Put the wheel of a carriage at the door of a country house. It can be the sign for the workshop of a carriage maker (and in this sense it is an example of the whole class of object there produced); it can be the sign for a restaurant (thus being a sample, pars pro totof of that rural world of which it announces and promises the culinary delights); it can be the stylization of a stylization for the local seat of the Rotary Club. One can also decide to recognize it as a manifestation of the symbolic mode: one can focus its circularity as suggesting the ability of proceding ad infinitum, the equal distance of the hub from every point of the circle, the radiant symmetry that links the hub to the rim through its spokes. . . .
One can disregard as symbolically irrelevant other properties (namely, its wooden material, its artificial origin, its metonymic link to oxen and horses . . .). Starting from the selected properties, one can discover, in one’s encyclopedic compe-tence, that these pertinent properties map the properties of something else, even though this something else is a nebula of many things, let us say, time with its forward progress, the perfect symmetry of God, the creative energy that produces from a unique center the circular perfection of every being, the progression of the divine lightbeams throughout the fall of Neoplatonic emanations. . . . That wheel can send us back to all these properties of all these entities, and in its content nebula it conveys all of them, and all of them can coexist at the same time, irrespective of their mutual contradictoriness.
The symbolic mode neither cancels the wheel as a physical presence (all the suggested content seems to live within the wheel and because of the wheel) nor cancels the token wheel as a vehicle of a ‘literal’ conventionalized meaning. For the profane it could still remain the sign for the carriage maker’s workshop. In the same way, the profane only sees a cobbler at work where the Kabalist recognizes in his operation the symbolic action of who “at every stitch of his awl . . . not only joined the upper leather with the sole, but all the upper things with all lower things,” drawing at every step “the steam of emanation down from the upper to the lower (so transforming profane action into ritual action), until he himself was transfigured from the earthly Enoch into the transcendent Metatron, who had been the object of his medita-tion” (Scholem 1960; Eng. tr., p. 132).
The symbolic mode is thus not only a mode of producing a text, but also a mode for interpreting every text—through a pragmatic decision: “I want to interpret this text symbolically.” It is a modality of textual use.
This pragmatic decision produces at the semantic level a new sign-function, by associating new content — so far as it is possible, undeter-mined and vague — to expression already correlated to a coded content. The main characteristic of the symbolic mode is that the text, when this mode is not realized interpretively, remains endowed with sense — at its literal or figurative level.
In the mystical experience, the symbolic contents are in some way suggested by a preceding tradition, and the interpreter is convinced (he must be convinced) that they are not cultural unit but referents, aspects of an extrasubjective and extracultural reality.
In the modern aesthetic experience, the possible contents are suggested by the co-text and by the intertextual tradition: the interpreter knows that he is not discovering an external truth but that, rather, he makes the encyclopedia work at its best. Modern poetic symbolism is a secularized symbolism where languages speak about their possibilities. In any case, behind every strategy of the symbolic mode, be it religious or aesthetic, there is a legitimating theology, even though it is the atheistic theology of unlimited semiosis or of hermeneutics as decon-struction. A positive way to approach every instance of the symbolic mode would be to ask: which theology legitimates it?
[5] CODE
5.1. The rise of a new category
5.1.1. A metaphor?
In the second half of this century, semiotics and related disciplines have largely diffused the usage of the term code. The meaning of this term seems to have become exaggeratedly generous, covering many semantic areas, at least all those that philosophers of language would label as lin-guistics competence, a language, a system of rules, world knowledge or encyclopedic competence, a set of pragmatic norms, and so on; as every-one realizes, these areas, albeit frequently overlapping each other, are by no means co-extensive.
The notion of encyclopedia has been proposed in order to explain how signs work according to an inferential model and in what way their mean-ing can be interpreted as a set of co-textually oriented instructions. If one now compares such a flexible notion with the one of code, such as it has been worked out in the first linguistic, semiotic, anthropological writings of the 1950s and 1960s, one wonders whether these two notions still have something in common.
The idea of encyclopedia attempts to take into account a process of interpretation which takes the form of an inference (p q), whereas codes, according to common opinion, are sets of point-to-point equiva-lences (p q).
It would be sufficient to assume that the concept of encyclopedia im-proves and better articulates the ‘old’ concept of code, so that it would be advisable to get rid of such an outdated category. However, if it is wise to try new coinages when a concept becomes more elaborate and more comprehensive, it is always imprudent to dispose of the old ones without exploring, along with their history, the reasons for which they enjoyed consensus and popularity, as well as their perhaps still undiscovered fruitfulness. We can easily start from the assumption that, as it appeared and as it was so voraciously employed, the expression code is a mere metaphor. But as it is shown in Chapter 3, metaphors reveal the underlying structure of an encyclopedia; that is, they show (when interpreted) many ‘family resemblances’ among different concepts. Thus they should never be discarded as merely ‘poetic’ devices. To under-stand why they have been coined will reveal what they aimed at suggest-ing. What was suggested is never an idiosyncratic connection; it has something to do with the semantic interconnections provided by a given historical encyclopedia.
5.1.2. Dictionaries
Until the second half of this century, code was used as dictionaries suggest, that is, in three senses: paleographic, institutional, and correla-tional.
The paleographic sense provides a clue for understanding the other two: the codex was in Latin the stock or the stem of a tree from which wooden writing tablets, smeared over with wax, were made; thus the term came to designate parchement or paper books. Thus a code is something which tells something else; it has had to do with communication or signification since its most remote origins.
There is a book and a communicational purpose in correlational codes: the Morse code is a code book or a dictionary which provides a set of correlations between a series or a system of electric signals (written down as dots and dashes) and a series of alphabetic letters. As we shall see, speaking of the difference between ciphers and cloaks, there are codes correlating expressions to expressions and codes correlating expressions to contents.
Also, institutional codes are books, insofar as they are a “systematic col-lection of statutes, a body of laws arranged as to avoid inconsistency and overlapping . . . a set of rules of any subject,” and in this sense also “the prevalent morality of a society or class” (Oxford English Dictionary), Legal codes, codes of etiquette, chivalric codes, and so on, are systems of in-structions.
At first glance, correlational codes seem to obey the equivalence model, whereas institutional codes seem to obey the inferential one. The difference is not, however, so clear-cut. For instance, the Roman Law (as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon Common Law, which is rather a body of examples endowed with instructional or implicative power) looks like a system of correlations: the Italian Codice Penale (penal law code) does not say explicitly that murder is bad and does not forbid it as such but, rather, correlates various forms of homicide with various forms of punishment. On the other hand, the Italian Codice Civile (civil law code) is a set of directions as to how one should act, and at the same time a set of sanctions correlated with violations of the norm.
Our question is, however, the following: did the notion of code, such as it appeared in the structuralistic milieu in the mid-century have some-thing to do with one or more of the notions above? And why?
5.2. The landslide effect
Saussure speaks vaguely (in Cours de linguistique generate) of le code de la langue. The expression betrays embarrassment: Saussure does not say that a language is a code, but that there is a code of a language. We can say that this first hint remained unexploited until the 1950s. This date has been chosen for several reasons: 1949 is the year of Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication; and 1956 is the year of a book which had been influenced by research in the theory
