Wendy Wheeler

Figures in a Landscape: Biosemiotics and the Ecological Evolution of Cultural Creativity

THIS ESSAY IS CONCERNED NOT SO MUCH WITH ecological imagery in literature as with how we might account for the fact of literature—or, more precisely, the strange processes of literary creativity—from an ecologically-informed point of view. If this project seems to be an ambitious one, I should say that it is already an implicit part of a general biosemiotic endeavour, towards which this is a small contribution.1 By ‘an ecologically-informed point of view,’ I mean one that sees all life, including culture, as naturally co-evolved and interdependent. I will argue here that the frequently made distinction between nature and culture is misconceived. Culture is not a quite different thing to nature, and the commonly made argument that nature is merely ‘a social construct’ is equally wrong. By this, I do not mean to say that we have an entirely unmediated access to the reality of the world; languages, including the methodological codifications of science, are modelling systems: they always construe reality according to prevalent belief systems to some extent. However, language as such is derived not only from our embodied experience,2 it is a form of human semiosis which is derived also from our biological and semiotic being in a natural world which is, throughout, “perfused with signs,” as Charles Sanders Peirce put it. In what follows, I will argue that the similarity, repetition, and difference which so many French philosophies have made central to their understandings is more usefully understood not via a Saussurean theory of the sign (as it often has been), but via a Peircean one. I will offer a brief account of the development and implications of biosemiotics out of what Thomas A. Sebeok has called “global semiotics,” and I will also argue that such a semiotics can begin to provide a way of understanding evolution as an emergent feature of complex, open, evolutionary, adaptive systems, and the emergence of anthroposemiosis—language, culture and aesthetic creativity—from biology. In particular, I shall briefly argue that the triadic nature of signs identified by Charles Sanders Peirce—icon, index, and symbol—can both take us through the stages of the emergence of anthroposemiosis, and also go some way to explaining the strange experience of creativity in art and language. First, I will give a brief introduction to the development of biosemiotics. Second, I will look at

Delectable Creatures and the Fundamental Reality of Metaphor: Biosemiotics and Animal Mind

This article argues that organisms, defined by a semi-permeable membrane or skin separating organism from environment, are (must be) semiotically alert responders to environments (both Innenwelt and Umwelt). As organisms and environments complexify over time, so, necessarily, does semiotic responsiveness, or ‘semiotic freedom’. In complex environments, semiotic responsiveness necessitates increasing plasticity of discernment, or discrimination. Such judgements, in other words, involve interpretations. The latter, in effect, consist of translations of a range of sign relations which, like metaphor, are based on transfers (carryings over) of meanings or expressions from one semiotic ‘site’ to another. The article argues that what humans describe as ‘metaphor’ (and believe is something which only pertains to human speech and mind and, in essence, is ‘not real’) is, in fact, fundamental to all semiotic and biosemiotic sign processes in all living things. The article first argues that metaphor and mind are immanent in all life, and are evolutionary, and, thus, that animals certainly do have minds. Following Heidegger and then Agamben, the article continues by asking about the place of animal mind in humans, and concludes that, as a kind of ‘night science’, ‘humananimal’ mind is central to the semiotics of Peircean abduction.

Biosemiotics and culture: introduction

Do human linguistic capacities evolve from the use of signs in the rest of nature? Are literature, theatre, film and digital media extensions of the kinds of semiotic behaviours and sedimented memory found at every level of life from the simplest organisms to the most complex? This special issue of Green Letters results from a conference on Biosemiotics and Culture, held at the University of Oregon in May 2013, exploring these questions towards a radical new way of thinking. Five of the contributors are scientists (four Europeans and one American), and one is a philosopher (American) of European medieval and American modern semiotics. This is because biosemiotics developed out of a largely western and eastern European scientific milieu which then met with North American semioticians, Thomas A. Sebeok in particular, who had scientific interests. The editors, in turn, have long been convinced that environmental humanists must reengage ourselves with the sciences (despite the latter’s own metaphysical assumptions; Lewontin 1997), not only because of the general clarity of scientific thinking, but also, especially where the life sciences are concerned, to restore non-reductively our whole cultural experience to the biotic matrix from which it emerged. Reductionism in the modern sciences has made that move very difficult for humanities and arts scholars (although one or two have tried), but biosemiotics presents, precisely, a non-reductive, evolutionary semiotic systems approach to the sciences of living organisms (including humans). For too long, as Stephen J. Gould maintained (2003, 11–15), the estrangement of the ‘two cultures’ has been a debilitating caricature causing many humanists to retreat into defensive academic enclaves and scientists to assume that literary and philosophical research are not serious ways of exploring or characterising the world. Although Gould’s solution of non-overlapping magisteria is not satisfactory from the interdisciplinary perspective of biosemiotics, most of us know very well C.P. Snow’s (1959) ‘two cultures’ argument about the shameful ignorance of humanities (and by implication) arts scholars in regard to scientific matters. For those of us in the humanities who are especially drawn to ecological matters and their representation – whether centrally and consciously or marginally and symptomatically – in works of literature and art, or to the observation that similar patterns and movements appear in biological and cultural forms, the work of scientists in formulating the life sciences must remain of vital concern. When we pursue questions of biodiversity and its importance, the loss of species, climate change and ecological breakdown, it is from the sciences that we take our direction. In understanding evolution and biological systems development, it is from the sciences that we can start to think the interrelationships of organisms that have made them, including us, what we now are. Richard Kerridge tells us that ‘ecological crisis calls for deep changes of desire and behaviour in an impossibly short space of time’ (2012, 21), and surely a serious turn to the life sciences and earth sciences must constitute such a deep change. Yet as Dana Phillips charged, in spite of appeals to interdisciplinary practice, ‘ecocriticism has been lamentably under-informed by science studies, philosophy of science, environmental history, and ecology’ (2003, viii–ix). However, as noted above, the life sciences (including the cognitive sciences) have for too long remained under the dominant reductionist and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2015 Vol. 19, No. 3, 215–226, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2015.1078973

The Wrecked Vessel: The Effects of Gnosticism, Nominalism and the Protestant Reformation in the Semiotic Scaffolding of Modern Scientific Consciousness

This essay discusses the semiotic scaffolding of modern science, the roots of which lie in the Protestant Reformation and the latter’s repudiation of the “semiotics of nature” upon which medieval theology depended. Taking the fourteenth-century battles between realism and nominalism as the semiotic scaffolding of the Reformation which was subsequently built on nominalist principles, and the Reformation as what made possible the development of early modern science, this essay argues that nominalism, Protestantism, and early modern science were all infected by the gnostic influences which had always accompanied Christianity from the start. Indicating that forms of creative discovery, in the arts, humanities and sciences, are closer to poetic forms than they are to the Baconian model which informed modern science, the essay goes on to link the latter gnostic-influenced metaphysics, motivated by a Reformation anxiety about sin and error, to the development of the modern “megamachine” as described by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine volumes 1 and 2. Finally the essay suggests that semiotically revivified life sciences might be capable of resolving some of the systemic and ecological problems which Mumford identifies.

A Feeling for Life: Biosemiotics, Autopoiesis and the Orders of Discourse

This essay explores the roots of semiological structuralism in Roman Jakobson’s use of a model drawn from the developmental biology of Karl Ernst von Baer and the non-Darwinian evolutionary theory which von Baer helped to initiate. Drawing on the work of the French Slavicist linguist Patrick Sériot, the essay indicates the influence on Jakobson both of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and also the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. It does so while noting also the mistaken nature of later assumptions concerning the basis of structuralism as residing solely in Saussurean linguistics. The essay goes on to argue that Jakobson’s original biological insight generates a theory of the growth of an evolutionary ecology of meanings which is compatible both with Peircean-influenced biosemiotic accounts of learning and growth in nature-culture, and also with the biological developmental systems and epigenetic research now challenging both the 70 year long dominance of the Neo-Darwinian gene-centric Modern Synthesis and also Francis Crick’s Central Dogma of the one-way only flow of biological information from DNA to protein. The essay argues that Jakobson’s use of developmental biology as a model for the growth of meanings provides a theory of processual structuration, akin to Peirce’s thesis about the non-linear evolutionary growth of meanings and knowledge. This, the essay concludes, is in effect a semiotic process biology which can also usefully inform a biosemiotic and ecocritical theory of literary reading. WendyWheeler, LondonMetropolitan University E-Mail: wendy.j.wheeler@btinternet.com 1 A Biosemiotic Theory of Reading: Roman Jakobson and the Developmental Model We might ask ourselves what a biosemiotic theory of reading literature would look like. Biosemiotics provides us with a very rich and productive way of looking at the naturo-cultural world and our relationship to and within it. That is, natureculture is not a difference but a continuum. Culture, biosemiotics says, is natural and evolutionary. Culture does not replace nature. It rests upon it and, of course, DOI 10.1515/anglia-2015-0005 Anglia 2015, 133(1): 53–68

Stars and Moons: Desire and the Limits of Marketisation

Sometime in the 1960s, my mother — advocate of the unlikely mix of Freudianism and astrology which produced the intense sixties interest in the work of Carl Jung — took me, excitedly (because here was evidence of a new, popular and marketable, interest in the esoteric ideas which she considered important), to a new bookshop in Camden Town. This bookshop — Compendium — sold and thus released upon the market ephemerides (plural of ephemeris — the annual book of tables detailing the movements of the planets which are used by astrologers to erect astrological charts) which had, previously, only been available via very limited specialist outlets.