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Critical Semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect
Critical Semiotics provides long overdue answers to questions at the junction of information, meaning and 'affect'. The affective turn in cultural studies has received much attention: a focus on the pre-individual bodily forces, linked to automatic responses, which augment or diminish the body's capacity to act or engage with others. In a world dominated by information, how do things that seem to have diminished meaning or even no meaning still have so much power to affect us, or to carry on our ability to affect the world?
Linguistics and semiotics have been accused of being adrift from the affective turn and not accounting for these visceral forces beneath or generally other from conscious knowing. In this book, Gary Genosko delivers a detailed refutation, with analyses of specific contributions to critical semiotic approaches to meaning and signification. People want to understand how other people are moved and to understand embodied social actions, feelings and passions at the same time as understanding how this takes place. Semiotics must make the affective turn.
Linguistics and semiotics have been accused of being adrift from the affective turn and not accounting for these visceral forces beneath or generally other from conscious knowing. In this book, Gary Genosko delivers a detailed refutation, with analyses of specific contributions to critical semiotic approaches to meaning and signification. People want to understand how other people are moved and to understand embodied social actions, feelings and passions at the same time as understanding how this takes place. Semiotics must make the affective turn.
200 pages, Paperback
Published September 22, 2016
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January 31, 2022
Critical Semiotics, Gary Genosko, a close reading:
Perhaps better titled, “What is Semiotics?,” Gary Genosko brilliantly traces in “Critical Semiotics” Theory (from information to affect) the historical meaning of semiotics: “Semiotics investigates meaning-making . . . found in . . . forms and substances . . . potentially or actually, in . . . qualities and quantities.” (p. 1) Guattari’s A-signifying (vs. a-semiotic) Semiotics (Ch. 1): Genosko distinguishes “a-semiotics” as truly independent from representation and language while “a-signifying” semiotics are less than signs (signals), have machinically connective qualities, but can be computed quantitatively despite possible meaning and lie in the semiotic strata of expression and content planes. Guattari defines signification as the encounter between formalizations of a system of values and an a-signification machine of meaningless expressions (Machinic Unconscious, p. 230). Meaning (enunciation) for Guattari is not derived from linguistic structures of signification which have been hijacked by social power relations, but from machinic, nonhuman assemblages of proto-enunciation and proto-subjectifications. Guattari applies a-signification to computer coding as fundamentally machinic and secondarily linguistically signifying or anthropomorphic. With Lacan, there is a duplicitous subjectivity when ‘a signifier represents the subject for another signifier.’ A-signification is essentially informatic for Guattari according to Genosco. On the basis that substance (agents of individuated enunciation) is skirted around by form (signs) and matter (things), a-signification is the assembling of particle-sign (partial) components (parts not lacking wholes, and void of grammatical particles). Particle-signs are particle-like and exist either hypothetically or minutely (p. 23). Guattari avoids subsuming dynamic and productive a-signifying diagrams under the Piercean trap of icons (where diagrams are graphic representations). Particle-signs molecularize semiosis and empty semiological triangles of representamen-interpretant-object thus producing sign-particle “dust” from the emptied triangles (MU, p. 282). This sign dust is the nanoparticle swarm of potentiality beyond flux and reflux, where the haboob of dust “transcends itself back into the immanence out of which it came” (Massumi, Semblance and Event, p. 22). While conceptualizing a more and more artificial plane of the post-human, Guattari thus accounts for the impersonal machinics of semiocapitalism (capitalism as a subjugating semiotic operator) which proceed according to his meta-model of a-signifying diagrammatic semiotics. The machinic thus passes from extensive (space-time location and sensational) to intensive states (potential and multilocal) by means of the expression-content function rather than signifier-signified relation (e.g., from sound-image to conceptualization). Guattari rejects subjectivity as social subjection and machinic enslavement but encourages a collective subjectivity that is self-positing in concert with other subjectivations (p. 45). Guattari holds out for the beyond and the before of the human. A-signifying semiotics in the informational space recast visual representation images algorithmically (e.g., computational photography) in order to be understood relationally and probabilistically. The error of information theory is that it separated the transmission of information by physical signals from meaning, reducing meaning to subjectivity. Guattari never rejects meaningful signification perse but decenters it via a-signifying semiotics.
Baudrillard's anti-semiology (Ch. 2): For Baudrillard, media and communication are unidirectional gifts without real returns. In this case, gift (from Derridian origination) refers to symbolic exchange between sender and receiver, between signifier and signified. B claims that media as typified by "reality TV" or "cinema verité" creates a meaningless cynical parody of reality, absent genuine communication or co-relationship which becomes accepted as reality. A deconstructive negation (of false symbolic exchange) of the negation (hyperreality) is called for here in order to activate the possibility of true communication beyond "estrangement of signs" (p. 90).
Semiocapitalism and Info-commodities (Ch. 3): Capitalist production seizes individuals from the inside through the semiotics of signs, syntax and subjectivity (Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 220). Guattari's theory of globalization (Integrated World Capitalism, IWC) consists of 1) modes of machinic production and integration, 2) dominant semiotic-economic systems, 3) a state which becomes minimal and speculative. IWC is a postindustrial capitalism focusing on immaterial labor wherein human semiosis (general intellect produces value independent of material mediation. Semiocapitalism attempts to capture what is between the signifier (desire) and the real (economic infrastructure) --all relational complexities between the semiotic and the material strata wherein informational commodities are created by info- or digital laborers described as immaterial labor or semiotic production of knowledge laborers (p. 93). The "being" of immaterial production is all about "intellection, affects, relationships, cooperation, language, communication (Negri 2008, p. 214).
General intellectual faculties such as imagination, ethics, intellect, and language function as productive machines in contemporary labor not needing a physical manifestation. ) Guattari elaborates how form (semiotic) and matter (material fluxes) swerve around substance to produce partial semiotic instantiations of immaterial forces such as affect. Guattari doubled down on Deleuze's incorporation of Hjelmslev's concept of purport (unformed matter), emphasizing the nonlinguistic nature of what they termed the abstract machine. For Hjelmslev, purport is the shadow of a net or grid (form) cast over undivided sand (amorphous thought mass) yielding a substance seen in the shadow. The abstract machine is a lexical gap without substance--not the form of the net but its function (shadow), and neither semiotically nor physically formed--pure Matter-Function. Combined with the diagram from Peirce, the abstract machine possesses minimal traits (particles) and intensities (tensors). With the abstract machine, form is substance, though beyond the abstract machine, substance coagulates on the strata below a physically formed substance as irregular aggregates and destratifying forces. The abstract machine directs matter prior to its stratification (unformed) as signifier/expression and signified/content, and prior to matter's formalization into signs like icons, indices and symbols. The outcome of Guattari's a-signifying semiosis included "substitution of collective for individuating enunciations; nonhuman for human-centered fluxes, and artificial for natural referents" (p. 99).
For Guattari, part-signs are signals where there is no conflation of a-semiotic natural encodings on the microbiological/chemical level with algorithms of machinic info technological origin. A part-sign functions as a start/stop order such as data separators on a credit card magnetic strip. Part-signs do not require semiologically signifying, subjectifying (individuated) representational mediation (p. 102). Capital is a semiotic operator which makes use of both the semiotic (at the core of all power), and the a-semiotic. Capitalism captures both by machinic enslavement (of affects, percepts, desires, and part-signs) and by subjection (of social or macro-scale identity). The cellularization of labor bypasses the human for automatized and computerized production based on the machinic phylum where machines rise to the surface of the present.
An info-commodity derives from a-signifying part-signs produced through digital networks which generate the machinic phylum. No longer recruiting people, but buying packets of time, capital seeks to completely capture cognitive labor through the digital nervous system, as we see with the cell phone, consuming every moment of time in concert with productive cycle needs. Semiocapital enslaves the "independent" contract code writer. Labor producing value consists in enacting simulations (e.g., blockchain calculations) which are later transferred by computerized machines to actual matter. Personal confidence is inspired by the a-signifying semiotics engendered by mobile devices (giving the illusion of independence and self-enterprise) and techno-financial routines connecting bodies to credit and personal banking paradigms. Neuroworkers (cognitarians) plug themselves into terminals along the networked information highway.
Guattari believed that fragments secreted by semiocapitalism could produce "an existential singularization correlative to the genesis of new coefficients of freedom (1995, p. 13) and exit mass media in favor of postmedia. While capitalism as a semiotic operator monetizes the value of human subjectivity, the exploitation of general intellect by semiocapitalism drives subjectivity toward the enunciation of nonhuman machines allowing for lines of flight and immaterial products of mental labor which keep the info-commodity from fossilization. Thus, abstract semiotic fragments are generated by digital laborers in the form of info-commodities due to highly personalized creativity, feelings and imagination across surplus-value generating platforms.
Foucault’s Obstacle-signs (Ch. 4): Public torture as a primary means of discipline eventually gave way to the ubiquity of imprisonment according to Foucault’s analysis, thereby reducing the diverse signifieds of obstacle-signs, of representational signs of punishment. He identified punishment as a punitive “sign that serves as an obstacle” to crime. The semiotic aspect of punishment (as a sign) follows six rules: 1) Minimize advantages of crime, 2) Pain of punishment functions as an ideality and representation, 3) Extension of awareness of punishment of the criminal to others, 4) Representational signs establish necessary and unbreakable connections between punishment and the crime, 5) Common truth based on judicial verification of the crime 6) Optimal specification of punishment fitting the crime by clear definition and coding. While Foucault’s obstacle-signs identify semiotics a play, his concept was less comprehensive than Deleuze’s use of modulation in his writings on control society. Deleuze focused beyond imprisonment societies to control societies which capitalize on open systems of modulation (alterations according to circumstances) as opposed to fixed molds. Disciplinary societies are like ice melting into the water of control societies, which Foucault partially addresses via the six characteristics of obstacle-signs: 1) Avoid arbitrariness to maximize the signified punishment acting as a deterrent to the mind of the “criminal,” 2) Signs subdue criminal desires, 3) Penalty employs temporal modulation (not permanent) to reduce penalties and thereby motivate “criminals,” 4) Punishment extends beyond the criminal to any would-be criminal, 5) Unambiguous decodable moral lessons understandable by all, 6) Criminals become sources of instruction of what not to do and the consequences. MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving) connected the obstacle-sign of the red-ribbon signifier with its signification of commitment to sobriety, reinforcing consequences of police check stops, designated drivers, roadside license suspensions, impounding of the car, installation of breathalyzer technology, etc. Obstacle-signs have established a pervasive connection between drinking, driving and awareness of potential punishment. Lyotard's
Tensor Signs (Ch. 5) Lyotard was in synch with Guattari in attempting to signify the other of signification, and to think intensity as structure, not in opposition to other signs, but to think together both the figural (form) and the tensor (intensity) which are both disruptive to language. Lyotard establishes the Moebian libidinal skin (band) that is a field of intensities (tensors) or interiorities which resist exteriorization (sign of intensity) and spinning disjunctive bar of the representational sign (sign of signification) which dematerializes, both of which must be accounted for. Intensities undermine the signifier/signified and inherited philosophical hierarchies (speech/writing, interiority/exteriority, sensible/intelligible). Events and affects are dampened by signs. Lyotard's spinning bar parallels the disjunctive synthesis of recording in terms of an either/or that restricts by differentiation (i.e., affirmative disjunction of both at once) and in terms of immanence as affirmation of more than both by maintaining the disjunction of either/or. Tensor signs bring the libidinal skin into existence (while for Guattari, lines of flight are inscribed on the body-without-organs)--the immanent use of disjunction. A tensor sign returns energy to the sign as a carrier of intense singularities, a syntatic ice which is its incandescence. Lyotard's integration of intensity into structure is a precursor to the challenge of signs posed by affect. In the zone between signs and things, Lyotard claims contra Derrida that there is something outside the text, a plastic borderspace in which motivation exists.
There is a vertical relation of signification between signifier and signified as well as a horizontal axis of value between signs (derivatives of value), both of which are illusions of thickness. Lyotard says that the thick sign is a precursor to the tensor sign, and that true thickness brings quandries of reference, includes the sensory and visual, and reintroduces motivation (intensity). Massumi in 'Parables for the Virtual' (2002, p. 66) posits that affect intersects with signification by giving matter, motion and intensity back to bodies prior to code, text and signification. Process must come before signification and semiology, just as Guattari distinguished between semiology (linguistic) and semiotics (nonlinguistic). While the semiotic does not rest on the foundation of affect, the first curve in the affective turn requires rethinking encounters, movements and intensities prior to signification and code--the in-between to apprehend becoming in itself. (Lyotard on the other hand insisted o producing meaning and intensity at the same time.)
Guattari envisioned not a science of energy, but an energetico-semiotics which could be diagrammed between his four domains (existential territorial refuges; alterities of incorporeal universes; machinic phyla; material flows--effects between flows and phyla, and affects between territories and universes), thereby identifying quanta of interdomain relations of energy-signification and tensors which mediate forces across ontological domains. Tensors for Guattari both actualize and virtualize. Critical
Semiotics Toolbox (Ch. 6):
I. Jameson defines vivid (intense) signifiers as the result of the breakdown of signs, the disappearance of the center self/subject, and the appearance of subjectless subjectivity. “The sign’s crack-up, splintering, and flaking supplies the semiotic dust plateau with twinkling fragments” (p. 155). Not only does the vivid signifier circumvent linguistic meaning by isolating the signifier from the signified (, but it also circumvents the ability of time to be united by solidifying the past, the present, and the future as with schizophrenic experiences of shattered time. While Jameson accepts the semiological explanation of schizophrenia, Guattari argues for nonlinguistic a-signifying intensities similar to Jameson’s vivid signifiers. Jameson and Lyotard both interject the body into semiosis such that for Jameson there are two spaces, 1) the graphical or linguistic and 2) figural or nonlinguistic. Lyotard termed the energetics at play “loss and gain” while Jameson’s termed it “force field.” The confusion between the graphic linguistic and figural plastic derives from affects (of Deleuzean-Spinozist formulation), capacities of bodies to affect and be affected.
II. Since the signified always exceeds signifiers, floating signifiers are an abstract supplement to signification (though not apriori) and facilitate code exchange (signification) by being a) an undetermined quantity, b) devoid of meaning, c) able to acquire meaning, and d) able to bridge the sign’s strata as needed. By linguistically signifying nothing, the floating signifier (e.g., the mime’s body) enables signification via the sensuous and the material. Deleuze defines the gap between the floating signifier in Robinson’s paradox (in LOS) as the empty square of excess (square empty of occupant) which partializes social totality, versus the signified which is marked by lack which totalizes social partiality (occupant without a square/place). Occupying the empty square does not close down the linguistic flow, and language is not the only occupant. “We can conclude that there is no structure without the empty square, which makes everything function.” (LOS, p. 51). Flotation is a symbol in a pure state of emptiness and is of zero symbolic value. Both Lacan and Levi-Strauss appeal to the zero symbol. The zero phoneme for example is both the absence of any phonemes and is in opposition to all other phonemes which becomes pure potential (virtual), and an energy field (without actualization) to aid in creation of meaning. For Deleuze, a) the virtual exists to be actualized, b) it is real even before it is actualized, c) actualization is not representation, d) the virtual possesses a creative capacity. While affect theory attempts to bring energetic movement to linguistic structure, the floating signifier is the virtual sign which enables linguistic structure to flow.
Perhaps better titled, “What is Semiotics?,” Gary Genosko brilliantly traces in “Critical Semiotics” Theory (from information to affect) the historical meaning of semiotics: “Semiotics investigates meaning-making . . . found in . . . forms and substances . . . potentially or actually, in . . . qualities and quantities.” (p. 1) Guattari’s A-signifying (vs. a-semiotic) Semiotics (Ch. 1): Genosko distinguishes “a-semiotics” as truly independent from representation and language while “a-signifying” semiotics are less than signs (signals), have machinically connective qualities, but can be computed quantitatively despite possible meaning and lie in the semiotic strata of expression and content planes. Guattari defines signification as the encounter between formalizations of a system of values and an a-signification machine of meaningless expressions (Machinic Unconscious, p. 230). Meaning (enunciation) for Guattari is not derived from linguistic structures of signification which have been hijacked by social power relations, but from machinic, nonhuman assemblages of proto-enunciation and proto-subjectifications. Guattari applies a-signification to computer coding as fundamentally machinic and secondarily linguistically signifying or anthropomorphic. With Lacan, there is a duplicitous subjectivity when ‘a signifier represents the subject for another signifier.’ A-signification is essentially informatic for Guattari according to Genosco. On the basis that substance (agents of individuated enunciation) is skirted around by form (signs) and matter (things), a-signification is the assembling of particle-sign (partial) components (parts not lacking wholes, and void of grammatical particles). Particle-signs are particle-like and exist either hypothetically or minutely (p. 23). Guattari avoids subsuming dynamic and productive a-signifying diagrams under the Piercean trap of icons (where diagrams are graphic representations). Particle-signs molecularize semiosis and empty semiological triangles of representamen-interpretant-object thus producing sign-particle “dust” from the emptied triangles (MU, p. 282). This sign dust is the nanoparticle swarm of potentiality beyond flux and reflux, where the haboob of dust “transcends itself back into the immanence out of which it came” (Massumi, Semblance and Event, p. 22). While conceptualizing a more and more artificial plane of the post-human, Guattari thus accounts for the impersonal machinics of semiocapitalism (capitalism as a subjugating semiotic operator) which proceed according to his meta-model of a-signifying diagrammatic semiotics. The machinic thus passes from extensive (space-time location and sensational) to intensive states (potential and multilocal) by means of the expression-content function rather than signifier-signified relation (e.g., from sound-image to conceptualization). Guattari rejects subjectivity as social subjection and machinic enslavement but encourages a collective subjectivity that is self-positing in concert with other subjectivations (p. 45). Guattari holds out for the beyond and the before of the human. A-signifying semiotics in the informational space recast visual representation images algorithmically (e.g., computational photography) in order to be understood relationally and probabilistically. The error of information theory is that it separated the transmission of information by physical signals from meaning, reducing meaning to subjectivity. Guattari never rejects meaningful signification perse but decenters it via a-signifying semiotics.
Baudrillard's anti-semiology (Ch. 2): For Baudrillard, media and communication are unidirectional gifts without real returns. In this case, gift (from Derridian origination) refers to symbolic exchange between sender and receiver, between signifier and signified. B claims that media as typified by "reality TV" or "cinema verité" creates a meaningless cynical parody of reality, absent genuine communication or co-relationship which becomes accepted as reality. A deconstructive negation (of false symbolic exchange) of the negation (hyperreality) is called for here in order to activate the possibility of true communication beyond "estrangement of signs" (p. 90).
Semiocapitalism and Info-commodities (Ch. 3): Capitalist production seizes individuals from the inside through the semiotics of signs, syntax and subjectivity (Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 220). Guattari's theory of globalization (Integrated World Capitalism, IWC) consists of 1) modes of machinic production and integration, 2) dominant semiotic-economic systems, 3) a state which becomes minimal and speculative. IWC is a postindustrial capitalism focusing on immaterial labor wherein human semiosis (general intellect produces value independent of material mediation. Semiocapitalism attempts to capture what is between the signifier (desire) and the real (economic infrastructure) --all relational complexities between the semiotic and the material strata wherein informational commodities are created by info- or digital laborers described as immaterial labor or semiotic production of knowledge laborers (p. 93). The "being" of immaterial production is all about "intellection, affects, relationships, cooperation, language, communication (Negri 2008, p. 214).
General intellectual faculties such as imagination, ethics, intellect, and language function as productive machines in contemporary labor not needing a physical manifestation. ) Guattari elaborates how form (semiotic) and matter (material fluxes) swerve around substance to produce partial semiotic instantiations of immaterial forces such as affect. Guattari doubled down on Deleuze's incorporation of Hjelmslev's concept of purport (unformed matter), emphasizing the nonlinguistic nature of what they termed the abstract machine. For Hjelmslev, purport is the shadow of a net or grid (form) cast over undivided sand (amorphous thought mass) yielding a substance seen in the shadow. The abstract machine is a lexical gap without substance--not the form of the net but its function (shadow), and neither semiotically nor physically formed--pure Matter-Function. Combined with the diagram from Peirce, the abstract machine possesses minimal traits (particles) and intensities (tensors). With the abstract machine, form is substance, though beyond the abstract machine, substance coagulates on the strata below a physically formed substance as irregular aggregates and destratifying forces. The abstract machine directs matter prior to its stratification (unformed) as signifier/expression and signified/content, and prior to matter's formalization into signs like icons, indices and symbols. The outcome of Guattari's a-signifying semiosis included "substitution of collective for individuating enunciations; nonhuman for human-centered fluxes, and artificial for natural referents" (p. 99).
For Guattari, part-signs are signals where there is no conflation of a-semiotic natural encodings on the microbiological/chemical level with algorithms of machinic info technological origin. A part-sign functions as a start/stop order such as data separators on a credit card magnetic strip. Part-signs do not require semiologically signifying, subjectifying (individuated) representational mediation (p. 102). Capital is a semiotic operator which makes use of both the semiotic (at the core of all power), and the a-semiotic. Capitalism captures both by machinic enslavement (of affects, percepts, desires, and part-signs) and by subjection (of social or macro-scale identity). The cellularization of labor bypasses the human for automatized and computerized production based on the machinic phylum where machines rise to the surface of the present.
An info-commodity derives from a-signifying part-signs produced through digital networks which generate the machinic phylum. No longer recruiting people, but buying packets of time, capital seeks to completely capture cognitive labor through the digital nervous system, as we see with the cell phone, consuming every moment of time in concert with productive cycle needs. Semiocapital enslaves the "independent" contract code writer. Labor producing value consists in enacting simulations (e.g., blockchain calculations) which are later transferred by computerized machines to actual matter. Personal confidence is inspired by the a-signifying semiotics engendered by mobile devices (giving the illusion of independence and self-enterprise) and techno-financial routines connecting bodies to credit and personal banking paradigms. Neuroworkers (cognitarians) plug themselves into terminals along the networked information highway.
Guattari believed that fragments secreted by semiocapitalism could produce "an existential singularization correlative to the genesis of new coefficients of freedom (1995, p. 13) and exit mass media in favor of postmedia. While capitalism as a semiotic operator monetizes the value of human subjectivity, the exploitation of general intellect by semiocapitalism drives subjectivity toward the enunciation of nonhuman machines allowing for lines of flight and immaterial products of mental labor which keep the info-commodity from fossilization. Thus, abstract semiotic fragments are generated by digital laborers in the form of info-commodities due to highly personalized creativity, feelings and imagination across surplus-value generating platforms.
Foucault’s Obstacle-signs (Ch. 4): Public torture as a primary means of discipline eventually gave way to the ubiquity of imprisonment according to Foucault’s analysis, thereby reducing the diverse signifieds of obstacle-signs, of representational signs of punishment. He identified punishment as a punitive “sign that serves as an obstacle” to crime. The semiotic aspect of punishment (as a sign) follows six rules: 1) Minimize advantages of crime, 2) Pain of punishment functions as an ideality and representation, 3) Extension of awareness of punishment of the criminal to others, 4) Representational signs establish necessary and unbreakable connections between punishment and the crime, 5) Common truth based on judicial verification of the crime 6) Optimal specification of punishment fitting the crime by clear definition and coding. While Foucault’s obstacle-signs identify semiotics a play, his concept was less comprehensive than Deleuze’s use of modulation in his writings on control society. Deleuze focused beyond imprisonment societies to control societies which capitalize on open systems of modulation (alterations according to circumstances) as opposed to fixed molds. Disciplinary societies are like ice melting into the water of control societies, which Foucault partially addresses via the six characteristics of obstacle-signs: 1) Avoid arbitrariness to maximize the signified punishment acting as a deterrent to the mind of the “criminal,” 2) Signs subdue criminal desires, 3) Penalty employs temporal modulation (not permanent) to reduce penalties and thereby motivate “criminals,” 4) Punishment extends beyond the criminal to any would-be criminal, 5) Unambiguous decodable moral lessons understandable by all, 6) Criminals become sources of instruction of what not to do and the consequences. MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving) connected the obstacle-sign of the red-ribbon signifier with its signification of commitment to sobriety, reinforcing consequences of police check stops, designated drivers, roadside license suspensions, impounding of the car, installation of breathalyzer technology, etc. Obstacle-signs have established a pervasive connection between drinking, driving and awareness of potential punishment. Lyotard's
Tensor Signs (Ch. 5) Lyotard was in synch with Guattari in attempting to signify the other of signification, and to think intensity as structure, not in opposition to other signs, but to think together both the figural (form) and the tensor (intensity) which are both disruptive to language. Lyotard establishes the Moebian libidinal skin (band) that is a field of intensities (tensors) or interiorities which resist exteriorization (sign of intensity) and spinning disjunctive bar of the representational sign (sign of signification) which dematerializes, both of which must be accounted for. Intensities undermine the signifier/signified and inherited philosophical hierarchies (speech/writing, interiority/exteriority, sensible/intelligible). Events and affects are dampened by signs. Lyotard's spinning bar parallels the disjunctive synthesis of recording in terms of an either/or that restricts by differentiation (i.e., affirmative disjunction of both at once) and in terms of immanence as affirmation of more than both by maintaining the disjunction of either/or. Tensor signs bring the libidinal skin into existence (while for Guattari, lines of flight are inscribed on the body-without-organs)--the immanent use of disjunction. A tensor sign returns energy to the sign as a carrier of intense singularities, a syntatic ice which is its incandescence. Lyotard's integration of intensity into structure is a precursor to the challenge of signs posed by affect. In the zone between signs and things, Lyotard claims contra Derrida that there is something outside the text, a plastic borderspace in which motivation exists.
There is a vertical relation of signification between signifier and signified as well as a horizontal axis of value between signs (derivatives of value), both of which are illusions of thickness. Lyotard says that the thick sign is a precursor to the tensor sign, and that true thickness brings quandries of reference, includes the sensory and visual, and reintroduces motivation (intensity). Massumi in 'Parables for the Virtual' (2002, p. 66) posits that affect intersects with signification by giving matter, motion and intensity back to bodies prior to code, text and signification. Process must come before signification and semiology, just as Guattari distinguished between semiology (linguistic) and semiotics (nonlinguistic). While the semiotic does not rest on the foundation of affect, the first curve in the affective turn requires rethinking encounters, movements and intensities prior to signification and code--the in-between to apprehend becoming in itself. (Lyotard on the other hand insisted o producing meaning and intensity at the same time.)
Guattari envisioned not a science of energy, but an energetico-semiotics which could be diagrammed between his four domains (existential territorial refuges; alterities of incorporeal universes; machinic phyla; material flows--effects between flows and phyla, and affects between territories and universes), thereby identifying quanta of interdomain relations of energy-signification and tensors which mediate forces across ontological domains. Tensors for Guattari both actualize and virtualize. Critical
Semiotics Toolbox (Ch. 6):
I. Jameson defines vivid (intense) signifiers as the result of the breakdown of signs, the disappearance of the center self/subject, and the appearance of subjectless subjectivity. “The sign’s crack-up, splintering, and flaking supplies the semiotic dust plateau with twinkling fragments” (p. 155). Not only does the vivid signifier circumvent linguistic meaning by isolating the signifier from the signified (, but it also circumvents the ability of time to be united by solidifying the past, the present, and the future as with schizophrenic experiences of shattered time. While Jameson accepts the semiological explanation of schizophrenia, Guattari argues for nonlinguistic a-signifying intensities similar to Jameson’s vivid signifiers. Jameson and Lyotard both interject the body into semiosis such that for Jameson there are two spaces, 1) the graphical or linguistic and 2) figural or nonlinguistic. Lyotard termed the energetics at play “loss and gain” while Jameson’s termed it “force field.” The confusion between the graphic linguistic and figural plastic derives from affects (of Deleuzean-Spinozist formulation), capacities of bodies to affect and be affected.
II. Since the signified always exceeds signifiers, floating signifiers are an abstract supplement to signification (though not apriori) and facilitate code exchange (signification) by being a) an undetermined quantity, b) devoid of meaning, c) able to acquire meaning, and d) able to bridge the sign’s strata as needed. By linguistically signifying nothing, the floating signifier (e.g., the mime’s body) enables signification via the sensuous and the material. Deleuze defines the gap between the floating signifier in Robinson’s paradox (in LOS) as the empty square of excess (square empty of occupant) which partializes social totality, versus the signified which is marked by lack which totalizes social partiality (occupant without a square/place). Occupying the empty square does not close down the linguistic flow, and language is not the only occupant. “We can conclude that there is no structure without the empty square, which makes everything function.” (LOS, p. 51). Flotation is a symbol in a pure state of emptiness and is of zero symbolic value. Both Lacan and Levi-Strauss appeal to the zero symbol. The zero phoneme for example is both the absence of any phonemes and is in opposition to all other phonemes which becomes pure potential (virtual), and an energy field (without actualization) to aid in creation of meaning. For Deleuze, a) the virtual exists to be actualized, b) it is real even before it is actualized, c) actualization is not representation, d) the virtual possesses a creative capacity. While affect theory attempts to bring energetic movement to linguistic structure, the floating signifier is the virtual sign which enables linguistic structure to flow.
September 15, 2022
This is a fun romp through a lot of takes on continental philosophical strands of semiotics and how they're connected and differentiated in academic interests. At times it spends a little more time on being "poetic" instead of going for clarity, but that's par for the course here. Regardless, I had fun with how this tied itself to information. I wished affect had made an earlier entry though. It could have been done. It felt squeezed into the last two chapters.
August 25, 2019
Genosko is a very good writer and, I think, very generous.
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