ABSTRACT
The concept of the ‘code’ is central in structuralist semiotics. While Saussure dealt only with the overall code of language (langue), he did of course stress that signs are not meaningful in isolation, but only when they are interpreted in relation to each other. It was another linguistic structuralist, Roman Jakobson, who emphasized that the production and interpretation of texts depends upon the existence of codes or conventions for communication (Jakobson 1960 and 1971c). Influenced by communication theorists, he substituted the distinction of code from message for the Saussurean distinction of langue from parole (Jakobson 1990, 15). Since the meaning of a sign depends on the code within which it is situated, codes provide a framework within which signs make sense. Indeed, we cannot grant something the status of a sign if it does not function within a code. Codes organize signs into meaningful systems which correlate signifiers and signifieds through the structural forms of syntagms
The conventions of codes represent a social dimension in semiotics: a code is a set of practices familiar to users of the medium operating within a broad cultural framework. Indeed, as Stuart Hall puts it, ‘there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code’ (Hall 1973, 131). Society itself depends on the existence of such signifying systems. When studying cultural practices, semioticians treat as signs any objects or actions which have meaning to members of the cultural group, seeking to identify the rules or conventions of the codes which underlie the production of meanings within that culture. Understanding such codes, their relationships and the contexts in which they are appropriate, is part of what it means to be a member of a particular culture. Codes are not simply ‘conventions’ of communication but rather procedural systems of related conventions which operate in certain domains.
