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MEDIA STUDIES 113

planes. This first system of signification he calls the plane of ‘denotation’. For
example, when the word pig (signifier) has the content of the concept, ‘A very
useful animal that produces meat, bacon, etc.’ (signified), the relation between the
signifier, pig, and the signified, ‘very useful animal that produces meat’, gives us
the signification ‘animal, pig’. In Saussure, it is not the morpheme pig, nor the
actual animal in the farmyard, but the relating of the morpheme to a concept—
signifier/signified— which gives us the sign.
At a second level, the above relation between signifier and signified (that is, the
whole system of ‘denoted’ meaning) can become the plane of expression or the
signifier of a second system. For instance, in the context of the North American
black movement, the word ‘pig’ does not mean the relation between the signifier
and the concept of a material object (animal), but becomes instead the signifier
of a new sign: policeman. This level is that which Barthes calls ‘connotation’.

As we said above, connotative meanings are defined by lexicons or sub-codes
which are used within specific groups or with reference to a more delimited
domain. Though a message employing this sign might be emitted and received in
a common code, the connotation in this message—‘Off the Pig!’—would be
decoded according to the lexicons only of those familiar with the language of the
black ghetto. It follows that the connotation can be encoded or decoded so as to
yield many different significations. Thus the same signifier, pig, with reference
to the same concept, ‘pigness’, when read in the context of the feminist
movement will connote ‘male chauvinist’.
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Another type of second-order system is what Barthes calls ‘myth’. Myth should
be thought of as a special type of connotation since, according to Barthes, the
mythical system is generated in the same way as connotation. The real soldier
saluting the flag (signified)+the photograph of him saluting (signifier) gives us
the ‘denotation’ =negro saluting flag (sign). At the second level, this constituted
sign (negro saluting flag)+the concept of French imperiality gives us the second-
order connotation, which is ‘France is a great empire, and all her sons, without