Connotative codes are the linguistic means by which ideology enters culture

Evidence

Connotational codes of this order are, clearly, structured enough to signify, but they are more “open” or “open-ended” than denotative codes. What is more, they clearly contract relations with the universe of ideologies in a culture, and with history and ethnography. These connotative codes are the “linguistic” means by which the domains of social life-the segmentations of culture, power, and ideology-are made to signify. They refer to the “maps of meaning” into which any culture is organized, and those “maps of social reality” have the whole range of social meanings, practices and usages, power and interest, “written in” to them. Connoted signifiers, Barthes has reminded us, “have a close communication with culture, knowledge and 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.’ ” 21 The denotative level of the televisual sign may be bounded within certain, very complex but limited or “closed” codes. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 801

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how connotative codes function as the pathway for ideology into cultural meaning, via Barthes’s ‘fragments of ideology’.
• XREF: The ‘maps of meaning’ concept prefigures Hall’s notion of ‘maps of meaning and maps of power’ in cultural studies debates. — connects to: Ideology operates through language itself, not merely through false beliefs — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 698