A sign is a phenomenon of the external world. Both the sign itself and all the effects it produces...occur in the outer
experience...Signs emerge only in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another. And the
individual conciousness itself is filled with signs. Consciousness becomes consiousness only once it has been filled with
ideological(semiotic) content, consequenlty, only in the process of social interaction (11).
The word [is] the primary medium of individual consciousness (14).
The idealistc philosophy of culture and psychologistic cultural studies both commit the same fundamental error. By
localizing ideology in the consiousness, they transform the study of consiousness and its laws (12).
The individual consiousness is a social-ideological fact...The only possible objective definition of consciousness is a
sociological one (12-13).
The reality of the inner psyche is the same reality as the sign... By its very existential nature, the subjective psyche is to be
localized somewhere between the organism and the outside world, the borderline separating these two shperes of reality. It is
here that an encounter between the organism and the outside world takes place, but the encounter is not physical one: the
organism and the outside world meet here in the sign (26).
True, the psyche and ideology are said to coincide, to share a common denominator- meaning (27).
A thought that as yet exists only in the context of my consiousness, without embodiment in the context of a discipline
constituting some unified ideological system, remains a dim, unprocessed thought. But the thought has come into existence
in my consciousness already with an orientation toward anideological system, and it itself had been engendered by the
ideological signs that I had absorbed earlier (33).
In its pure form, the inner sign, i.e., experience, is receivable only by self-observation (introspection) (36).
The sign and its social situation are inextricably fused together. The sign cannot be separated from the social situation
without relinquishing its nature as sign (37).