ECSA ECONOMIC IDEAS

SIGN MACHINES (2006)

Akseli Virtanen

Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill

According to Felix Guattari, signification can either be accepted de jure, as an inevitable effect excepted to be found at every semiotic level, or it can be accepted de facto, as a part of particular system of social organization. (188) In other words, signification does not just fall from the heavens, emerge directly from symbolic structures, from language itself, from the mathematics of the unconscious, or from some mystical semantic womb, but is inseparable from the form of organization and control of the society.

In his attempt to elucidate the connection between signification and subjectivation and forms of social organization and control, Guattari emphasized Hjelmslev’s distinction between thought-matter and the formation of semiotic substances.

According to Guattari, as far as the distinction between the forming matter and the semiotically (significationally) formed substance takes place regardless of the relation between expression and content, it opens for semiotics a way out of the control based on and enabled by the bipolarity of the signifier and the signified. He thought that “institutional semiotics” should be liberated from the sphere of this linguistic dichotomy of expression/content so that it could encompass for instance the domains of biology, technology, aesthetics and organization which are not only linguistic and human, but also part of the formation of the subject. This would open a possibility of a semiotics that would be independent from the semiology of signification, needed in the institutional situation. It would not be based in the bipolarity of the signifier and the signified; instead, it would open up a possibility both to examine the production of significations as a form of control and organization of subjectivity and to outline a “machinic consistency” that functions without the mediation of signification. (189)

Guattari abandoned the formal classification of semiotic components in his attempt to structure the functional organization of various orders of signification, and presented a series of distinctions based on Hjelmslev’s theory, a topology or a map of the ways of semiotisation whose purpose was to outline the different signifying machines. They can be presented in the following table: (190)

Image Not Showing Possible Reasons

The image was uploaded to a note which you don't have access to
The note which the image was originally uploaded to has been deleted

Learn More →

1. A-Semiotic Encoding

According to Guattari, we should not confuse semiotic encoding, which works by forming an autonomous semiologic substance (a given language) from the purport or thought-matter common to all languages, with “natural” encoding, which works independently from language. In the case of a-semiotic encoding, it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of signals rather than of signs. The difference between a linguistic sign and for instance a genetic code or a hormonal signal is that a signal does not produce any type of signification; it does not need to become linguistic (circulate through a semiologic substance) in order to work. It does not need signs in order to function; it functions through form and matter, yet outside the planes of expression and content, without interpretation and exchange of significations, without a semiologic substance. A-semiotic encoding forms material intensities and functional structures without relying on a separate and translatable “code of inscription”, or, as Guattari says, “There is no genetic ‘handwriting’”. (191) Consequently, these encodings cannot be directly “translated” or “made linguistic”. If semiotically formed matter is substance, then a-semiotic encodings are non-semiotically formed matter.

2. Signifying Semiologies

Signifying semiologies function instead in systems of signs, which are always already organized into semiotically formed substances on the planes of expression and content (the four squares on the right hand side in the diagram). There are two types of them:

A. Pre-signifying symbolic semiologies, which function in the polyphony or decentralized order of the substances, that is, with several different substances of expression, none of which steps forth to determine the others. Signifying semiologic organizations are characterized by signifying representations and objects which they refer to, as well as the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. There are, however, pre-verbal means of expression or types of signs which function in an analogical or similar relation between themselves and the representations they signify – such as icons. They are means of expression that assume “an immediate and immediately understandable form”. (192) Traffic signs are another example of this – they do not require linguistic mediation to be understood; neither do crying children who, regardless of their nationality and without the aid of dictionaries make their discontent or the object of their desire easily known. In so called primitive societies the expressions of gestures, facial expressions and corporal attitudes, of rhythms and rituals, of the earth and the totems are never entirely independent from each other. They intermingle and imbricate; yet they function in such a way that they can never be entirely translated into the control of one system of signification. (194) The multiple ways of expression and semiotisation create segments of subjectivity that complement one another. They guide the evolution of the individual through initiations and the tribal system in a way that the individuals find themselves “enveloped by number of transversal collective identities […] situated at the intersection of numerous vectors of subjectivation”. (195)

B. Signifying semiologies, which subject the content to the expression and at the same time understand the latter as mere substance of the expression of the linguistic signifier. In their sphere, the sign always refers to another sign. This means that compared for instance with symbolic semiologies, in signifying semiologies all the different means of expression (voice, dance, gesture, movement, word, etc.) are centered, or “over-encoded” into one signifying substance, whose place in signifying semiology is occupied with the signifier. To be more precise, it is occupied by the absent signifier which seems the origin of all significations and around which all other expression must intertwine.

In signifying semiologies the signifier and the signified are connected in the vertical relationship of the sign, but the relative meaning of the signified (its value) is determined in the horizontal relations of the differences of the signifiers: meaning emerges in the systematic differences between arbitrary signifiers. In other words, signification is production of chains of signifiers where the chain as a whole forms the signified, rather than an attachment to a specific expression or state of affairs. Signification is production that makes signification endless in binding it to the transcendence of the absent signifier. Or as Deleuze puts it, meaning is “not only founded on, but determined by, a transcendental topology”. (196) Because the signified is only an effect of the signifier, the signifier in effect dominates the signified. This is why Guattari calls signifying semiologies dictatorships of the signifier.

We could in fact renounce the concept of sign in this instance as well, for this is not so much a matter of the relationship of the sign with the state of affairs it is referring to, or with an object that it signifies. What is at stake here is only the formal relation of signs with other signs insofar as they define signification (consequently what is at stake is only a formalism through which thought and meaning form). The endlessness of signification displaces the sign: “When denotation […] is assumed to be part of connotation, one is wholly within the signifying regime of the sign”. (197) The sign is in a constant movement of referring from one sign to the other, which is diffusing in every direction. All signs are only signs of signs. It is not so much a matter of what a specific sign means, but of which other signs it is referring to or which other signs attach themselves to it in order to form an infinite circle with no end and no beginning that casts its shadow on an undivided surface. For an instant this undivided surface or “amorphic continuum” appears to be signified, but it is as if it kept sliding from under the signifier whom it serves only as an instrument, or, to quote Deleuze and Guattari, it serves as a wall for the signifier: contents separate from the material conditions of their production or from their bodies and become abstract or athmospheric and “rise up in the air”. (198) The closed or walled circle in Guattari’s table originates from this: the world begins to become signifying even before nobody knows what it signifies. This is why Guattari can say that a sign referring only to other signs causes a particular impotence or uncertainty. It creates a hysterical world of paranoia where we never stop asking: But what does it mean?

Consequently, from Guattari’s perspective, it is strange how it has been possible to prove the ever-diffusing structure of meaning so definitely - which was maybe the most important discovery of the 20th century - without paying any attention to the way the social organization and control works in the despotism of the signifier. The meaningfulness and clarity of communication depends directly on the division of these attached, signifying chains. (199)

Why is it that the values (of the sign) appear as permanent, relatively unified meanings and shared values, if that is not what they are? Answering this question means acknowledging that signification cannot be separated from its social origin, that is, from the social configurations that create it. Along with Marx, it is perhaps Nietzsche who has gotten the farthest with this question, because he understood that the origin of the relationship between the master and the slave lies in language, not in work (as Hegel thought). In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sees the relationship forming through the language of the masters:

“[…] the judgement “good” did not originate with those to whom goodness was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradiction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values: what they had to do with utility! […] The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say “this is this and this”, they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it.” (200)

Perhaps we should think that a signifying sign that has to reach for the signifieds allocated to it by signification – the signifieds that are nonetheless only chains of signifiers and that are therefore always decisively absent, as Derrida has shown for all writing – always presumes two languages: the language of masters and the language of subjects. Deleuze and Guattari borrow an example from Jean Nougayro: “For the Sumerian, a certain sign is water; the Sumerian read this sign as A, which means water to them. An Akkadian arrives and asks his Sumerian master, ‘What is this sign?’ The Sumerian answers, ‘It is A.’ The Akkadian thinks this is the sign for A, and from thereon there is no relation between this sign and water (which is mû in Akkadian). (201) Alphabetical writing was not created for the illiterate; it was invented by the illiterate. It was not created for communication; it was created for translation. The signifier presumes language which over-encodes another language, whereas the other language is encoded as entirely as phonetic elements. All contents are structured in innumerable micropolitical ways before they are structured by language: meanings are the result of power relations.

In signifying semiologies the organization of sign on the syntagmatic axe (the function of signification) is inseparable from the organization of signs on the paradigmatic axe (the function of interpretation). The sign are cut out from their actual production, because they must travel through the mental world of representations. (202)

To be detached from material intensities is to be trapped in a “signifying ghetto” (the subject is always forced to articulate the already articulated). Signification is based on the system of representation, or the excessive production of signification, which creates a relativistic world of apparent objects and images, a world of uncertainty and impotence that we are used to calling our “mental world”, instead of factual intensities and multitudes. Signification follows from this identification with the signifying ghetto to the representation itself. In the signifying semiologies the sign never refers directly to anything; it has to go through this mediation; it must be mediated through the world of representation. (203)

If one accepts signification de jure, one is trapped in a vicious circle, says Guattari. The signifier functions autonomously, referring incessantly only to itself. The individuated (and subjected) subject emerges from here; its foundation is the fact that, as Lacan says, “the signifier (…) represents a subject to another signifier”. The auto-referential yet eternally absent signifier “determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindness, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and social acquisitions notwithstanding”.(204) It is not that simulation replaces the real, but that simulation appropriates “the production of the real by a quasi cause”. (205)

The “cultural dependence” of the truth and of reality provided also the sharp point of the Sophists’ irony, when they demonstrated that a signifying word does not refer to any actual state of affairs. (206) Sophists, who were interested in ethics and in the relation between customs and nature, were active in Greece in 500-400 BC, at a time when the polis alone had begun to decide on right and wrong, or had “taken the law in its own hands”. The sophists examined the belief in meaning and the uses of this belief.

If “every experience contains two opposing logoi”, as Protagoras stated in his study on the right use of words, a word that can be simultaneously both true and false tell us nothing about reality. The term logos should not be understood as a ruse by the representatives of the opposing arguments, or as mere rhetoric, but rather as the truth on the nature of the thing in question. It approaches the term pragmata, which means the true nature of experiences and things (also of the matters of state). Reality is such that there are two opposing ways, logoi, to describe, explain, and understand any given experience. When the sophists asked one to present an argument which the sophist then proved true, after which, to the amazement of his fellow debaters, he also proved the opposing argument true, they were pursuing the truth rather than playing at its expense. If anything, the art of sofia they practiced, the public demonstration of the principle of the two logoi destroyed the faith in the sign and signification as an instrument of knowing and governing.

Gilles Deleuze has demonstrated how signification never defines or validates the truth without also validating the false, or the lie. (207) As a result, in the sphere of signification the condition of truth is never opposed to untrue, but to the absurd and senseless, to that which signifies nothing and can be both true and false. Signification, which can never act as the ultimate foundation, is ruled by doxa (common sense). Deleuze calls this also the first synthesis of time: it gives the present the direction from the past to the future. (208)

3. A-Signifying Semiotics

Unlike signifying semiotics, a-signifying semiotics does not function only in the sphere of signification, but independent from it or in spite of it, using it only as one of its means. Unlike a-semiotic encoding, a-signifying semiotics that Guattari also calls the “semiotics of intensities” belongs to the semiotic order. It operates thus on the planes of expression and content, but touches directly the semiotic and material intensities and events without being conditioned by signification (in the table, the two open arches that directly connect form and purport, bypassing the sphere of signification).

Guattari uses the example of a credit card number, which triggers the functioning of the cash machine. (209) A-signifying semiotic figures or materially intensive expressions not only produce significations or only secrete signification, they avoid the signifying mediation instead. Despite the amount of signification they express they are expressions that are not only signifying or human. They are functions that do not necessarily signify anything; they are like operational means devoid of any signifying or interpretational dimension to rein them in.

Free from the world mediated by mental representations and from the “signifying ghetto”, signs can function and participate in things without mediation that possesses only false depth and a retreating center. Signs and things are now bound together without the control of subjectivity that the subjects of single expressions think they are able to use. This machinery of “non-human processes”, or “machinic unconscious” and its part in the production of subjectivity means non-human, or rather, in the Nietzschean sense, super-human processes of the production of subjectivity on the level of which Guattari wanted to move the study of the unconscious. These processes do not function through representation, but on the plane of “affective contagion” where “it starts to happen to you, in spite of you”. (210)

For example, purely intensive use of language that leads to expression that is materially intense and formless in terms of signification, is not representative or extensive use of language. (211) It no longer is part of signifying language; nor is it organized music or singing, although it might resemble them, like the vibration of Gregor Samsa’s voice in Kafka, starting to disarticulate the words. The expressive matter speaks for itself; it has no need to be interpreted or put into a signifying form. A-signifying semiotics moves from signification to language, into the materiality of language and the (a-signifying) expression of materiality and sensuality, which bores a tunnel under the iron curtain erected between spirit and matter, culture and nature, mind and body. Language, detached from signification, rediscovers its value (meaning) only in the materiality of the word. It is no longer defined by signification, the category of the signifier, or by the individuation of the subject. Children, for example, are very good at touching language in this way: they keep repeating a word whose meaning is only vaguely familiar to them, in a way that the word starts to vibrate and twist and ceases to be representational; it begins to move without the limitations of signification. It starts to become. It becomes minoritarian. (212)

It is important to understand that this is nor wordplay nor a metaphor. Kafka’s Gregor-animal does not speak “like” a human; instead, he extracts from language tonalities which do not signify. The words in themselves are not “like” animals; instead, they climb up, bark, and swarm on their own. They are animals, insects, and dogs that are actually verbal. A-signifying semiotics opens the signifying word to unexpected material intensities, or to “a-signifying, intense use of language”. (213)

It is perhaps easier to understand these elements expressing the materiality of language and its inner tensions – which Deleuze and Guattari call elsewhere also “intensives” and “tensors” – if we revisit Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon’s painting. (214) For modern painters, the empty canvas is by no means a tabula rasa, but a space of visual preconceptions and accepted conventions of representation that the artist brings onto the canvas, with which he wrestles and which he strives to conquer or escape. For Bacon, a transformation begins with a stroke of the brush, a drop of paint, or a sweep or scrub on the canvas, which can happen accidentally. For example, a light touch on wet paint can cause the mouth to spread from one side of the face to the other. It creates a moment of chaos, a small disaster of pictorial probalities, which Bacon calls the diagram. According to Deleuze, Bacon’s diagram is indeed chaos and catastrophe, but also the seed of an organization and a rhythm. (215) Bacon begins to follow the change, the form, the color or the line of this diagram. It is as if the skin of a rhinoceros was being tightened, and new, microscopic, repeating designs would be emerging from underneath. Bacon uses it as a route to produce, in the very painting, new, intense relations that inevitably change what he had started to paint. The new shape emerges from this deformed shape.

Bacon’s strategy is to paint portraits and studies of human shapes and in this way stay within the boundaries of representation. He allows nevertheless the diagram to create “a Sahara in the person’s head”, or “split the head in two with an ocean”, or “let the body change into piece of meat”, thus deterritorializing the human subject. There is a resemblance between the configuration of the paint and the human shapes, between the ocean and the woman’s breasts, but one could say that these resemblances are no longer “productive”, but only “produced”. To be only produced (without signification, without the mediation that makes something “productive”) means to be born through completely different relations than those of signification.

Let us return for a moment to Hjelmslev’s metaphor of the spread-out net and sand. Hjelmslev’s model deals above all with the way the linguistically unformed purport or thought-matter (which is common to all languages) forms into meaningful substances (specific languages). For Hjelmslev, substance is formed semiotically when form falls on the purport like the shadow of a spread-out net falls onto sand and forms boundaries on this undivided surface.

A-signifying semiotics does not consider purport (the “though-matter” common to all languages) only as substance for forms, and in this sense, dependent on them. It must nonetheless be noted – and Guattari seems to be forgetting this at times – that although Hjelmslev does not bother thinking about the other possible states of the matter, he does not claim that purport should always be interpreted as substance (which is exactly why he distinguished the plane of matter in it). (216) The difference remains that Guattari strives to construct an autonomous existence for the matter – an existence that would be independent from its actual forms: an existence without a form or state. It spreads out as indeterminate and unorganized intensities that are independent from the actual substances into which they will form. Purport is not so much “amorphic mass” (in Hjelmslev’s terms) that exists only as formed; it possesses instead its own (potential) existence without a state or a space. (217) As such, it is “as differentiated as the most material of materials”. In the terms of Hjelmslev’s sand: anyone who has ever walked barefoot on a beach has probably noticed that it is not formed by one, homogenous mass.

Hjelmslev discovered the connection between expression and content on the plane of the form of expression and the form of content, which he identified with each other (the two-way arrow in the diagram of the meaning of management). Guattari found this idea of a common or two-way form ingenious: it outlined the question on the existence of a bridge or a formal machinery that would be “transversal to every modality of Expression and Content”. (128) Yet, contrary to Hjelmslev’s view, Guattari emphasized that the forms could not be autonomous. They could only exist without action as abstract structure or an ideal game of chess. On the one hand, Hjelmslev’s forms were thus too abstract, but, on the other, they were also too bound to language and not abstract enough for a-signifying semiotics, which was “much more” than language. (219)

Functioning forms and material intensities without a form or a state: it was from these elements that Guattari developed the idea of a configuration or combination of relations that would not function through semiological substances, but – instead of verbal linearity, chains of signifiers, games of signs, and paradigmatic accumulation – directly between form and matter. Guattari’s discovery was the idea of a-signifying semiotic organization that forms connection between material uncertainties that have not yet formed as signifying substances. In this organization, what is at stake is the unceasing variation of informal functions and formless intensities rather than the formation of signifying substances. The task of the “schitzoanalysis” or “institutional semiotics” outlined by Guattari was to analyze the semiotic and material features of this interaction.

Guattari, too, called the non-representational “forms” of this interaction diagrams. They function on the same plane with the linguistic-material intensities and have a direct hold on the continuum of change. Diagrams belong to becoming that precedes the birth of signifying layers. They do not form a universal code that would govern the formation or would be separate from their expression; they form the very matter of becoming and change, formed by “the crystals of potentiality which catalyze the connections, de-stratification and re-territorialization in the living as in the non-living world.”(220)

[An Excerpt from Akseli Virtanen: Arbitrary Power. Towards a Critique of Biopolitical Economy (Tutkijaliitto, Helsinki 2006, pp. 56-60]

REFERENCES

Modifying Guattari’s diagram, in Molecular Revolution, p. 73.
Ibid., p. 74; see Gustafsson (1994), Production av allvar. Stockholm: Nerennius & Santérus, p. 164-175.
Guattari (1984), Molecular Revolution, p. 167.
Ibid., p. 167.
Guattari also gives the example of the world of the child, the madman, and of artistic creation. Ibid., p. 74 and 91; Guattari (1995), Chaosmosis, tr. By Paul Bains and Julia Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 98.
Ibid., p. 98.
Deleuze (1972), “A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?”, second criterion.
Deleuze & Guattari (1980), A Thousand Plateaus, p. 112.
Ibid.
According to de Saussure, that everything in language is negative holds good only when signifiers and signifieds are analyzed distinct: “when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class.” Course in General Linguistics, tr. by Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library, p. 112. The play of differences is indeed boundless, but just as Risto Heiskala reminds us, in the end, it is not boundless: “The identities of signifiers and signifieds can be understood as the stabilizing values of the play of purely negative differences within two different orders, which however receive a positive identity when two parallel orders articulate into a relation thus constituting a linguistic structure […] At this level language is a social fact and can be used for communication because certain signifiers carry relatively shared meanings for all users of the language”. Heiskala (2000), Toiminta, tapa, rakenne. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, p.130. Even if de Saussure was convinced that “everything that relates to language as a system must […] be approached from this viewpoint, which has scarcely received the attention of the linguists: the limiting of arbitrariness” (Course, p. 133.), his theory does not give any account on how does this takes place.
Nietzsche (2000), On the Genealogy of Morals, I § 2, p. 461-462.
Nougayrol (1963), L’ecriture et la psychologie des peoples. Paris: Armand Collin, p. 90; Deleuze and Guattari (1984), Anti-Oedipus, p. 240.
For Guattari, signification is a semiotic process that takes place through the mediation of substance; in other words, the purport or meaning-matter is always already determined as substance from the viewpoint of language. This determination takes place through denotation, representation, signification, interpretability, identification, and individuation. The semiologies of signification include signs characterized by three functions: denotation, representation, and signification. Denotation establishes a relationship between the sign and the thing it designates; it is therefore a referential function (which presupposes the reality of the thing denoted and structures the dominant reality). Representation organizes denoted reality as mental images, the sum of which is called the mental world. According to Guattari, signification is the outcome of relating the signifying basis of the representation to the representation itself. The sign does not refer directly to reality, but is always forced to go through the sphere of representation. The organization of signification is based on the division between the signifier and the signified; the organization of representation is based on the division between substance and form; and the articulation of the both organizations as a form of subjectivation prevents the direct contact with multitude of material intensities. Guattari (1984) Molecular Revolution, p. 79, 91-92, 95, 101.
Ibid., p.92.
Lacan (1998), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits ofLove and Knowledge. N.Y.: Norton, p. 49; Lacan (1972), The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”, tr. by Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48:60.
Deleuze & Guattari (1984), Anti-Oedipus, p. 87 and 210. Actually the opposition between simulation and real is erroneous. This is why Deleuze and Guattari answer ‘yes’ both to question whether simulation will replace real, which indeed exists prior to simulation, and to the question whether simulation is everything that exists. Simulation produces the real, or, to be exact, adds real (and more than real) while constructing itself on the real. It carries the real beyond its very principle (genuine vs. copy) to the point where it is in fact produced.
See the chapter “Refrain: Oikos, Polis, Nomos” in this book.
Deleuze (1990), The Logic ofSense, tr. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, p. 14-15.
Deleuze (1997), Difference et Repetition, p. 225.
Guattari (1995), Chaosmosis, p. 49.
Ibid., p. 92.
On “extensive”, see Deleuze (1997), Difference et Repetition, p. 293-299.
On “minor”, see Deleuze & Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, p. 105-106.
Deleuze & Guattari (1986), Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature. Tr. by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, p. 22.
Deleuze (2005), Francis Bacon: The Logic ofSensation. Tr. by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum.
Ibid, p.93
This is because Hjelmslev does not consider this reflection necessary, or even the task of linguistics as we have already noted. What interests Hjelmslev is primarily the linguistic form, approached regardless of the substance. This is why it is possible to apply this semiotic apparatus to the analysis of any structure that is analogous with natural language.
On the relationship between state, form, and space, see the chapter “Refrain: Oikos, Polis, Nomos” of this book.
Guattari (1995), Chaosmosis, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 24; Deleuze &Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, p. 141.
For C. S. Peirce, diagram was “predominantly an Icon”, the icon of comprehensible relations in the constitution of its object (see e.g. Peirce (1931-35), Collected Papers, 4.531.). It was a representation of these relations, but is was also something else. For Peirce diagram contained certain ways that take part in the creation of a graphic abstraction (for instance in geometry), as well as certain indexal features of indicating (“Over there!”) without allowing any conception of its object. Because the diagram expresses in itself the formal features of its object, it can be said to take the place of its object: “the distinction between the original and the copy disappears; for a moment, it is but a dream” (Ibid, 3.362). This imitation or simulation shatters the territorializing effect of representation and denotation. For Peirce icons can also be deterritorializing, in Guattari’s sense, because they do not automatically lead to any of their object, but rather express the nature of their object in themselves. Icons can therefore wave aside the semiotic formations in power.