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Quote :Literary Theory: An Introduction
Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to “naturalize” social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the “natural” sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word “freedom”, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Signs are pretty common in day-to-day life. We see them all over and in loads of forms. For that reason, they often seem natural to us. That leads to a slippery slope where the link between signifier and signified becomes taken for granted, meaning we sometimes lose sight of its constructedness. This isn’t really surprising, but it would be wrong to think that it’s always an accident.
This is where the concept of ideology comes in: sign producers (or other interested parties) can encourage people to read signs in a particular way while also attempting to pass this off as nature rather than culture. Eagleton notes, for instance, that patriotic gestures such as saluting a flag become so ingrained that they become commonplace and spontaneous. Quite the eagle-eye, Eagleton!
This applies to loads of things when we think it’s “natural” to think a certain way, act a certain way, salute a certain way, etc. And that’s what ideology boils down to—transforming culture into “nature.”
Referring to ideology as a “contemporary mythology,” Eagleton brings to mind Roland Barthes’ discussion of mythologies: not Greek gods and all that stuff, but modern sign associations, which can be so powerful that there doesn’t seem to be any space for ambiguity or alternatives. Ideology can therefore be pretty influential, even if we don’t recognize it—which, let’s face it, is the whole point.
All in all, it’s important to recognize that sign associations aren’t just innocent and natural. This doesn’t mean that all signs are produced according to sinister, Dr. Evil-esque motives, but one of the roles of semiotics is to uncover links that have become routine, and to ask what cultural codes come into play when signs are produced and interpreted.