Language as Representation of Culture in the theory of Stuart Hall and Ferdinand de Saussure

Cultural Studies, fairly new in humanities, has been developed since 1980 s, specially in the U.S., as a method. Stuart Hall has developed this field in his Representation: Cultural Representations and signifying practices, and Encoding /Decoding, in the center of Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hall suggests that language is the representation of culture which is quite inseparable from it. The processes of encoding and decoding take place within and by means of culture and as the culture is perpetually moving and changing, significations and meanings getting shaped, not being static either, and are changing all the time, so the meaning is not fixed and unitary and is continuously getting constructed along with the changing culture. This is a common point between Hall and Ferdinand De Saussure. We owe the theory of representation and construction of the meaning to social and cultural factors emphasized by Saussure who for the first time questioned an essential link between the signifier and the signified, and so was a pioneer in the field of signification. This paper is to show that, although the culture and representation try to fix the meaning according to the norms of the leading culture and discourse, they deconstruct themselves at the same time and give way to new readings of them. So, unlike the leading culture and discourse, one can always create and build new meanings that each can be an event to deconstruct the culture and Art and lead them to new paths.