Territories of Meaning:

The Bliss wallpaper.

My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts. - Adam Curtis, 2024

Abstract:

Networks are giving rise to new online-offline spaces of meaning-making, characterized by distinctive patterns of expression and understanding. These networks are not simply platforms or infrastructures for social interaction but have become primary environments where meaning emerges, identities form, and communities develop. "Semioscapes"–landscapes of meaning formed within these networks–operate through processes of semiosmosis, creating selectively permeable boundaries that enable both difference and exchange.

This essay argues that the development and maintenance of these semiosmotic boundaries–regulating flows of meaning, association, and participation–represents a new form of collective meaning-making in networked spaces. These membranes of meaning are shaped through dynamic processes of co-curation, influenced by but not reducible to the interests of external actors like institutions, corporations, or governments. This framework reframes how we understand differentiation and meaning-making in the networked age, suggesting that networked semioscapes have become crucial sites where questions of collective expression, identity formation, and cultural development play out.

Introduction

In Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour provocatively claims: “I can now state the aim of this sociology of associations more precisely: there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations.” For Latour, the notion of translation itself takes on a particular meaning: “a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting. If some causality appears to be transported in a predictable and routine way, then it’s the proof that other mediators have been put in place to render such a displacement smooth and predictable” (Latour, 2005, p. 119). For Latour, the world is rendered in terms of networks of relations. And in the midst of this, ‘the social’ becomes viewed as “a circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society.” (Latour, 2005, p. 139; emphasis added)

This “circulating entity” positions the social as a “flow:” “what gets highlighted now are all the mediators whose proliferation generates, among many other entities, what could be called quasi-objects and quasi-subjects.” (Latour, 2005, p. 249) Latour’s social is a fluid network of mediators: social relations themselves are expressions of intermediation of the quasi-objects and quasi-subjects: “Things, quasi-objects, and attachments are the real center of the social world, not the agent, person, member, or participant—nor is it society or its avatars.” (Latour, 2005, p. 249) As the social becomes increasingly mediated by digital networks, we must look at the shifting nature of the mediators. These “quasi-objects” are now found in the realm of digital representation: hyperlinked media, digital images, videos (often short clips), and so on, the common staples of online experience, act as mediators and also affordances for the social. In this sense, digital networks–and their manifold modalities of representation–become the ground for the translational work between mediators. Just as “[a] good text elicits networks of actors when it allows the writer to trace a set of relations defined as so many translations,” (Latour, 2005, p. 140), so does a digital network elicit its own network of actors: on the same representational surface can be found a person, a photograph, a memory, a poem, a meme.

The social is comprised of these mediators, structured in what Latour might describe as “flows of translations” (Latour, 2005, 132). This is what Latour calls a network. Yet as we’ve already begun to see, networks are digital systems as well as the flow of translations. And increasingly, for the purposes of how humans experience the social, the two are becoming blended and continuous. Here I point to a kind of coevolution: as the social has increasingly moved into digital networks, so have these networks become the ground of reality by which the social is experienced. No longer are digital networks, including social media sites, simply representations of the social—they are the very mediators and translators that make “it” possible. Early work by Manuel Castells, who coined the term “network society” puts it as follows: “hypertext constitutes the backbone of a new culture, the culture of real virtuality, in which virtuality becomes a fundamental component of our symbolic environment, and thus of our experience as communicating beings.” (Castells, 2000, p. 694) In this sense, we might think of virtuality–being online, interfacing with one another through digital systems and their affordances–as a crucial component of the “symbolic environment” that is ground to the social.

Even at the turn of the century, Castells noticed the immediate impacts of virtualization: “With the diffusion of electronically based communication technologies, territorial contiguity ceases to be a precondition for the simultaneity of interactive social practices.” (Castells, 2000, p. 696) Indeed as the social flows virtualized, the “flows of translation” could span across geographic areas and align based on the unique affordances of the symbolic environment–the specific interface properties–offered by a digital network: for instance, Facebook, with its abstraction of “groups” could create new patterns of affinity through the affordances of its interface. Pinterest, with its mood boards, could create new kinds of ambient meaning through its ability to facilitate networked curation. As the social–Latour’s “circulating entity”–increasingly became virtualized, flows could span geographies, be algorithmically mediated, and take on intrinsically digital dynamics. The symbolic environment of virtuality–digital networks–became part of the territory upon which the social flows.

If these digital networks were simply “maps” of the social, inert vessels in which the social world would “flow” then it would suggest that no new kinds of organization would be enabled by virtuality. We would simply have digital “platforms” that enacted a simulacrum of the existing social relations. And yet while that may well be how they initially started out, these “maps” are now a large portion of the “territory” upon which the social world flows. We experience the social as virtuality itself and this representational “collapse” has widespread implications for how we think of territory.

By invoking the metaphor of “territory” I’m describing something more wider and more subtle than its traditional notion of an area bounded in space: rather, a bounded (geographic or virtual) area that is the ground to experience, social interaction, and meaning-making. By ground to experience, I mean to say that the “territory” is indicative of the domain on which reality is constructed and unfolds. By calling something territory, I’m saying it’s not representational (like a map, an external marker of a separate and autonomous entity) but rather the substrate that mediates experience. Why call it “territory”? It’s not simply about indicating something as “real” or “the real” vs. “symbolic”, but rather territory indicates that it is a bounded area upon and within which experience can unfold. This taps into the longer tradition of conceptualizing territories as geographic areas over which individuals or groups exercise control. Take Sack’s robust definition of territory: “the attempt by an individual or group (x) to influence, affect, or control objects, people, and relationships (y) by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.” (Sack, 1983, p. 56) Yet look closer at the boundaries of the area, and something more subtle is at work here too: networked spaces typically do not set the boundaries by control and delineation, but function more like ‘membranes’–allowing for differentiation while maintaining productive exchange with their environment.

Likewise, by indicating something as “territory” we’re identifying where meaning emerges through semiosmotic processes within bounded areas (note, not only geographic, as territories can be virtual, that is, exist largely within information systems). These boundaries are not primarily about control, but about enabling distinct patterns of meaning to develop through selective permeability. In this sense, territories can be contested, not primarily through force but through different approaches to maintaining and curating these semiosmotic boundaries. By invoking this dual understanding of territory - 1) ground of experience and reality, and 2) space of differentiated meaning-making—I’m asserting that the ground of experience emerges through processes of selective exchange and distinction. By claiming the network is a territory, we're then asserting the dual insight that 1) digital networks are now also the ground of experience (in addition to traditional geographic areas) and 2) these spaces develop their distinctiveness through semiosmotic processes of expression rather than through imposed control. As we saw with Latour, the social “circulates” and meaning “flows” but these flows are stemmed and directed through semiosmotic processes, cultural thresholds so to speak, whether that’s Berghain’s bouncer, the tacit conformity of a punk-rock aesthetic, or even reaching a local minima in the algorithmic feed that channels the viewer to a very specific style of wellness influencer.

How does cultural flow work on networks? How does a network become a territory–in the dual meaning of ground of experience and differentiated zone of expression? Here we look to the literature of territorialization and specifically to Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on the subject. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish a territory from a milieu: “There is a territory precisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimensional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) Here a milieu might be thought of as the flat and unbounded cultural space: the airport, a liminal zone, might represent a confluence of cultural expressions undifferentiated and thus lacking a certain expressive quality, yet remain still rhythmic in their repetition and structure.

Deleuze and Guattari define the milieu as being born from ‘chaos’ and differentiate themselves by being ‘vibratory’–that is, repetitive: “From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born. … Chaos is not without its own directional components, which are its own ecstasies. We have seen elsewhere how all kinds of milieus, each defined by a component, slide in relation to one another, over one another. Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 335, emphasis added) By laying the groundwork for the milieu, they carefully note how it is ‘coded’ but not ‘expressive,’ a careful tacit distinction that speaks to the primacy of repetition and rhythm in creating bounded areas of meaning that are apart from the background chaos and yet remain open to it: “The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 335) This becomes distinct to how a territory is maintained, which is by an ‘expressive quality.’

This notion of expressivity is central to their understanding of territory: they speak of “matters of expression” as “qualities,” drawing on the natural order for inspiration: “What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). Take the example of color in birds or fish: color is a membrane state associated with interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as long as it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight).” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) These matters of expression, or “qualities”, refer to the representational ground of territories. “[T]he component under consideration has become expressive and that its meaning, from this standpoint, is to mark a territory.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) What is implied is the inexorable relationship with expression, meaning, and the marking of a territory.

For Deleuze and Guattari “it is the mark that makes the territory”—semiotic categories arise as marks, like colors among flocks of birds, that produce the territory out of a milieu–that is, territorialization: “In this sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) In elaborating on the natural world’s instances of territorialization they refer to the excrement of rabbits and the brightly colored sexual organs of monkeys that “that marks the limits of the territory.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) The becoming of the territory is a matter of the immediacy of delimited zones of expression: immediate grounds where meaning and signal-making establish the boundaries of the territory. They comment on the “rapidity” of this process: “It has been remarked how quick this becoming is in many cases, the rapidity with which a territory is constituted at the same time as expressive qualities are selected or produced.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337)

Understanding territory as a function of expressive qualities lends us a critical insight: territories are upheld not only by acts of control, as Sack implies, but by the signals that evoke the very potential for control and violence starting at the border, but projected “inward” throughout the territory, and the potential for acts of love and care, internal to the territory (if only possible because of the very same expressive quality). In this sense, there is already a representational exchange implied in the act of territorialization: one of boundary-making through the “expressive qualities” of those upholding the territory. In this sense the territory is inseparable from the representations that indicate it, and this inseparability might be the very same way it becomes the ground for experience in the same breath as a bounded zone of control. Because for a milieu to become a ground of experience presupposes territorialization: “Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) In other words, when milieu components become qualitative, they become representational, with their own codes and logics, that enable them to act as the ground of qualitative experience. We might thus see expression as starting from the territory’s border: indicative that within the territory is a “milieu of components become qualitative” with their own special representational regime and symbolic order.

As we start to ask questions of networks as territories, and territories as sovereign entities, we can begin our analysis at the border: asking what representational regimes set the stage for the internal representational logics of the territory and for its boundary conditions? What regimes of control are implied at the border and through what expressions or qualities? Such as the rattle of the snake suggests danger, but also a (albeit small) territory that is being penetrated, so we might ask how networks signal their territorial boundaries and the territorial, qualitative order that it implies once one has penetrated the network. What we are likely to find is a patchworked landscape of territories of meaning: representational regimes, each with their own border conditions that are manufactured and upheld from scales ranging from the individual to the national and beyond. How are these territories governed from within and at their borders? And how are new online social formations–emerging networks–showing the emergence of new kinds of “cultural sovereignty” over their territories of meaning?

Networked Identities

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A 1940’s newspaper stand.

As we increasingly find our social lives intermediated by networks, network effects increasingly start to shape identities–how we self-identify to ourselves and others, the signals and symbols we use to communicate this identity, the political networks, information and norms we have access to, and thus the material we have access to to continually reinvent ourselves in response to a changing world. Prior to digital networks, communities imagined themselves using other mass media models. These large-scale purveyors of meaning could create nation-scale semioscapes, thus creating the informational basis for collective identities: I am an American, I am a Houstonian, I am a Swiftie. These are also known as “anonymous identities” because you can’t know each individual who adopts this identity (as we’ll see this is a fundamental requirement for sociality). Institutions are often architected to support and maintain large-scale semioscapes and their anonymous identities–from national mythmaking through institutions like museums, to the educational system reinforcing a sense of national history, to corporations that leverage a star’s networked agency to reproduce a cohesive fandom.

Benedict Anderson draws attention to this aspect, without explicitly naming the semioscape. In Imagined Communities, he defines a nation as "an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." A nation "is imagined, because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet, in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." Therefore, the ability to uphold anonymous identities exists because there is a shared imagination of the community. This shared imagination is the community’s semioscape, which is both experienced individually and collectively.

In the era of print media, there was greater alignment between the collective and individual semioscapes, because of the “mass ceremonies” that members of the nation state participated in, such as reading the newspaper. Anderson writes about this astutely: "It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion." (35) The newspaper was itself a semioscape, a territory for meaning making, that intervened in the offline social processes of the sociosemioscape. A story could shape discourse among members of a community all reading the same article, creating a shared reference frame against which anonymous identities could form and therefore maintain a sense of nationhood.

In the networked age, this “mass” ceremony might be reading a Substack, subscribing to a podcast, scrolling in a curated feed, a popular playlist, or lurking in a Discord channel. Each of these streams have different levels of intermediation and algorithmic curation. It’s possible that the more aligned the common media is with a given network, the more it has the ability to create a cohesive semioscape (shared ambient meaning, or vibes). For example, if a diffuse group of people who don’t know each other or don’t have a shared anonymous identity are listening to the same playlist that’s less likely to create an active and vibrant semioscape than if a network of people are sharing and curating music together (as is the case with the crate coalition, whose motto is “Curation is Care”). In other words, it’s the ability for a network to co-curate meaning around a cultural happening that matters, not the fact they’re on a shared list. Which public has a more robust semioscape–the one with 100 members in dialogue? Or that with 10,000 “followers” who parasocially engage with a channel but do not speak with one another?

This extends to political identities. Channels of media (such as a podcast or a Substack, or a network thereof) that create shared discourses might have a more vibrant and active semioscape. Notably, this transition to virtual enclaves wrests control from the large institutions and nation-scale semioscapes. Now anyone can be a cultural producer, in effect creating a “cambrian explosion” of semioscapes proliferating alongside different networks and epistemic gatherings. This incipient model of media engagement, happening still (mostly) within the container of the state, creates a patchwork of overlapping and intersecting publics, organized largely by where in the broader macro-network individuals and groups find themselves.

Beyond Territory

How should we conceptualize “sovereignty” and the attendant “territories” as they relate to digital networks and territories of meaning? A classic definition of sovereignty might define it as “the authority of a state to rule over its territory and the people within its borders, without external interference.” (Storey, 2017, p. 118). But as we move away from classical definitions of territory as geographical areas to territories of meaning, we might say that sovereignty also lies in an entity (why only the state?) to rule over its territory–these territories might be conceptualized as the ground of experience as well as a bounded zone of control–and so this means sovereignty over territories of meaning might be conceived, at first glance, as a kind of “cultural sovereignty.” That is, the right of an entity to govern the flows of meaning and the symbolic environment within its borders. Increasingly, as digital networks become the territories upon which meaning is made we find that cultural sovereignty becomes the right for networks to determine their own internal norms and modes of qualitative expression.

Yet here we should pause, and carefully consider the premise upon which the control that is endowed to the sovereign is based. Sack’s definition of territory, again, provides a crucial insight: “the attempt by an individual or group (x) to influence, affect, or control objects, people, and relationships (y) by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.” (Sack, 1983, p. 56, emphasis added). The use of “control” veils the role of violence, or potential for violence, that underlies the establishment and maintenance of a territory. Weber highlights this in “Politics as Vocation”: “Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 1919, p. 1). Here yet again, we see yet again the inextricable link between force and territory.

Yet looking across scales splinters this relation: at the state (macro) scale, we might regard territories as bounded geographic and virtual areas controlled by the sovereign state. Through acts of coercion, force (legal and physical), the sovereign can regulate its internal semioscapes through institutions, regulatory measures, and more extreme forms of state-sanctioned violence. Yet as we close in on the meso and micro scales, the city, the neighborhood, the online-offline network, we find flourishing semioscapes whose cultural autonomy are not upheld as much by violence, as through selective, permeable membranes that regulate their ‘borders’. Take, for instance, an ethnic enclave in a major metropolis as New York City: Chinatown. This enclave is at once integrated into the broader urban flows of the city. It’s borders are not rigid, rather they allow for the free flow into and out of its loosely bounded area and yet it remains territorialized in the sense that it retains a distinct expressive quality: its own linguistic norms (which are extended even to the street signage), it’s own cultural norms expressed through a differentiated curation of businesses, social services, associations, and so on.

Glimpsing at Chinatown’s soft borders (not enforced with signals of force) discloses a process of semiosmosis at work. A patchwork of boundaries and thresholds, from the meso-neighborhood scale, to the micro-business scale: the signage and signaling of Chinese language organizations gives rise to a ‘directional’, expressive quality where the milieu components “become qualitative.” Qualitative in the sense that they express an interior logic of meaning specific to the enclave, differentiated from its neighboring territories, that allows for the potential for degree of cultural autonomy, selectivity, and system differentiation.

Breaking down each of these, we note the use of “autonomy” over sovereignty because the enclave's expressive quality allows it to serve as a ground for subjectivity independent of the conditions manifesting at its borders. “Selectivity” in the sense that the enclave’s signals and expressive qualities cater to certain populations and not others (primarily the Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking populations). And “system differentiation” in the sense that “the whole system uses itself as environment informing its own subsystems and thereby achieving greater improbability on the level of those subsystems by more rigorously filtering an ultimately uncontrollable environment.” In other words, by instituting affordances (like specific street signs, associations, cultural and linguistic affinities) Chinatown subdues the cultural variation its environment to a more controlled zone (without the threat of violent control) that achieves greater improbability.

Yet even here we should be careful to rush to idealize the Chinatown, or ethnic enclaves, as an example of semiosmosis at work. The territories within New York’s Chinatown were themselves organized by various Tongs, associations that might be connected to a street gang that controlled territory within the enclave. Perhaps the key takeaway here is that even under the conditions of semiosmosis and cultural autonomy, the potential for violent control to reproduce itself remains possible. How, then, might we envision moving beyond the framework of ‘sovereignty’ in regards to how territories maintain their borders and inner, representational autonomy?

The key insight might lie in understanding the ‘networked affordances’ of semioscapes, territories of meaning, that are both online and offline in their nature. When we adopt the stance that territories are virtual as well as geographical, applying selectivity to the flow at the borders of the territory takes on new dimensions. In virtual territories, participation becomes based on factors like information access, financial resources, or one’s position in the network. Subcultures on Instagram, for instance, might create selective boundaries that differentiate themselves from their chaotic, hyperconnected milieu through the use of specific identifiers and signals (like aesthetic choices), tacit signals of mutual connection in the network (like mutual followers), and offline gatherings (which may or may not be widely broadcast on the digital network).

In some sense, semiosmosis is a design possibility that remains elusive in online-offline networks. Digital spaces at times remain too permeable, over-connected, and in essence unable to maintain their own cultural autonomy because of the design of the networks that introduce interference into the careful curation territories maintain for themselves. Even people’s own feeds, a personal semioscape, on popular platforms face the tension between the algorithm's drive for exploration (introducing new content) and exploitation (serving content it believes will resonate based on its priors). These systems are often built around metrics of engagement (roughly how long the user spends on the platform) which does not address the more relational metrics that might speak to a virtual enclave’s wellbeing–connectedness within the network, differentiation from its environment, and so on. Perhaps the next generation of online-offline networks will recognize the value of system differentiation and semiosmosis in creating conditions for cultural autonomy in online-offline networks by building networks that are reflexive in their understanding of the interplay between the system’s affordances and the social flows they make possible.

Conclusion: A Design Proposal

What this paper still needs is an empirical case study that can explore the role of boundaries and borders in online offline networks, and how they create the conditions for the expressive qualities of territories to flow inwards. In essence, what this calls for is a semiosmotic network which, by design, creates the conditions for cultural autonomy for online-offline networks. This could be thought of as a network that creates, at its borders, conditions of selectivity at its exterior and the possibility for improbability at its interior. Immediately, this seems to become an exploration of community governance and stewardship. How can one engage stakeholders of different kinds in the reproduction of soft borders and maintenance of their inner semioscape?

This prompts the basis for a design proposal. It asks to study the boundaries and thresholds of existing online-offline networks and how they shape the interior norms and governance protocols of the network. How does selective permeability of networks influence their inner semioscapes? What are ethical metrics for assessing a network’s cultural autonomy? What is the role of force, if any, in upholding the expressive qualities of the network’s semioscape? What innovative tactics can be deployed by members of the network itself to cultivate the expressive qualities of their semioscape?

Putting these questions into practice might not only involve studying existing networks, but building novel technical prototypes, experiences, and games (such as live action role plays). Within these contexts, one might better be able to study the underlying social dynamics at work and in doing so draw out the expressive qualities of a network’s internal semioscape. How might networks improve their operations with a more refined account of the social? This essay continues the lineage of positioning it as a “flow”, and developed the idea that ‘territories of meaning’ form in online-offline networks through semiosmotic processes. Future work will seek to take these ideas into account in the operation and study of an online-offline networked system.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to SOAM and its curatorial team. My gratitude to Felix Beer, Virginia Zangs, Judd Smith, and Jing Yi Teo for their collaboration. To Mar for reviewing and eyebrow raising. To Steve Jackson, Malte Jung, and Chris Csíkszentmihályi for their advisorship and institutional support.

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