On Semiotic Ideology

This article reviews the concept of semiotic ideology and its implications. Semiotic ideology refers to people’s underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs serve, and what consequences they might produce. Those assumptions vary across social and historical contexts. But semiotic ideology as such is not a kind of false consciousness, nor is it something that some people have and others do not. Rather, semiotic ideology manifests the reflexivity that is inherent to the general human sign-using capacity. It ties general semiotic processes to specific judgments of ethical and political value: to take a sign a certain way is to take seriously the world it presupposes and, often, the life that that world recommends. Two examples show how attention to semiotic ideologies sheds light on the articulation of general semiotic processes with particular social, cultural, and political ones. The analysis of social class helps show some political implications of semiotic ideologies. Clashes over the status of religious signs reveal the ontological and ethical entailments of semiotic ideologies, in which the very existence of a sign’s object may be in dispute. Such ongoing semiotic processes help endow social existence with much of its constructive, uncertain, and conflictual character.