Semiotics has integrated critical realism and the cultural turn. Genosko's book provides a historic exploration of critical semiotics and an argument for combining semiotic analysis of meaning-making and affect theory's focus on intensities. The combination is challenged by the sign's attachment to meaning, which renders it centralized on human subjectivity and thus not easily representing intensity/movement. Genosko admits the combination's awkwardness but argues that signs can ‘become something more than themselves when they “take up” affective intensities’ (2). He explores this potential through the writings of semiologist and psychotherapist Félix Guattari.

Chapter 1 discusses Guattari's a-signification (signals transmitting information without semantic content, i.e. nonlinguistic information transfer) and hybrid semiotics freed from the linguistic signifier and human subjectivity. Genosko moves from explicit connections between language and meaning in linguistics-dominated signifier-signified relationships to exploring how intensities can disrupt and open experiences: other decodings previously smothered by overcoded signifcations. Genosko refers to several theorists to illustrate the extent that critical semiotics benefits from displacement of meaning.

Genosko reviews Jean Baudrillard's logics of signification conversion table. Genosko's in-depth explanation of butter and margarine as simulation is just one instance of many throughout the book in which he explains critical semiotics through detailed examples. Both chapters 1 and 2 present the mutual influences of Baudrillard, Barthes, and Guattari.

The book next describes info-commodities—semiocapitalism's partial signs and conceptualization of critical operations as not limited to analyses of form/substance. Genosko outlines benefits of a hybrid theory of semiotics and describes Guattari's interpretation of Louis Hjelmslev's production as immaterial creation combining semiotic segments.

Chapter 4 presents Michel Foucault's explanation of obstacle signs, which Genosko uses as an example of creatively overcoming the arbitrariness of the sign. Turning to Jean-François Lyotard, Genosko addresses whether and how signs conduct intensities in chapter 5, ultimately discussing tensor signs’ ability to signify intensities. Lyotard's introduction of intensity into structure foreshadows the challenge of combining signs and affect.

The final chapter is a toolbox for critical semiotics. Genosko modifies Fredric Jameson's material signifier in relation to affect theory before addressing the floating signifier's potential to enable symbolic thinking. The chapter closes with the positive effect of the zero-sign for attracting change in the form of meaning and managing affective flows actualized as floating signifiers/signifieds with varying intensities. Genosko concludes with reflections on critical theorists’ contributions to destabilizing the signifier-signified relationship, recognizing that signifying nothing opens a path for impulses of potentiality and affective signs that actualize without forcing energies into a limiting structure.

Although the book is intended to be read sequentially as Genosko builds an argument for affective signs’ ability to actualize potentiality, chapters can be read independently for detail-rich explanations and examples from Guattari, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, and others. Genosko occasionally depends upon his previous publications to explicate Guattari's writing, but his frequent detailed examples elucidate social and semiotic connections. For those interested in semiotics or who are unfamiliar with applications of critical semiotics outside of cultural theory, Genosko's affective turn illuminates the subjugation inherent in the signifier-signified relationship from a poststructuralist, posthumanist perspective.