UC Davis

This dissertation provides a materialist theory of the origin of ideology in socially reflexive signs, signs that primarily have effects and origins in social practice rather than consciousness. These signs, I argue, provide a prototype for our understanding of the connection between sign and world, and consequently the connection between idea and world. I follow the dominant form of socially reflexive semiosis through the history of capitalism, beginning with copyhold agreements in late medieval monetary manorialism, then looking at the development of the negotiable instrument in the sixteenth century, then turning to the development of money, from banknotes, to the ledger deposit, to the mechanized monetary database. I trace the semiotic effects of these shifts, first in the transition from the medieval concept of language to a modern concept of the sign, then the further development of the modern concept of semiotics in the work of Whitney, Saussure, and Chomsky. As I look at these material practices and their semiotic effects, I trace the development of the modern episteme as seen in the evolution of scientific languages, beginning with the formation of algebraic notation in the seventeenth century with Descartes, then the formation of set theory with Dedekind, the expansion of set theory in the work of Russel and Gödel, and finally the development of programming languages in the 20th century. In the connections between these three histories, I illustrate the way that these scientific languages pull from these materially conditioned concepts of semiosis in both rational and irrational ways.