ABSTRACT
There are performative dimensions of knowledge use and communication that travel alongside our reliance on logic, which are necessary for connecting disembedded facts to the social norms that secure their effectivity in utterance. Some recognize in this gap between assertion and utterance certain conceptual debates that followed the twentieth-century linguistic turn, and over time led to some basic divergences in perspective between the analytic and Continental traditions in philosophy. Both traditions have been influential in information systems (IS) design. This chapter discusses phenomenologically informed sociology, as it has been taken up in social computing, to influence thinking around today's social graph-based platforms. Developing an account of a performatively formatted subject, it lays out some of the ways that practitioners in the field have reconciled philosophies of social embedding and situated language-use to the formal requirements of software code. The chapter discusses the relationship between graph technology, philosophy, semiosis, and collective behavior. It elaborates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's mixed semiotic.
