Lines Crossed and Circles Breached

This chapter lays out the key moves, and organizational logic, of the entire book. It argues that, rather than privileging mere ‘relations’, our analysis must foreground a particular ensemble of relations between relations if we are to properly understand the following modes of mediation: semiotic processes, semiological structures, agentive practices, environment-organism interfaces, communicative channels, social relations, and parasitic encounters. And it shows the ways such modes of mediation get computationally enclosed through processes that automate, format and network them, such that their meaningfulness is made to seem relatively portable: applicable to many contents and applicable across many contexts. It reviews and reworks several key ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. And it summarizes each of the chapters, highlighting key themes, arguments, and interlocutors.