Semiotics of ideology

If an ‘ideology’, in its broadest sense, is ‘a system of ideas’, semiotics, the study of sign systems, is predestined to make essential contributions to the study of ideologies. The semiotic approach to the study of ideology begins with an investigation of the concept itself, which has changed considerably in the course of its history. Theoretical semiotics has studied signs of ideologies and ideologies as sign systems, and applied semiotics has developed critical instruments to reveal the ideological foundations of media discourse, but critical semiotics has not only been critical of the discourse of ‘the others’; it has gone so far as to raise the self-critical question whether the discourse of semiotics itself has ideological foundations.