Connotative codes function as a culture’s maps of meaning

Evidence

Connotative codes, above all, which enable a sign to “reference” a wide domain of social meanings, relations, and associations, are the means by which the widely distributed forms of social knowledge, social practices, the taken-for-granted knowledge which society’s members possess of its institutions, beliefs, ideas, and legitimations are “brought within the horizon” of language and culture. These codes constitute the crisscrossing frames of reference, the sedimentations of meaning and connotation, which cover the face of social life and render it classifiable, intelligible, meaningful. … They constitute the “maps of meaning” of a culture. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 902

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the crucial concept of ‘maps of meaning’ via connotative codes.
• XREF: connects to: Interpretive codes function as modes of attention directed at textual phenomena — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1686; Fixed noun-adjective couplings hypnotically fix meaning and block alternative explications — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 390; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”