Page 83 - Decoding Culture

76 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

connotative or inferential apparatus. This, following Hjelmslev, is
the domain of connotative semiotics, and Barthes (1973: 90)
observes, with the period's characteristic optimism, that 'the future
probably belongs to a linguistics of connotation'. However, what if
S is not the signifier of S - its plane of expression - but its signi­
2
1
fied, or plane of content? In this case, S becomes a metalanguage
2
which has S as its language object - the relation found between,
1
among others, semiology and the significatory systems that it
analyses. It follows, of course, that each metalanguage could
become the plane of content for yet another secondary system,
and so on up a scale of encompassing metalanguages.
What are the consequences of this somewhat confusing analy­
sis? On the question of connotation, what is clear is that not only
does Barthes see connotative semiotics as central to the future of
semiology, but he also considers this form of analysis to raise
'
directly the question of ideology: [ als for the signified of connota­
tion, its character is at once general, global and diffuse; it is, if you
like, a fragment of ideology' (ibid: 91). The signified of connotation
is ideology, while its signifiers are constituted by the rhetorics
which convert the denotation of S into the connoted meanings of
1
S . Subjected to the appropriate rhetorics, the soldier saluting the
2
flag comes to signify the ideology of French militaristic imperial­
ism. Meanwhile, the semiologist, who is marshalling a different S 2
in the cause of metalanguage analysis, is both obliged thereby to
untangle the web from which connotation is constructed and to
recognize that, in turn, this very semiological account may itself be
relativized within further metalanguages. So, Barthes concludes
(ibid: 94) , the semiologist 'seems to have the objective function of
decipherer . . . in relation to the world which naturalizes or con­
ceals the signs of the first system under the signifiers of the
second; but his objectivity is made provisional by the very history
which renews metalanguages'. The general task of semiology may

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