[There are] five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be grouped....Under the hermeneutic code, we list the various (formal) terms by which an enigma [a puzzle or mystery or unanswered question] can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed. [Labeled HER, plus "Enigma 1" or whatever number it is, with a word indicating the kind of enigma, e.g. "Question."(p. 17)]
 

As for the semes [explained on p. 17: a connotative signifier, such as a word or phrase that is automatically associated with feminity, wealth, childhood, evil], we merely indicate them-without, in other words, trying either to link them to a character (or a place or an object) or to arrange them in some order so that they form a single thematic grouping: we allow them the instability, the dispersion, characteristic of motes of dust, flickers of meaning [Labeled SEM, plus a word or phrase indicating what is connoted].
 

Moreover, we shall refrain from structuring the symbolic grouping;[Labeled SYM, this code apparently refers to recurrent examples of traditional rhetorical devices, such as antithesis and metaphor; however, there is much more to it]; [the symbolic grouping] is the place for multivalence and for reversibility; the main task is always to demonstrate that this field can be entered from any number of points, thereby making depth and secrecy problematic.
 

Actions (terms of the proairetic code [labeled ACT, with a name for the action itself and also for its place in a sequence of actions-see p. 18]) can fall into various sequences which should be indicated merely by listing them, since the proairetic sequence is never more than the result of an artifice of reading; whoever reads the text amasses certain data under generic titles for actions (stroll, murder, rendezvous), and this title embodies the sequence; the sequence exists when and because it can be given a name, it unfolds as this process of naming takes place, as a title [for it] is sought or confirmed; its basis is therefore more empirical than rational, and it is useless to attempt to force it into a statutory order. . . . here again, we shall not attempt to put them into any order. Indicating them (externally and internally) will suffice to demonstrate the plural meanings entangled in them.
 

Lastly, the cultural codes [labeled REF] are references to a science or a body of knowledge [the "gnomic" is the body of knowledge represented by folk sayings and proverbs]; in drawing attention to them, we merely indicate the type of knowledge (physical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary, etc.) referred to, without going so far as to construct (or reconstruct) the culture they express.
 

The Weaving of Voices
 

The five codes create a kind of network, a topos [place or space] through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the multivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. . . . The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shard, the broken or obliterated network-all the movements and inflections of a vast "dissolve," which permits both overlapping and loss of messages. [He here refers specifically to what he calls "writerly" texts, texts in which the reader has to participate in the process of making a meaning or meanings; some "classic" texts, he claims, already have a single set meaning, and the reader's only responsibility is to recognize it. Certainly many texts that are regarded as literary classics have the "writerly" qualities he refers to, however-that is, there are more than one, perhaps many, perhaps an infinite number, of ways of interpreting that text. The description he gives, however, applies particularly to the post-modern "writerly" works because part of what such works want to "say" is that life, experience, and meaning are not unified and not whole.]
 

We use Code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted. The code is a . . . mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns; the units which have resulted from it (those we inventory) are themselves, always, ventures out of the text, the mark [or] sign of a virtual digression toward the remainder of a catalogue ([such an ACT label as] The Kidnapping refers to every kidnapping ever written); they are so many fragments of something that has always been already seen, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already. Referring to what has been been written, i.e., to the [metaphorical] Book (of culture, of life, of life as culture), it makes the text [any text] into a prospectus of this Book. Or again, each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven.
 

Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is "lost" in the vast perspective of the already-written de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect: the Voice of Empirics (the proairetisms [ACTS]), the Voice of the Person (the semes), the Voice of Science (the cultural codes), the Voice of Truth [I would say, of answered questions or questions to be answered] (the hermeneutisms), the Voice of Symbol.
 

In the summary outline on pp. 261-65 of the English version, Barthes provides this outline of the "symbolic field." (The Roman numerals refer to segments of S/Z.)
 

A. The body, site of meaning, sex, and money: whence the critical privileges apparently granted the symbolic field (XCII).

B. Reversibility: the subject perfused in the text (LXX); the symbolic field reached by three entrances, without order of preference (XCII).

C. Rhetorical entrance (meaning): Antithesis (XIV) and its transgressions: supplement (XIV), paradigmatic conflagration (XXVII, XLVII, LXXIX)

D. Poetic entrance (creation, sex)

1)The lubricated body (XLIX), the reassembled body (L, LI)

2)Duplicated chain of bodies (XXIX). Beauty (XVI, LI, LXI). Posterity (XVIII).

3) Term and problems of the duplicative code: the masterpiece (LII); the beyond and short (XXX); the chain (XXXI, LXXXV); deficiency and underneath (theory of realistic art) (XXIII, L, LIV, LXXXIII, LXXXVIII).

E. Economic entrance (trade, Gold). Passage from index to sign (XIX). Narrative as subject of a contract (XCI); upsetting the economy (XCII).

F. Generalized problem: castration as a camp (XVII), as metonymy (XXIX), as pandemic (LXXXVIII, XCII). The castrating figure: the "gossip" (LXXXIX). Metonymic collapse (XCII).