Issue # 14 | Spring 2014 | Asignifying Semiotics: Or How to Paint Pink on Pink

This issue of Footprint examines the notion of asignifying semiotics, which plays a dominant role in contemporary capitalism and becomes indispensable in creating the very conditions for its political critique. Asignifying semiotics is not limited to the semiotics of mathematics, stock indices, money, accounting and computer codes, but includes the semiotics of music, art, architecture, film, dance, and so on. What they have in common is their repudiation of the hegemony of meta-languages. Asignifying signs do not represent or refer to an already constituted dominant reality. Rather, they simulate and pre-produce a reality that is not yet there. Existence is not already a given, it is a stake in the experimental assemblages, be they scientific, political or artistic. Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of asignifying rupture calls for relinquishing the tautological, and hence trivial effort of tracing, in favour of creative mapping. The ten articles in Footprint 14 constitute a cartography that is coextensive with the social field, no longer as mimesis but as poiesis.

Issue's editors: Deborah Hauptmann and Andrej Radman