Connotative codes make social knowledge thinkable by mapping meanings onto signs

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. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 902

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how connotative codes operate — the conceptual mechanism by which taken-for-granted social knowledge enters language.
• XREF: Connects to Barthes’ Elements of Semiology and cultural ‘maps of meaning’ — the framework Hall carries into encoding/decoding theory. — connects to: Initial coding organizes raw text into researcher-driven meaningful groups — Amy Fisher-Smith, Charles R. Sullivan, John D. Macready, and Geoffrey Manzi, Identity Reconfiguration and the Core…, 287