Definitions of Semiotics, Discourse, Ideology and Hegemony

Definitions of Semiotics, Discourse, Ideology and Hegemony

Here's some basic definitions of the major terms we've used over the first few weeks of the course.


Semiotics and Language
Really Basic Definition:
Semiotics is the idea that we communicate through a system of signs. Those signs can be words, pictures, sounds etc etc. They take on meaning by connecting to each other.

“Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘order’, and ‘reality’ become established.”
-Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin



Discourse
Really Basic Definition:
Discourse describes the ‘environment’ in which words, pictures, objects and images get used. All communication takes place within discursive environments.

"Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity… we will say for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation…”
-Michel Foucault


Ideology
Really Basic Definition:
The word ‘ideology’ describes the belief systems through which we understand the world.

“The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: “they do not know it, but they are doing it.”
“…reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification.”
-Slavoj Zizek

“In ideology ‘men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form’”.
-Louis Althusser

Hegemony
Really Basic Definition: Hegemony describes the way belief systems are subtly made to benefit certain social groups.

“Originally, hegemony referred to the way that one nation could exert ideological and social, rather than military or coercive, power over another. However, cultural theorists tend to use the term to describe the process by which a dominant class wins the willing consent of the subordinate classes to the system that ensures their subordination.”
-John Fiske