Introduction

This paper revisits Stuart Hall’s works on communication and the media. Its basic task is to ground some foundations of a Marxist-Humanist concept of communication by engaging with Stuart Hall’s works on communication and the media. It asks: What can the approach of developing a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication learn from an engagement with Stuart Hall’s concepts of the media and communication? The present work argues with, for, against, and beyond Stuart Hall in order or productively draw on ideas that emerge from this engagement.

Marxist and Socialist Humanism is a current of critical thought and theory that emerged as a political reaction to Stalinism. Its political perspective is the advancement of democratic socialism. At the level of research and theory, it stresses the role of human practices, social production, and alienation in society; the transformative capacities of class and social struggles; the dialectic as a theoretical and methodological tool, alienation, and the importance of Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophical works. The cumulation of inhumanities, global problems, existential crises of humanity, as well as the threat of new fascisms, a new World War and nuclear annihilation have in recent years resulted in a renewed interest in Marxist/Socialist/Radical/Critical Humanism as theoretical and political perspective (e.g. Alderson & Spencer, 2017; Anderson et al., 2021; Fuchs, 2022b; Harvey, 2014; Johansson & Baumgartner, 2021; Kozlarek, 2021; Mason, 2020). The engagement with Hall’s media and communication theory is part of an attempt to rethink critical communication theory as part of the Marxist-Humanist conjuncture (see, for example, Fuchs, 2016a, 2020, 2021a, b, 2022a, b). Hall’s theory is an approach that contemporary Marxist studies of communication should engage and argue with.

Let us briefly discuss the following questions: Why is Marxist Humanism important today? Why is there a renewed interest in it today?

We live at a crossroads of society where the future is highly uncertain. In the worst-case scenario, there will be a new World War and the end of humanity, society, and life on Earth. In the best-case scenario, a socialist and democratic global society can be established that manages society’s global problems.

The manifold crises we face today have to do with the rise of anti-Humanism in various forms. The most consequential manifestation of anti-Humanism has in recent years been the rise of new nationalisms, new fascist movements and politicians, and the intensification of authoritarianism. The antagonisms of neoliberalism and global capitalism have exploded into crises where authoritarianism, nationalism, and fascism have been strengthened around the world. Politics has become much more polarised. Fascists, nationalists, and authoritarians are anti-Humanists because they deny the equality and equal rights of all humans. They believe in violence as means of politics. This is why a new World War has become more likely.

Other forms of anti-Humanism that are prevalent today include AI-based automation that can displace humans from key roles in society. The rise of online fake news and algorithmic politics on the Internet replaces human interests with ideologies. It is no longer evident if a certain online action was initiated by humans or an AI-based bot. In academia, big data-based research methods known as computation social science and the digital humanities have become a new positivism, a digital positivism that has driven back the importance of interpretative, qualitative methods and critical theories of society. The global increase of inequalities in global, neoliberal capitalism has undermined the human interest of everyone being able to lead a good life. Fossil capitalism has created the climate and environmental crisis that threatens the survival of humans, society, and nature. The public sphere has become so polarised that citizens with different opinions tend to believe in emotionalised post-truth and isolate themselves in echo chambers where they only listen to those who share their own opinions. Everyday life and politics have become more violent. Those who stand up for democracy and a good life for everyone in many places face actual violence and threats of violence. Natural disasters, wars, precarity, and poverty have displaced humans from where they live, which has resulted in migration. Many migrants have been treated in an inhumane manner, have died in boats on the sea, and have had to face racism and the denial of legal justice. Racist police violence and other violence, again and again, dehumanise and murder People of Colour. Precarious labour has become so prevalent that the perspectives for a whole generation of young people are bleak. In a nutshell: Inhumanity rules the world. That’s why we need Radical, Socialist Humanism today. There are movements and forms of praxis that stand up for Humanism and a good life for all. Radical Humanism is nothing less than the project to save the world from the descent into barbarism.

In the realm of theory, what we in my view need first and foremost is a rediscovery, update, renewal, repetition, and development of the theory tradition of Marxist Humanism. I have contributed to this rediscovery by engaging with the works of thinkers such as Angela Davis, Lucien Goldmann, C.L.R. James, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, M. N. Roy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and others in the context of digital and communicative capitalism (see Fuchs, 2016a, 2020, 2021a, b, 2022a, b).

Extending this endeavour to the works of Stuart Hall is a logical step. Hall was a contemporary of Edward P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, whom he characterised as “Culturalists”, which is a circumscription for Marxist Humanism. Hall was also influenced by Structuralism, especially the works of Louis Althusser and Ernest Laclau. Thompson, Williams, and other Marxist Humanists were critics of such structuralist approaches. Given the Marxist Humanist and Marxist Structuralist influences on Hall’s thought, his works are interesting for the project of the renewal of Marxist Humanism in the age of digital capitalism.

In the 1970s, Althusser’s works had a major influence on Stuart Hall’s thought. In the 1980s and 1990s, the major theoretical influence on Hall’s approach was no longer exerted by Althusser’s Structural Marxism, but by Foucault’s post-Structuralism and Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism. Hall’s cultural studies thereby undertook a “shift away from its encounter with marxism” (Sparks, 1996, 95). In one of his final interviews, Stuart Hall criticises that Cultural Studies today lacks the kind of conversations it once had “with, against some aspects of, around the questions, expanding a Marxist tradition of critical thinking” (Jhally, 2016, 338), which is a “real weakness” (339). Reflecting Stuart Hall’s call for the basic reengagement of the conversation between Cultural Studies and Marxism, the present article is part of attempts to renew the conversations between Marxist theory, especially Marxist Humanism, and Cultural Studies in the context of communication theory and analysis.

My engagement with Stuart Hall’s theory of communication and the media will be conducted in four steps. First, it reengages and re-evaluates what Hall called the two paradigms of Cultural Studies: Structuralism and “Culturalism”/Humanism. It discusses the role of human agency in society. Second, it engages with Hall’s and Althusser’s notions of articulation and sets the notion of articulation in relation to the concept of communication. Third, the paper discusses the relationship between communication and work in the context of Hall’s works. Fourth, it revisits and engages with Hall’s encoding/decoding-model in the context of digitalisation.

The goal of the paper is to read Stuart Hall in a manner that can inform the renewal of Marxist Humanism and the development of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. This involves reconstructing elements of Hall’s approach, criticising certain aspects of his work, and through this engagement developing new theory elements. The engagement with Hall is part of my endeavour to construct a Marxist-Humanist critical theory of society that is also a critical theory of communication.

Structuralism and Humanism: the role of human agency in society

An important foundational aspect of a Marxist-Humanist theory of society is the question of what role human agency has in society.

In his influential essay Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, Hall (1980a) distinguishes between Culturalism (Raymond Williams, Edward P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart) and Structuralism (Lewis Strauss, Louis Althusser) as the two paradigms that have influenced (his version of) Cultural Studies. Hall derives the term Culturalism from Williams’s and Thompson’s focus on lived experiences, the dialectic of the cultural and the non-cultural, and practices (63–64). In reality, the difference is one between Humanist Marxism and Structuralism as the two paradigms. There are also Structuralist analyses and theories of culture such as the works of Roland Barthes, so the term “Culturalism” does not fit so well. Hall argues that the “Culturalists” reduce society to practices and experiences (64), which is why he is also interested in Structuralism.

Although Hall says that neither Structuralism nor “Culturalism” are adequate and that both are needed, he only mentions one advantage of “Culturalism” and three of Structuralism, which positions him more on the side of Structuralism (67–69). One of these Structuralist “advantages” is, according to Hall, the assumption that the subjects do not speak, but are “’spoken by’ the categories of culture” (66). This advantage is dubious. A language, a television programme, or a racist ideology does not exist independently of humans. Without the human practices of speaking, watching, producing, reproducing etc. cultural structures are “dead” and not meaningful. Hall is certainly right to warn against a fetishism of practice (“voluntarism”) that sees all practices of certain groups as subversive, revolutionary, progressive, etc. (67). There is no automatic and no necessary democratic, progressive consciousness and practice etc. of any group. We do not need Structuralism for the insight that humans are not just making society but do so under specific conditions that reflect power relations between humans and their practices organised within these relations. Rather, we can argue based on Hegel and Marx that there is a dialectic of human practices and soci(et)al structures.

In Structuralist and Functionalist approaches, structures are often said to act, to structure and determine individuals’ and groups’ actions, and to be society’s key factors. Structures are said to be subjects. Human beings and their social practices are either not mentioned or subordinated to structures. There is a Structuralist current in Stuart Hall’s works. Let us have a look at some example formulations:

The state “organises ideologically, through the cultural sphere and the education system – once again, progressively expanded and complexified as the productive needs it serves develop; through the means and media of communication and the orchestration of public opinion” (Hall et al., 1978, 205).

“Events, as news, […] articulate what the audience is assumed to think and know about the society.” (56).

Hall argues here that the ideological state apparatuses of the education system and the media system organise ideology and that news events articulate ideology. The point here is that cultural structures and not humans are said to act. Hall (1989, 48) says that in communication, meaning and ideology, “discourse is articulated to power” (Hall, 1989, 48). Not humans are the subjects, but discourse is a subject that acts. Hall (1982) writes that humans are positioned and languaged (80), ideological discourses win their way (80) and discourse speaks itself through him/her (88). For Hall (1997b, 5), “representational systems” such as language and music “communicate feelings and ideas”.

The problem with all of these formulations is that they neglect active human beings who communicate with each other and so produce social relations. In Structuralism, it is not humans who communicate ideology, ideas, discourse, feelings, etc. through language, music, news media and other representational systems. It is said that structures and systems language, speak, communicate, etc. Human communication is subsumed under communications, i.e. structures and systems of communication. Communication is reduced to the status of a structure. Such an approach misses that communication is a social process that connects humans and establishes and maintains relations between them. Communication is the social practice, in which humans produce and reproduce sociality and social relations by making sense of each other and the world. The term “human” is not mentioned once in Hall’s (1973b) Encoding/Decoding-paper. Hall misses that discourses, communication, and ideology are the processes that relate humans and help constitute particular power relations.

Anthony Giddens stresses in his criticism of Structuralism and Functionalism that they are based on “an imperialism of the social object” (Giddens, 1984, 2) where structures strongly dominate and are said to fully or at least strongly determine the actions of groups, individuals, and society at large as such. The proper alternative is not methodological individualism that fetishises individual agency and individual freedom to act and neglects constraints, contexts and conditions, but the emphasis on social practices, i.e. the individual and collective practices of humans that take place in, interact with, change, reproduce and are conditioned, contextualised, enabled and constrained by society and by social structures that stand in a dynamic mutual interaction with practices. In many versions of Structuralism and Functionalism, humans, as Giddens (1989, 61) criticises, “are acted upon by ‘social causes’ that somehow determine the course of what they do”. But structures are not actors because they are not, as humans are, knowledgeable, practically conscious, emotional, moral, languaging, communicating, anticipatory, need-oriented beings. Society’s rules are not natural laws but are shaped by conventions, agreements, and disagreements, as well as rules that are set up in social and power relations and are therefore open to change.

Hall’s (1973b) Encoding/Decoding essay works out a Structuralist model of communication. It provides a more Structuralist model of communications grounded in Marx’s (1857) Introduction to the Grundrisse. Starting from Marx’s German Ideology, Raymond Williams (1977) conceptualises and analyses communication as human social agency. He argues that humans produce society, social relations, structures, and sociality (see Fuchs, 2017). Hall (1980a) characterises Williams as a representative of Culturalism. It is more precise to say that Williams’ approach is a Humanist Marxism that has a focus on the materialist analysis of communication and culture. Hall (2016, 25–53) argues that “human practice” as “the material activity of human beings” forms the core of Williams’ approach (39). Williams’ Humanist position sees language and communication as practices, whereas in Structuralism, language, and communications are discursive structures (72).

Articulation is an important Structuralist and Structuralist-Marxist concept. But it also has a Humanist connotation. In the next section, we will therefore explore this concept by engaging with Althusser and Hall’s reading of Althusser.

This section has dealt with the question of what roles human agency has in society. In Stuart Hall’s works, there are elements where he in a Structuralist manner argues that structures are actors. Communication is a particular type of agency. To articulate means both to build and sustain relations and to communicate. Communicating and building relations are two fundamental human activities. They are also dialectically entwined and interlinked (see Fuchs, 2020, chapter 4). Articulation is an important concept in Hall’s works. Looking at what he wrote about articulation also allows us to discuss how far the notion of articulation is a suited element for a Marxist Humanist theory of society and communication. Therefore, in the next section, we will discuss the concept of articulation.

Articulation and communication

Althusser’s structuralism

Articulation is a category that is prominent not just in the works of Stuart Hall but can especially be found in Louis Althusser’s writings. Hall was influenced by Althusser’s concept of articulation. Let us, therefore, start this section with Althusser.

Louis Althusser’s works are the epitome of Marxist Structuralism. Althusser is neither a media theorist nor a communication theorist but his works have influenced the field of Media and Communication Studies (May & Siegfried, 2018).

Althusser rejected Hegel’s dialectical philosophy. In For Marx, Althusser (1969/2005, chapter 6) published a chapter titled “On the Materialist Dialectic”. In it, he makes a sharp distinction between Hegel’s idealist dialectic and the Marxist materialist dialectic that he in this chapter bases on Lenin and Mao.

Althusser (1969/2005) rejects Hegel’s notion of an “original essence” (198) and therefore says that Marxism needs to free itself of the Hegelian concepts of “negativity and alienation” (214–215). But negativity is wherever there is the dialectic as it is constitutive of contradictions. Marx used the notion of alienation from his early until his late works for designating the lack of control that humans have in class societies (see Fuchs, 2016b, chapter 7). Alienation is bound up with the concept of class struggle. Progressive social struggles are struggles against alienation. Therefore, by rejecting negativity and alienation, Althusser. Althusser discards a key dialectical insight by Marx, namely that humans “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx, 1852, 103).

For Marx, the dialectical development of society means that there are objective conditions present in class societies’ structures that condition human practices. When these conditions enter crisis and humans no longer want to continue the old way, class and social struggles emerge, which is the practical dialectic, human praxis that aims at transforming society. Societal development is a dialectic of objective contradictions and collective subjective praxis and of necessity and chance. By throwing human subjects out of theory, Althusser fetishizes necessity. As a consequence, the mode of production for him determines society by necessity.

Althusser does not mention classes and class struggles in his discussion of the dialectic, but rather speaks of the overdetermining role of the structure in dominance, the “domination of one contradiction over the others” (200), and “determination in the last instance by the (economic) mode of production” (111). For Althusser, there is not a dialectic of structures and practices that governs societal change. Rather, economic structures, especially the mode of production, determine society’s development.

This is also why the British Marxist historian and Marxist Humanist Edward P. Thompson (1978) in his book The Poverty of Theory, which is a critique of Althusser, argues that Althusser’s theory is mechanistic, reductionist, and static, that Althusser propagates a “total collapse of all human activities back into the elementary terms of a mode of production” (97) and constructs a “conceptual prison”, in which “mode of production = social formation” (163) (for a discussion of Thompsons’s importance for a Marxist Humanist theory of communication, see Fuchs, 2019). For Thompson, Socialist Humanism is the alternative to Althusserianism and Structuralist Marxism:

“It [Socialist Humanism] is humanist because it places once again real men and women at the centre of socialist theory and aspiration, instead of the resounding abstractions – the Party, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, the Two Camps, the Vanguard of the Working Class – so dear to Stalinism. It is socialist because it reaffirms the revolutionary perspectives of Communism, faith in the revolutionary potentialities not only of the Human Race or of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat but of real men and women” (Thompson, 2014, 53).

Althusser’s Structuralist notion of articulation

Althusser’s works had a strong influence on Stuart Hall’s writings, which becomes evident in Hall (1980a) much-read essay Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, where he acknowledges the influence of Althusser’s notions of articulation, over-determination, and relative autonomy on Cultural Studies (Hall, 1980a, 69). Hall, 1980a, 69) writes that the notion of articulation and Structuralism have “the considerable advantage” of allowing to think together and apart practices, i.e. to analyse how practices, contradictions, and structures are at the same time different and connected.

The notion of articulation promises a connection to the analysis of communication as the word “to articulate” both means “to be related to something” and “to express or explain your thoughts or feelings clearly in words” (Oxford Dictionary, 2022). It, therefore, makes sense, that we have a look at definitions of articulation in both Althusser’s and Hall’s works.

Althusser defines articulation as the constitution of a “social formation” by “different levels”: “the economic base, the legal and political superstructures, and the forms of social consciousness”, “the elements which are found in every social structure”, a system’s “construction (Bau)” (Althusser and Balibar 1968/2009, 204). He stresses that such elements of a structure have a “degree of independence”, “’relative’ autonomy”, and a “type of dependence”, and determination “in the last instance” (58). When talking about articulation, Althusser mostly talks about relations of elements, levels, instances, structures, and contradictions. He does not talk about humans and relations between humans, which indicates that he is a post- and anti-Humanist thinker who wants to overcome the focus on the human being.

Hall found Althusser’s approach useful for arguing that there is a relative autonomy of economy and culture, production and consumption, encoding and decoding of information; class, race, and gender; etc. He does, however, not criticise Althusser for neglecting humans and presenting structures as actors that do something. In Althusser’s works, humans are necessarily subjected, subordinated to and determined by structures. Althusser argues there is “a certain attribution of the means of production to the agents of production” (Althusser & Balibar, 2009, 193), and relations of production determine “the places and functions occupied and adopted by the agents of production” (198), that humans “are the ‘supports’ (Träger) of these functions” (199), and that the “true ‘subjects’ are these definers and distributors: the relations of production” (199). For Althusser, humans just “fulfil certain determinate functions in the structure” (283) and are nothing but “limbs ‘of the social system’”. As a consequence, E.P. Thompson (1978) – whom Hall (1980a) together with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart characterises as the “Culturalists” – criticises that Althusser sees humans as passive and not active beings and overlooks that instances and levels “are in fact human activities, institutions, and ideas” that humans experience (Thompson, 1978, 97). Thompson and Hall were both involved in the founding of New Left Review when Universities and Left Review, where Hall was involved, and Thompson’s journal The New Reasoner merged in 1960. Hall became NLR’s first editor.

In For Marx, a work that Hall prefers to Reading Capital (see Hall, 1985, 93–94), Althusser (1969/2005) understands articulation as a complex relationship between contradictions, a”structured unity” where “one contradiction dominates the others” (201), which is why he says that “the complex whole has the unity of a structure articulated in dominance” (202). There are no humans and their social practices and work processes in Althusser’s notion of articulation. Articulation is merely understood as a structure between structures. In this respect, there is not much difference between Reading Capital and For Marx. Both are manifestations of structuralist and functionalist thought.

Stuart Hall on articulation

Hall (2016) argues that Althusser was just like Marx focused on “the decentering of the subject” (100). Therefore, Hall says that the element of “making history” through practices in Marx’s famous phrase “is always secondary to the larger project of displacing the subject” (Hall, 2016, 100), which for him means that humans are “positioned by the relations of production” (101). That famous phrase is not, as Hall (2016, 100) says, part of the German Ideology, but the 18th Brumaire, and reads:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language” (Marx, 1852, 103-104).

There is no displacement of the subject here. On the contrary, Marx analyses how human praxis brings about “something that has never yet existed”. He does acknowledge that what is possible for humans to create in a certain moment of society depends on the existing structures that shape, constrain, limit, and enable human practices. But Marx did not, as claimed by Althusser and Hall, displace the subject. It is therefore no surprise that we find very structuralist formulations in Hall’s works. For example, in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), the authors write that the judicial system’s “control culture” and the tabloid media’s “signification culture” enter a “mutual articulation of […] two ‘relatively independent’ agencies” that is, in a specific example where a judge justifies imposing a severe penalty by referring to media reports, “so overdetermined that it cannot work in any other way than to create an effective ideological and control closure” and the media become an “ideological state apparatus” (76). What we find here are the “judicial discourse” (76) and media discourse in the form of “stories” (76) that enter an “amplification spiral” (76). The authors do not discuss and name the specific humans, the judges and journalists, who act here. Instead, we rather find, according to Hall, discourses that act and create articulation as a structure that connects discourses.

At one point in his work, Hall (1980) gives a Structuralist definition of articulation, where he understands it as structure and combination, “an articulated combination”, “a complex structure”, “a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities” and where there are “relations of dominance and subordination” so that the structure is “structured in dominance” (Hall, 1980b, 325). In this understanding, there are no practices and no humans.

In another work, Hall (1986, 53) acknowledges the “double meaning” of articulation as expression and relation. He does, however, then define articulation in purely Structuralist terms as “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions” (Hall, 1986, 53). Hall opposes Laclau and Mouffe’s move to analyse “all practise as nothing but discourses” (56). He instead uses language as a metaphor and argues that “the social operates like a language”. But a language is a system of concepts, a structure, so Hall thereby suggests the social is a structure. The social certainly is also, but not only a structure. It is practiced as well. The constitutive feature of the social is the dialectic of social structures and human practices. In a materialist framework, it is not evident why language should be a metaphor or model of the social that is superior to production and work.

In lectures held in 1983 and published in 2016, Hall gives the following definition of articulation:

“By ‘articulation,’ I mean the form of a connection or link that can make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute, and essential for all times; it is not necessarily given in all cases as a law or a fact of life. […] So the so-called unity of a discourse, for example, is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness.’ An articulation has to be positively sustained by specific processes; it is not ‘eternal’ but has constantly to be renewed. It can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown (disarticulated), leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections (rearticulations) being forged. It is also important that an articulation between different practices does not mean that they become identical or that one is dissolved into the other. Each retains its distinct determinations and conditions of existence. However, once an articulation is made, the two practices can function together, not as an ‘immediate identity’ (in the language of Marx’s, 1857 ‘Introduction’) but as ‘distinctions within a unity.’ A theory of articulation, then, is a theory of ‘no necessary belongingness,’ which requires us to think the contingent, nonnecessary connections between and among different social practices and social groups” (Hall, 2016, 121-122).

This definition is very Structuralist. There are no humans who act, just structures are subjects. For Hall, an articulation is a dynamic diversity within unity and unity in diversity. Things change by being different and united at the same time. This was already Hegel’s insight in his dialectical philosophy and logic, so it is not clear why a new term should be invented for the dialectic. Hegel talked about the dialectic of the one and the many and about the dialectic of attraction and repulsion:

“The One proves to be what is absolutely incompatible with itself, what repels itself from itself. and what it posits itself as is the Many. We may designate this side in the process of being-for-itself with the figurative expression repulsion. […] Each of the Many, however, is itself a One and, because it behaves as such, this ubiquitous repulsion changes over into its opposite, namely attraction” (Hegel & Friedrich, 2010, Addition to §97).

For Hegel, the dialectic of the One and the Many is open and dynamic, it results in the production of novelty: “Something becomes an other, but the other is itself a something. hence it likewise becomes an other, and so on and so forth ad infinitum (Hegel & Friedrich, 2010, §93).

For Hall, the importance of the Althusserian concept of articulation is that it enables logic in terms of “no necessary correspondence” (Hall, 2016, 123; Hall, 1985, 94) and “no necessary non-correspondence” (Hall, 2016, 123; Hall, 1985, 94). For this insight one does not really need Althusser, who was profoundly anti-Hegelian, an engagement with and application of Hegel’s dialectical logic suffices.

Hall’s relation to Althusserianism and Structuralism is itself contradictory. Whereas he on the one hand reproduces at some points in his works some of Structuralism’s and Althusser’s shortcomings, he at other points goes beyond it. Talking about society, Hall says that there is no necessary correspondence between the origins and effects of “practice and struggle” (Hall, 2016, 123). He argues that there is no guarantee that “social or economic forces” and politics are articulated so that change takes place (124). Rather, Hall argues that such an articulation “has to be constructed through practice” (124). Hall says that he reads Althusser as “retaining the double articulation between ‘structure’ and ‘practice’” (124).

”By ‘double articulation’ I mean that the structure – the given conditions of existence, the structure of determinations in any situation – can also be understood, from another point of view, as the result of previous practices. We may say that a structure is what previously structured practices have produced as a result. These then constitute the ‘given conditions,’ the necessary starting point for new generations of practice. In neither case should ‘practice’ be treated as transparently intentional: We make history, but on the basis of anterior conditions which are not of our making. Practice is how a structure is actively reproduced” (125).

The dialectic of structure and practice that Hall propagates is a useful proposition that resonates with Hegel’s dialectical logic, Marx’s dialectic of making and conditions, and the insights of Hegelian Marxist thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse (1941/2000). “There is no guarantee that classes will appear in their appointed political places, as Poulantzas so vividly described it, with their number plates on their backs” (Hall, 2016, 125–126). Hall here gives a Hegelian-Marxian understanding of articulation that he presents as a “reading” of Althusser (see Hall, 2016, 124). Hall is here closer to Hegelian Marxism than he might himself have admitted.

Hall’s understanding of articulation is on the one hand Structuralist and on the other hand a transcendence of Structuralism. In the Structuralist version, an articulation is for him a complex, dynamic structure. In the dialectical version, he acknowledges the dialectic of structures and human agency as a central feature of articulation. Given the association of the concept of articulation with Structuralism, Slack (1996, 116–117) notes that articulation cannot be found as an entry in Raymond Williams’ Keywords. Humanist Marxists such as Williams and E.P. Thompson were critics of Structuralism and therefore kept their distance from the notion of articulation.

Hall does in some passages emphasise the construction of articulation “through practice” (Hall, 2016, 124), which means more of a dialectic of practices and structures. But also here articulation is not itself a practice, but is produced by practices. Hall does not fully get at the double-meaning of articulation as structure and practice, relation and utterance/expression. A Marxist-Humanist theory of communication that makes use of the notion of articulation can be based on and simultaneously go beyond Stuart Hall. I will now introduce such a model. Articulation is at the same time practice and structure, a dialectic of the practice of articulation and structures of articulation, articulating and articulatedness.

A Marxist-Humanist approach to articulation as dialectic of articulating and articulatedness

An articulation is a human being’s individual expression of meaning that is directed at others. It is an utterance taking on the form of sentences, gestures, body language, etc. The human being articulates itself in order to tell others something. Such an articulation can, but does not necessarily result in at least one other human being’s response in the form of another articulation. The one human being’s practice of articulating then brings forth other human beings’ practices of articulating, which in turn creates other articulating practices, etc. Communication is a sequence of human beings’ practices of articulation. Communication is the process, by which humans produce and reproduce sociality, i.e. they create and recreate social and societal relations (Fuchs, 2020). Such relations are articulations understood as structures. Human beings’ practices of reciprocal articulating bring forth products and results, namely articulatedness, social structures that objectify and condition practices.

Figure 1 visualises the communication process. It shows that humans articulate themselves in the communication process through which they (re)produce sociality, i.e. social structures that Hall terms articulations and that we in order to distinguish structures from the practice of articulating term articulatedness.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The communication process as the production of sociality and the dialectic of articulating and articulatedness

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In this section, we discussed the notion of articulation and its potentials for a Marxist Humanist theory of society and communication. One result of the discussion is that Althusser’s understanding of articulation neglects humans, communication, and human practices. For Althusser, articulation is a structure between structures without humans. In passages that are heavily Althusserian, Hall follows Althusser in excluding humans from articulation. But Hall also goes beyond Althusser’s structuralism by pointing out the dialectic of human practices and social structures with his notion of the double articulation of structure and practice. Building on and transcending Hall, we can grasp the double meaning of articulation as relation and communication by distinguishing between articulatedness and articulating. There is a dialectic of communication as a production process and social relations, articulating and articulatedness.

A materialist theory of communication and culture is, among other things, interested in the production of meaning, which brings up the question of how communication and work are related. We will in the next section start from Hall’s writings in order to reflect on this relationship between work and communication. Work is a key dimension of a Marxist Humanist theory of society and communication. In the next section, we will discuss the relationship of work and communication. We will start with a look on what Hall has to say on that issue and will through that discussion work out new theoretical elements.

Communication and work

Stuart Hall on work

Stuart Hall (1989) challenges the behaviourist transmission model of communication by emphasising the importance of critical theories of communication. He argues that communication involves “the continuous struggle over […] representational practices” (47) so that meaning is not reproduced from the media in consciousness like in a mirror, but operates without guarantees.

In the book Representation, Stuart Hall (1997b) wrote a long introductory chapter titled “The Work of Representation”. Representation has to do with culture, signification, language, and communication. Therefore, the essay promises to enlighten the relationship between communication and work. The essay by and large takes a Structuralist position by discussing Foucault’s concepts of discourse, power, and knowledge, as well as Saussure’s and Barthes’ semiotics. Hall (1997b, 54) argues that Saussure “tended to abolish the subject from the question of representation” and that for Foucault, it is “discourse, not the subject, which produces knowledge”. In such approaches, “language […] speaks us” (54) and “the discourse itself produces ‘subjects’” (56). Hall here describes Structuralist positions that say that it “is discourse, not the subjects who speak it, which produces knowledge”, that the subject is merely “produced within discourse” and “subjected to discourse”, and that the subject is “the bearer of the kind of knowledge which discourse produces” (Hall, 1997b, 55). For Hall, discourse here is a producing subject. In a talk Hall gave around the time the Representation book was published and that the Media Education Foundation used for a documentary film, he in a similar manner spoke of “the work of representation which the stereotypes are doing” (Hall, 1997a, 21) and said that “the image is producing not only identification, […] it’s actually producing knowledge” (20) so that images “construct us” (17). So here, for Hall, it is discourses, images, and stereotypes – structures – that are conducting symbolic work, the work of representation.

The words “work” and “working” have the double-meaning of producing and functioning. Humans work, which produces results. Systems work by functioning in certain manners. The work of representation is for Hall (1997a, b) to a significant degree about how representation works in the sense of functioning. He, therefore, describes it in Structuralist terms utilising terms such as systems of representation, classifying systems, conceptual maps, signs, language systems, codes, symbolic function, orders of things, “how language works” (34), and “how representation of meaning through language works” (25).

In the largest part of his chapter on Representation, Hall understands “work” as the functioning of language and representation. In some formulations and passages in the same essay, there is more of a Humanist approach that understands work as human production. “Representation is the production of meaning through language. […] Meaning is produced by the practice, the ‘work’ of representation” (Hall, 1997a, b, 28). He also says there is a “system of mental representation which classifies and organizes the world into meaningful categories” (28), that “codes […] stabilize meaning within different languages and cultures” (21), and that “systems of representation […] construct” relations between the world and the system of concepts as well as between conceptual maps and signs (19), which is a more Structuralist logic.

In Hall’s essay, on the one hand, there is an undercurrent of thought where it is humans who work and produce meanings and on the other hand, a mainstream where it is cultural and cognitive systems that work in a certain manner by systems doing something – classifying, organising, stabilising, constructing, etc. Note that Hall puts “work” in quotation marks in the phrase “the ‘work’ of representation”, which means the has doubts about the use of this term. It remains unclear in his works what work is all about.

The dialectic of work and communication

The notion of the “work of representation” is interesting because it brings together two realms of society that have traditionally often been thought to be separate, the economy and culture, work and communication, production and representation, use-values and symbols. Hall’s work as a whole challenges this separation. We can take Hall’s Humanist understanding of the work of representation as starting point for thinking about the relationship between work and communication.

According to Georg Lukács (1984, 1986), work is teleological positing, i.e. the human beings’ active production of novelty that is led by goals that they strive to achieve by particular means they use in the production process. The goal of communication and articulation is that humans connect to other humans, make meaning of them, and express meanings to them. The goal of representation is to make meaning of the world, both the physical and the social world. Communication, articulation and representation are therefore particular work processes. Work and communication are not the same, but they are truly dialectical: Communication is one form of work, and work requires and is based on communication. There is the work character of communication and the communicative character of work (Fuchs, 2020).

Communication is a particular form of work and production where humans through the mutual work of representation and articulation make meaning of the world and (re)produce social relations. Communication works (functions) as a particular form of human work, the work of articulation and representation that produces meanings and social relations. Human works (products) are created by work processes that are organised through communication processes. Raymond Williams (1977) argues in this context that communication and language are material. The economic and the cultural are intertwined and encroach on each other. Work as the process of production takes place as part of all social relations so that humans produce in particular ways and bring about particular products. Meaning-production is the cultural dimension of all social relations. Social relations have an economic and a cultural dimension that are interconnected and articulated, they form a dialectic.

Just like we saw in the previous section that articulation has a double meaning of relation and communication, we discussed in this section the double meaning of “work(ing)“ as a production process and as functioning. Hall often uses work in the functionalist understanding of systems that are working, and less frequently as meaning human production. Hall’s notion of the work of articulation can inform our understanding of the dialectic of work and communication. Communication is the work of articulation and representation that produces meanings and social relations.

Hall’s writings on articulation only engage with its meaning as communication in a cursory manner. But there are other works where he engaged more thoroughly with communication and mediated communication: His most read and most cited work is the essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (Hall, 1973b), where he introduces a model of communication, then encoding/decoding-model. This model is therefore of particular interest for a critical theory of communication. We will engage with it in the next section.

The encoding/decoding-model in the age of digitalisation

Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding-model

Jennifer Daryl Slack (1996, 125) argues that Hall’s Encoding/Decoding (E/D)-essay is “a rethinking of the process of communication not as correspondence but as articulation”. Hall grounded his notion of communications in Marx’s theory. At the time when he wrote this article in 1973, he also worked on a new reading of Marx’s (1857) Introduction to the Grundrisse. This interpretation of Marx was published as the first essay in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ Stencilled Occasional Papers-Series (Hall, 1973a). Hall stressed the importance of Marx’s dialectic of production, circulation, and consumption. The Encoding/Decoding-essay is an application of this dialectic to communication(s): “Thus – to borrow Marx’s terms – circulation and reception are, indeed, ‘moments’ of the production process in television” (Hall, 1973b, 119).

In this influential article, Hall (1973b) argues that a “message” that is a “meaningful discourse” is decoded in the form of “de-coded meanings that ‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct or persuade” (3). “In a determinate moment, the structure employs a code and yields a ‘message’: at another determinate moment, the ‘message’, via its decodings, issues into a structure” (3). The achievement of this essay is its stress that there is no necessary correspondence of encoded and decoded meanings. What is, however, missing is stress on media workers’ practices of production and audiences’ practices of consumption and producing meanings. The focus is instead more on discourses, messages, propositions, meanings, signs, and codes. The visualisation of the encoding and decoding process is a structural model without the presence of human beings (4). In it, we find technical infrastructures, structures of production, knowledge frameworks, meaning structures, discourses, and programmes. Communications are for Hall (1973b) structures for the articulation, encoding and decoding of meanings and discourses.

The E/D-model later influenced the cultural circuit-model (Johnson, 1986/1987, Du Gay et al., 1997), in which communication and humans do not feature prominently. That the E/D-essay stands in the Structuralist tradition also becomes evident from its references to Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Louis Althusser and by its explicit placement in the context of “the semiotic paradigm” (Hall, 1973b, 5). In an interview, Hall (1994, 254) explicitly acknowledges the influence of Barthes and Levi Strauss on the E/D model. Colin Sparks (1996, 87) characterises the E/D-model as “a ‘Barthesian’ theory” that does not give enough focus to the “process of encoding” and its relation to the “structure of society”. He adds that in later versions of Cultural Studies, such as the one by John Fiske, the model was interpreted as implying “the radical indeterminacy of audience readings” (Sparks, 1996, 94).

In the E/D-essay, Hall (1973b) introduces several forms of the interpretation of messages: the dominant/hegemonic form, where the audience decodes the encoded meaning “full and straight” (16), the negotiated form where there is a “mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements” (17), and the oppositional form where the message is decoded in a “contrary way” (18). In the E/C-article, there is a strong focus on the “lack of ‘fit’” and the “a-symmetry” (4) between encoded and decoded meanings. The encoded meaning and the decoded meaning “may not be the same. They do not constitute an ‘immediate identity’” (Hall, 1973b, 4). Hall stresses that there is no necessary correspondence between encoded and decoded meanings. This is certainly true, but he creates the impression that all three forms are equally likely, which is somewhat relativist. This impression is reinforced by Hall’s stress that the sign is “fundamentally polysemic” (Hall, 1973b, 13), a theme to which Hall, again and again, returns in his works with reference to Bakhtin and Vološinov by e.g. stressing “multi-accentualities” (Hall, 1986, 51), “the polysemic quality of commodities […] as signs” (Du Gay et al., 1997, 104), or that Cultural Studies developed “heteroglossia, carnival, or multi-accentuality” (Hall, 1996, 493). We will see that in a follow-up essay to E/D, Hall somewhat corrected this shortcoming. What is missing in the E/D-essay is that there is also no necessary non-correspondence of encoded and decoded meaning and that there are strategies, such as ideological work that creates and spreads ideologies, that actors in contemporary society use for trying to make it more likely that their defined meanings are interpreted in the manner they prefer.

E/D was published in two versions, the 1973 long version in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies working paper series (Hall, 1973b) and a shorter 1980 version in the book Culture, Media, Language (Hall, 1980b). What is left out in the 1980 version is the discussion of encoding in the context of the Western genre. Gurevitch et al., 2003, 240) note that the first version “focuses more on the moment of encoding”, and the second one “moved towards the moment of decoding”. Given that the initial version is simply longer, it is perhaps more correct to say that the working paper focused on both encoding and decoding. In both there is a typology of decoding but no typology of encoding. We may therefore say that indeed in both there is more theoretical focus on decoding.

Morley (2019) points out that in the transition from the longer Stencilled Paper version to the shorter book version of E/D “much was lost” (247) and that Hall addresses some of the E/D-model’s shortcomings in “other papers from the same period” (249) such as The “Structured Communication” of Events (Hall, 1973c) and The External-Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting: Television’s Double-Bind (Hall, 1972).

The “Structured Communication” of Events is an article that Hall (1973c) published in the same year as the well-known Encoding and Decoding-essay. On August 4th, 2023, the E/D essay was with 15,669 citations on Google Scholar Hall’s most cited work. The Structured Communication article in contrast had only 163 citations.Footnote 1Structured Communication continues the discussion started in the E/D paper and can be seen as its second part. The “Structured Communication” of Events is, however, much less known and read than E/D. Hall argues that in the process of public communication as encoding and decoding of information, there are obstacles to and the systematic distortion of communication.

Hall (1973b, 13) argues there are “dominant or preferred meanings” where producers try to encode certain meanings and try to make the decoding of their own intended meanings more likely. Such encoded dominant meanings are manifestations of the “institutional/political/ideological order” in the text (Hall, 1973b 13). The encoders try to suggest to the audience to read the content “in this way” and not in others, which “is never fully successful, but it is the exercise of power in the attempt to hegemonize the audience reading” (Hall, 1994, 262). One issue here is that there are dominant meanings that society’s dominant political and economic actors as well as ideologues want to see represented in the media. And there are the meanings actually encoded by the media producers and the audience’s decoded meanings. Society’s dominant actors can use lobbying, public relations, political pressure, etc. to try to get their messages, meanings, and worldviews represented. Others do not have such means at their disposal. The consequence is that the news media in class and dominative societies are a “contested and contradictory space”, a space of intellectual struggle (Hall, 1994, 263).

Hall, Habermas, and the public sphere

Hall (1972, 1973c) in a manner comparable to Habermas’ (1991) Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere discusses how power structures constrain the public sphere. These constraints include, according to Hall (1972, 1973c), the unequal distribution of the “competence to speak” (Hall, 1973c, 5), media monopolies, the selection and reliance on powerful actors as privileged sources of information and the exclusion of out-groups, the selection of interview partners and subjects of coverage (opposing viewpoints of powerful actors are voiced, but those of the less powerful are much less frequently or not at all present); powerful organisations’ use of public relations, “image makers” and “news management” for “impression management” (Hall, 1972, 3) and their interest to monopolise media and attention “for consensus-formation for their preferred accounts and interpretations, thereby extending their hegemony” (Hall, 1972, 13), silence and invisibility as non-reporting and exclusion of specific events, viewpoints, aspects, interpretations, contexts, etc.; dominant professional standards, routines, knowledge and practices; the institutional embeddedness of assumptions about what is consensus in society that rules out the inclusion of alternative assumptions; the media logic of constructing folk devils, scapegoats and moral panics; state censorship, editorial censorship, and self-censorship. In the essay External Influences on Broadcasting: The External-Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting: Television’s Double-Bind, Hall (1972) makes comparable points.

Hall argues that political and economic power are “shadowed by what we may call the unequal distribution of cultural power” that consists in the command of “(a) the power to define which issues will enter the circuit of public communications; (b) the power to define the terms in which the issue will be debated; (c) the power to define who will speak to the issues and the terms; (d) the power to manage the debate itself in the media” (Hall, 1973c, 35). Habermas (1991) spoke of the re-feudalisation of the public sphere and processes of “monetarization and bureaucratization” (Habermas, 1987, 321, 323, 325, 386, 403) as the colonisation of the lifeworld. Ideology as a factor in the distortion of public opinion does not so much play a role in Habermas’ approach. Hall is more than Habermas concerned with the ideological and cultural control and distortion of communication in the public sphere. Both thinkers analyse the asymmetric visibility, power and communication competences of actors in the public sphere.

In Habermas’ theory of the public sphere and communicative action, there are economic and political dimensions of distortion of the public sphere. Stuart Hall gives particular attention to cultural factors. Thinking together Habermas and Hall, we can create a model of economic, political and cultural alienation of communication in the public sphere (see Table 1).

Table 1 Three forms of power and three corresponding forms of alienated communication in the public sphere
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One of Hall’s (1973c, 33) conclusions is that “the structures of power and the structures of broadcasting are articulated with one another”. He argues that in class and dominative societies, there are “mediations between broadcasting and power” (Hall, 1972, 1). He says that the media system is neither determined nor autonomous from power structures. There are constant mutual influences and a “relative autonomy” (Hall, 1972, 6) so that journalists and other media producers often, but not necessarily (e.g. not when there is dictatorial control of the media system or single media), have a relative professional autonomy of action.

News media in multiple ways depend on those in power (sources, topics, legislation, advertising revenue, etc.) and at the same time have the capacity and task to interrogate and question power as well as to uncover and report hidden knowledge about power in order to create attention and fulfil their role as watchdogs. There is a continuum that ranges from the media’s full affirmation of power on the one end to the full critique of power on the other end. It’s a continuum ranging from control to autonomy. At different times due to various intervening conditions, media are more or less critical or affirmative of dominant power structures and the powerful. That news and media organisations have relative autonomy means that in a societal environment where there is a significant level of economic concentration in the media sector and other economic sectors, state control of the public sphere, and ideological control and the cultural centralisation of voice, media content is more likely to come under pressure to give special attention to dominant views and ideologies. This is not a necessity, but with increased economic, political and cultural power asymmetries the likelihood of the limitation of the freedom of the press, media and communication increases. Using Hall’s formulation, we can say that there is no necessary correspondence and no necessary non-correspondence of media content and the moral values and ideas of dominant economic, political and cultural actors. Reproduction of such ideas at certain times becomes more likely when power asymmetries increase in society.

Hall (1973c) uses the term “structured communication” for what in this paper is characterised as the alienation of the public sphere and what Habermas terms the feudalisation of the public sphere and the colonisation of the lifeworld. The phrase “structured communication” is a bit misleading because all communication is structured by society’s structures and is helping to structure society’s structures. In order to indicate there is a problem it is therefore better to speak of alienated, distorted or feudalised communication.

It is a non-trivial question if and when resistance to instrumental or dominant codes and culture emerges. Some of Hall’s formulations imply that subordinated cultures with necessity resist sooner or later. For example, he speaks of the “cultural dialectic” of “incorporation and resistance” between the dominant culture and subordinated cultures (subcultures) and writes that the dominant culture and subordinated cultures “are always, in some sense, in struggle with one another” (Clarke et al., 1975/2006, 6). He also talks about “the double movement of containment and resistance”, which “is always inevitably inside” of popular culture (Hall, 2019, 348). “There are points of resistance; there are also moments of supersession. This is the dialectic of cultural struggle. In our times, it goes on continuously, in the complex lines of resistance and acceptance, refusal and capitulation, which make the field of culture a sort of constant battlefield” (Hall, 2019, 354). Popular culture is for Hall “deeply contradictory” (354), “the arena of consent and resistance” (360). Culture and popular culture are certainly sometimes arenas of intellectual struggle. They are an arena of consent and resistance, but not the (only) arena as struggles take place in many spheres, systems, contexts, and forms.

The trouble with formulations such as the ones that there is a dialectic, double movement, or an arena of “containment and resistance”, “consent and resistance”, “incorporation and resistance” etc. is that they make it look like that wherever there is domination there is automatically resistance and struggle-from-below. Hall is here too optimistic about the potentials of resistance. Struggle needs to be collectively organised, it does not arise with necessity and not automatically. There is no automatic resistance as a reaction to domination. Speaking of the “inevitability”, “continuity”, and “constancy” of cultural struggles and of a culture that is “always in struggle” shows that there are passages in Hall’s work that are based on a logic of automatism and where Hall overestimates the potentials for and realities of resistance. This shortcoming is certainly not characteristic of all of his work but can be found in some of it.

A model of the media system

Thinking together what has been said thus far and further developing Hall’s media and communication theory, we can visualise the media system in Fig. 2. What follows is my own model that is informed by some of Hall’s ideas and at the same time goes beyond Hall.

Fig. 2
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The media system

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Let us have a look at what is visualised in Fig. 2. On the upper left side of the figure, there are knowledge workers who produce content. On the right-hand side of the figure, we find audiences who consume and engage with media content. On the bottom, we see the societal contexts of media production, distribution, and consumption, namely the economic system, the political system, and the cultural system.

The media system is part of the public sphere. In the media system, media producers create meaningful content that is distributed and then consumed and interpreted by members of the public and audiences. The media system is the system of public communication where content is produced and published, i.e. made available to the public. The work of content producers and audiences’ content consumption interacts with the economy, politics, and culture, i.e. the economic, political and cultural dialectics of practices and structures taking place in society. These three realms of society are shown at the bottom of Fig. 2.

Society and its subsystems and social relations are characterised by power relations and power structures. Power structures are at certain moments or in certain phases more or less alienated. Power relations are at certain moments or in certain phases more based on consensus without heavy social struggles or on conflicts where we see explicit and at least partly heavy social struggles. A society’s consensus consists of the “shared agreements about fundamental issues” that hold together “the social order” (Hall, 1972, 12). Consensus is what prevents the outbreak of wars of all against all. This means that pure conflict means war. In phases of deep political crisis, this consensus can break down and society can become more polarised and contentious. War is the ultimate danger of such phases and developments.

The interaction of power structures (the continuum alienation ––- non-alienation) and power relations (the continuum conflict ––- consensus) shapes the economy, politics, culture, and society at large. The resulting force field is shown as influence on these systems at the bottom of Fig. 2.

The production, distribution, and consumption of content in the media system interact with the intersection and interaction of the three societal power forcefields. This means that the content and the meanings that are produced and the meanings that audiences make of this content are shaped by and shape society’s power structures and power relations. These interactions are complex, which means we cannot read off the meanings produced in the media system from society’s power forcefields and vice-versa. Economic, political and cultural power influence, but do not determine the media system, its content, and the encoded and decoded meanings. The media system has a relative autonomy from the economic, the political and cultural systems. It requires these systems and has itself economic, political and cultural dimensions. Economic, political and cultural actors such as companies, governments and celebrities/influencers become part of the media system in different ways (advertising, ownership, funding, legislation, interviews, lobbying, subjects of reports, etc.) but do not singlehandedly control content.

Social struggles and power structures are important factors that influence the encoding and decoding of meanings in the media system. Given that the media system publishes content aimed at the public, powerful actors have an interest to be positively represented in the media. Therefore, in class and dominative societies, the media are often arenas and terrains of intellectual, cultural and ideological struggles. This is especially the case in “moments of polarization and conflict” such as crises and heavy social struggles (Hall, 1972, 5). What we can learn from Stuart Hall is that there is neither an automatic correspondence nor an automatic non-correspondence of (encoded and decoded) meanings created in the media system and economic, political and ideological interests. In addition, there is also no automatic correspondence and no automatic non-correspondence of encoded and decoded meanings. There can be hegemonic/dominant, mixed, and oppositional encoded meanings. The same is true of decoded meanings. In a participatory democracy, fascist meanings are oppositional meanings. In contrast in a fascist society, democratic meanings are oppositional meanings. This means that Hall’s categories of dominant, mixed and oppositional meanings depend on the overall character of society and its power structures. It seems necessary that we add another dimension to the characterisation of mediated meanings in order to be able to also assess meanings independently of the actual power structures.

In this context, Horkheimer’s (2002, 2004) distinction between instrumental and critical reason is helpful. Instrumental reason is a logic where certain humans think that it is reasonable and adequate that they instrumentalise other humans’ labour, action and ideas in order to benefit at their expense. This reason guides their practices. Exploitation and domination are the results. The critical reason is critical thought and action that questions power asymmetries, exploitation and domination. It aims at establishing relatively symmetrical power distributions, “a society without injustice” (Horkheimer, 2002, 221).

The meanings that media workers and audiences produce in the media systems are characterised by two dimensions: (a) the type of reason and social logic that underpins meanings, (b). the relationship to society’s power structures. There can be meanings that are (a) critical, mixed, or instrumental as well as (b) hegemonic/dominant, mixed, or oppositional in character. These characteristics of meanings can be found both at the level of encoded meanings that media workers produce and at the level of decoded meanings that audiences and members of the public produce. There is no necessary correspondence and no necessary non-correspondence of these features of meanings at the level of encoded meanings and decoded meanings. Meaning-production is complex and depends on the contradictions, power relations, power structures, social practices, relations and struggles taking place both inside the media system and in society at large as well as their interactions.

The consumption of content often leads to new and further production of content. For example, if there is a regular readership of a newspaper then sufficient consumption during one time period leads to enough revenue for further production during the next financial time period. The move from consumption back to production is not a necessity but contingent. If there is a crisis of a medium or an industry, then a shrinking audience can result in the end of production, bankruptcy, declining revenues, etc. and as a consequence in layoffs, wage cuts, strikes, etc.

In a democratic society, many different media represent a wide variety of groups and their interests as well as the public interest and are widely consumed. The democratic character of the media is limited by the alienation of communication that stems from the interaction of the media system and the economy (media concentration), the political system (state control, surveillance and censorship of communication), and the cultural system (asymmetric attention, voice, visibility and reputation; ideology). This means that powerful actors in society have means at hand (money, laws, violence, influence) that they can and often try to use in order to make their voices heard in the public sphere or that they use to try to control and shape the media’s and the audience’s meaning production.

In Digital Media Studies, Hall’s E/D-model has, for example, been situated in the context of interactive media, computer games, social media, and digital journalism (e.g. Bødker, 2016; Shaw, 2017). The model still matters today in the context of digital and social media. One central feature of the networked computer is that it is not just a means of communication but also a universal means of production and a convergence technology (Fuchs, 2021a, b). It is universal because digitalisation is able to enter and shape different realms of society. It is a means of production because it allows consumers of information to become producers of information. It is at the same time a means of production, distribution and consumption of information. Whereas in traditional broadcasting, there are different technologies for the production, distribution and consumption, the networked computer combines these features, they converge. The border between production and consumption thereby becomes transient and blurred. Using social media, apps, the smartphone, software and the Internet, consumers of information have the potential to become producers of information, so-called “prosumers” (producing consumers) who create user-generated content.

The digital media system

Figure 3 is a further development of Fig. 2 that shows the media system in the age of digitalisation and the Internet. The intersection of the realms of production and consumption shows the activities of prosumers.

Fig. 3
figure 3

The media system in the age of digitalisation and the internet

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Take a moment to first look at Fig. 2 and then at Fig. 3. The main difference is that the realms of content production and media consumption are overlapping. The overlap of these two spheres is the space where prosumption takes place, productive consumption of information. That’s why prosumers are visualised in the intersection of these two spheres. They are both consumers and producers of information making use of networked computing technology for creating user-generated content. In the digital age, the boundaries between production and consumption have become blurred. The prosumer is a figure who is both a worker and a consumer, a producer of information and an audience member consuming information. The networked computer enables such activities as it is both a means of production (a machine) and a means of consumption.

That there is the potential for prosumption does not mean that all digital media users act as prosumers. In March 2022, there were 2.6 billion monthly active YouTube users and 114 million YouTube channels, which means that just 4.4% of YouTube users also have their own channels on that platform. 321,100 channels had more than 100,000 subscribers, which is just 0.3 percent of all channels. Such statistics show that there are only relatively few prosumers and that the capacity for user-generated content has not completely transformed the media world. Many users think of YouTube as a new version of television and do not create content themselves. Society’s power structures also shape Internet platforms. The social media industry is highly concentrated, some states monitor, control, block and censor social media, and we find lots of ideology on social media, etc. The power of attention and visibility is highly asymmetrically distributed on social media. Many content creators have little attention, a small number of creators and influencers achieve high visibility: 75 percent of all YouTube channels have just between 0 and 100 followers, whereas 0.03% (32,300) have more than one million followers.Footnote 2 There are both influencers and proletarianised content producers on YouTube (Fuchs, 2021a, b, chapter 7).

Table 1 identifies three forms of power and three forms of distorted, alienated communication. In digital capitalism, these contradictions take on specific forms that condition and constrain communication in the public sphere. Table 2 gives an overview of digital capitalism’s antagonisms.

Table 2 The antagonisms of digital capitalism
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In digital capitalism, there are specific forms of power that certain actors control and that give them advantages in the control of property, the influence on collective decisions, and in being recognised and visible online. These forms of power include the creation of digital monopolies and concentrated digital capital; the authoritarian control of digital communication as well as the spread of authoritarian politics online; and the asymmetrical distribution of attention, voice and visibility on Internet platforms as well as the spread of ideologies online. The control of such forms of economic, political and cultural digital power enables actors to influence processes of encoding and decoding in their interest. They cannot absolutely determine meaning-making, but have means at their disposal for creating and spreading content that reflects their interests and that has a higher likelihood to reach many users than content that reflects the lives of and is created by ordinary users.

In this section, we have taken Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model as a starting point for constructing models of the media system and the digital media system. Hall’s model is in a way too Structuralist so one needs to bring communication processes and humans as workers, producers, communicators, audiences, and prosumers into theory. I have tried to do so in this section by discussing commonalities and differences between Hall and Habermas and going beyond their works. Hall’s forms of decoding are a helpful starting point for a critical theory of communication and the media system. His Encoding/Decoding-essay presents an imperfect model that one should engage with, re-engage with, be critical of, and use as one of the foundations of a critical theory of communication in society.

Conclusion

This paper engaged with works by Stuart Hall on the communication and the media from the perspective of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. The goal of the paper was to read Stuart Hall in a manner that can inform the renewal of Marxist Humanism and the development of a Marxist-Humanist theory of communication. This involved reconstructing elements of Hall’s approach, criticising certain aspects of his work, and through this engagement developing new theory elements. Just like Hall called for an engagement of Cultural Studies with Marx, Marxists should engage with Hall, which does not imply one has to agree with everything he wrote. His works are rich in character. There are lots of things in it I disagree with but also some that I find quite helpful as one of the foundations that we together with elements from other critical theories need to sublate and reconstruct in order to arrive at a contemporary critical theory of communication and society.

The engagement with Hall’s work was conducted in several steps by discussing the role of human agency in society, articulation and communication, communication and work, as well as the encoding/decoding model of communication.

Let us now summarise the main findings along the four dimensions that make up this paper’s four main sections.

Human agency in society:

  • In Structuralist thought, structures are often said to be subjects. Influenced by Strauss, Saussure, Althusser, Barthes, Laclau, and Foucault, there is a Structuralist current in Stuart Hall’s thought where discourses, language, structures, and ideology are said to act. The problem is that structures only exist and are meaningful in and through human practices. Discourses, language, structures and ideology do not act. They only have effects in and through human practices that produce, reproduce, and use them.

  • Bestowing agency on structures misses that there is a dialectic of humans and their practices and social structures where communication is the process through which humans in their everyday social relations produce and reproduce social structures that enable and constrain human practices.

Articulation and communication:

  • Articulation is a key concept in Structuralism and Structuralist Marxism. Articulation both means relatedness and the process of expressing oneself. The latter meaning makes the concept interesting for a Marxist-Humanist approach, which opens up a possibility for the engagement with Hall.

  • For Althusser, articulation is a structure between structures. Based on Althusser, Hall provides Structuralist understandings of articulation as a complex structure that links together structures or elements in an open manner so that the link can be broken and remade, there is no necessary (non-)correspondence, and structures in domination are created. Transcending Structuralism, Hall in another attempt to characterise articulation speaks of the double articulation of structures and human practices, by which he means that humans produce articulations and structures through their practices that are conditioned by structures.

  • Hall’s trans-Structuralist understanding of articulation is a good starting point for reconceptualising articulation from a Marxist-Humanist perspective. Hall did not integrate articulation as utterance and expression into his theory. A model of communication was introduced (see Fig. 1), where we find a dialectic of the practice of articulation and structures of articulation, articulating and articulatedness. In the communication process, humans mutually articulate ideas in a recursive manner and produce meanings. The role of communication in society is that through it humans produce social relations and sociality, through articulation they create articulated social structures. The human practices of articulating result in the articulatedness of social structures that enable further practices of articulating.

Communication and work:

  • The words “work” and “working” have the double-meaning of producing and functioning. In the Structuralist current of his thought, Hall understands the work of representation, culture, communication, and discourse as the functioning of language and the logic of representation. There is, however, also a Humanist undercurrent in Hall’s works where work is conceived of as the human practice of production that creates something novel in society.

  • Hall’s works challenge the separation of the economy and culture, which is an excellent starting point for thinking about the relationship between communication and work. Work is a process of teleological positing where humans produce in order to achieve certain goals. Communication is a particular form of work and production where humans through the mutual work of representation and articulation make meaning of the world and (re)produce social relations. Communication works (functions) as a particular form of human work, the work of articulation and representation that produces meanings and social relations

The encoding/decoding model of communication in the age of digitalisation:

  • Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding-essay presents a highly influential model of communication. It has to be read together with related essays Hall wrote in the early 1970s. Such a reading shows parallels to Habermas’ theory of the public sphere.

  • Thinking together Hall and Habermas allows to create a model of alienated communication in the public sphere (see Table 1 and Fig. 2). The model is based on the insight that asymmetric distribution of economic, political and cultural power can easily reduce the influence ordinary humans have on public communication. When companies, political parties, governments, state institutions, celebrities, or ideologues are powerful, then they have resources available they can utilise to try to control communication in the public sphere. Society is shaped by power forcefields consisting of two axes, one is a continuum between full alienation on the one and full non-alienation on the other end, the other is a continuum between heavy conflict on the one end and consensus on the other end. Society’s power forcefields interact with the public sphere and the media. In phases of heavy conflict and social struggle, the media and the public sphere are likely to become contradictory arenas of intellectual struggles. Meaning-making at the level of both content producers and audiences in the media system and the public sphere is shaped by a forcefield where one axis is a continuum between critical reason on the one end and instrumental reason on the other end and the other axis a continuum with hegemonic/dominant meanings on the one end and oppositional meanings on the other end.

  • The E/D-model can also be used as a foundation for a model of the digital media system (see Fig. 3 and Table 2). One of the features of the networked computer is that it is a universal means of communication and production and a convergence technology. It enables prosumption (productive consumption) in the form of user-generated content. The E/D-model has to be further developed for taking these features of digital communication into account. There is a realm where production and consumption intersect, the realm of prosumption. That this realm exists does not mean that all users produce content that is effectively heard and seen in the digital public sphere. Rather, many users consume Internet content (e.g. YouTube videos, video streams on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV + , Disney + , BBC iPlayer, Spotify, etc.) in a manner that is comparable to the traditional broadcast model. Only a small number of prosumers acts as Internet influencers who control lots of online attention. The digital public sphere and the digital media system are in digital capitalism realms that are shaped by power asymmetries.

Engaging with and transcending Stuart Hall’s works allows us to ground foundations of a dialectical concept of communication: Articulation is both practice and structure. The communication process is a dialectic of articulating and articulatedness. This dialectic shows that the two meanings of articulation as expression/utterance and relation are interconnected. Communication is also shaped by another dialectic, namely the dialectic of work and communication. Work is humans’ active production of something new that helps them achieve certain goals. It is the process of humans’ teleological positing. Work as economic process takes not just place in the production of use-values in the economic system but in all social relations. Also, communication is a particular work process, the production and reproduction of social relations, sociality, social structures, social systems, and society. Communication as work works through the dialectic of articulating and articulatedness. There is the work character of communication and the communication character of work. Communication is a form of production, production is organised through communication. The dialectic of articulating/articulatedness and the dialectic of work/communication are the internal dialectics of the communication process. There is also an external dialectic of communication, the dialectic of the public sphere and society. Communication in the public sphere shapes and is shaped by the power forcefields of the economy, politics, and culture. Public communication organised in the media system is both dependent and relatively independent from society’s power relations and structures. The media system and the public sphere are relatively autonomous. Powerful actors have strategies and use resources for trying to make their interests and worldviews heard in the public sphere. There is no automatic correspondence and no automatic non-correspondence of dominant interests and meanings produced in the public sphere and the media system. The public sphere and the media system are contradictory. They are dialectical systems.

Together with Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall had a leading role in the creation of the May Day Manifesto 1967/1968, a New Left political vision. For these thinkers, critical research and critical theory have to inform politics. The Manifesto expresses the concern that the control of the modern means of communication, “unless there is public intervention”, passes into “minority hands, which then use them to impose their own views of the world” (Mayday Manifesto Committee, 2013, 35). The Manifesto called for “democratic control” over “the whole processes of production” (Mayday Manifesto Committee, 2013, 146). It argued for the advancement of a participatory socialist democracy and democratic socialism. As part of such a transformation, Hall envisioned the creation of democratic, participatory media a collective means of production and communication that allows humans “the mutual exploration of reality” and where “transformed realities” are being “jointly created” (Hall, 2021, 235). “A democratic system would aim to provide a variety of choice representing the variety of people's interests and potential interests” (Hall & Whannel, 1964/2018, 374) in light of the organisation of individuals’ and groups’ “fuller participation in society” (Hall & Whannel, 1964/2018, 380).

In the contemporary digital age of echo chambers, fake news, and post-truth, there is a lack of engagement, debate, listening, and complex argumentation. Realities are not jointly created and transformed, but contained, closed, and organised in the form of nationalist ideology, polar opposites, hatred, and war. In the age of digital capitalism, Stuart Hall’s vision of a democratic public sphere and democratic media in a democratic-socialist society remains highly important as the beacon of hope in social struggles today.