layers of meanings, a process that begins at the level of language, between sign and signifier. He states, "There is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code." In unpacking the struggle over meaning, that is the slippage between connotation and denotative meaning, he highlights the relationship between dominant hegemonic (ideally dominant encoded) messages and oppositional codes. How is the work of cultural studies invested in transgressing the hegemonic/dominant code? Is cultural studies a practice of oppositional decoding? What's at stake in this critical cultural project? 

In Hall's "What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture" he details his discontent with postmodernism's tendency to ignore/underplay racialized differences. He alludes to the "rupture of primitivism" and postmodernism's erasure as a "difference that may not make a difference." Alternatively he declares, "For we cannot forget how cultural life, above all in the West, but elsewhere as well, has been transformed in our lifetimes by the voicing of the margins." (470) He points to the struggle over cultural hegemony and finds hope in "cultural strategies that can make a difference, that's what I'm interested in--those that can make a difference and can shift the dispositions of power." (471) In contrast to high culture, or I would add the textual, what kinds of cultural production does this argument open up for us (i.e. music, poetry)? What does it mean to seek out alternative traditions and how do we remain cognizant of commodification of black (and ethnic) cultural forms? 

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