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“Tongues I’ll Hang on Every Tree”: Biosemiotics and the Book of Nature
Abstract
These trees shall be my books.And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character – As You Like It, Act 3, scene ii.Biosemiotics and Natural Constructivism.During the nineteenth century, the idea of a natural oikos, an economy of natural being and relationship, gave rise to the invention, by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, of the term “ecology.” Despite its evident emphasis on relationships over things, the dominance of materialism and determinism in the natural sciences, alongside the habitual assumptions of material reductionism as the most appropriate way of understanding ecological development, meant that the idea of relationship was defined in a rather constrained way. Similarly, the Modern Synthesis of Neo-Darwinism, which was developed in the 1930s and 1940s and sought to resolve the discoveries of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian natural selection, gave expression to a mechanistic and reductionist model of evolution. This was later supported by Francis Crick’s articulation, in 1958, of the unidirectionality of the Central Dogma’s evolutionary thesis: that genetic information flows one way only from DNA to protein. Together these two materialist and deterministic precepts attained the status of nearly unassailable truth. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has noted, “Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect.” From the point of view of scientific discovery as an open and ongoing process, the dogmatism to which Nagel refers represents a rather parlous state of affairs.
In this chapter, I discuss Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of novels Oryx and Crake (2004), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) in the context of a rethinking of life driven by anthropogenic climate change. I argue that the inter-species genetic aesthetic Atwood develops in the trilogy manifests both a new stage in the novel’s exploration of life and a specific response to the challenge of addressing in fiction the ecological crisis of the twenty-first century. I connect recent ecological genetics and the genomic mapping of the biosphere with the role of genetic science in posthumanist and ecocritical theory. I describe Atwood’s posthumanist ecologies of life as transgressive extrapolations of current genetic thinking that illuminate the political, ecological and ethical ramifications of the genetic connections between all life forms and of an increasing commodification and biopolitical manipulation of life itself. The novel’s aesthetic renegotiation of life ranges from its generic mixture of science fiction, utopia and dystopia, its self-reflexive contemplation of narrative and art in a genetically engineered future, to the metaphorical and literal creation of inter-species hybrids. The trilogy explores the implications of genetics for human society and for the future of all life on the planet.
Delving into biosemiotic and endosemiotic theory, this transdisciplinary analysis of Le Clézio’s fiction illustrates how the Franco-Mauritian author undermines the dichotomous thinking that pits the human semiotic agent against soulless automata whose sounds and gestures are nothing but the insignificant product of an internal machinery. Le Clézio takes aim at much of Western philosophy and traditional linguistic theory, which tend to undermine the importance of other-than-human semiosis entirely, in his call for a re-evaluation of the complexity of the signs that are endlessly being conceived, transmitted and interpreted by and between various species. Similar to the founding father of Biosemiotics Jakob von Uexküll, Le Clézio implores us to reinvigorate our dulled senses in the postmodern world in order to (re-) establish a sensorial connection to the ‘score of nature’, thereby enabling us to catch a glimpse of the billions of other biosemiosic threads in the web of life.
This chapter investigates Morin’s description of life as an informational battlefield in which every species strategically conceives, disseminates, and interprets signs as a temporary solution for staving off the internal and external forces of death that threaten our ephemeral existence on this planet. The philosopher highlights how all organisms including microbial entities interfere with the ability of potential predators to engage in semiosis by blocking or masking the signs of those who represent a perceived risk to the integrity of their biosemiotic Self. Owing to the advent of the post-pandemic era epitomized by the very real possibility that the deadly COVID-19 outbreak may not be the last due to widespread ecological degradation that has forced bacteria and viruses to find another environmental niche, Morin demonstrates that difficult conversations concerning the rights of microbial entities endowed with a degree of semiotic freedom in addition to moral agency cannot be avoided altogether.
This chapter delves into the controversial philosopher Michel Onfray’s biosemiotic, materialistic, and post-monotheistic reworking of human and other-than-human semiosis. Onfray takes aim at the lingering influence of the Judeo-Christian vision of the other-than-human animal reinforced by Cartesian dualities that are grounded in chimerical, oppositional thinking as opposed to rigorous philosophical inquiry. Onfray also blames Judeo-Christian ideology for creating puritanical barriers that prevent us from experiencing the world directly and comprehending our small place in it more fully. When we remove the puritanical shackles, the philosopher explains that we (re-) discover a biosphere that is teeming with purposeful and meaningful semiosis at all biological levels of organization. Onfray also attempts to rehabilitate our much-maligned five senses in Western society as epistemological vectors that permit us to catch a glimpse of the semiosic nature of existence. Espousing the principles of philosophical materialism, Onfray describes matter itself as a communicative tissue.
This chapter explores how Michel Serres continually refines his biocentric vision of human and other-than-human semiosis from 1968 to his death in 2019. Specifically, Serres takes advantage of the metaphor of music to demonstrate that the biosphere is teeming with purposeful and meaningful semiosis at all biological levels of organization in addition to imploring us to rethink the essence of life itself. Serres’s biosemiotic thought presents a rudimentary framework for confronting the unique challenges of the hominescent age, the dawn of the Anthropocene, and the advent of the post-pandemic era. In an attempt to grapple with these daunting, anthropogenic obstacles, Serres proposes a multifaceted solution to climate change that involves a new relationship with the rest of the planet that he terms a natural contract, the recognition of other-than-human rights, and a form of cosmic matrimony that reinvigorates our diminished senses.
This chapter interprets Clare’s poetry in terms of biosemiosis, a theoretical approach that understands semiosis (the use and interpretation of signs) not just as an exclusively human activity but as characteristic of and fundamental to all life. Instead of organizing environments around a single dominant point of view, Clare in much of his poetry distributes cognitive agency throughout the environment, including not only various humans but also other mammals, birds, and even insects and flowers. Many of Clare’s poems, especially in his Northborough period, in this way offer a multi-focal, biosemiotic version of environment, constituted by multiple centres of perception and agency and overlapping networks of semiosis and cognition. The physical destruction of the commons for Clare also impoverishes this richly interactive ‘semiosphere’, or sphere of semiotic activity. The chapter concludes by exploring the contemporary implications of this biosemiotic approach to Clare’s poetry as a version of posthuman, multi-species worldmaking. Clare’s biosemiotic poetics decentres the human, while making it clear how our human forms of meaning, subjectivity, and perception depend on our immersion in these multi-focal semiotic networks all around us.
This Derridean and biosemiotic reading of Yamen Manai’s novel L’Amas ardent illustrates that many other animals are capable of responding to a plethora of challenges through the transmission of signs that are laden with meaning. Dismissing outdated linguistic and philosophical models that have relegated all other organisms to the status of automata that are unable to communicate anything significant at all, Derrida and Manai implore us to take a closer look at other-than-human semiosis. In the Anthropocene epoch, both authors suggest that the stakes of having a more nuanced and rigorous discussion about other-than-human communication have never been greater.
This dissertation investigates masculinities and nature in mountain sports texts. Men and masculinities are disproportionately responsible for the current state of climate change and biodiversity loss but representations of masculinity in mountain sports texts and those representations’ relationships to the environment are under-researched. This dissertation therefore examines how nature and masculinity are represented in mountain sports texts. To support the central research aim, the articles gathered in the dissertation ask four questions, each one using different kinds of texts as materials: 1) How are cultural male/female and human/nonhuman borders represented in contemporary nonfiction mountain sports films? 2) How are male athletes’ embodied, connected relationships to nature represented in commercial YouTube videos produced by the outdoor gear company Salomon? 3) How are nature and the professional mountain athlete Timothy Olson’s troubled past commodified via social media branding? 4) How is the search for healing from trauma by male mountain athletes represented in contemporary mountain climbing literature, more specifically in Jeff Long’s The Wall (2006) and Tommy Caldwell’s The Push (2017)? The dissertation’s method relies on theoretical contextualization via the fields of critical gender and sports studies, ecocriticism, and trauma studies, and a multisensory close reading of multimodal texts. The dissertation’s key findings are the influence of commercial interests on representations of new hybridized, connected, masculinities in the mountains, and the way male athletes’ troubled, even traumatized past experiences frame representations of them. More specifically, some representations attempt to frame men’s relationships to nature in ecological terms by highlighting their connection to their environment and by eschewing traditional hegemonic (hyper)masculinities. Further, male mountain athletes’ traumatized or otherwise troubled pasts influence how their relationships to the environment are represented, and even how their motivations to practice their sports are framed.
Keywords: critical sports studies, critical studies on men and masculinities, ecofeminism, ecological masculinities, ecocriticism, mountain athletes, mountain sports, trauma
The purpose of this essay is to explore the philosophical and linguistic implications of the French philosopher Edgar Morin’s “complex thought.” In stark contrast to standard communicative models which profess that Homo sapiens are the only organisms that are capable of engaging in semiosis, Morin unequivocally proves that other-than-human communication is laden with significance and purpose. Living on an imperiled planet that is increasingly defined by an anthropogenic, ecological calamity that is spiraling further out of control with each passing day, Morin persuasively argues that we must transcend our myopic, anthropocentric frame of reference and adopt a more ecocentric view of communication.
In Cosmos , Onfray argues in favor of a (re-) conceptualization of communication based on recent scientific discoveries. Similar to many researchers in the field of biosemiotics, the controversial philosopher posits that all life forms engage in constant semiosis. As opposed to being a singular characteristic that only homo sapiens possess, Onfray contends that all organisms are endowed with semiosic faculties that enable them to exchange information in purposeful and meaningful ways. Appealing to scientific logic, the philosopher debunks the common misconception that non-human vocalizations are merely the product of an internal machinery. Onfray offers concrete examples from both the animal and plant kingdom illustrating the astounding complexity of non-human semiosis. Nonetheless, in his reflections about the advent of hyperreality, the philosopher nuances his philosophical position by underscoring what makes the human primary modelling device of “language” the most sophisticated form of semiosis that exists in the biosphere. Although all material beings communicate with each other effectively in order to survive, to relate to each other, and to reproduce, Onfray recognizes that humans appear to have a heightened predisposition for symbolic exchange. The philosopher affirms that the human Umwelt is the richest and most complex semiotic space of all. Due to the pervasive nature of human semiosis in the modern world that threatens the ability of other life forms to create, stockpile, emit, and interpret signs, the philosopher also insists that preserving the fragile semiosic diversity of the “soundscape” is the key to averting the impending, anthropogenic eco-apocalypse.
This chapter discusses material ecocriticism’s approach to gender and nature through the theoretical frameworks of the material turn, which conceives matter as an agentic entity with an effective and transformative power over human and nonhuman environments.
This book presents programmatic texts on biosemiotics, written collectively by world leading scholars in the field (Deacon, Emmeche, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kull, Markoš, Pattee, Stjernfelt). In addition, the book includes chapters which focus closely on semiotic case studies (Bruni, Kotov, Maran, Neuman, Turovski). According to the central thesis of biosemiotics, sign processes characterise all living systems and the very nature of life, and their diverse phenomena can be best explained via the dynamics and typology of sign relations. The authors are therefore presenting a deeper view on biological evolution, intentionality of organisms, the role of communication in the living world and the nature of sign systems — all topics which are described in this volume. This has important consequences on the methodology and epistemology of biology and study of life phenomena in general, which the authors aim to help the reader better understand.
Sydney Brenner confuses the mathematical theory of information [...] with information processing by living organisms
Our definitions of consciousness and intelligence are largely anthropocentric, potentially skewing research. In fact, consciousness in its many forms could well be ubiquitous, even down to the simplest of organisms.
Prions are an unusual form of epigenetics: Their stable inheritance and complex phenotypes come about through protein folding rather than nucleic acid-associated changes. With intimate ties to protein homeostasis and a remarkable sensitivity to stress, prions are a robust mechanism that links environmental extremes with the acquisition and inheritance of new traits.
The first comprehensive presentation of Peirce’s mature philosophy.
Explains and illuminates the 20th-century metamorphosis of the ancient discipline of semiotics from a language-centered model to one that encompasses the whole biosphere.
This book argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one. The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.
Peter Harrison provides an account of the religious foundations of scientific knowledge. He shows how the approaches to the study of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were directly informed by theological discussions about the Fall of Man and the extent to which the mind and the senses had been damaged by that primeval event. Scientific methods, he suggests, were originally devised as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by human sin. At its inception, modern science was conceptualized as a means of recapturing the knowledge of nature that Adam had once possessed. Contrary to a widespread view that sees science emerging in conflict with religion, Harrison argues that theological considerations were of vital importance in the framing of the scientific method.
What is Life? Decades of research have resulted in the full mapping of the human genome - three billion pairs of code whose functions are only now being understood. The gene's eye view of life, advocated by evolutionary biology, sees living bodies as mere vehicles for the replication of the genetic codes. But for a physiologist, working with the living organism, the view is a very different one. Denis Noble is a world renowned physiologist, and sets out an alternative view to the question - one that becomes deeply significant in terms of the living, breathing organism. The genome is not life itself. Noble argues that far from genes building organisms, they should be seen as prisoners of the organism. The view of life presented in this little, modern, post-genome project reflection on the nature of life, is that of the systems biologist: to understand what life is, we must view it at a variety of different levels, all interacting with each other in a complex web. It is that emergent web, full of feedback between levels, from the gene to the wider environment, that is life. It is a kind of music. Including stories from Noble's own research experience, his work on the heartbeat, musical metaphors, and elements of linguistics and Chinese culture, this very personal and at times deeply lyrical book sets out the systems biology view of life.
Our lives cannot but implant the knowledge in our souls that the mind is one thing and the world is another. Out of this separation arises the problem of intentionality, that our minds necesarily occupy themselves with things in the world, or that mind processes are always “about” something. In the scholastic tradition from Thomas Aquinas this “aboutness” is still seen as an immaterial or intentional direct union between the knower and the known. To know about things, e.g. a storm or a flower, implies that these things exist in the mind of the knower as intentional beings, and the nature of this kind of being is that of a relation or interface. This understanding is radically different from the cognitive theories that came to dominate in the course of the scientific revolution. According to Descartes the exterior world is grasped through the mechanical work of the senses, which then required some intermediate entity, a concept or an idea, to stand between the outside world (reality) and the mind. Henceforward the mind lost its direct access to the world, and logically enough this line of thought ended up in the conception that we can never understand the world as it is in itself. The idea of intentional being was taken up once again by Franz Brentano in 1874, who claimed that “Mental phenomena … are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves”. To Brentano – and the phenomenological tradition he thus initiated – mind should be seen as real, irreducibly intentional, and inexplicable naturalistically. Philosphers of the analytic tradition rejected this whole notion claiming that whatever is real is nonintentional and explicable naturalistically. Unnoticed by most thinkers a third position was suggested by Charles Peirce, who agreed with Brentano that mind is real and irreducibly intentional but in the same time maintained, contra Brentano, that mind is explicable naturalistically. This chapter takes the semiotic realism of Charles Peirce as a starting point and discusses a biosemiotic approach to the problem of intentionality. Intentionality is seen as implicit to semiosis (sign processes) and semiosis and life is seen as co-existant. The needs of all living beings for expressing a degree of anticipatory capacity is seen as an evolutionary lever for the development of species with increased semiotic freedom. Human intentionlity is not therefore unique in the world but must be understood as a peculiar and highly sophisticated instantiation of a general semiotics of nature. Biosemiotics offers a way to explicate intentionality naturalistically.
Dans des travaux quelque peu concis, R. Jakobson a examine les connexions interdisciplinaires possibles entre le domaine de la linguistique et d'autres domaines tels que la biologie. L'A. examine ici la portee de ces travaux dans le cadre du developpement de la pensee biosemiotique et montre qu'il a fourni un certain nombre de perspectives et d'idees sur la communication qui anticipent le nouveau domaine qu'est la biosemiotique
1. Introduction: does information matter?; Paul Davies and Niels Henrik
Gregersen; Part I. History: 2. From matter to materialism
and (almost) back Ernan McMullin; 3. Unsolved
dilemmas: the concept of matter in the history of philosophy and in
contemporary physics Philip Clayton; Part II. Physics: 4. Universe from
bit Paul Davies; 5. The computational universe Seth Lloyd; 6. Minds and
values in the quantum universe Henry Pierce Stapp; Part III. Biology: 7.
The concept of information in biology John Maynard Smith; 8. Levels of
information: Shannon-Bolzmann-Darwin Terrence W. Deacon; 9. Information
and communication in living matter Bernd-Olaf Küppers;
10. Semiotic freedom: an emerging force Jesper Hoffmeyer; 11. Care on
earth: generating informed concern Holmes Rolston; Part IV. Philosophy
and Theology: 12. The sciences of complexity - a new theological
resource? Arthur Peacocke; 13. God as the ultimate informational
principle Keith Ward; 14. Information, theology and the universe John F.
Haught; 15. God, matter, and information: towards a Stoicizing Logos
christology Niels Henrik Gregersen; 16. What is the 'spiritual body'?
Michael Welker; Index.
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. Worlds visible and invisible 2. Sensible signs and spoken words 3. The two reformations 4. Re-reading the two books 5. The purpose of nature 6. Eden restored Conclusion References Index.
Bell System Technical Journal, also pp. 623-656 (October)
Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. "This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."âD. W. Harding, New York Review of Books "[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."âRoger Keesing, American Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was the author of Naven and Mind and Nature.
Narrative Structure and Mythopoesis: A Critique and Reformulation of Structuralist Concepts of Myth, Narrative and Poetics
- Turner
Organism as a Self-reading Text: Anticipation and Semiosis
- Kull