I’d agree that there’s a strategic demystification of the production process in many trade presses and popular media forums (“encoding stories” as you call them), which are not designed to produce a critical consciousness of the production process so much as to reinforce dominant ideologies within a given production culture and renew the allure of the media product for its intended consumer. However, I’m not sure scholarly studies of production practices and textual forms necessarily risk complicity here; rather, it strikes me that we could just as easily see the prevalence of those encoding stories as evidence of the increased URGENCY for more scholarly accounts that can provide some critical and historical perspective lacking in the trade stories and popular press coverage. (I suspect we may be in agreement on this point.) Agreed, as well, that it’s important to remain sensitive to media texts, forms, and practices that lie beyond our immediate critical agenda (and to interrogate our own biases in terms of which texts and practices we’re singling out for analysis and which fall by the wayside) . . . . but, by the same token, don’t the dominant texts, forms, and practices, by virtue of their dominance, also warrant particular critical attention? I’d suggest that a “history of the dominant” certainly has its place in analyses of aesthetic form.

A deeper issue you’ve raised here may concern the relationship between the “encoding” and “decoding” moments of Hall’s original model, which of course configured them within a “circuit” where one moment constantly shaped the conditions and possibilities of the other. A more culturalist and reception-oriented study, then, would by no means be foreign to the project of aesthetic analysis, although for the production-oriented approach I’ve proposed here I’d want to ask how that second moment in the circuit in turn impacts the creative choices made by producers and the design of the text itself. In a sense, this would be the difference between the two larger branches of “aesthetics” as traditionally defined: one concerned with understanding the nature of the art object, the other concerned with understanding the nature of aesthetic experience. If it’s aesthetic experience that concerns us, I think attention to the moment of reception can be especially illuminating; for understanding the art object itself, I think we may be better served by a production-oriented approach (albeit one sensitive to the larger sociohistorical pressures that producers negotiate).