Semiocap K - Michigan 2024 HHRS

Michigan 7 Weeks – SemioCapitalism
Notes
This file is a critique of the system of Semiocapitalism, which argues that the system of capitalism has accelerated to the point that the stimuli it generates far exceeds the limits of our biological systems. Semiocapitalism is distinct from former forms of capitalism insofar as it includes the exchange of cognitive labor, that is, our mental energies are now resources to be exchanged through advertising and the like.
IP relates to this insofar as it dictates the ways that signs and nonphysical property is managed, and therefore, deployed in our world. Strengthening of IP properties means that there are even more things to catch our attention and more stimuli circulating in the world. The inevitable result of this process is both structural violence in the form of mental exhaustion (our brains eventually burn out due to the mismatch of speed in our mental capabilities and the world around us) and existential due to environmental collapse.
There are a few alts.
Refusal to work is going to be the best for an alt centered debate as it is a material strategy for resolving the links. By withdrawing from the overstimulation of labor under semiocapitalism, the alt would lead to a process of deacceleration and cognitive healing. The perm is mutually exclusive insofar as it requires people to continue their labor to enforce and enact the plan.
The rest are far more epistemologically focused, and choosing which one to read really comes down to personal preference.
This file may seem confusing at first, but once you look past the language it isn’t all too bad. Think of this as a saucy Cap K file with some post-modern phrases thrown in there.
1NC
Semiocapitalism
1nc
IP seeks to dominate every thought and encode itself into every form of communication. Every genocide begins in the genocide of our freedom.
Eckstein 14 [Lars Eckstein, German cultural historian, 10-23-2014, "Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South (Theory for a Global Age Series)" Bloomsbury, https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/58757/9781472519443.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, pg. 50 - 51]//陈静值
The transformation of intellectual property law from an esoteric legal subject to a topic of daily conversation and debate has occurred in a relatively short span of time. Over the past few years, the aggressive expansion of property claims into every domain of knowledge and cultural practice has interpellated almost everyone, from the academic to the musician, into the heart of the debate. No account of the contemporary moment would be complete without an examination of the dominance of the copyright sign or the effect of the small print of the trademark notice on our lives. In many ways, the mere act of looking at, reading, listening to, making, understanding or communicating any objects that embody thought, knowledge or feeling is as fraught with danger and anxiety today as the appropriation of material wealth or trespassing onto private property were through much of human history (Bagchi et al. 2005: vi).
The anxiety and conflict are certainly not restricted to a set of geographical locations, but the nature of conflict gets configured differently as we move from the United States and Europe to parts of Asia and Africa. In the United States, the crisis is represented in terms of the shrinking of the public domain and of the commons by the extension of copyright, the linking of file sharing and peer-to-peer activities with the global war on terror, and the emergence of a new breed of criminals in the form of students sued by music companies for downloading MP3s online. In South Africa, the government is bulldozed by pharmaceutical corporations who have attempted to prevent it from declaring statutory licenses that will make AIDS drugs more accessible, and in many parts of Asia, the proliferation of cheap technologies of media reproduction creates a parallel economy that threatens the monopoly of old media players (Cullet 2001). The concern over the expansionist tendency of intellectual property has also motivated a rearticulation of the importance of the commons of knowledge and cultural production. This is exemplified by various phenomena among the increasing popularity of non-proprietary modes such as free software and open content. A number of these concerns historically have emerged from the experience of Europe and the United States. But when one attempts to translate the terms of the intellectual property debate into the contemporary experience of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa, it is difficult to locate any easy indexical reference to ideas such as ‘the digital commons’.
Semiocapitalism’s ever increasing pace of stimulation alienates us from all real political and environmental solutions – locking in extinction through anthropocentric dissociation from reality
Emmelhainz 21, (Irmgard Emmelhainz, 11-09-2021, "Chapter 23: Visuality conditions under the Anthropocene," Elgar Online, "Chapter 23: Visuality conditions under the Anthropocene," Elgar Online, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800884298.00038) #GayFrog
One of the show’s early episodes, “The Entire History of You” (2011), imagines a world in which almost everyone has a “grain” implanted behind their ear. This grain has the capacity to transform human eyes into cameras that record reality and projectors that can reproduce it, thereby amalgamating lived experience, memory, and image. In a later episode, “Be Right Back” (2013), a woman is able to revive her dead partner with a program that rebuilds him—first his writing habits, then speech patterns, and eventually his very self via a cloned, synthetic body—solely from the proliferation of information he uploaded on the internet when he was alive. The deathless and bodiless information, images, and signs—the inert map of a life—becomes embodied by an avatar that exists in actual, not virtual, reality, and that has the (albeit limited) capacity to exist and interact directly with humans. In the episode, the fabrication of subjectivity from data—which implies the automatization of subjectivity—foreshadows the relationship between determinist automatisms and cognitive activity, which, according to Franco Berardi, is the core goal of the Google Empire: to capture user attention and to translate our cognitive acts into automatic sequences. The consequence is the replacement of cognition by a chain of automated connections, seeking to automatize the subjectivities of users (Berardi, 2014, paras. 21‒23. Aside from the fact that images and data are taking the place of or giving form to experience, automating our will and thought, they are also transforming things into signs by welding together image and discourse, bringing about Visuality conditions under the Anthropocene a tautological form of vision. With the widespread use of photography and digital imaging, all signs begin to lead to other signs, prompted by the desire to see and to know, to document and to archive information. Thus, the fantasy that everything is or can be made visible coexists with the increasing automa- tion of cognition, which, following Franco Berardi, is the basic condition of semiocapital (the valorization and accumulation of signs as economic assets) (Berardi, op. cit., par. 3). In the pilot episode of Black Mirror, “The National Anthem” (2011), an alleged terrorist group kidnaps a nationally beloved British princess in the early morning hours. In order to free her, the anonymous group demands that the prime minister have sex on live television with a pig at four o’clock that same afternoon. The video in which the princess announces the “price” of the ransom goes viral and the whole nation pressures the prime minister to fulfill the kidnappers’ demands. At the end of the episode, postcoitus, it is revealed that the kidnapping was a singular artist’s gesture, intended in its successful implementation to point critically to the obscenely inflated role the media has in shaping public opinion and official policy. The artist’s action, in other words, illuminates the highly visceral shift in power brought on almost instantaneously by the ransom video’s circulation in the infosphere. Insofar as the episode unfolds montages of the whole nation glued to televisions in the pub, workplace, and waiting room at four o’clock, the artist highlights how connec- tive interfaces actually govern, as they have the direct capacity to manipulate and coordinate behavior on almost every level (Berardi, 2012, p. 15). Under the conditions of semiocapitalism, images and signs acquire value and/or power by means of being seen, largely through “likes” and retweets. The fact that sign-value has supplanted exchange-value means moreover that we no longer consume material things, but rather swallow cognitive signs embedded in and around them. Aside from consuming “experiences” or “moods,” we buy immaterial commodities (in the name of lifestyle and branding) and consume signs for “equality,” “happiness,” “wellness,” and “fulfillment.” In Don Delillo’s White Noise (2002), Jack Gladney describes a trip to the supermarket and makes clear how the signs found in the brands and labels of products that he and his wife buy have the power to relieve them of the mysteries and anxieties brought about by everyday life: It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening. (Delillo, 2002, p. 20) What becomes evident in this paragraph is Baudrillard’s assertion that objects are no longer commodities whose message and meaning we can appropriate and decipher, but rather, tests that interrogate us. For him, commodities are a referendum, the verification of a code, circularity as well as sameness and homogeneity: here the commodities bring a well-being that reflects the well-being of the consumer and his or her lifestyle (Baudrillard, 1976). Furthermore, the acceleration in proliferation of cognitive signs since the time of Delillo’s novel is another of the features of communicative capitalism’s subjugation, submitting the mind to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli, and in so doing generating not only panic and anxiety, but also destroying all possible forms of autonomous subjectivation. Under communicative capitalism, images transformed into signs embody the current concatenation of knowledge and machines—that is, the technological organization of capitalism to produce value. With the enabling of the visualization of data by machines, images have become scientific, managerial, and military instruments of knowledge, and thus of capital and power (Bratton, 2013, para. 16). In this context, seeing means the accelerating perception of the fields of everyday experiences, or rather, the field of trivial visual analogies of experience: a kind of groundless, accelerated tautological vision derived from passive observation. This is for Berardi another of communicative capitalism’s forms of governance, as this kind of vision generates technolinguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning, automating thought and the will (Berardi, 2012, p. 41). Images circulating in the infosphere are also charged with affect, exposing the viewer to sensations that go beyond everyday perception. Hollywood cinema, for instance, delivers pure sensation and intensities that have no meaning. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), the main characters try to survive in outer space by solving practical and technical problems. The movie repudiates a point of view and a ground for vision in favor of immersion, transforming images into physical sensations mobilized by the visual and auditory (espe- cially in its 3-D version), and thus into affect. The becoming-affect of images derives from communicative capitalism’s ruthless conversion of sensation and aesthetic experiences into cognition: its transformation of these experiences into information, sensations, and intensities without meaning is precisely what enables them to be exploited as forms of work and sold as new experiences and exciting lifestyle choices (Shaviro, 2010, para. 14). One of the problems that arises is that affect cannot be linked to a larger network of identity and meaning. Gravity also presents itself as a symptom of the normalization of a groundless seeing brought about by modernity’s decentering of the subject parallel to our Visuality conditions under the Anthropocene 291 exposure to aerial images (for example, Google Earth). The hegemonic sight convention of visuality is an empowered, unstable, free-falling, and floating bird’s eye view that mirrors the present moment’s ubiquitous condition of groundlessness (Steyerl, 2011, para. 6). According to many thinkers, this groundlessness characterizes the Anthropocene. The current fragmentation and transience of sociopolitical movements attests to the fact that we are first of all lacking ground on which to found politics, our social lives, and our relationship to the environment. Second, as Claire Colebrook put it, with the Anthropocene we are facing human extinction, as well as causing other extinctions, thereby annihilating that which makes us human. We are thus all thrown into a situation of urgent interconnectedness, in which a complex multiplicity of diverging forces and timelines that exceed any manageable point of view converge (Colebrook & Wolfe, 2013). In this context, criticality is both in trouble and spinning on its head. Many questions arise: How do we redefine the ground of deterritorialized subjectivation beyond the subsumption of subjectivity by the modes of governance of accelerated tautological forms of vision and communicative capitalism? How can we transform our relationship to the indeterminacy of deterritorialization and the multiplicity of diverging points of view in order to provide a heightened sense of place, giving way to the possibility of collective autonomous subjectivation and thus a new sense of politics and of the image? In an era of ubiquitous synthetic and digital images dissociated from human vision and directly tied to power and capital, when images and aesthetic experience have been turned into cognition and thus into empty sensations or tautological truths about reality, the image of the Anthropocene is yet to come. The Anthropocene is “the age of man” that announces its own extinction. In other words, the Anthropocene thesis posits “man” as the end of its own destiny. Therefore, while the Anthropocene narrative keeps “man” at its very center, it marks the death of the posthuman and of antihumanism, because there can be no redeeming critical antihumanist or posthuman figure in which either meta- physics or technological and scientific advances would find a way to reconcile human life with ecology. In short, images of the Anthropocene are missing. Thus, it is necessary to transcend our incapacity to imagine an alternative or something better. We can first do this: draw a distinction between images and imagery, or pictures. Although it is related to the optic nerve, the picture does not make an image (Daney & McMahon, 1999). In order to make images, it is necessary to make vision assassinate perception; it is necessary to ground vision, and then perform (as in artistic activity) and think vision (as in critical activity) (Didi-Huberman, 2007, p. 17).
Semiotics comes first---signification overdetermines intellectual property.
Tan 21 [David Tan, Associate Professor at the University of Washington, 05 -2021, "Intellectual Property and Semiotics: The Signs of the Times," No Publication, https://academic.oup.com/book/41122/chapter/350441689]//陈静值
Cultural perspectives on law are a growing part of contemporary legal scholarship and, in particular, semiotics has been argued in interdisciplinary legal scholarship on IP to be helpful in illuminating some of the intractable issues encountered in the laws governing copyright, trademarks and the right of publicity. The use of semiotics to interrogate IP laws is a relatively new concept that caught the attention of mainstream legal scholarship just over a decade ago when Barton Beebe published his seminal article ‘The Semiotic Analysis of Trademark Law’ in the UCLA Law Review.2 Prior to this, other legal scholars such as Rosemary Coombe, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, Keith Aoki, and Michael Madow have applied a cultural studies critique to IP laws, but had not distinguished semiotics as an independent perspective in their writings.3 More recently, there is a healthy trend in US law reviews and the International Journal of the Semiotics of Law publishing articles that apply a semiotic approach to IP laws.4
Semiotics is fundamentally the study of signs.5 Semiotics seeks to understand the operation of a given system or process by observing the function of signification, expression, representation, and communication.6 Generally, semiotics has followed two independent lines: the ‘linguistic’ tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, and the ‘logical’ tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce.7 The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, widely credited as the most influential scholar in the field of semiotics, emphasized the nature of the sign as the coded association of a material signifier, such as the sound of a word, with a signified or preconceived meaning.8 The purely linguistic formulation of a sign is best illustrated in de Saussure’s dyadic model where a linguistic sign comprises two parts: a concept (signified) and a sound-image (signifier). For instance, the word ‘cat’ is a signifier; when it is spoken, it triggers the signified in the listener’s mind, namely the mental image of a cat. According to the Peircean conception of the sign, a third subsign element is adopted to complete Saussure’s model: the referent. In situations where language is used to alert the listener to a specific physical object, a triadic model is necessary. Thus, in the above example, the word or sound ‘cat’ is the signifier, the mental image evoked is the signified, and the actual cat being discussed is the referent.9
Umberto Eco describes semiotics as a social science discipline that studies ‘everything that can be taken as a sign’.10 A sign is simply a thing that stands for something else. Although it has its origins in the study of language, semiotic analysis is a trans-linguistic activity11 that can be applied to the inquiry of ‘[a system] of structural codes … that engages with culture, consumption, and communication in the marketplace’.12 It has been said that there are ‘two general components to the functioning of a semiotic sign: signification and value. Signification represents the process by which a signifier evokes a signified, which in turn can lead to the identification of a referent or object … Value is described as the horizontal relation among subparts and involves differentiating among subparts (that is, for example, signifiers from other signifiers or signifieds from other signifieds)’.13
Semiocapitalist forces us to exhaustive workings of our minds and our bodies. Vote neg to preserve our wealth in time and refuse to work for productivity.
Bray 15, Karen Chair, Religious Studies and Philosophy Department. B.A. (Liberal Arts), Eugene Lang College of New School University 2005; M.Div. Harvard Divinity School 2010, “The Monstrosity of the Multitude: Unredeeming Radical Theology”, October 19, 2015, “Palgrave Communications, Vol. 1, 2015”, https://www.n

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