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the presence/absence of ideology in language but the different levels at which
ideologies and discourses intersect. 8
The level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference and
positioning in different discursive fields of meaning and association, is the point
where already coded signs intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture
and take on additional, more active ideological dimensions. We might take an
example from advertising discourse. Here, too, there is no ‘purely denotative’,
and certainly no ‘natural’, representation. Every visual sign in advertising
connotes a quality, situation, value or inference, which is present as an
implication or implied meaning, depending on the connotational positioning. In
Barthes’s example, the sweater always signifies a ‘warm garment’ (denotation)
and thus the activity/value of ‘keeping warm’. But it is also possible, at its more
connotative levels, to signify ‘the coming of winter’ or ‘a cold day’. And, in the
specialized sub-codes of fashion, sweater may also connote a fashionable style of
haute couture or, alternatively, an informal style of dress. But set against the right
visual background and positioned by the romantic sub-code, it may connote
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‘long autumn walk in the woods’. Codes Codes of this order clearly contract
relations for the sign with the wider universe of ideologies in a society. These
codes are the means by which power and ideology are made to signify in
particular discourses. They refer signs to the ‘maps of meaning’ into which any
culture is classified; and those ‘maps of social reality’ have the whole range of
social meanings, practices, and usages, power and interest ‘written in’ to them.
The connotative levels of signifiers, Barthes remarked, ‘have a close
communication with culture, knowledge, history, and it is through them, so to
speak, that the environmental world invades the linguistic and semantic system.
They are, if you like, the fragments of ideology’. 10
The so-called denotative level of the televisual sign is fixed by certain, very
complex (but limited or ‘closed’) codes. But its connotative level, though also
bounded, is more open, subject to more active transformations, which exploit its
polysemic values. Any such already constituted sign is potentially transformable
into more than one connotative configuration. Polysemy must not, however, be
confused with pluralism. Connotative codes are not equal among themselves.
Any society/ culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its
classifications of the social and cultural and political world. These constitute a
dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal nor uncontested. This
question of the ‘structure of discourses in dominance’ is a crucial point. The
different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into discursive domains,
hierarchically organized into dominant or preferred meanings. New, problematic
or troubling events, which breach our expectancies and run counter to our
‘common-sense constructs’, to our ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge of social
structures, must be assigned to their discursive domains before they can be said
to ‘make sense’. The most common way of ‘mapping’ them is to assign the new
to some domain or other of the existing ‘maps of problematic social reality’. We
say dominant, not ‘determined’, because it is always possible to order, classify,