GARY GENOSKO, Critical semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect.

London:
Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. 200. Hb. $128.

Reviewed by EMILY SUH

Department of Education, University of Indiana-Southeast
01 Hillside Hall
emsuh@iu.edu

Semiotics has integrated critical realism and the cultural turn. Genosko’s book provides a
historic exploration of critical semiotics and argument for combining semiotic analysis of
meaning-making and affect theory’s focus on intensities. The combination is challenged by the
sign’s attachment to meaning which renders it centralized on human subjectivity and thus not
easily representing intensity/movement. Genosko admits the combination’s awkwardness but
argues that signs can “become something more than themselves when they ‘take up’ affective
intensities” (p. 2). He explores this potential through the writings of semiologist and
psychotherapist Félix Guattari.
Chapter 1 discusses Guattari’s a-signification (signals transmitting information without
semantic content, i.e., nonlinguistic information transfer) and hybrid semiotics freed from the
linguistic signifier and human subjectivity. Genosko moves from explicit connections between
language and meaning in linguistics-dominated signifier-signified relationships to exploring how
intensities can disrupt and open experiences: other decodings previously smothered by
overcoded signifcations. Genosko provides several theorists to illustrate the extent that critical
semiotics benefits from displacement of meaning.
Genosko reviews Baudrillard’s logics of signification conversion table. Genosko’s detailed
explanation of butter and margarine as simulation is just one instance of many throughout the
book in which he explains critical semiotics through detailed example. Both Chapters 1 and 2
present the mutual influences of Baudrillard, Barthes and Guattari.
The book next describes info-commodities, semiocapitalism’s partial signs and
conceptualization of critical operations as not limited to analyses of form/substance. Genosko
outlines benefits of a hybrid theory of semiotics and describes Guattari’s interpretation of
Hjelmslev’s production as immaterial creation combining semiotic segments.
Chapter 4 presents Foucault’s explanation of obstacle signs, which Genosko uses as an
example of creatively overcoming the arbitrariness of the sign. Turning to Lyotard, Genosko
addresses whether and how signs conduct intensities in Chapter 5, ultimately discussing tensor
signs’ ability to signify intensities. Lyotard’s introduction of intensity into structure foreshadows
the challenge of combining signs and affect.
The final chapter is a toolbox for Critical Semiotics. Genosko modifies Jameson’s material
signifier in relation to affect theory before addressing the floating signifier’s potential to enable
symbolic thinking. The chapter closes with the positive effect of the zero-sign for attracting
change in the form of meaning and managing affective flows actualized as floating
signifiers/signifieds with varying intensities. Genosko concludes with reflections on critical
theorists’ contributions to destabilizing the signifier-signified relationship, recognizing that
signifying nothing opens a path for impulses of potentiality and affective signs which actualize
without forcing energies into a limiting structure.
Although the book is intended to be read sequentially as Genosko builds an argument for
affective signs’ ability to actualize potentiality, chapters can be read independently for detail-rich
explanations and examples from Guattari, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, and others. Genosko
occasionally depends upon his previous publications to explicate Guattari’s writing, but his
frequent detailed examples elucidate social and semiotic connections. For those interested in
semiotics or previously unfamiliar with applications of critical semiotics outside of cultural
theory, Genosko’s affective turn illuminates the subjugation inherent in the signifier-signified
relationship from a post-structuralist, post-humanist perspective.