Codes

The ‘Code’ is highly important to structuralist semiotics. As mentioned by Saussure, signs are meaningless if isolated and need to be interpreted together. Roman Jackson; a linguistic structuralist also said the creation and understanding of texts depends on the existence of codes or conventions for interpretation (Jakobson 1960 and 1971 c). Signs would be meaningless without their frameworks of codes which enable them to be understood. A code will organise a sign into a meaningful system which correlate signifiers and signified through the structuralist form of syntagms and paradigms (Chandler 2002).

In order to correctly interpret a code, we need to be familiar with the correct set of conventions. A convention is the correct meaning attributed by users to something through one particular medium, but known in a broad cultural framework. As Stuart Hall once wrote ‘there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code (Hall 1973, 131). When investigating cultural practice, a sign is treated as anything that may be attributed a meaning by the cultural group, who are trying to understand what is behind the sign in order to understand rules or meanings within that culture. To understand the codes is to be a part of the culture.

“All various non- verbal dimensions of culture, such as styles in cooking, village lay-out, architecture, furniture, food, cooking, music, physical gesture, postural attitudes and so on are organised in patterned sets so as to incorporate coded information in a manner of analogous to the sounds and words of sentences of a natural language...It is just as meaningful to talk about the grammatical rules which govern the wearing of clothes as it is to talk about the grammatical rules which govern speech utterances.” (Leach 1976 10)

Semioticians try to identify what makes up a code, and to do this, they have created groups for the codes. Individual theorists chose what makes up a code and how to categorize it. An example of splitting a code is separating it into verbal and non- verbal categories. Some may say this is a division into sub- codes, but it is usually down to an individual to decide.

Here is an example of a framework by Daniel Chandler

Social codes

· Verbal language (phonological, syntactical, lexical, prosodic and paralinguistic subcodes.)
· Bodily codes (bodily contact, proximity, physical orientation, appearance, facial expression, gaze, head nods, gestures and posture.)
· Commodity codes (fashion, clothing, cars.)
· Behavioural codes (protocols, rituals, role-playing, games.)

Textural Codes

· Scientific codes, including mathematics.
· Aesthetic Codes within the various expressive arts (poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, music etc.) including classicism, romanticism, realism.
· Genre, rhetorical and stylistic codes: exposition argument, description and narration and so on.
· Mass media codes including photographic, televisual, filmic, radio, newspaper, and magazine codes, both technical and conventional (including format).

Interpretive codes

· Perceptual codes: e.g. of visual perception (Hall 1973, 132; Nichols 1981, 11ff.; Eco 1982) (note that this code does not assume international communication).
· Ideological codes: more broadly, those including codes for encoding and decoding texts- dominant (or ‘hegemonic’), negotiated or oppositional (Hall 1980; Morley 1980). More specifically we may list the ‘-isms’, such as individualism, liberalism, feminism, racism, materialism, capitalism, progressivism, conservationism, socialism, objectivism and popularism; (note, however, that all codes can be seen as ideological).

In order to use these types of codes, a certain level of knowledge may be required

· Knowledge of the world.
· Knowledge of the genre or medium.
· A modality judgement between the world and the genre or medium.

Codes vary in the ‘credibility’ they may have. Some may say that a code from a painting may have less viability compared to something as computer code, where there are fewer possible meanings. It is even argued by some theorists that the more ambiguous systems may be codes at all (e.g. Guiraud 1975, 24, 41, 43-4, 65.

Resources Used: Semiotics, The Basics by Daniel Chandler