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.
• (Related, not yet paged: Jean Baudrillard, 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.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• 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.

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?