Stuart Hall the Discourse Must Then Be Translated
1
Communication Is Translation
(So Please Heed the Gap)
What you lot are reading is a translation. It began as a lesson in i of my classes, replete with slides, and now I have turned information technology into a volume affiliate.
No, that'due south not right. It began much earlier. My lesson reworked a keynote talk I gave at a conference, and my keynote reworked an opaque theoretical article I published in the International Journal of Communication . 1 And that article reworked Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model to see what it had to reveal about translation. (For that matter, so does this chapter.) And Hall's model reworked Marx's take on political economy in the Grundrisse . (And the Grundrisse reworked older versions of political economy, which reworked . . . which reworked . . . which reworked . . . )
In other words, there is no single point of origin. What you are reading is the result of one long series of transformations and substitutions: encoding/decoding substitutes for the Grundrisse ; my commodity substitutes for encoding/decoding; my keynote substitutes for my article; my lesson substitutes for my keynote; and at present, this chapter substitutes for my lesson. It is a translation. It could non be otherwise.
Information technology is no coincidence I'm describing it as a translation. My purpose hither is to demonstrate the strategy of the parallax view by asking what would happen if cultural studies scholars talked near translation. Or, more to the indicate, what would a theory of translation look like if it were grounded in the field of cultural studies? The answer I give is as performative as information technology is expository. That is, the logic that shapes my reply also applies to this chapter itself, in that it shapes its form. Like every other form of discourse, this chapter participates in an economy of substitution—of trading words, sentences, and ideas for other words, sentences, and ideas. When I speak of translation, that trading is what I mean, and in that respect, my opening examples are strategic: they show how translation works before I even say what I think it is. The examples I choose in the sections that follow are besides strategic: they illustrate a key relationship between signs by moving betwixt semiotic systems (for instance, between words and pictures or between formal and informal linguistic registers).
So what, then, is that relationship? What exactly is translation? To answer that question, I propose three axioms:
- To use a sign is to transform information technology.
- To transform a sign is to translate it.
- Communication is translation.
In the post-obit sections, I approach these axioms by providing two parallax views. I brainstorm past describing an early on model of advice—the sender-message-receiver model—developed by electrical engineers in the 1940s as a style to improve the telephone networks they were edifice. Then, to piece of work through these axioms, I peer at the sender-message-receiver model from a dissimilar bending, the one provided by Stuart Hall'southward "Encoding/Decoding." 2 It serves as the footing for a materialist approach to semiotics, which in turn provides the conceptual tools to take a new wait at "Encoding/Decoding" itself. The point is to pry open the act of speaking and responding to see how signs are transformed when nosotros use them. Taking my cues from Hall, whose essay has had a profound bear on on scholarly notions of politics, I cease by arguing that the transformation and substitution of signs opens up a space for a politics of invention, where we can rethink our relation to cultural others so that people we once feared tin can find their place in the communities we claim equally our own.
Sender-Bulletin-Receiver
Ane of the virtually influential models of communication adult from efforts by electrical engineers in the 1940s to discover ways to make telephones piece of work better. They were asking a technical question, namely how to overcome the noise that interfered with the transmission of information, particularly as telephone lines got longer and noise increased. They wanted to calculate the signal where signals were transmitted with maximum efficiency, only they had to balance efficiency with redundancy. The most efficient transmission would exist 1 where each element of a message is sent once, simply merely once. The problem is that the channels used for transmission introduce extraneous signals. If each chemical element is sent only in one case, the receiver has no way to know whether it has been corrupted considering at that place is no way to ostend that the message received is right. (The receiver would have to ask "Did yous say . . . ?" and and so repeat the message, thus sending it more than once.) Think of the children'south game of phone, where one person whispers a message to a second, who whispers it to a third, who whispers it to a fourth, and then on. 3 It'due south an efficient arrangement (each person whispers the message in one case), but the message the terminal person receives is always garbled. And since there is no feedback from ane person to the side by side, the last person cannot know for certain whether (or where) it is garbled until the first person tells anybody what she or he said.
One solution to this problem is to build in forms of redundancy, especially in the form of feedback, although doing then makes the transmission less efficient. Imagine once more our game of telephone. If the 2d person repeated the bulletin back to the first, making certain to get it exactly right, and and then the third person repeated information technology back to the second, and the quaternary to the third, and and then on, the message would probable be less garbled when information technology arrived, only information technology would have much longer for it to piece of work its way down the line.
To solve the problems they faced in the 1940s, engineers proposed the sender-bulletin-receiver model. Claude Shannon published the kickoff iteration in 1948, which Warren Weaver helped popularize in the years that followed. A transmitter, they said, transforms information into a message that can be sent through a aqueduct like a copper wire. The receiver so transforms the bulletin back into its original course. Or, to use Weaver'southward terms, "The function of the transmitter is to encode, and that of the receiver to decode, the bulletin" ( figure 4 ). 4 Just just as in the case above, no transmission is exact. At that place is always noise, and information technology takes feedback from the receiver to the transmitter to be confident the data is transmitted correctly, or at least that whatsoever abuse is kept to a minimum, as Shannon showed with a set of mathematical formulas for determining the optimal levels of efficiency and back-up.
Although this model has been influential in advice theory, it has drawbacks. The most important, from a cultural studies bespeak of view, is that the "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." 5 In other words, Shannon was concerned only with the reliable transmission of information, which for him could be any fix of symbols, whether they were imbued with meaning or not. He was not concerned with content, which could be "fsd jklrwiouv kldf sa" (a string of letters I produced by smashing my fingers on the keyboard) but as well as "To slumber, possibly to dream." In either case, the applied science problem remained the same. (Weaver, to be fair, did address the possibility of meaning in his efforts to popularize Shannon's model. "The formal diagram of a communication system," he wrote, "tin, in all likelihood, be extended to include the central issues of significant and effectiveness.") 6
Figure 4. Sender-message-receiver model developed by Shannon and Weaver showing the steps of message transmission. Adapted from Weaver (1949, p. 12–13).
The question of meaning would be Stuart Hall'south betoken of departure, the pin around which he would walk to encounter the sender-message-
receiver model from a new perspective.
Theoretical Foundations: A Materialist Arroyo to Semiotics
The axioms I propose in a higher place have two starting points: materialism (a philosophical opinion that grounds analysis in people'south lived experience) and semiotics (the study of how pregnant functions). vii The materialism comes, as mentioned in the introduction, from Stuart Hall'southward reaction to the sender-message-receiver model in his essay "Encoding and Decoding in the Goggle box Discourse," better known in its revised course, "Encoding/Decoding." Hall argues that television programs are only i moment in a circuit that links producers and viewers in a specific social context. The meaning with which they imbue a program is grounded in this context.
The encoding/decoding model, in fact, is an application of Marx's political economy, as laid out in his introduction to the Grundrisse . 8 Marx'due south insight was that production and consumption were not contained moments in the apportionment of commodities but were, on the contrary, mutually constitutive—one could not be without the other. On the ane manus, to requite an instance, the objects a cobbler produces go a pair of shoes in a meaningful sense only when someone puts them on her or his feet. In this way, the human activity of consumption is implicated in the human activity of production. On the other, the cobbler produces shoes in such a mode equally to influence how people habiliment them, by altering materials and styles to create a demand. In this way, production is implicated in the act of consumption.
Hall extends this analysis to television. He describes the moments of product and consumption—"encoding" and "decoding"—equally mutually constitutive. (Annotation the mutual linguistic communication with Shannon and Weaver.) Producers encode certain meanings into shows, but viewers do not necessary decode them every bit intended. Withal, the moments of product and consumption are linked in that producers anticipate viewers' reactions, and viewers translate shows in part based on their knowledge of producers. The shows themselves are complex signs that link producers and viewers, who too operate within a shared social context.
In short, production and consumption are linked in a human relationship of mutual dependence. Hall frames these forms of mutual influence equally a circuit, which he illustrates in figure 5 .
Note that I take adapted the figure Hall presents in the earlier version of his essay (from 1973), which differs from its better known counterpart (in "Encoding/Decoding" from 1980) in i of import way: it has an arrow that runs from the factors that influence decoding to those that influence encoding. In other words, information technology completes the excursion past making the influence of decoding on encoding explicit.
Figure 5. Encoding/decoding model past Hall showing the circuit of meaning generated in a television program. Analogy by Stuart Hall, "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse," CCCS Stencilled Occasional Papers 7 (1973, p.four).
Besides note the way Hall's diagram looks like the sender-bulletin-
receiver model, just all stretched out and twisted. Shannon and Weaver were concerned with how a aqueduct transmitted information. Hall is concerned with how a plan becomes a channel, or improve yet a medium, for transmitting meaning. Just he likewise draws the idea of transmission into question. Shannon and Weaver were concerned with the steps a transmitter took to encode information and the steps the receiver took to decode information technology. Hall breaks the moments of manual and reception downwards by looking at the factors that shape them, relative to people'south frameworks of noesis, the structures of product in which they are embedded, and the technical infrastructure bachelor to them. By peering at the sender-message-receiver model from a different angle, ane where meaning predominates, he helps us run across that Shannon and Weaver'south main question—how can nosotros transmit information with the least baloney?—is not the right question at all, at least non if nosotros are concerned with meanings that are contested.
Hall'due south attention to the factors that influence encoding and decoding, which all relate to the fabric weather condition of textual product and significant-making, is what makes his model materialist. Nevertheless, the psychological aspects of meaning—how programs evoke ideas for viewers—remain unclear. Hence my second starting point, the thought of a sign. Here I draw on American philosopher Charles Peirce, who says,
A sign . . . is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. Information technology addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more adult sign. That sign which information technology creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. ix
Consider my stick-figure heroes in figure 6 . The star spoken past Hero i (on the left) is the sign because information technology evokes something for Hero two (on the right). And the ideas information technology evokes for Hero 2 are also signs, equally they evoke however more ideas, which evoke more, and more, and more. (My paradigm cannot capture the full chain of associations.) This is what Peirce ways when he speaks of the interpretant. 10
Effigy 6. A sign used by Hero 1 evokes a serial of interpretants for Hero 2. Fatigued by the author.
It is useful to make a distinction here between the material and subjective aspects of the sign. On the one hand, at that place is the material side—the specific patterns of vibrating sound that hit our eardrums in the instance of a discussion, for instance, or the patterns of light and sound in the example of a television program, or Hero ane'south star. 11 On the other, there is the subjective side—what a speaker or producer hopes to evoke past using a given material sign (a word, a Goggle box program, etc.), and what that material sign evokes for a listener or viewer, as in the case of Hero 2'southward chain of associations. The subjective aspect of the sign consists in the cord of interpretants evoked by the cloth sign. 12
Axiom 1: To Utilize a Sign Is to Transform It
How does a materialist approach drawn from Marx'due south political economy and from 1970s-era reactions to a 1940s-era engineering science trouble relate to the thought of a sign made upwards of textile and subjective parts? As Hall demonstrates, the televisual sign links producers and viewers. Its meaning is a signal of negotiation betwixt them, which is shaped by their knowledge and expectations of each other. But this negotiation over meaning is not unique to tv set. V. N. Vološinov, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , argues that nosotros negotiate the meaning of every sign. He gives the example of a word:
A word presents itself not as an item of vocabulary but as a word that has been used in a wide variety of utterances by co-speaker A, co-speaker B, co-speaker C and and then on, and has been variously used in the speaker's own utterances. xiii
So when Hero 1 on the left uses a sign ( figure vii ), Hero 2 on the right responds past taking into account how Hero one used it ( effigy eight ). If Hero 2 uses information technology again, it is with the earlier exchange in listen, at least partially.
Simply we are more than than merely reactive: when we talk to people, we are besides predictive. As Mikhail Bakhtin points out:
When constructing my utterance, I attempt actively to determine this response [that is, the response of the person I am talking to]. Moreover, I try to act in accordance with the response I anticipate, then this anticipated response, in turn, exerts an active influence on my utterance (I parry objections that I foresee, I make all kinds of provisos, then forth). 14
Figure vii. Hero 1 asks Hero 2 a question. Drawn by the author.
Figure 8. Hero 2 answers the question posed past Hero ane, using Hero 1's word in a subtly inverse context. Drawn by the author.
In other words, just equally Idiot box producers (according to Hall) shape their programs in partial anticipation of what viewers will think, we shape our utterances (whatever grade they might take) in partial anticipation of how others will react. (And nosotros do and then in a given social context, to render to Hall's model.)
Thus our heroes continue to pass a give-and-take dorsum and forth, each time reacting to what the other has said and taking that reaction into account. Perhaps they have a discussion. Possibly Hero 2 is actually a jerk, or maybe only clumsy with Hero 1'due south feelings. Maybe Hero 2 is not really a hero at all ( figure 9 ). So Hero ane leaves, while Hero ii calls later Hero 1 in vain ( effigy 10 ).
Figure 9. Hero 1 responds to Hero 2, repeating the same word in a nevertheless-evolving context, and concludes that Hero ii is a jerk. Fatigued by the writer.
And, finally, Hero 2 is left to replay the scene, to figure out what went wrong. The sign means something for Hero 2 that it did non mean before. At the beginning of the conversation, it did not evoke regret or puzzlement, and now information technology does ( figure eleven ). This is what I hateful when I say "to use a sign is to transform it." The material aspect of a sign may remain the aforementioned over the course of an exchange, just the subjective aspect does not. And if the textile aspect is one side of a sign, and the subjective aspect the other, so the pair has changed. The sign—the pair together, as a unit—is different from what it was before. xv
Figure 10. Hero ane has had plenty and walks away. Hero 2 objects to Hero 1's determination most their commutation. Fatigued by the author.
Figure eleven. Now alone, Hero ii considers the exchange with Hero 1 and wonders what went wrong. Drawn by the author.
Axiom 2: To Transform a Sign Is to Translate It
And so nosotros arrive at my 2nd axiom: to transform a sign is to translate it.
Perhaps this axiom appears counterintuitive or based on a notion of translation that I take had to wrangle and contort. In fact, the opposite is true. What do I mean past translation ? Exactly what it means in a conventional sense—the substitution of one sign (or i set of signs) for another. We transform signs past using them: their subjective dimension changes because Hero 2 has to have into account the use by Hero 1, something Hero 1 did not have to do. Thus the transformed sign substitutes for the sign that came before. The change might be minor (in fact, nearly of the time it is), simply we can also imagine more dramatic cases, such as when Hero 1 tells Hero 2 something life-irresolute, and Hero two must brand sense of a new configuration of their symbolic universe. (By "symbolic universe" I hateful the ordered set of beliefs people take that shape how they make sense of objects and events.) Call up of Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back . 16 The sign father changes dramatically when he learns who Darth Vader really is.
Or think of how the sign translation has inverse for you since the starting time of this affiliate. As you think of questions you want to ask and points y'all want me to clarify, you are taking into business relationship what I accept said. The chain of associations—that is, the interpretants—the sign translation evokes for yous has grown. Perhaps not dramatically, but it is larger all the same. The subjective aspect of the sign has changed, which means the material/subjective pair equally a unit of measurement has changed. I have substituted a new use of the term for an older use. At the risk of existence as well clever, I would say I accept translated translation .
Axiom 3: Communication Is Translation
Here we arrive at my 3rd precept: "Advice is translation." In all truth, the first ii axioms grade a syllogism, from which the third derives. If nosotros utilize a sign, we transform information technology. If we transform a sign, nosotros interpret it. Therefore, if nosotros use a sign—that is, if we communicate—we translate it. In other words (what a revealing phrase—"in other words"), communication is translation.
In some ways, this assertion is not new. George Steiner, in his influential book Afterwards Babel , argues,
Any model of communication is at the same fourth dimension a model of translation, of a vertical or horizontal transfer of significance. No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no 2 localities use words and syntax to signify the same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings. 17
Paul Ricoeur, in On Translation , goes further. Because the sign I use never evokes the exact aforementioned affair for you as for me, we constantly misunderstand each other. We say what we have to say, but then nosotros also take to explain what we mean. Sometimes nosotros take to explain our explanation, until we are as satisfied as we can be that we have gotten our message through:
It is ever possible to say the same matter in another way. . . . That is why we have never ceased making ourselves clear, making ourselves clear with words and sentences, making ourselves clear to others who do not see things from the same angle as we do. xviii
Language is reflexive, and tant mieux —if we could not talk near what we mean, specially when we see that our point has non gotten through, communication would grind to a halt.
Notation, however, that Steiner and Ricoeur brand an assumption that I practice not. They presume there is an active agent, someone thinking about the significant of signs, in that they are explaining, "When I said X, what I really meant was . . . " In effect, they are translating Ten past "say[ing] the same affair in some other way." But if each use of a sign transforms it, and so there is no need for an agile agent. Transformation and translation accept place whether we retrieve nearly what signs mean or not. Hero i says "*" and Hero 2 adds that use to their series of interpretants, and so when Hero 2 says "*" it is not an identical sign ( figure 12 ).
Figure 12. The meaning of a word evolves as ii people converse, illustrating how translation takes the form of transformative exchange. Drawn past the writer.
A Politics of Invention
Why dwell on this seemingly pocket-size point? As Stuart Hall showed with television, the gap betwixt the producer's intended meaning and the meaning a prove evokes for a viewer is the condition of possibility for acts of resistance. Considering we are intelligent human beings, and because we take our own feel which differs from that of the people who produce television, we do not have to agree with what we see on TV. In fact, we can take what nosotros see and arrive at radically different—and every bit plausible—interpretations as we reconfigure meanings to lucifer with our experience and run into our expectations.
That idea of resistance leads me to a further ascertainment: the gap between signs is productive, something we can put to employ. We must (as the London Surreptitious reminds us) heed the gap. How do we do that? That question is the point of this volume, which approaches it as an empirical question: how have people put that gap to use? How accept they used information technology to persuade others to run into the world differently? These questions get to the center of what rhetoricians, drawing on Aristotle, draw as invention (or inventio in Latin), by which they mean the generation of arguments. 19 It is one of five steps in the process of crafting a persuasive oral communication, the other four of which include arranging arguments ( dispositio in Latin), matching them stylistically to the audience ( elocutio ), remembering them ( memoria ), and finally delivering them effectively ( pronuntiatio ). (We volition explore Aristotle'south notion of invention in more depth in chapter 3 .)
Aristotle says that rhetoric is the art of persuasion, or "the kinesthesia of observing in whatever given case the available means of persuasion," and rhetorical invention is the ability to find the right words in a item context. 20 In this sense, persuasion is contingent on circumstances, which change from one state of affairs to the next. It is grounded in the moment of speaking and therefore not knowable in advance. It is a thing of mastering different tools that help you think on your toes.
My contention is that the gap between a speaker'southward sign and a listener'southward sign is a space where we can do a specific type of invention. Cultural translation, as a number of people have observed, has a certain utopian potential. 21 For instance, it opens upward the possibility for acts of hospitality past allowing us to speak against the hegemonic norms of identity that prevent people who appear dissimilar or foreign from joining "our" group, whichever it is. Information technology is a affair of identifying the "available ways of persuasion." This act is fundamentally artistic, and it has important ethical implications.
Permit me illustrate with an example, which comes from Bertolt Brecht, past style of translation studies scholars Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny. 22 In his poem "The Democratic Judge," Brecht describes an Italian immigrant to the United States who is applying for citizenship, although he does non speak English language. The man stands before the judge, and the guess asks him questions about the United States every bit part of a citizenship test. "What is the eighth amendment?" the judge asks. "1492," he answers because he does not empathize.
The setting of the exchange is symbolically important. The applicant is asking for admission into a new national customs. It is the culmination of a long procedure of asking—from immigration, to integration (in different senses, as he does not speak English), to finally making a formal request. Thus when he is refused, according to Buden and Nowotny, it is a literal refusal of his symbolic asking, one more refusal on top of all the others he has faced since arriving in his new habitation.
So the homo returns later, and the approximate asks some other question. "Who was the winning general of the Civil War?"
Again the homo answers, "1492." Again, he is refused.
He returns a third time, and the scene repeats itself. "How long do presidents serve?" "1492."
Simply something happens for the judge. It is a moment of invention. When the man returns a fourth time, according to Brecht:
The estimate, who liked the man, realised that he could not
Learn the new language, asked him
How he earned his living and was told: by hard work. And then
At his fourth appearance the judge gave him the question:
When
Was America discovered? And on the strength of his correctly answering
1492, he was granted his citizenship. 23
The judge looks at the state of affairs and assesses it. He looks at the tools available to him. He is a gauge, so he cannot break the law, just he takes pity on the homo and decides the The states would exist improve for having him as a citizen. Given those constraints, he contrives a question—one that is in line with all those he has already asked, although today it would exist a bit anachronistic—that the human being can answer. The estimate has worked within the constraints imposed on him to make a stranger no longer strange, a new fellow member of the national customs.
Buden and Nowotny say that the estimate has plant "a correct question" for "a wrong answer." 24 The judge has taken advantage of the gap betwixt one utilize of the sign 1492 and the side by side. Over the course of his interactions with the man, the sign 1492 has come up to have a richer set of interpretants. In each instance, only especially in the question that sets up the final, "correct" use, he has taken his previous interactions with the man into account. Hence the expanded fix of associations ( figure 13 ). What is important is that the guess finds a way to brand the evolution of the sign'due south meaning productive—information technology becomes a tool in an act of inclusion. It is not difficult to call up of other situations where such invention has value, or where scholars can utilize this idea to gain insight into our interactions with groups who are marked equally "different" or "strange."
Figure 13. Bertolt Brecht's estimate devises the correct question for a wrong answer. Illustration of judge adapted from Ward (1899, "Men of the 24-hour interval No. 756: Caricature of Mr. Franklin Lushington [1823–1901]"). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Conclusion: The Logic of Substitution-Transformation
In this chapter's introduction, I wrote that this chapter is a translation, a reworking of a lesson, which reworked an article, which reworked . . . which reworked . . . which reworked. . . . Why have I made the same statement more than once? What is the value of the repetition? What does this version offer that older versions (or past links in the chain) did non?
1 answer to these questions is relatively superficial. My before elaboration relied on a deductive mode of reasoning. 25 It was a serial of literal and implied "if-then" statements. I crafted the version you take just read to rely more than on induction—I proceed by examples and build to my conclusions from in that location. I hope this version achieves a dissimilar effect—I promise it left blanks that you filled in. In brusk, I hope information technology demonstrated invention as much equally explained it.
Another answer goes all the same farther. In this chapter'due south introduction I also wrote, What would a theory of translation wait like if it were grounded in the field of cultural studies? The answer I give is as performative equally it is expository. That is, the logic that shapes my respond as well applies to this chapter itself, in that it shapes its course. How does this logic apply? This question and these statements are signs, past Peirce'due south definition, in that they "stand to somebody for something in some respect or chapters." Their use here differs from their utilize in my introduction, if I take succeeded in my translation, because they evoke something new for you. The outset time, I had hinted at simply not laid out the logic of transformation-substitution. You lot had to have my assertion on faith. Now, I hope, information technology stands on its own claim.
This logic is what authorizes the theoretical moves I brand in the following chapters. The parallax views I produce or describe depend on the multiplicity of meanings of any given sign, which comes about because of the transformation signs undergo with each use. Nosotros can gaze at significant from another angle because signs always mean more than what the people who use them intend, a semiotic backlog that provides an excess of perspectives, if we choose to explore them.
In sum, the questions of invention that follow from this formulation of translation are ones I think we should be asking in the fields of communication and cultural studies. If we develop a theory of translation that responds to our concerns, and if we bring the tools we have developed to behave on such a theory, we can excogitate new approaches to politics and ideals. In a world where the forces of globalization are constantly accelerating, and where we come up into greater and greater contact with people unlike ourselves, few tasks could be as important equally this one.
Just zero guarantees our success, and as I write in the side by side chapter, the same logic of transformation-substitution can close off the very potential that invention seems to open up.
1 Kyle Conway, "Encoding/Decoding every bit Translation." Just even this genealogy is not quite right. There is an intermediate step: an before version of this affiliate appeared every bit "Communication Is Translation, or, How to Mind the Gap" in Palabra Clave twenty, no. 3 (2017): 622–44. Information technology is reproduced here with the kind permission of the journal.
2 See Stuart Hall, "Encoding and Decoding in the Tv set Soapbox," and "Encoding/Decoding."
3 My Canadian students call this game "cleaved telephone." That name seems better suited to the way messages break down.
four Warren Weaver, "The Mathematics of Communication," xiii.
5 C. E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," 379.
six Weaver, "Mathematics of Communication," 14.
7 Note how this use of the term materialism (which derives from Marx's work) differs from our everyday sense of materialism as an undue focus on material goods at the expense of relationships with people that fulfill us on a deeper level. This is one point where I must ask my students—my get-go readers—to remember that I am using the discussion differently. Otherwise, this discussion is likely to be confusing.
viii Karl Marx, "Introduction," in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economic system , esp. sec. (2).
ix Charles Peirce, The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings , 99.
10 If my heroes bring to mind Randall Munroe's brilliant webcomic xkcd ( https://xkcd.com ), and so they are signs and xkcd is their interpretant.
11 Peirce would call this material sign the representamen . For an overview of Peirce'southward terminology, run into Floyd Merrell, "Charles Sanders Peirce's Concept of the Sign," 29–39.
12 This distinction betwixt "material" and "subjective" signs needs clarification. Offset, it looks like Ferdinand de Saussure'due south stardom (in Course in Full general Linguistics ) between signifier and signified, but it is not. Strictly speaking, Saussure's signifiers are "sound images," whereas material signs exist in the world outside speakers' psyches. Similarly, Saussure'due south signifieds are concepts evoked by sound images, but they exercise not operate in a chain, as in Peirce's conception. 2nd, I have called not to phone call material signs "objective" (as the inverse of "subjective") because the term would exist misleading to the degree it unsaid that the meanings of materials signs were stock-still. Finally, this distinction is only heuristic. V. Due north. Vološinov (in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language ) demonstrates that textile atmospheric condition always impinge on our subjective experience of linguistic communication, so much so that language is a material fact that exists outside of speakers' individual psyches.
13 Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Linguistic communication , 70.
14 Mikhail Bakhtin, Spoken communication Genres and Other Belatedly Essays , 95.
fifteen My formulation here seems to suggest a constantly expanding interpretant, but that'south not necessarily the case. People stop using signs in certain circumstances, likewise. Meanings can contract, every bit affiliate 4 shows in the case of the phrase fake news before and immediately following the 2022 U.S. ballot.
16 Irvin Kershner, dir., The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
17 George Steiner, Afterward Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation , 47.
18 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation , 25–27.
nineteen We tend not to use invention this way in everyday speech. I anticipate that one challenge for my students volition be to accept that the term means something other than what they expect. My employ of this older sense risks falling into the trap I describe in the kickoff paragraph of the introductory chapter, namely, that information technology will have no place within their pre-existing symbolic universe. That is, if they read it equally invention in a contemporary sense—say, some scientific innovation for which one might receive a patent—the argument I'm presenting will be confusing. They will demand to set up aside what they know to see the term from a new bending.
20 Aristotle, Rhetoric , book I, part 2.
21 Most notably, Homi Bhabha makes this argument in The Location of Culture .
22 Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny, "Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem."
23 Brecht, quoted in Buden and Nowotny, "Cultural Translation," 206–7.
24 Ibid., 207.
25 Conway, "Encoding/Decoding as Translation."
Source: https://read.aupress.ca/read/the-art-of-communication-in-a-polarized-world/section/6dba378d-050a-4c47-af15-6e29436a8ee0
Postar um comentário for "Stuart Hall the Discourse Must Then Be Translated"