This essay is not particularly interested in redescribing, or even paraphrasing, the work that semiotics has enabled in terms of an ideological critique of semiotic systems. The literature is enormous, and extensively known in cultural studies, English literature, and film studies departments throughout the western academy, and is taken as given.

However, it should be noted that I am are not subscribing to a naive Althusserian view of ideology in which ideology was equated with either capitalist or patriarchal forms of representation. This view offered the possibility of some ideologically neutral position on the 'outside.' Ideology, much like 'prejudice' in contemporary hermeneutics, knows no outside.