Abstract
Semiotics, in the guise of the limited Saussurean semiology, has been widely used in the humanities and in cultural studies for the past 20 to 30 years at least. With the advent, nearly 20 years ago, of the environmental humanities, including the new field of humanities animal studies, the weaknesses of this mode of analysis became increasingly clear. This essay forms part of a larger attempt to develop a Peirce-informed biosemiotic theory capable of affording conceptual tools for the broad-based study of human and nonhuman natural and cultural developmental ecologies. It is particularly concerned to develop a biosemiotic, and hence non-reductive, account of aesthetic experience in which function consists in the growth of knowledge. Based on the role of chance, and thus creativity, in natural and cultural evolutionary systems, this essay uses poetry and poetic theory in order to argue that chance is a habit-upsetting happenstance whereby something which has the potential to become a sign (in Peirce’s triadic account), or to become a bearer of meaning, actually does become a sign to some living thing.
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Notes
From “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (Peirce 1992: 28–55).
Hardy’s long marriage to Emma Gifford was full of difficulty. His final novel, Jude the Obscure, a work full of darkness and despair about the coming modern world, and especially the liberalizing movements towards democracy and equality between the sexes, was published in 1895 to widespread condemnation for its immoral representation of the relationship between Jude Mason and Sue Bridehead.
This aspect of aesthetic affect will be developed more broadly, into a general biosemiotic theory of the relation between feeling, semantic frames and their cultural and historical articulations, in a subsequent special issue of Biosemiotics on semiotic scaffolding edited by Jesper Hoffmeyer.
Techne and poiesis are craft and making. See Heidegger’s unresolved broaching of the question of their difference towards the end of “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger 1993). All organisms make their worlds and each other’s, but they do so within evolutionary constraints. These are certainly not only genetic, but all surely fall within Aristotle’s four kinds of causation: material, efficient, formal and final. Constraints are the anvil on which natural and cultural creativity is shaped.
T.S. Eliot makes this point about art generally: “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it” (Eliot 1997 [1920]: 41).
Essentially, this is the experience of discovering in the present a meaning in past events which we did not, or could not, see at the time. Readers may be familiar with the version of this in which an apparently insignificant event registers sharply at the time, but one does not discover why it registered so sharply until much later – sometimes several years later. It is also reminiscent of Michael Polanyi’s account 1974 [1958]: 64) of scientific development in which we are committed
passionately, and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality […] Such is the true sense of objectivity in science […] I called it the discovery of rationality in nature, a name which was meant to say that the kind of order which the discoverer claims to see in nature goes far beyond his understanding, so that his triumph lies precisely in his foreknowledge of a host of yet hidden implications which his discovery will reveal in later days to other eyes.
In other words, the future will see more precisely what was merely intuited before. C.S. Peirce’s version of this lies in his accounts of abduction and of the immediate and dynamic object and the dynamic interpretant (de Waal 2013: 73–92). For Peirce also, science is a living commitment “which seeks cooperation in the hope that the truth may be found, if not by any of the actual inquirers, yet ultimately by those who come after them and who shall make use of their results” (Peirce CP 7.54 cited in de Waal 2013: 106–7). Polanyi had read Peirce, of course.
In recent years, the work of George Lakoff and his collaborators has reignited interest in metaphor among scientists. The extent of this welcome development, however, seems limited. Molecular biologists still insist that ‘codes’ and ‘messengers’ and ‘chaperones’ and the like are “only metaphors”. One wonders how much they know about such a logically tricky phenomenon. The original title of Paul Ricoeur’s book on the subject (published in English as The Rule of Metaphor) is, tellingly, La Métaphore Vive (Ricoeur 2003 [1975]).
Adam Scarfe begins an answer to that question by saying “Neo-Darwinists suggest that the use of the mechanistic framework is necessary in that it curtails vitalistic and teleological view of life from entering into objective science, in so doing offering a’non-metaphysical‘account of nature. However, this claim depends on what we mean by’metaphysics’” (Scarfe 2013: 29). Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that ‘machine’ (meaning a device or a means) was also used in the medieval period as a way of speaking about the natural world. To Scarfe’s beginning, I would like to add the necessity of thinking through the implications, for modern forms of economic utilitarianism in relation to the use of natural resources (including humans of course), of an earlier, non-secularised and pre-Industrial Revolution, sense of nature as machine. We appear to the owe the modern sense of machine, as in all natural bodies being explained “only according to mechanical laws”, to the Dutch physician Cornelis van Hogeland, after reading Descartes’ Discourse in 1646 (Scarfe 2013: 35). That such desacralising views should be encouraged and welcomed in Britain and the Netherlands, the two great bourgeois and Protestant trading nations of the early modern period, seems worthy of remark.
Clearly, all imaginative creation is dependent upon what has gone before. The distinction which Coleridge is making, and I am endorsing, which is clarified further in the quote from “Dejection: An Ode” below, is that genuine creativity consists in making a new life out of the past, not in mere derivative imitation. Resemblance and repetition or habit (metaphor’s initial move) are inevitable; it is the tiny bit of difference (metaphor’s “second move” so to speak) that counts.
D. H. Lawrence was extremely alert to this aspect of Hardy’s writing (Lawrence 1985).
Perhaps the deepest question concerns what can register as a sign (or a Peircean representamen) in the first place. Resemblance to what already matters is, of course, important. But not every resemblance takes a hold. Similarly, contextual (e.g. environmental) pressures do not produce the same response in every individual. It seems that the close relation between form and function (or purpose) – i.e. in Aristotelian terms between formal and final causes – is oddly (to the modern mind) alive both in some individuals and in cultures (hence, perhaps, the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery), but mainly non-consciously so. Rather as DNA is rather well protected from interference in bodies so that memory can be handed on more or less intact over time, it seems that the vast non-conscious forms of knowing are protected from interference by the will.
Freud’s characterization of melancholia in “Mourning and Melancholia” (originally written in 1915) and the death drive in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (originally written in 1920) was precisely that of pathological repetition of the same (see Freud 1984). Adam Scarfe’s discussion of reductionism also notes Hans Jonas’s notion that “reductionist thinking is ‘under the ontological dominance of death’” (Scarfe 2013: 36). We might say, therefore, that the reductionist biology of the modern period, which treats living things like dead ones, is equally caught in a deathly repetition of the same which fails to distinguish between the biotic and abiotic realms.
According to Margaret Boden, such mastery normally takes about 12 years of solid endeavour. The idea that anyone, whether child or adult, can be spontaneously creative in the absence of experience, application and learning, is clearly an uninformed delusion.
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Wheeler, W. A Connoisseur of Magical Coincidences: Chance, Creativity and Poiesis from a Biosemiotic Perspective. Biosemiotics 7, 389–404 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9218-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9218-8