Any rigorous attempt to undermine the viewer as a semiotic meaning-maker will eventually lead to a re-estimation of the contingent relevance of the formal, technical, material aspects of media.
FURTHERMORE, such underminings destabilize old semio-centric, anthropo-centric regimes and lead outward + inward toward surfaces and substrates and materialities and affects, distributing and dispersing the semiotic realm into flows, economies, processes, materials, bodily ways of knowing, and affective resonances + forces. Humans are undone as primarily meaning-making machines and distributed more fine-grainedly into broader ecological flows.
[This site is based on a presentation Curt Cloninger gave at Harvard in 2016.]