Towards a Deleuzian Semiotics: Draft of a Manifesto

Abstract

This essay sketches a manifesto for a Deleuzian semiotics. Rather than reconstructing a history of Deleuze’s relation to semiotic theory, it traces four displacements that such an approach imposes on the discipline. First, the object of analysis is no longer recognised but emerges diagrammatically, through transemiotic translation. Second, enunciation is relocated from the speaking subject to collective assemblages, impersonal haecceities and non-human actors. Third, the diagram is recast as an immanent abstract machine of transcoding between expression and content, against every form of linguisticism. Fourth, bodies and affects are mapped cartographically, as thresholds of becoming. A series of ethnographic semiograms – nail fetishes, Kaluli bird-dancers, the Salento taranta, Iatmul schismogenesis – shows how anthropological knowledge has nourished Deleuzian concepts, and how it can sustain a critical politics of immanence against algorithmic governmentality.