Abstract
In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), F & eacute;lix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze argue for modes of expression that can counter reductive master signifiers. For Deleuze and Guattari the predominance of master signifiers is a central problem for knowledge production and artmaking, as well as for the human condition overall, because current dominant forms of human culture forsake imagination in favour of highly articulated and predetermined significations, affects, and intensities, many of which anthropocentrically prefigure modes of perception from the outset. In place of these, they argue for polyvocal signs which include asignifying or as-yet unarticulated semiotics that are irreducible to any given regime of signs and its inscription processes. Keeping these threads in mind, we argue in this article that the arts hold the potential to disrupt and challenge the semiotic coordinates of human exceptionalism. Our aim is thus to think about how such asemiotic encounters can be provoked, which we do with reference to recent work on 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) cognition and enaction. Looking specifically at 0rphan Drift's cephalopods and other "myth-science" avatars, we argue that they provide us with precisely such alternative enactive "fictionings" for the delineation of fabulatory praxes that can engender a tentacular ethics in opposition to all-too-human stories and histories.