Sign Systems Studies

Editor’s preface: For a minor semiotics

Ott Puumeister — 2025-09-11

Editor’s preface: For a minor semiotics.

Front Matter

Editors — 2025-09-11

Front Matter

Reference points: A “structuralist” account of Deleuze’s (radical) structuralism and semiotics

Roger Dawkins — 2025-09-11

In this essay I explain a radical version of structuralism and concept of the sign, put forward by Deleuze. My aim is to create a model of Deleuze’s structuralism, called Interpretative Structuralism, that can be applied to the world and everything in it (bodies). My explanation of Deleuze could be called structuralist because I take a systematic approach to explaining his structuralism and produce a model for future application. I maintain, however, that the model of Interpretative Structuralism is not an interpretation of Deleuze’s work, a reading. That means, despite being a model, it enables a perspective on bodies and world that sees immanence and difference – in line with Deleuze’s own radical structuralism and philosophy of difference. I focus my analysis on the Deleuze–Parnet essay “On the superiority of Anglo-American literature”. This essay explains Deleuze’s structuralist approach, and, in terms of its own structure, shows Deleuze’s structuralism in action. The concept of the sign outlined in this text is vital, but most salient is the semiotic mediator of structuralism, which (from Deleuze’s concept of external relation) I call ‘the joker’. Crucially important to Deleuze’s radical structuralism is “seeing”, and thinking with, the joker.

Troubling signs: On the aniconic, the asignifying, and art in planetary times

Kamini Vellodi — 2025-09-11

I consider how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of signs, particularly their conception of the ‘asignifying’, can prompt new understandings of ‘aniconic’ art. Usually analysed within the context of religious imagery, ‘aniconism’ is a term traditionally used to refer to artefacts, objects and images that withdraw from the conventions of resemblance, including iconic similarity to a thing represented. Today, aniconism demands to be thought of as a transhistorical and transcultural category that can offer a compelling tool for the decolonized thought of art in planetary times. Reading aniconism alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of the asignifying invites expanded ways of addressing pertinent questions of alterity and the non-representational at the intersections of contemporary art and material culture, world art history and the critical humanities, against a backdrop of intensifying interest in phenomena and objects that exceed or trouble anthropocentric coordinates of thought and perception.

Valdur Mikita and the return of the real: In search of any-spaces-whatever in Estonian forests

Sven Vabar — 2025-09-11

Around the turn of the millennium, a paradigm shift took place in Western arts and humanities. (Post)structuralism, which had focused on language, the signifier, the epistemological, receded, and both academic and artistic attention turned to the real, the material, the ontological, the object, or the so-called “thingin- itself ”. In Estonia, discussions of this shift started as recently as in the 2010s, and then mostly in the context of art and ethnology; however, in retrospect, changes in this direction can be observed earlier and also in other areas of life. The work of the author Valdur Mikita, who had started to write in the 1990s and became extremely popular in Estonia in 2013, is a characteristic example of this paradigm shift. The shift from language games to the real is illustrated by Mikita’s interest in what Gilles Deleuze has called ‘any-spaces-whatever’.

The degradation of music’s object: Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatics and musical semiotics

Iain Campbell — 2025-09-11

This article explores what the music theorist Raymond Monelle called a “certain degradation of the object” in the semiotic analysis of music, that is, the notion that an object or reference seems to be ultimately absent from musical semiotics. Monelle takes his brief and undeveloped theorization of this idea to be a departure from some of the Peircean perspectives prominent in musical semiotics and in his own work, and turns to the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a means to deal with this feature of the semiotic study of music. This article pursues Monelle’s suggestion further. It begins by outlining the adoption and adaptation of the thought of Charles S. Peirce in musical semiotics, before turning to Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with and departure from Peirce in the development of their own diagrammatic theory. It then considers applications of this theory to musical semiotics, suggesting that Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatics shows that the object of music is not something to be found, but something to be created.

Sounding signs: Intentionality and repetition between Peircean and Deleuzian semiotics

Martin Švantner — 2025-09-11

This article examines intentionality and habit formation in musical experience through Deleuzian and Peircean semiotic frameworks. Through analysis of experimental music practices, particularly extreme metal and jazz, we investigate how these philosophical perspectives illuminate contemporary musical phenomena. The study begins with an analysis of Deleuze’s critique of phenomenological intentionality and his theory of temporal synthesis at the pre-individual level. This framework is then applied to the musical subgenre of thall to demonstrate processes of differentiation and actualization. The investigation proceeds to Peirce’s semeiotic approach to intentionality, focusing on habit formation and the quasimind in relation to musical practice. Analysis of jazz improvisation and practice routines demonstrates the explanatory power of Peircean habit acquisition theory for understanding musical skill development. The study concludes by identifying theoretical convergences and divergences between Deleuze and Peirce, particularly regarding teleology and processual becoming. This comparative analysis reveals how both philosophical approaches transcend traditional subject–object dichotomies while maintaining distinct positions on teleological aspects of experiential and experimental processes.

Music semiotics in a minor key: Deleuze and Guattari’s refrain and the musical topic

Karl Joosep Pihel — 2025-09-11

Music semiotics spends considerable effort on establishing musical signification through relatively stable – if non-logocentric – concepts such as the musical ‘topic’. Like any signs, these concepts entail a stable generalized type which are instantiated in particular tokens. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari praise music as an artform particularly suitable for deterritorialization, for becoming or events which do not proceed by the logic of the general opposed to the particular. This article probes the clash of these two perspectives on the contested battleground of musical meaning and proposes their mutual entwinement by comparing closely the concept of the ‘refrain’ from A Thousand Plateaus with the concept of musical ‘topic’ from semiotics, and the respective dynamics of these concepts. The clash results in a proposed re-orientation in the gaze of Deleuzean musicology to practices of signification as suggested by Iain Campbell and even to classical and traditional forms of music, but also to an internal distinction in music semiotics between mutually intertwined minor and major modes of practice, that is, practices oriented towards deterritorialization and territorialization, respectively. It is then demonstrated that a minor mode of interpretation is already present in musicologists’ writings on musical topics of the classical period.

On stasiosemiotics and semiostasis: Deleuze, Guattari and the potential of group phantasms for radical politics

Simon Levesque — 2025-09-11

Stasiosemiotics is made of two concepts: ‘stasis’ and ‘semiotics’. Stasis is a concept that refers to both the division of society and a suspension of time. As a branch of general semiotics, its specific focus, or object, is semiosis stasis, or semiostasis, which is technically impossible: by definition, semiosis is evergoing, continuous and infinite. Though paradoxical, semiostasis can nevertheless inspire a method to study sign systems and objects of which the meaning form is profound- ly intricate and temporally stratified. Among such inextricably complex objects shaping constellations of signs are phantasms and political fictions, or ‘group phantasms’ in Guattari’s terminology. Although on different levels, they both act as meaning condensers partaking in social subjectivation and alienation. Leaning on Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics of phantasm, political philosophy and anthropology, and poetics, ‘stasis’ can be understood both in the political sense (civil strife, division of the political body) and in the aesthetical sense (standstill – as in ecstasy, ek-stasis: being out of oneself, out of ego, in suspended time). Stasiosemiotics aims to virtually suspend the motion of semiosis (or what Guattari calls ‘semiotic fluxes’) for the profit of an inquiry on the intricacies of signs formation and operation. The conclusion suggests ethical consequences regarding the consciousness of habit and implications for radical politics.

On some aspects of a semiotics of the non-identical: Deleuze, Guattari and Adorno

Fabien Richert — 2025-09-11

In this article I propose to use the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s concept of the non-identical to explore the semiotic project that Félix Guattari developed alone and with Gilles Deleuze. I begin by recalling the principles, concepts and aims of schizoanalysis, as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Schizoanalysis is a militant practice that seeks to analyse the productivity of desire in the unconscious and its multiple points of applications in the social world. Alongside his collaboration with Deleuze, Guattari practised schizoanalysis as part of his clinical work at the La Borde Clinic. Initially inspired by Hjelmslevian semiotics, Guattari then proposed his own classification of signs, better suited to analysing the multiple components of subjectivity, desire and the unconscious in relation to capitalism. Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoanalysis combined with the more specifically Guattarian semiotics is from the beginning oriented towards the nonidentical. It offers conceptual and analytical tools for identifying and mapping the heterogeneity of the most singular semiotic universes within the media, art, science and, more broadly, social life.

Gilles Deleuze: semiotics of shock

Martin Charvát — 2025-09-11

The article offers a new interpretation of the notion of shock in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, with respect to his conception of the sign and semiotics. My perspective is based on the presupposition that shock is the condition of experience and knowledge, and that it is an operative concept that runs through Deleuze’s entire work. Deleuze argues against the idea that humans have a natural tendency to think – on the contrary, thinking occurs in a situation of violence when something forces us to think. I then move on to an account of the relation between sign, cognition and shock, focusing in particular on how Deleuze connects the notion of shock to affect: this connection is present in Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza, and also appears in his books on the cinematic image. Affect becomes an important link between the formation of subjectivity, the experience of the world and the transformation of thought. There is no shock without affect, and there is no affect that does not presuppose shock.

Translation is at the root of every language: A conversation with Silvana Rabinovich

E. Israel Chávez Barreto — 2025-09-11

This interview with Silvana Rabinovich, a philosopher working at the crossroads of ethics, discourse analysis, decolonial thought and political theology, presents an overview of Rabinovich’s positions regarding the study of language and languages. It then proceeds to the philosophical problems of translating and observes the connections between translation and interreligious dialogue by looking at the case of Judeo-Arabic language. The conversation then moves on to explore Rabinovich’s idea, drawing on Levinas, of building a heteronomous relationship with language. In its closing part, the interview presents an apt comment on how academics might contribute to the solving of social problems.

The concept of semiosphere – Wallis before Lotman and Hoffmeyer

Kalevi Kull — 2025-09-11

This note records the early usage of the term and concept of ‘semiosphere’, which appeared in print already in 1961, employed by Polish aesthetician, art philosopher and semiotician Mieczysław Wallis (1895–1975). The term ‘semiosphere’ was also used by Walter Moser in 1979, yet it became widespread only when Juri Lotman introduced the concept in 1984. Jesper Hoffmeyer extended the scope of the concept to cover the biosphere.

Discussing the “extended semiotics” in various academic cultures

Ekaterina Velmezova — 2025-09-11

Discussing the “extended semiotics” in various academic cultures.

Igor Černov, founder of the Department of Semiotics in Tartu. In memoriam

Anti Randviir — 2025-09-11

Igor Černov, founder of the Department of Semiotics in Tartu. In memoriam