Gunther Kress - Explorer of the Semiotic Landscape

1 Introduction

This special issue addresses the work of Gunther Kress who passed away in June 2019. Kress has written several hundred publications, including over 20 monographs, all centring on meaning making, notably on language, ideology, discourse, representation, communication, genre, learning, and multimodality. Taking inspiration from Marx, Saussure, Hjelmslev, Chomsky, Halliday, Hymes, Barthes, Eco, and Foucault, he went on to influence scholars in a range of areas including (applied) linguistics, social semiotics, media and communication studies, literacy studies, and English education. His innovative, often provocative ideas and approaches to analysing multimodal texts have been foundational for entirely new fields of intellectual endeavour, including critical linguistics, social semiotics, and multimodality.

We celebrate his legacy through what he would call ‘transformative engagement’ with some of his most influential, thought-provoking ideas. We re-read his work, which spans over forty years, exploring, interpreting, and reflecting on concepts he developed and revised and the examples he used to develop and illustrate them. We identify changes over time, highlight novelties and distinct contributions, and draw attention to apparent inconsistencies and problems, and suggest new directions for further research. In short, we make meaning of the way Kress made meaning of meaning-making, keeping his work as open as he would have liked it to be, treating it as a set of challenges, in need of constant transformation and (re)contextualization.

We situate Kress’s ideas, making explicit connections with other works, including the work of the founding fathers of semiotics who preceded him, of the contemporaries in social theory and sciences that shaped him, and of the authors who were prompted by his work, particularly by his work in multimodality. In keeping with Kress’s preference for seemingly simple, ‘knock-out’ examples, we revisit some of the texts from his well-known collection of signature examples, occasionally adding some new ones, including texts produced by Kress himself. All contributors to this special issue write from a personal perspective. Most of us have worked closely with Kress in some part of his life, as the biography below will show. Thus, looking back on collaborations and conversations, we document the ‘making of’, and the ‘behind the scenes’ of his conceptual work, and continue our dialogue with him through quotations and comments.

In all this, we try to avoid portraying Kress as a precursor of fields that have since come to fruition through the work of others. It is true that he was an explorer, early to sense changes in the semiotic landscape that have now become part of our everyday reality – new forms of writing, new forms of learning, new kinds of social relations. But his work needs to be reread rather than put on a pedestal. It is not a linear trajectory to ‘where we are now’, a trajectory from asserting the power of institutions, including language, to re-discovering agency and the creativity of individuals and communities. Binaries of this kind – the social and the individual, institution and community, subjection and agency – are, in his work, constantly revisited, constantly struggled with, constantly reworked.

In keeping with Kress’s emphasis on the impact of individual – yet socially and culturally shaped – experiences on meaning making, we start this introduction with a short biography of his academic life, introducing his own journey and the main strands in his work.

2 A brief introduction to the life and work of Gunther Kress^[1]

Gunther Kress was born in Fürth, near Nuremberg, in 1940. At the age of 16, he moved to Australia, and became an apprentice-furrier. He entered the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, at the age of 22, studying English Literature (1962–1966). In the final year of this undergraduate programme he focused on linguistics, engrossing himself in the work of Noam Chomsky. Upon completing his degree, he moved back to Europe, first to Germany, where he was a Lektor for a year, and then to England, where he worked as a Research Fellow and later as a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Kent (1967–1971). From Kent he commuted up to London to do a postgraduate course in Linguistics at University College London, where he was supervised by Michael Halliday (1925–2018). He then became a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where he developed Critical Linguistics with Robert Hodge, Roger Fowler and Tony Trew, co-authoring Language and Control (Fowler et al. 1979) and Language as Ideology (Kress and Hodge 1979). As editor of Halliday: System and Function (Halliday 1976) he helped settle the naming of Halliday’s linguistics, which until then was variously called either System Structure Theory or System Function Theory.

He moved back to Australia in 1978, inaugurating and heading up the School of Communication and Cultural Studies at the South Australian College of Advanced Education, Adelaide (1978–1983) before moving to the Institute of Technology, Sydney, to become Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 1987 he became Professor of Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 1988 he gained a Doctor of Letters from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. During this time in Australia, Kress continued to teach and write about language and power (Kress 1985), introducing Critical Linguistics (and Critical Discourse Analysis, as it became known in subsequent years) to the emerging field of Cultural and Media Studies. He also wrote Learning to Write (Kress 1982), in which he reflected on (his own) children’s developing sense of writing; and embarked on two collaborative projects: a second project with Bob Hodge, who had already moved back to Australia in 1977; and a project with Theo van Leeuwen.

With Bob Hodge, Kress developed the premises and concepts from Critical Linguistics to explore other modes of representation, such as image, sculpture, photographs, paintings and layout in magazines and on billboards. They named their approach, and their 1988 book, Social Semiotics (Hodge and Kress 1988), after Michael Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic (Halliday 1978), taking from him the idea that language is one of many semiotic resources available within a culture. With Theo van Leeuwen, Kress continued to develop a social semiotic approach to image, culminating in Reading Image 1990 (Kress and van Leeuwen 1990); published by Routledge in 1996 (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), followed by a second edition in 2006 (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) and a third edition in 2021 (Kress and van Leeuwen 2021). Socially and culturally organized sets of semiotic resources would later become known as ‘modes’, and ‘multimodality’ became a key concept of Social Semiotics. Multimodality highlights that meaning is always made in different ‘modes’ – speech, gesture, facial expression, writing, colour, music etc. – which, in Kress’s words, have different affordances: specific modes allow only certain messages to be articulated, and their affordances are socially conditioned. This insight would be crucial for the later part of Kress’s career.

In 1991, Kress moved back to England to become Professor of English (and, in 2008, Professor of Semiotics and Education) at the Institute of Education, University of London. Now in an institutional environment which focuses on teaching and learning, he developed Social Semiotics along educational lines, drawing on his encounters with Basil Bernstein, and weaving in notions of curriculum and pedagogy. He took part in The New London Group (1996), discussing the future of literacy and education in a global world and new media. In Before Writing (Kress 1997) and Early Spelling (Kress 2000) he continued to think about ‘learning’ through making and engaging with text, seeing sign-making as creative, transformative acts.

During this time, Kress focused increasingly on ‘multimodality’– understood as an approach to the theory and analysis of not only ‘print text’, as mediated through books, magazines or screens, but of all forms of representation and communication, including ‘talk’, and of the relations between them. This understanding is articulated in Multimodal Discourse (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), the product of a second round of collaboration with Theo van Leeuwen, who was based at the London College of Printing in the late nineties. Multimodality became the starting point for a number of research projects which Kress led in the 2000s. Funded by UK research councils, and working with Carey Jewitt and others he explored the multimodal production of Science and English in classrooms, on screens, and in textbooks (Bezemer and Kress 2008; Kress et al. 2001, 2005), focusing on social, cultural and technological change and its relation to multimodal representation and communication (Kress 2003). His thoughts on multimodality would be the focus of his last single authored monograph, Multimodality. A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication (Kress 2010).

In the same period Kress advanced his conceptualisation of learning. With Staffan Selander, Sophia Diamantopoulou, Jeff Bezemer and others he explored notions of design for learning and ‘transformative engagement’, looking beyond schools to, for example, museums and operating theatres (Bezemer and Kress 2016; Selander and Kress 2010). In Europe, he brought together colleagues to explore and compare social perspectives on learning (Kress et al. 2021), while, in South Africa, his work was picked up by Pippa Stein, Denise Newfield, and Arlene Archer, leading to new, long-lasting partnerships.

3 The papers in this special issue

The seven papers in this special issue draw out ideas from Gunther Kress’s vast oeuvre. Some concepts feature in multiple papers, always from different perspectives. The first four papers, by Bob Hodge, Hartmut Stöckl, Jeff Bezemer, and Staffan Selander, respectively, are primarily conceptual reviews. The following two papers, by Theo van Leeuwen and Denise Newfield, respectively, while also exploring relevant concepts, reflect on Kress’s approach to (‘method’ of) scholarly work, and the practical application and impact of his ideas, respectively. The special issue concludes with an epilogue by Carey Jewitt that relates his ideas to the most recent technological developments.

Bob Hodge turns to the motivated sign, Kress’s challenge of Saussure’s idea that in language the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary. Without proving Kress right or Saussure wrong, he emphasises the role of motivated signs in systems that mediate between meaning, reality and society and finds “surprisingly many signs and meanings produced in whole or part by motivated signs. Typically, many of these are already recognised as important, to a degree, but they are more powerful and flexible in theory and analytic practice when integrated into a multimodal semiotics which recognises the role of motivated signs.”

Hartmut Stöckl also revisits the motivated sign and warns against overemphasising materiality and under-analysing situational context. He calls for more delineation of the idea of medium and mode, in part through more attention to grammar in different modes and the ways in which they interact. Looking ahead, he suggests to advance work on multimodal genre as an interface between context and multimodal configuration, to bring in ideas on pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms in discourse interpretation, and to move beyond single examples to explore phenomena through multimodal corpora.

Jeff Bezemer explores Kress’s adoption of the notion of affordance to explain the relation between signifier and signified. He investigates the conceptual, rhetorical and analytical merit of the notion of “potentials and limitations of specific modes”, in Kress’s own work and in that of multimodalists, who have widely adopted the term. He suggests that a preoccupation with affordance risks undermining a holistic understanding of meaning making in which features of material form and social convention are considered alongside the sign maker’s lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making, as Kress had originally proposed.

Staffan Selander focuses on Kress’s theory of learning as sign-making, and as a transformative activity. He then argues for the need to understand this process more fully in the context of the informal and formal institutional environments in which it takes place, and of the specific resources, social relations and value systems that characterize these environments. He also calls for a stronger focus on the role of bodily experience in learning and for greater attention to digital media and the interaction between individual learning paths and the structures that are built into these media.

Theo van Leeuwen offers insight in Kress’s ‘exploratory’ approach to semiotics in which an open attitude to data, dialogue, and the interdependence of text analysis and theory-formation play a fundamental role. He illustrates this with Kress’s constant movement between acknowledgement of social determination and individual agency, and alternating orientation to critique (aimed at deconstructing retrospectively) and design (aimed at enabling reconstruction with a firm view to the future), showing how his open approach facilitated the tensions between these polarities, and prevented him from firmly anchoring himself to a fixed position and safeguarding himself from doubt.

The concern with helping shape futures is also what Denise Newfield reflects on. She offers a compelling account of the ways in which Kress’s conceptualisation and meta-semiotic language helped educationalists in post-apartheid South Africa re-envision teaching and learning. Through notions such as interest, design and multimodality, they were able to change practices of assessment and cultures of recognition and give voice to students from all backgrounds. The case illustrates how the impact of Kress’s work is felt well beyond the world of academic scholars, showing how and why his ideas helped re-shape cultures of recognition and pedagogic practice.

In her epilogue, Carey Jewitt moves beyond interrogations of Kressian concepts to consider the future of multimodality. She proposes that an interdisciplinary approach will enable us to continue to broaden our empirical horizon and refine our theoretical lenses as the world continues to change. She illustrates this with an exploration of touch technologies and its social and semiotic effects on the digital communication landscape.

We acknowledge that this collection is, inevitably, selective. It engages with the concepts introduced above, and not with many others that would have been equally deserving of further analysis, such as ideas about transcription and representational change. The authors are by no means representative of the diverse group of academics that Kress has worked with, let alone of wider communities. Many more reflections on Kress’s work will undoubtedly follow, which we hope will together cover a wider range of perspectives and offer alternative readings, contextualisations, critiques, and suggestions for further work. After all, for Kress, things were never conclusively settled, and, characteristically, many of his papers and books ended with open questions, or with accounts of what had not been achieved: “We realize that we have only just begun, and find ourselves thinking more about the limitations of what we have done and the amount of work that still remains than about what we have achieved so far” (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996: 264). In this special issue, Bob Hodge, one of Kress’s earliest close collaborators, takes up their final and unfinished collaboration, a study of the motivated sign. When Kress proposed that topic, Hodge was surprised, he reports, since “he had believed that this was a settled topic and that Gunther’s position had been consistent and unproblematic for the last thirty years”. It turned out not to be so. Nothing ever was, and it is this provisionality that will make his work continue to be fertile.