Introduction

In this paper I intend to join a project that 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 consistently calls this a social semiotics (e.g. Kress, 2009), 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 (De Saussure, 1960: 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 (for an example, see Eco, 1979).

Much of the problem resides in the way in which 'system' is imagined here. In classical structuralist approaches, a system is necessarily timeless and context-less – it is the deeper level that generates the 'real' phenomena operating in a concrete context. Systems, or 'structures', consequently display an uneasy relationship to history: the structuralist 'synchrony' was necessarily 'achronic' because it did not claim to have any empirical existence. After all, an empirical 'synchrony' in linguistics, for example, would come down to 'the recording of all the words spoken at the same time by thousands of speaking subjects' – an enterprise which Greimas, for instance, qualifies as 'rather pointless' (Greimas, 1990: 95), and which from a structuralist viewpoint would also not be worth one's while.