Research On Stuart Hall’s Culture Communication And Ideology Theory

Stuart Hall is one of the major representative of culture studies, and his theory is the most important and typical theory in culture study. Mass communication theory and ideology theory are the most influencing theories, because the rest of his theories can be derived and expressed through analyzing the media theory. As he said:"Racism and the media are directly related to ideologies. The major significance of operating the media lies in its production, operation and transmission to ideologies. The intervention to the construction of media races equips the intervention to the ideological field". Studying Hall’s media theory is to study the core and can help to understand the entire system.Due to the open, diverse, interdisciplinary, practical feature, studying his media theory need to start on his semiotics,"encoding/decoding" mode, and cultural representation theory, then to find the hidden ideological demands, In communication,"Encode/Decode" mode is Hall’s most famous mode. With the enlightenment of Marxism, he treats culture as product, which needs to go through procedures of manufacturing, circulation, consuming and reproduce. It breaks the traditional linear communication mode of North America, and puts forwards three audience decoding positions, which are dominant hegemonic position, negotiated coded and oppositional position. He regards audience’s decoding as the critical link of producing communication significance starts the audience study in communication and reveals that mass communication has became the battlefield of mess and dominant discourse. The influence of structuralism semiotics to Hall’s theories is obvious. Hall’s representation and signifying practice theory is the semiotics extension of the culture communication; he classifies culture as the’sharing of significance’and’representation yields significance through discourse’. He builds the connection between the things in actual world and the concepts/symbols in our mind using two representative systems, illustrating that in’sharing of significance’, the corresponding between symbols and significance is like a rule of thumb, so to emphasizing that culture has the social inertia. In analyzing the operation of representation, by using Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, Roland Barthes’s semantics and Michel Foucault’s Power and Discourse Theory, Hall emphasizes representations’constructivism path and tries to explain the discourse constructs the significance, not the subject, and social power is the real motivation concealed in significance. However, by further researching Hall’s communication theory, it’s easy to find Hall’s demands on ideology. Instead saying Hall is a master on communication, we would rather say as the British cultural Marxist, Hall intentionally chooses mass communication which is the most influencing ideology battlefield in ’citizenship society’. There’re three ideological theories that has a significant influence to Hall’s culture study, which are traditional Marxism, Louis Althusser’s ideology theory and Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory. This thesis represents Hall’s ideology theory through Hall’s criticizing to these theories and application of Hall’s theories in solving social issues.As the important feature of integrating theory with practice, Hall’s culture study theory always analyses media’s role and function in ideology on the level of politics and society, and further analyzes the ideology of culture itself and the powers of cultures., trying to find the strategy and method to lead the development of culture and media, and finally make culture better serve the cultivation and development of social democracy. So, in this thesis, through explaining’the CNN event’using Hall’s, analyses has been done on western media’s operating mode, and reveals the reasons of the’misunderstanding’and the possibility of settlement in Chinese&Western culture communication. In one word, researching Hall’s mass communication theory has great value of developing the culture communication and constructing a harmonious society.