Semiocapitalism

Definition

Semiocapitalism designates a late stage of capitalism (the term associated with Jean Baudrillard and developed by Franco Berardi) in which information technologies make it possible to merge the productive use of signs and information with capital valorization. Economies capitalized on attentive time — TV series, social media, online games, advertising, framed as lifestyles and consumer preferences — partially replace the production of goods. Bahtsetzis glosses the result as the "attention economy" and Bernard Stiegler's "hyperattention": the over-exploitation of attentive time as a means of accumulating capital. Under semiocapitalism, images are both semiotic operators and a form of fixed capital, semicapital.

Key Thinkers

• Sotirios Bahtsetzis — synthesizes the concept and connects it to the spectacle and theological economy.
• Guy Debord — the spectacle as the antecedent image-regime that semiocapitalism develops.
• Jean Baudrillard — the precursor thesis: the "political economy of the sign" and the general operationalization of the signifier, in which the "monopoly of the code" displaces the monopoly of the means of production (1973/1975). See form-sign, political-economy-of-the-sign.
• (Related, not yet paged: Franco Berardi, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Spectacle — the image-regime that semiocapitalism monetizes.
• Eikonomia — the theological economy Bahtsetzis reads as semiocapitalism's genealogy.
• Iconic Architecture — architecture's image-value within the attention economy.
• Noopolitics — the governance of attention/affect that semiocapitalism implies.
• Form-Sign — the phase in which sign-value becomes the system's own basis: "the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign."
• Political Economy of the Sign — Baudrillard's name for the program that semiocapitalism's later theorists generalize.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the semio-economic register: "the debauchery of signs… is much more powerful than reality" as the real motor of societies; the "floating capital" of Eurodollars and the ecstatic form of value; and the "miniaturization of time, bodies, pleasures" that prefigures the attention economy. See sign-value, value-without-referential, ecstasy.

• Semiocapitalism, Spectacle, Eikonomia, and the Function of Art

• The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism

• Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics

• The Society of the Spectacle

• An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'

• Spectacle, Simulation, and the Selfie: Revisiting Baudrillard's Simulation and Hyperreality

• Everyday (Virtual) Life

• Why the Customer Is Always Right: Debord's Spectacle as the Rationalisation of Mimesis

• Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (Virilio 1977) — dromocracy as the governance of circulation and attention that semiocapitalism extends.

• War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989) — the "logistics of perception" as the militaristic counterpart to the attention economy; images as fixed capital.

• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the concept's theoretical ancestor, in Baudrillard's own words: "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning"; "information is directly destructive of meaning… or… neutralizes them"; "Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social"; and the absorption of all languages into advertising's "degree zero of meaning." Where Bahtsetzis and Berardi name the economy of signs, Baudrillard supplies the mechanism — information as entropy — and the terminal form: the sign exchanged only against itself. See implosion-of-meaning, simulation-hyperreality.

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the precursor thesis of semiocapitalism: political economy's third phase replaces material production with sign-operations — "The super-ideology of the sign and the general operationalization of the signifier—everywhere sanctioned today by the new master disciplines of structural linguistics, semiology, information theory, and cybernetics—has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," pp. 121–123) — and control shifts from owning production to commanding signification: "The monopolistic stage signifies less the monopoly of the means of production (which is never total) than the monopoly of the code" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," pp. 121–123). See form-sign, political-economy-of-the-sign.

• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

• source-notes/proto-2023-spectacle-and-the-screen

Synthesis

• Semiocapitalism and Iconic Architecture — the icon as a semiocapitalist apparatus for producing, capturing, and valorizing attention through architectural images.

Open Questions

• Is "semiocapitalism" distinctively explanatory for architecture, or does it merely restate the claim that iconic architecture is image-capital?