Sign, Affect, and Musicking before the Human

Abstract

Viewed in broad and deep-historical perspective, human musicking can help us to discern a semiotics reaching far beyond the human sign, clarifying its signifying processes while at the same time delimiting them within the larger realm of information. These categories and distinctions, brought to bear on recent affect theory, show it to be often inadequate in its use of key concepts. This biosemiotic analysis, then, indicates three directions forward: first, toward an adjustment of certain claims of object-oriented philosophers sometimes allied to the affect theorists; second, toward a revisiting of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and of the relation there of the sign and affect to assemblages and their formation; and, third, toward the speculative materialism of Meillassoux and the opportunity it proposes for an anti-Kantian historicism.