ABSTRACT
We wish in this chapter to join a project that, in our view, ties together much of Gunther Kress’ work, and can also be found, among others, in the “Geosemiotics” developed by Scollon and Scollon (2003). This project is the construction of a materialist theory of signs: a study of signs that sees signs not as primarily mental and abstract phenomena reflected in “real” moments of enactment, but as material forces subject to and reflective of conditions of production and patterns of distribution, and as constructive of social reality, as real social agents having real effects in social life. Kress (2010b) consistently calls this a social semiotics, but it is good to remember that methodologically, this social semiotics is a materialist approach to signs. Such a materialism reacts, of course, against the Saussurean paradigm, in which the sign was defined as “une entité psychique” with two faces: the signifier and the signified (Saussure, 1960, p. 99). The study of signs—semiotics—could so become a study of abstract signs; retrieving their meaning could become a matter of digging into their deeper structures of meaning systems; and semiotics could become a highly formal enterprise (Eco, 1979).
