Connotation in postmodern culture is always plural and simultaneous, not layered on pure signs.

Evidence

The language of connotation which began to impose itself in the preceding paragraph would seem to impose a reexamination of the central elaboration of this concept, which we owe to Roland Barthes, who elaborated it, following Hjemslev, in his Mythologies, only in his later “textual” work to repudiate its implicit differentiation of firstand seconddegree languages (denotation and connotation), which must have come to strike him as a replication of the old divisions between aesthetic and social, artistic free play and historical referentiality — divisions which essays like Le Plaisir du texte were concerned to evade or escape. … For the situation here is rather the inverse of the advertising one, where “purer” and somehow more material signs were appropriated and readapted to serve as vehicles for a whole range of ideological signals. Here, on the contrary, the ideological signals are already deeply embedded in the primary texts, which are already profoundly cultural and ideological: the Beethoven music already includes the connotator of “classical music” in general, the science fiction film already includes multiple political messages and anxieties (an American Cold War form readapted to Japanese antinuclear politics, and both then folding into the new cultural connotator of “camp”). But connotation is here — in a cultural sphere whose “products” have functions that largely transcend the narrowly commercial ones of advertising images (while no doubt still including some of those and surely replicating their structures in other ways) — a polysemic process in which a number of “messages” coexist. … Thus the alternation of Beethoven and disco no doubt emits a class message — high versus popular or mass culture, privilege and education versus more popular and bodily forms of diversion — but it also continues to vehiculate the older content of some tragic gravity, the formal time sense of the sonata form itself, the “high seriousness” of the most rigorous bourgeois aesthetic in its grappling with time, contradiction, and death; which now finds itself opposed to the relentless temporal distraction of the big city commercial music of the postmodern age that fills time and space implacably to the point where the older “tragic” questions seem irrelevant. All these connotations are in play simultaneously. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 231

Categorization

• DEFINE: Reverses Barthes’s advertising model: ideological signals are already embedded in primary texts, not added in a second layer — connotation as polysemic coexistence.
• XREF: connects to: Any text’s ideological conditions of production are always several, never singular — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 480