Barthes’ Codes (Abigail Odum)

 Roland Barthes describes a text as:

“a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language...” (S/Z – 1974 translation)

What he is basically saying is that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.

Barthes was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so. And there are 5 major codes within a story that are interwoven in order to create meaning. Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following five ways:

• Action code & enigma code

• Symbols & Signs

• Points of Cultural Reference

• Simple description/reproduction

• Structures

These are all important however the enigma and action codes are the most helpful. The Enigma (hermeneutic) code refers to those plot elements that raise questions on the part of the reader of a text or the viewer of a film. For example, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Cause and Effect,” we see the Enterprise destroyed in the first five minutes, which leads us to ask the reason for such a traumatic event. Indeed, we are not.

The Action (proairetic) code, on the other hand, refers to mere actions – those plot events that simply lead to yet other actions. For example, a gunslinger draws his gun on an adversary and we wonder what the resolution of this action will be. We wait to see if he kills his opponent or is wounded himself. Suspense is thus created by action rather than by a reader’s or a viewer’s wish to have mysteries explained.

I learnt a lot from this information; it gave a detailed explanation on different codes which are used in filming thrillers. This helped as it gave me ideas on how to make our 2 minute sequence as effective as possible. Some of this above was taken from