Ian has written an interesting post discussing computer languages. Here he’s riffing on Morton’s post discussing whether or not computer language should be taught in humanities departments. All of this brings to mind Guattari’s idea of “a-signifying semiotics”. Over the last couple of years I’ve become increasingly critical of the focus on meaning or signification in the humanities and social and political thought. My point is not that meaning and signification aren’t important components of the social world, but only that they are only components or part of the story. This is the point, in part, that I was trying to convey in my recent post on relation. There the idea was that there are all sorts of entities that bring people together and organize social relations that aren’t directly about meaning. Meaning plays a role, but it isn’t the entire story.
However, within the framework of much social and political thought and humanities, the implicit thesis seems to be that it is meaning that holds society together. The glue of society, as it were, is meaning or signification. Take the example of Zizek. For Zizek, it seems, the social world is held together by ideas (ideology). This is why, in his work, critique of ideology is ground zero of political engagement. There the social relations that exist are the result of the ideas or ideology that holds the social together. If you wish to dissolve or change these relations you must dissolve the ideas. My point is not that things such as ideology aren’t a part of that glue, but that there are many other factors besides and that we need to attend to these factors.
Returning to the discussion of computer languages, Guattari’s concept of a-signifying semiotics would be an example of extra-signifying factors that play a role in forming social relations. If I understand Guattari correctly (and I always find him challenging) when he evokes a-signifying semiotics he is referring to forms of operation that manipulate elements in ways that do not involve signification or meaning. The way in which DNA and RNA interact would be an example of, for Guattari, an a-signifying semiotic. However, of greater interest to those of us engaged in social and political thought would be the role that computers increasingly take in our lives. Take the example of book recommendations on Amazon or personalized radio stations such as Pandora on the iPhone. These things function not through signification or meaning, but through a-signifying semiotics. The way in which they select books that you might be interested in or music that you would probably like is through a computer algorithm that has nothing to do with meaning but which, rather, calculates probabilities based on what others have bought and listened to. Other examples of a-signifying semiotics would be the manner in which grocery store purchases are used if you make your purchases using discount cards, credit card ratings, the way your social security number functions in computer banks, etc.
Meaning and signification, of course, gets imbricated in these a-signifying semiotics when we encounter their results, but these operations do not in and of themselves function according to meaning or signification. In the contemporary world, a-signifying semiotics play a growing role in sorting and structuring the destinies of human lives, in forming communities or groups of individuals (Amazon’s book recommendations play a role in forming something like a community of readers with a shared hermeneutic horizon), in bringing people together in particular ways, and in enabling and preventing certain forms of association (all sorts of things are rendered possible or impossible based on credit card ratings). There is a rich domain of research to be done in how operations that proceed through a-signifying semiotics play a role in organizing social relations. So long, however, as we begin from the implicit premise that meaning is the sole glue of the social, all of this remains invisible.
January 26, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Just what the doctor ordered.
January 26, 2011 at 8:10 pm
[…] one or two things about similar principles that occur in literary expression and computation), Levi also has a really interesting take on this involved a-signifying semiotics that do not involve […]
January 27, 2011 at 8:10 am
One question, which might be naive: why are some of these semiotics signifying, while others are a-signifying? When a computer “talks” to another computer, it’s a-signifying, while when a human “talks” to another human using some language, it’s signifying. Is this because of some special Being that humans possess but machines don’t (the traditional Cartesian view, or a modification)? Or because of some specific quality of the interaction itself? Or because meaning is by definition meaning-for-humans?
January 28, 2011 at 10:08 am
[…] also looked at Levi R. Bryant’s post on a-signifying semiotics. He […]
January 28, 2011 at 11:04 am
[…] a happy coincidence, then, that Levi Bryant has just posted something to this effect, on a-signifying semiotics. And I know he makes huge strides towards a different view of Bateson and Spencer-Brown in his […]
January 29, 2011 at 11:31 am
Great post. Ganaele Langlois wrote an excellent dissertation in which she used a-signifying semiotics to analyze Amazon’s recommendation system: http://www.infoscapelab.ca/langlois-diss
January 29, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Nice post. As far as the difference between the a-signifying output of digital logic compared with the signifying communications between people, two reasons for the difference come to mind.
1) We’re not the computer. If there were any signifying going on within the application, we wouldn’t be privy to. Put a chip in your brain that runs Amazon recommendations and we might get a better feeling for whether or not it has feeling. Since our awareness is local to a particular living brain in it’s conscious condition, our subjectivity is limited to that condition and it represents phenomena outside of itself in degrees of a-signifying automatism. The degree to which exterior phenomenon encountered appears to resemble the function and form of our own determines (or contributes to a determination of) the degree to which subjectivity is ascribed.
2. Digital logic is inherently not signifying. It’s an inverted signification such that all forms and contents are reduced to flat, modular, quantitative coordinates which is completely unlike the branching, holistic, qualitatively rich logic of human pattern recognition. Rather than being a living sense of ambiguity and interpretation rooted in a massively parallel syncretic/synchronic aggregation of neurologically mediated experience, digital output exists as a reflection of the consciousness which uses it and has no sentience to bridge the sense of the physical-electronic binary fragments with the meaning of the application layer results which are ultimately delivered.
This is not to say that there is no signification going on at the hardware level – I think there may be a level of electronic tension which is ‘experienced’ in the physical circuit. Something like DNA may experience something completely different though. It’s appearance of a-signification may not have anything to do with what might be experienced on that layer of molecular interaction, but more about our technological limitations in accessing that level.
January 29, 2011 at 4:43 pm
Taina,
Many thanks for the reference!
December 12, 2011 at 1:53 pm
[…] Diagram the emergence/activity of the asignifying semiotic (‘forms of operation that manipulate elements in ways that do not involve signification or meaning’ Larval Subjects) […]