Production=signification: towards a semiotic materialism

Abstract

This article sketches the outline of a semiotic materialism, drawing on Mexican-Ecuadoran philosopher Bolívar Echeverría's thesis that production=signification. For Echeverría, every process of social production and consumption is and must at the same time be a process of signification and interpretation. This thesis, initially developed in the mid-1970s, emerges most immediately from a novel synthesis of Marx with the work of Jakobson and Hjelmslev. It also establishes an expansive and highly original social ontology, at the core of which is a ‘trans-naturalised’ conception of the specificity of human social reproduction. This ontology both grounds the conceptual innovations of structural linguistics within a critical understanding of reproduction, as the general structure of material life, and demonstrates the necessarily semiotic character of all acts of production and consumption. We analyse this proposition and elaborate upon its critical implications, particularly a deepened theorisation of ideology and fetishism, which Echeverría describes as enacting a ‘subcodification’ of every explicit ‘message’ that can be transmitted, regardless of its content. By inscribing signification at the heart of critical social theory, Echeverría offers a unique account both of social reproduction and the effects of capitalist accumulation upon that process.