Forthcoming From NGC

Issue #159 (Nov 2026)

Special Issue: Semiotic Machines

Special Issue Editors: Sarah Pourciau, Leif Weatherby, and Tobias Wilke

Recent discussions about the significance of generative AI technologies, and particularly of large language models, have often been cast primarily in terms of cognition, reasoning, and consciousness. This special issue instead approaches these technologies in their capacity as sign-producing, and hence inherently semiotic machines. It tackles a wide range of domains in which LLMs challenge the humanities where they live: text, image, poetry, ideology. It explores the possible implications of a perspectival switch toward semiotics for our contemporary understanding of the relationship between symbols and computation. It asks about what the new reality of semiotic machines does to inherited definitions of literary artifacts and established reading practices, but also about how humanists, as text-trained scholars, might be uniquely poised to contribute to the analysis of our text-driven present.

By examining the genealogies of AI and its imaginary, as well as the ways in which mathematical and technological processes are now fusing with genuinely cultural ones, the issue opens a new area of inquiry that brings critical and literary theory together with ongoing questions in computer science, data science, and mathematics. Neither materialist media theories nor quantitative digital humanities are well-poised to make sense of the Brave New World of language-generating machines, where quantity and quality converge to the point of inextricability. The articles in this issue provide an array of programmatic attempts to engage in a much-needed new area of study that takes aim directly at this convergence; the disparate vantage points on display are bound together by a shared commitment to the question of signification. The contributors believe it is time for old-fashioned literary and critical theory to confront avant-garde computation head-on. If thinking in dark times is to remain political, it cannot abandon humanistic rigor.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Leif Weatherby, Sarah Pourciau, and Tobias Wilke • Introduction
M. Beatrice Fazi • Causation as Sign Action: Peirce, Pearl, and Large Language Models
Sarah Pourciau and Leif Weatherby • Symbolic Throughput: On the Semiotics of Reasoning in Models and Humans
Matthew Handelman • Idea-Logic: Ideology as Context in Computational Language Models
Seb Franklin • Human Phonographs
Robert Mitchell • Artificial Intelligence, Expertise, and Bodies: From Leibniz and Baumgarten to Deep Learning
Tyler Shoemaker • Good Old-Fashioned Reading
Hannes Bajohr • Surface Reading Large Language Models: Synthetic Text and Its Styles
Hans-Christian von Herrmann • Con/Text Machines; or, Language in the Age of its Stochastic Modelability
Tobias Wilke • “The Birth of Poetry from the Spirit of the Machine”: On Artificial Text and Natural Language