Asignifying Semiotics Essay

The operations of asignifying semiotics are “diagramaric,” meaning they are non-discursive, impersonal, and operational, regardless of whether representing something to someone. Asignifying semiotics, therefore, moves beyond representing or referring to pre-given and unified meanings and symbols. Asignifying semiotics involves the amalgamation of human components (organ, affect, perception, memory, cognition, and so forth) and nonhuman components of machines (economic, scientific, and so forth), organizing them as parts of integrated operations of machinic assemblage (81-89). Within such assemblage, nonhumans have as much agencies as humans do, as they become interchangeable. This relationship is based on mutual communication and recurrence.

Lazzarato gives the example of driving, that human components are connected to the one of the macine to take parts in the “automatic” function of driving. It is a “psedo-sleep,” meaning it involves several systems of conscious depending on the event. In machinic enslavement, productivity of capital depends on the ensemble of these series of humans and nonhumans: on the one hand, mobilizing the pre-individual and supra-induvial capacities (memory, perception, cognition, physical force), functioning outside the body, and on the other, ensuring of the intelligence and physical capacities of machines (protocols, systems of sign, software, science, economy, and so forth). Lazzarato acknowledges the fact that “[i]n machininc enslavement, induvial labor and production are not proportional” (45). That is to say, production is no longer feeds off labour time. With the growing reliance of capitalism on asignifying semiotics, the most apparent of the phenomenon of enslavement is the introduction of “intensive surplus labour” from productivity and surplus value, regardless of employment, “that one may provide surplus value without doing any work”