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Maurizio Lazzarato’s a-signifying semiotics and the computational infrastructure of generative AI

Following the keyword of ‘machinic enslavement’ I stumbled across Maurizio Lazzarato’s notion of a-signifying semiotics, that which “tune[s] in directly to the body (to its affects, its desires, its emotions and perceptions) by means of signs” and “trigger an action, a reaction, a behaviour, an attitude, a posture”. There are other less rhetorically cumbersome and irritatingly oxymoronic framings, but it feels like something I should engage with nonetheless.

I’ve been prone to saying that habitual use of Twitter leaves the user’s creative processes entangled in capital accumulation but I’ve been less inclined to actually explain what I mean by this. This is how Lazzarato describes ‘machinic enslavement’:

If signifying semiotics have a function of subjective alienation, of “social subjection”, a-signifying semiotics have one of “machinic enslavement”. A-signifying semiotics synchronize and modulate the pre-individual and pre-verbal elements of subjectivity by causing the affects, perceptions, emotions, etc. to function like component parts, like the elements in a machine (machinic enslavement). We can all function like the input/output elements in semiotic machines, like simple relays of television or the Internet that facilitate or block the transmission of information, communication or affects. Unlike signifying semiotics, a-signifying semiotics recognize neither persons, roles nor subjects. While subjection concerns the global person, those highly manipulable subjective, molar representations, “machinic enslavement connects infrapersonal, infrasocial elements thanks to a molecular economy of desire”. The power of these semiotics resides in the fact that they permeate the systems of representation and signification by which “individuated subjects recognize each other and are alienated from each other”.

https://transversal.at/transversal/0107/lazzarato/en

I find the intersection of Autonomist and Deleuzean writing (alongside poor style and bad translation) aesthetically agonising to read, but the point is an important one for understanding the intersection of creative production under capitalism and the computational infrastructure of generative. As he puts it, “In the contemporary public arena, the production of the word is organized ‘industrially’ rather than ‘theatrically’.

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