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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
inevitably from encodings’ (Hall 1980, 136). Hall thus gave a significant
role to the ‘decoder’ as well as to the ‘encoder’ and presented
communication as a socially contingent practice. Mass media codes
offer their readers social identities which some may adopt as their
own. But readers do not necessarily accept such codes. Where those
involved in communicating do not share common codes and social
positions, decodings are likely to be different from the encoder’s
intended meaning. Umberto Eco uses the term ‘aberrant decoding’
to refer to a text which has been decoded by means of a different
code from that used to encode it (Eco 1965). We will return shortly
to how Hall incorporated into his model a series of alternative
‘reading positions’ for decoders.
This necessarily brief review of key structuralist models of
communication has shown that while systemic codes (and the
processes of encoding and decoding) are a central feature, post-
Saussurean semiotics also came to recognize the importance of
contexts (including social contexts) in the determination of meanings.
Implicit in such models (for instance in the reference of
Jakobson’s functions to the roles and modes of relation of the
‘addresser’ and the ‘addressee’) there are also implications for the
construction of social identities. In the structuralist tradition, through
the processes of human communication, the structures of language
and texts came to be seen as involved in ‘positioning the subject’.
THE POSITIONING OF THE SUBJECT
‘A sign . . . addresses somebody,’ Charles Peirce declared (Peirce
1931–58, 2.228). Signs ‘address’ us within particular codes. A genre
is a semiotic code within which we are ‘positioned’ as ‘ideal readers’
through the use of particular ‘modes of address’. Modes of address
can be defined as the ways in which relations between addresser and
addressee are constructed in a text. In order to communicate, a
producer of any text must make some assumptions about an intended
audience; reflections of such assumptions may be discerned in the
text (advertisements offer particularly clear examples of this).
Rather than a specifically semiotic concept, ‘the positioning of
the subject’ is a structuralist notion – although it is absent from early