Ideology - Ideology and Semiotic Theory

Ideology and Semiotic Theory

According to the semiotician Bob Hodge, ideology "identifies a unitary object that incorporates complex sets of meanings with the social agents and processes that produced them. No other term captures this object as well as 'ideology'. Foucault's 'episteme' is too narrow and abstract, not social enough. His 'discourse', popular because it covers some of ideology's terrain with less baggage, is too confined to verbal systems. 'Worldview' is too metaphysical, 'propaganda' too loaded. Despite or because of its contradictions, 'ideology' still plays a key role in semiotics oriented to social, political life". Authors such as Michael Freeden have also recently incorporated a semantic analysis to the study of ideologies.

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Famous quotes containing the words ideology, semiotic and/or theory:

    The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty—of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

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    Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienest who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous.... The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)