Datafication and Deleuzian Sense

This paper explores our relationship to data as a circle of signification and sense. It leads off by describing the grounding epistemic role played by Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic in establishing data's circle of sense, then goes on to develop an alternative perspective owed to Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the sign. Leaning heavily on recent secondary literature, the paper spends time explaining how Deleuze, sometimes in concert with Félix Guattari, took up and responded to Peircean semiotics, mutating the latter's thinking in important ways. This prefatory work organizes the original contribution of the paper, which is to ask: how might Deleuze's view of nonsense as it plays a role in his perspective on the circle of sense come to bear on our future relationship to social information systems? Probing the possibility of integrating Deleuze's perspective on nonsense into existing approaches to data, the paper experiments with his event-focused view of signification and sense through a series of interconnected diagrams.