Interpretive Cooperation in the Age of Algorithmic Semiosis

Postdoctoral project

Summary

Generative systems deliver objects that are already interpreted: the inferential walk that once belonged to the reader is pre-executed by computation. This project describes that regime — algorithmic semiosis — through three gestures, and draws out its consequences for the university as a site of interpretation.

Mapping, dwelling, resisting: toward a semiotic reform of higher education.

Mapping

Describe

Turning probabilistic reliefs into a legible map.

  • statistical attractor
  • perceptual attractor
  • probabilistic bifurcation
  • the thinking-visible
  • real perceptual operators

Dwelling

Protect

Holding the not-yet-resolved against premature closure.

  • semiotic silence
  • Ma
  • inhabitation
  • hesitation
  • transitional space (Winnicott)

Resisting

Act

Restoring to the interpreter the position of one who searches.

  • semiotic resistance
  • the second inquiry
  • the inferential walk, resumed
  • emancipation (Rancière)
  • a pedagogy of indeterminacy

The conceptual vocabulary above is developed at length in the Glossaire de la sémiose algorithmique, currently available in French only.

The problem

My doctoral thesis (L’accessibilité esthétique des mondes possibles au cinéma, UQAM, 2022) developed the concept of accessibility operators: the double-addressed semiotic signals by which characters and viewers cross the boundaries between fictional worlds. This project examines the contemporary mutation of that mechanism. In the age of generative AI, the devices that orient semiosis spill beyond fictional universes and act as real perceptual operators: generative images, LLM outputs, automated syntheses and pedagogical interfaces reconfigure the conditions of semiosis itself. The boundary has shifted, and now runs between the interpreting subject and the semiotic object.

The pivotal concept is Eco’s interpretive cooperation: every semiotic object is a lazy machine whose gaps call for the reader’s inferential journey. Generative AI performs the inverse operation — what I call reversed interpretive cooperation. Optimised to converge on an audience’s semiotic attractors, generative systems deliver an object that arrives already interpreted, its credibility immanent to its form. The inferential walk that was the interpreter’s work becomes an operation pre-executed by computation; the journey is replaced by a pre-calculated destination. Semiotics describes this mechanism with a precision that neither philosophy of technology nor cognitive science reaches alone: Peirce’s unlimited semiosis gives way to probabilistic convergence, where the index becomes icon by computation and Greimasian veridiction is pre-installed in the form. Where Deleuze conceived the image-thought as a putting-into-crisis of thought, the algorithmic regime anticipates the crisis in order to defuse it: indeterminacy becomes an anomaly to be corrected.

The stakes are institutional. The university has cultivated interpretive cooperation since its origins: reading difficult texts, tolerating indeterminacy, defending and revising one’s inferences. When AI short-circuits that journey, it raises far more than a question of academic integrity — it forces a rethinking of the very purposes of education, that is, of the kind of semiotic subject the university sets out to form.

Three gestures

The project describes algorithmic semiosis through three complementary gestures.

Mapping

The diagnostic gesture: describing the generative milieu as a territory of probabilistic reliefs — attractors, overweightings, bifurcations — in which a prompt converges on pre-stabilised forms. The thinking-visible, the regime of generative images in which form resolves its own interpretant, and algorithmic textuality, its discursive counterpart, appear here as reliefs on the map.

The properly semiotic contribution is to describe the chain of transduction running from the statistical attractor to the perceptual attractor: the passage from index to iconic sign, mediated by computation. The emergence of sparse autoencoders (SAEs), theorised here as partial renderings of Eco’s computational encyclopaedia, provides empirical purchase on this gesture for the first time.

Dwelling

The anthropological gesture: naming what the proliferation of algorithmic agents makes visible by contrast. Semiotic silence designates the interval between the perception of a sign and its resolution into meaning — a structural condition of interpretive creativity, grounded in phenomenological boredom (Husserl, Heidegger), the Japanese Ma, the Lotmanian boundary and Eco’s hesitation. Its inverse is premature closure, the structural pathology of agentic architectures in which each cycle calls forth the next.

From this gesture comes the hinge concept of inhabitation — dwelling in a semiotic space without filling it — which connects the anthropology of interpretation to the institutional question: the university functions as a transitional space in Winnicott’s sense, and it is precisely this in-between that the algorithmic semiosphere threatens to saturate.

Resisting

The political-pedagogical gesture, and the project’s most original contribution. Semiotic resistance is a critical stance: Rancière’s emancipation of the gaze, extended to the interpreting subject as a whole. Its operative protocol is the second inquiry (enquête seconde): an “algorithmic Blow Up” that turns generated output from destination into probe and resumes the pre-executed inferential walk. The generative system functions as an explicator in the sense of The Ignorant Schoolmaster; the second inquiry is the counter-conduct that restores to the interpreter the position of one who searches.

Deliverables: a diagnosis of the state of higher education in the face of AI; a set of devices for a pedagogy of indeterminacy that treats hesitation, silence and slowness as competences rather than defects; and a contribution to curriculum reform grounded in the formation of a critical semiotic subject.

Hinge — the interpretive spiral

The three gestures coil rather than follow one another: mapping makes dwelling and resisting possible, which in turn produces new reliefs to map. This open loop is the structural opposite of premature closure — the project’s methodological principle as much as its theoretical wager.

Method

Empirical inquiry runs across all three gestures as a transversal method rather than a separate strand. It combines three approaches: semiotic analysis of forms, describing the dominant attractors of a generated corpus; analysis of devices, treating interfaces as real perceptual operators; and interviews with students and instructors, documenting the situated experience of the inferential short circuit.

Corpus and fieldwork

Three types of paradigmatic object:

Generative texts and images from current-generation models, interrogated for their dominant attractors — which forms are overweighted, which bodies, faces and spaces are produced as “natural” or “universal”.

University cognitive interfaces — platforms, automated marking, LLM assistants — analysed as real perceptual operators that reconfigure the act of learning upstream of any particular use.

AI-assisted student work, read for traces of the inferential short circuit.

Contribution and stance

Dominant discourse on AI and education oscillates between integrative enthusiasm and regulatory panic, two positions that treat AI as a neutral tool whose use must be managed: the managerial register this project takes as its object of critique. The project holds that generative AI acts as a real perceptual operator, reconfiguring the conditions of seeing, reading, thinking and believing independently of use. The pedagogical question then becomes: what semiotic ecology must the university build so that human beings remain the subjects of their own semiosis?

In semiotics, the project updates foundational concepts in the context of algorithmic production and opens onto a computational semiotics. In media theory, it connects the French tradition — Stiegler, with algorithmic pre-tention as a deformation of tertiary retention; Simondon; Rancière — to the cognitive science of distributed cognition (Hutchins, Norman). In education research, it proposes a shift from digital competences to semiotic formation, making resistance to algorithmic semiosis an academic competence in its own right.

The stance is descriptive and anti-hermeneutic, in Bertrand Gervais’s sense: to describe the semiotic regimes that algorithmic outputs institute, and to reopen, through the second inquiry, the process their form claims to close. That description is the condition of any serious critical pedagogy.

References

A selection; the full apparatus appears in the long version of the project.

DE CERTEAU, Michel. 1980. L’Invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire. Paris: Union générale d’éditions.

DELEUZE, Gilles. 1985. Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps. Paris: Minuit.

ECO, Umberto. 1979. Lector in fabula. La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi. Milan: Bompiani.

ECO, Umberto. 1990. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

ECO, Umberto. 1989 [1962]. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.

GERVAIS, Bertrand. 2024. “Formes de l’identité-flux : figure-écran, profil de fiction et imagination artificielle.” Revue des sciences humaines, no. 352, 57–72.

GREIMAS, Algirdas Julien, and Joseph COURTÉS. 1979. Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette.

HUTCHINS, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.

LOTMAN, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Trans. Ann Shukman. London / New York: I. B. Tauris.

NORMAN, Donald A. 1991. “Cognitive Artifacts.” In John M. CARROLL (ed.), Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 17–38.

PEIRCE, Charles Sanders. 1931–1958. Collected Papers. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.

PRUD’HOMME, François David. 2022. L’accessibilité esthétique des mondes possibles au cinéma. PhD thesis in semiotics. Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal.

RANCIÈRE, Jacques. 1991 [1987]. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

RANCIÈRE, Jacques. 2004 [2000]. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum.

SIMONDON, Gilbert. 1958. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier.

STIEGLER, Bernard. 1994–2001. La Technique et le Temps, 3 vols. Paris: Galilée.

TEMPLETON, Adly, et al. 2024. “Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet.” Transformer Circuits Thread, Anthropic.

WINNICOTT, Donald W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

This summary describes work in progress; its formulations evolve with the research. For the long version, or to discuss the project, get in touch.