…the intelligible is reputed antipathetic to lived experience.

Process of signification

Quasi-tautological

…true sign systems and a statement of quasi-identity.

Non-/coded iconic message 

Hence, knowing that a system which takes over the signs of another system in order to make them its signifiers is a system of connotation,6 we may say immediately that the literal image is denoted and the symbolic image connoted. Successively, then, we shall look at the linguistic message, the denoted image, and the connoted image.

When it comes to the “symbolic message,” the linguistic message no longer guides identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vise which holds the connoted meanings from proliferating, whether towards exces­sively individual regions (it limits, that is to say, the projective power of the image) or towards dysphoric values.

The text is indeed the creator’s (and hence society’s) right of inspec­tion over the image; anchorage is a control, bearing a responsibility-in the face of the projective power of pictures – for the use of the message. With respect to the liberty of the signifieds of the image, the text has thus a repres­sive value10 and we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideol­ogy of a society are above all invested.

Then again (and there is no contradiction with what has just been said), it is a sufficient message, since it has at least one meaning at the level of the identification of the scene represented; the letter of the image corresponds in short to the first degree of intelligibility (below which the reader would perceive only lines, forms, and colors), but this intelligibility remains virtual by reason of its very poverty, for everyone from a real society always dispos­es of a knowledge superior to the merely anthropological and perceives more than just the letter.

Does the coding of the denoted message have consequences for the connoted message?

Spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority

The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation. 

The more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.

The language of the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted (for example at the level of the combiner of the signs or creator of the message), it is also the totality of utterances received:the language must include the “surprises” of meaning.

It can thus be seen that in the total system of the image the structural functions are polarized: on the one hand there is a sort of paradigmatic con­densation at the level of the connotators (that is, broadly speaking, of the symbols), which are strong signs, scattered, “reified”; on the other a syntag­matic ‘flow’ at the level of the denotation-it will not be forgotten that the syntagm is always very close to speech, and it is indeed the iconic “discourse” which naturalizes its symbols.