When Jorge Luis Borges quipped, “Life, I'm sure, is made of poetry” in his lecture series The Craft of Verse at Harvard University in 1967, perhaps he had something in mind aligned with what biosemioticians think of when we discuss semiosis, and how Marder (2020, p. 5) reinterprets logos as the “precondition for establishing relations.”

Borges’ ontological claim in a waning mechanical age suggests the code duality Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991) discuss, with life irreducible to algorithm, yet neither wholly a poetry which resists structure. This resistance against ontological monism, which accompanies atomistic individualism, is anchored in Marder’s (2020, p. 15) articulation that there exists “no logos, with no with.” Logos, that slippery Greek term which takes on the role of relation in this context, is “prelogical” in Marder’s rendering, urging us not to stay caught up with the snag of abstraction, to dig into “the inbetween” dirt of relations, a re-rendering of logos as situated, and evolutionary-historical (2020, p. 5). Both semiosis and recuperated logos in Marder’s Dump Philosophy: a phenomenology of devastation recapitulate an essential non-essentialism, a Heraclitan movement, which defies ontology as neither static, premade, nor predictable.

Inquiry into thrown-together nonrelations, the lack of relating which emerges from dumping ideas and objects together willy-nilly, has become an important hallmark of biosemiotics, in confronting the semiotic relations of the Anthropocene. The artificial selection of significance, premeditated and arranged as if according to some grand arbiter, is the false concreteness of a civilization aiming to order all life according to some single creator god principle. This deductive rather than abductive mode of meaning-making substitutes the emergence of ecology, including ecologies of mind, which evolve together, through the plurality of agents which compose a given habitat, in exchange for the Anthropocene’s forced compliance of artificial assemblage which has sought to design the living world according to incomplete and shoddy blueprints. While undoubtedly many good reasons and justifications have been forward as to why such exigencies are necessary, or even superior, to the way life on this planet has proceeded for the past 4 billion years, the proof has been in the pudding: metacrisis, polycrisis, semiotic breakdown through a perfusion of derivative and meaning-poor ‘information’ and ‘infotainment’ snacks engineered to hack our heuristics, have landed us in the final uncircumventable limit of passing the threshold of ecological and biological cohesion.

Terrence Deacon’s (1997) The Symbolic Species, as well as the co-edited follow-up volume The Symbolic Species Evolved (Schilhab et al., 2012), and co-authored work with Raczaszek-Leonardi and Deacon (2018), generate a compelling argument indicating the dangers of what occurs when symbols become untethered from grounding in physical reality. The Borges Effect, named after the author’s famous parable of a map overtaking the territory it is meant to represent, is one of the consequences of identifying symbolic thought and virtuality as more real than the world it represents. In tandem to this line of thought, Stjernfelt (2007, 2014) has also identified how “hypostatic abstraction” – the unique trait of human reasoning which allows extensive manipulation of concepts, but also that which allows us to out-fox ourselves investing in its awesome power – allows us to Rubik’s Cube symbols and concepts ideationally outside of space and time and then plop them back into reality as if they fit perfectly. Stjernfelt (2012, p. 41) counters Deacon’s cordoning off symbol use exclusively for humans by noting that “the most complex parts of Peirce’s basic triads should be expected to be realized even in the simplest biological processes.”

Similar to the Frankfurt School’s critiques of reification, C.S. Peirce describes how this degenerate form of sign use

consists in taking a feature of a percept or percepts (after it has already been prescinded from the other elements of the percept), so as to take propositional form in a judgment (indeed, it may operate upon any judgment whatsoever), and in conceiving this fact to consist in the relation between the subject of that judgment and another subject, which has a mode of being that merely consists in the truth of propositions of which the corresponding concrete term is the predicate. (C.P. 4.235)

Peirce (ibid) calls this sort of substitution from reality “fictitious,” where the feature of sweetness becomes the desired good rather than honey, which has the property of sweetness (amongst other more subtle properties). This flight from the concrete to the ungrounded realm of “cloud cuckoo land,” as Aristophanes called it, is a pernicious form of idealism which turns into “necrosemiotics” (Bennett, 2016), an undermining form of truncated semiosis that denies the necessity for objects at all, attempting to exist (however short-lived) in a realm of sheer symbolic reference and solipsistic representation.

But perhaps it has been the striking term of semiocide that has most propelled biosemiotics to square with the megamachine that fragments the possibility for semiosis to remain relational rather than a function of domination (Mumford, 1966; Scheidler, 2020). Originating in Estonian paleontologist Ivar Puura’s article originally published in 2002 developing the concept (translated into English and published in Sign System Studies posthumously in 2013), semiocide has quickly became a major site of biosemiotic study – the biosemiotics of the destruction of the possibility of biosemiosis. Puura defines semiocide as a “situation where signs and stories that are significant for someone are destroyed because of someone else’s malevolence or carelessness, thereby stealing a part of the former’s identity” (2013, p. 152). Uslu (2020, p. 226) explains Puura’s semiocide as “polyvalent destruction,” the very force which undermines the ability for sense to be made. As you might tell by now, semiocide’s ability to obliviously destroy others’ sign systems is made possible by its closed-loop operation. This abyss of meaning, which sucks the significance out of understanding and communication, is a positive feedback loop in the worst tense of the term. It is recursively cannibalistic, like the Wetiko image of North Native American cosmologies (Forbes, 2008; Kimmerer, 2015). Like the Tao Tie (饕餮) of ancient Chinese religion, semiocide behaves like a demon that is so insatiable that it devours the entire universe, and when it is done, it’s insatiable hunger turns on consuming its own body. Similar to the hungry ghosts of Tibetan Buddhism, semiocidal practices take on an automaticity of their own, playing out a script or algorithm predicated on fear, enforced want, and endless instrumentalism.

To address semiocide, both Dump Philosophy and biosemiotics have recovered from the modern “[d]iscomfort with tautologies” (Marder, 2020, p. 38). While Michael Marder’s canonical anchor points are different than those of biosemiotic, with biosemiotics focusing on Jakob von Uexküll rather than Martin Heidegger, Gregory Bateson rather than Jacques Derrida, and Charles Sanders Peirce rather than Heraclitus, the tracking of semiocide in its various guises is productively shared. Marder’s (2020, p. 62) diagnosis of ontological toxicity as “the red thread of the dump’s mangled components” evokes a nihilistic will-to-contaminate which could be likened to omni-semiocide, the domicide of all loci of relating. Without place there can be no semiosis, no ground of being to interact with and from. Domicide (the destruction of home, the dómos) destroys the possibility for logos, as it undoes the seat of semiosis, the referent from which we are able to refer. The destruction of the meaning-sphere, or Umwelt of an organism takes away the ability to make sense, to discern and rely on patterns, to form heuristics which are helpful rather than harmful shortcuts. When cognitive (and/or physical) offloading becomes a detriment rather than an affordance, what is demanded is an infinite pressure of atomism, that all semiosis be turned inwards, and that organisms approach the world with a hermeneutics of suspicion.

This review admires Marder’s inquiry as a parallel for which biosemiotics can find points of conceptual resonance, even as methodologically differences remain. By looking at the dump of ungrounded semiosis – the semiotics of instrumentalism and its effects – we can better do the work of applying biosemiotics not just towards the wonders of living relations, but also to the manifold ways in which industrial civilization is haphazardly yet systematically destroying the possibility for spontaneous relating. The dump and semiocide are cousin concepts which urge us to engage with not getting lost in the void they investigate (Nietzsche’s (2011, §146) “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”). Biosemiotics has much to gain by understanding the ways, gross and subtle, in which Anthropocenic hubris undercuts our own ability to make sense of the world, doubling down on overconfidence at the expense of all life (and signs to the contrary).

Semioticians could be said to be guardians of meaning. That entails not only detailing the wonders of living signs, but also bearing witness to the sorts of activity and attitudes which undermine the continuation of free and creative sign use. This review first examines Marder’s Dump Philosophy and its biosemiotic implications, before appraising strategies of ‘undumping’ which foster sui generis biosemiosis and ecosemiosis.

The Dump as Semiocide

Dumping for Marder is constituted by displacement and fragmentation. One might ask: Bereft of a standpoint, how can semiosis occur? When all organic semiotic scaffolding has been broken, from where hence does one orient? “Leaving no place for place, [dumping] disallows taxonomies and typologies where discrete categories of leftovers would find their niches and where they could be described, studied, cataloged, deposited, or discarded,” Marder (2020, p. 101) writes. This renunciation of finding a place for leftovers, remainders, for the overdetermination of life and semiosis, relegates these leftovers not as nourishment for other levels of life and meaning, but stops the composting of meaning short by cutting off recourse for these leftovers. To have no place (niche) – divorced time, or a permanent thwarting of goals – is to be without relation, to putrefy in one’s own hall of mirrors. No matter how resplendent the various forms of the dump seem, they never delivers satisfaction, as the lack of grounding of the relation in the objects of the world creates addiction through incompletion, rather than satiation. To have perspective, to be an interpreter, presupposes (getting) an angle; a certain sensitivity to the sensorial world which attends, even (or especially) the leftovers. Yet, it stops short of mopping up all leftovers and feeding them back into the machine of efficiency, contravening the logic which produced it. The development of sensitivity to alterity is truncated in milieus made meaningless by their isolation, or, through capriciously changing and disorienting the lack of reliable relations. No wonder the attraction to supernormal stimuli is so strong in the absence of affordances which actually afford (Hendlin, 2019).

The dump for Marder provides no logos, no implicate meaning. Logos is not like Lego blocks that you can just swap out to build something new, according to factory models of life (Marder, 2020, p. 37). Logos does not permit fungible, interchangeable, utilitarian units of mass or ideation exchangeable as an infinite and thus meaningless signifier like money that can made from everything and converted into anything (Hornborg, 2023). As Preparata has considered it, “The seed of all economic imbalance is the commodification of money….The antidote to the usurious malady…is straightforward: let the sign mimic the object, let the money die” (2006, p. 29). Letting master signifiers die, or better, compost, to provide soil for the emergence of new sets of relations, is hazardous. There is no guarantee that what comes out of such dirt will not reproduce, or exacerbate the original malady. And yet, hanging on to an already dead sign, suspended from context, is to deny the temporal changes of relating; holding on for dear life to that very thing whose perishing would set free toxic tensions to resolve elsewhere.

Dumps do not have character of their own – they are characterized by their very uncharacterizability. In biosemiotic terms this includes subsuming biology into chemistry into physics, pretending that treating the world as such is without remainder.Footnote 1 Such massification denies entry to scrutiny, and by their very fashioning are inscrutable, and therefore become sublime monoliths that permit neither approach nor reproach (Marder, 2020, p. 43–45). As the hype over artificial intelligence (AI) demonstrates, the supposed interconnectedness of everything, instead of offering more complexity and agency, makes our relations meaningless, broken, arbitrary. Because in the dump all relations are of an equal distance, like tempered versus untampered scales, piled upon each other for modularity, they lose their specificity, their flexibility, their absolute pitch, their potentiality for dunamis (δύναμις) to grow and evolve (ibid, p. 52). Infinite encompassment has become a bottomless pit of apathy for relations, rather than a weaving of relationships of care.

Potentiality only exists in tension between relations which are capable of relating. Semiosis can only occur when there is some continuity of difference which allows communication across this difference. There has to be a there there, in order for responsiveness to not degenerate into algorithmic reactiveness. Yet, as Michel Serres (2010, p. 71) has commented, “In the dump, all space is already appropriated.” Suffocated without sufficient space, dumps suck all the air out of semiosis as relations which could once be depended upon, which now no longer exist or are responsive. Part of this suffocation comes from failing to respect boundaries, cellular or conceptual, that provide membranes for sensing and responding (Marder, 2020, p. 3).

Indeed, the parallels (and discrepancies) between Serres’ Le Mal Prop and Marder’s Dump Philosophy are worth noting, as both see dumping or pollution as a positive feedback mechanism which mechanically churns living relations into placeless fodder for the selfsame runaway algorithm. Pollution as the separation of action into immediate and secondary aspects, that which we care about and that which one must not care about in order to pollute, can be said to be a proper object of study for the field of agnotology, the examination of how ignorance perpetuates throughout a system (Proctor, 2008). Another way of viewing Serres’ notion of pollution, and how this resonates with Marder’s examination of the dump, is that the Aristotelian unity of the four causes is fractured, with a bypass of the material and efficient causes as part of the final product or goal. This is the logic of unholy sacrifice: that it doesn’t matter what it takes to achieve something, so long as the thing happens in the desired way. Such logics are what Marder incorporates into the category of anti-logos, anti-logics which exclude the possibility of logos, just as such actions are exclusionary and other-blind by design. If these actions also create deserts in their wake, wastelands in which life can find no mooring, then under the spell of anti-logos, that is just an unhappy side-effect, insufficient to interrupt the main affair.

Serres’ notion of pollution as appropriating the world (p. 41) looks at the creation of property through acts of contamination. That which is toxic to others cannot and thus will not be appropriated. Thus, contamination as a strategy of colonization becomes the primary logic of ownership. Marder (2020, p. 17–18) similarly observes how the gesture of dumping works as a positive feedback loop, recursive where the “pile piles on indefinitely.” This lack of stopgap, off-switch, or Sollbruchstelle (circuit-breaker), is a defining aspect of the dump, and of semiocide. Runaway processes keep (re)producing more of the problem, and indeed excise the possibility for other ways of being, as non-dumps (compost) or generative gift-economy semiotics cannot possibly compete with the baroque overflow of supernormal stimuli. Colonization always overdetermines its territory, outcompeting alternative more merciful semiotic strategies.

In his critique of the empty gesture of categorization and labeling, Marder understands the very act of naming and articulating as it has come to be in the age of the dump as Sisyphusian. Naming objects in the dump is to list them, to create an ontological flattening of all difference, of nuance, of all semiosis which might disrupt the dead pinned butterflies of a collector, making museums mausoleums rather than sites for discovery (Hendlin, 2023). “[E]ach of us is an amateur Linnaeus of the impossible… pick[ing] up the scraps of these but do not pause to consider… the way they hang together” (Marder, 2020, p. 101). Marder’s insistence on the importance of the way things “hang together” is what makes him a semiotic thinker. Focusing on relations as primary rather than haphazard, Marder’s metaphysics enjoins relational ontologies. The lack of context, which is the defining act of postmodernity, where corporations embrace the decontextualized relativism of postmodernism as a way of exculpating their negligence and equating disinformation with independent science (Proctor, 2006), breeds disorientation – whether intentional or not. Thus, dumping difference into undifferentiation and gaslighting the icebergs of nuance lying below heuristics, are elements of semiocide which untether being(s) from trusted surroundings.Footnote 2 Cleaving habit from habitat, the built environment in all senses of construction, becomes the decontextualized palate of grey with which the dump is painted. We arrange our lives so that we never have to exit the homogenized human-fashioned world. Permanent de-differentiation, likened to permanent war, leaves no time for respite, for gathering one’s wits, for reestablishing affinities, for recalibrating routinized but dissociated heuristics.

The dump is an unique logic type. Marder (2020, p. 27) quotes Heraclitus, “Just as a heap of refuse piled up without purpose, so [is] the most beautiful world-order.” Ordering the world according to a disembodied, disembedded logos produces no order at all, rather it is the simulacrum of order. Lists and piles indicate a lack of relations between the items piles. The dump is “a dump for multiple significations, a hodgepodge of heavy, falling, massified, vulgarized meanings indifferent to their differences” (ibid, p. 102). The question for Marder then becomes, what is the relationship between the dump (sarma) and the kosmos? In contrast to the kosmos, which is coordinated, measured,

Sarma is the substantive outcome of the act of dumping, of piling up (kechumenon) what has been thrown aimlessly, without consideration, at random, or in vain (eikē). The dumped is essentially hidden from view, the heap obscuring its contents. A miscellany of non- or antiphenomena, sarma is not itself given; it names this very flight from givenness. (Marder, 2020, p. 38)

Picking up Heidegger’s observation that sarma becomes the opposite concept (Gegenbegriff) of logos, equating it with “unbeing” (Unsein), which in Marder’s (2020, p.40) task becomes the equation of the dump as antilogos, “imped[ing] phenomenology.”

Earth Emotions observer Glenn Albrecht, who coined solastalgia as the “loss of an endemic sense of place due to the negative impacts of global warming” (2019, p. x), has termed “meuacide”Footnote 3 “the extinction of our emotions,” especially the prosocial and connected ones we enjoy feeling (2022). For our emotions to also be dying, or fading away (it is unclear which is worse), just at the moment when the godlike self-referential cannibalism of AI is coming online in fits and starts, begs the question of what we are then in a deserted world. Where signs no longer correspond to objects, where the free-floating signifiers become empty and the belief reigns that virtuality can eclipse reality with no remainder or gap, is this peak dump, and peak denial (Doctorow, 2018)? To be able to throw away all previous meaningful relations for a new set of superimposed relations which do not relate but merely titillate and manipulate in order to keep the user hooked, is a bad deal indeed. As such, our emotions lose their motion, their ability to act and move as impetus for novelty.

While broadcast media tells us that ‘deep’ adaptation is necessary for us to deal with the polycrisis of dumping we have begotten, making all of existence change except the pollution that must stay constant, others argue that such tactics in fact directly result in the loss of our species. Deep adaptation to a broken world will not remake that world. There is no guarantee that the dump-provoked ‘posthuman’ human will be any ‘better’ (whatever that means) or more adapted. Or, that such adaptation doesn’t come with its own concomitant trade-offs. As Dostoyevsky (1994) once wrote, “Man, the scoundrel, can grow used to anything.” That we can adapt to horror without losing our humanity seems to be an implicit assumption in deep adaptation that takes for granted the continued loss of biodiversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity on this planet. I’m not so sure. Rather than glossed as our remarkable resilience, such inurement to desolation may result in the loss of precisely those features about our species that we most cherish.

Analyzing the phenomenon of pollution through a biosemiotically-informed systems ecology lens, a clear distinction between waste and pollution arises. Waste can be meaningful, but pollution is always meaningless. Waste can make sense insofar as it performs a function as part of an ecological system wherein waste products of that system are taken up again to be used, suffused, transformed and recycled.Footnote 4 Mary Douglas (1966, p. 40) once defined pollution as “matter out of place,” emphasizing that it is loss of relations, semiocide, which turns waste (i.e., excrement that would be composted by microbes) into pollution (which dumped into waterways causes eutrophication). As opposed to the biological waste of worms or humans in natural habitats, pollution takes away from the ecosystem while providing nothing in return. Ironically, it takes away via introducing something that cannot be assimilated. Pollution is anti-meaning: it jumpstarts a negative cycle that only brings further harm to its environment.

If pollution is introducing something out of place and out of context into a milieu where every being has established homeostatic relations with the other beings and things in its Umwelt, part of the ontological toxicity of dumping and semiocide involves the deliberate closing off of the self to the other. This methodology of being dead towards the other – subtracting one’s sense of self from situatedness – is entrenched in the origins of contemporary scientific investigation itself. In Descartes’ (2017, p. 24) third Meditation, his method of introspective contemplation is described as ontological closure: “I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I will regard all such images as vacuous, false and worthless.” Even in admitting the impossibility of total closure of the sensual self, by abnegating the body, and its sensations, as the precondition for moving into a pure realm of floating reality, interprets the experiential, kinesthetic world as expendable and suspect. This hermeneutics of suspicion of the sensible world consequently leads to devaluing and disqualifying signs that do not serve one’s own purposely constrained aperture of understanding. Thus, semiocide occurs through the double-move of attempting to remove oneself from a situation while simultaneously adding something that has no relation to a particular environment to that environment.

Politicizing Semiocide

While both Marder and Hoffmeyer shy away from directly engaging with institutions and bureaucracies, nontheless “[i]nstitutions, arts, crafts, infrastructure and technology form externalized scaffolds, moulding human behaviour in certain directions, affecting the bequests and reinterpretation of these scaffolds as well as the ongoing cultural selection between them, making possible their further development over generations” (Cobley & Stjernfelt, 2015, p. 296). Semiotic scaffolding entrenched in institutions supervenes on the free play of meaning creation, canalizing semiosis no less than Waddington’s epigenetic landscape (though at levels on the opposite end of the spectrum of semiosis). Cobley (2016, p. 39) stresses (bio)semiotic engagement with institutions, as institutionalization has become the prime locus of the dump, of semiocide, and unless dealt with, is likely in the long run to supervene on the best of intentions of scholars quietly minding to themselves:

In contrast to the nominalism of, say, poststructuralism, which figures humans as dominated by their sign systems, Sebeok’s work, for example, is a prolonged realist but not naïve consideration of the spiralling complexity of human semioses and the understanding of them coupled with a rueful awareness of how the institutionalization of knowledge and phylogenetic forgetfulness impede that understanding.

In other words, unless with deal with the semiocide of institutions, and how they breed homogenization and homelessness, sooner-or-later interpassive politics is not going to cut it.Footnote 5

Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres (Troy 2023) describe via the acronym TESCREAL – “Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism” – the desire to remake the world in the image of control based on assumed full understanding of biological, chemical, and physical complexity, as the apex of the dump. TESCREAL includes the belief that humans are too stupid to find alternative ways of solving our problems, so we should just engineer out of the hole that we have dug for ourselves. It simultaneously takes for granted that ‘humanity’ as a whole is the problem, rather than dysfunctional social structures, essentializing what is a rather modern mode of human existence that was forced upon the diversity of cultures by a single one. It assumes the game-theoretical dynamics of war and competition and markets as both inevitable and unavoidable, thus requiring humanity to give up our earthliness, and colonize space, colonize our own bodies through technological (rather than ecological, social, or praxis-based) human enhancement, and renounces the self-determination of humans and organisms to continue living in ecological environments from which their culture and instincts emerged. The TESCREAL agenda constitutes not only a top-down agenda assuming that infinite semiocide must be the price for survival (via AI progeny, eliding the organism-machine distinction), but it dumps everything in a gesture reminiscent of Agamben’s (1998) critique of “bare life.”

This involution of agency, the subterfuge of ersatz desire never quite fulfilled, is part and parcel of quartering off organic relations. Artificial selection of signs, increasingly more symbolically mediated, assume an endless fungability, exchanging one situation or relation for another, as if relations were chemical receptors accepting anything that fits close enough. George Tsakraklides (2023) draws upon a term coined by S.B. Banerjee: “necrocapitalism is the thief that never gets caught. It takes down everything in its path, consuming entire planets and leaving nothing standing.” The infinite aims of semiocide do not, unfortunately, end at the Earth’s boundaries. The first international radio signals which penetrated beyond our ionosphere were broadcasting Hitler, no less. The already crowded blanket around the Earth will be added to, with current plans for thousands more space trash-producing and electromagnetic field-shielding satellites, which may have semiotic consequences for earthlings and extraterrestrial matrices that we have little if any knowledge of. The encompassing inertia of semiocide prompts Marder (2020, 42) to propose that “[t]he global dump is as close as it gets to designating the ontology of contemporaneity.”

Dumping is (un)controlled demolition of semiosis. Semiocide does not occur in our present age as merely a side-effect, an externality, but in fact, is part of the program of exerting semiotic rigidity and homogenization to commodify all relations into fixity. “The control methods looming over us today do not assume the shape of a tremendous, fine-tuned, centrally run machine,” Marder (2020, p. 132) writes. Rather, “[t]hey consist in part of a nanopolitical, personalized, wired, information-based set of psychodigital manipulation techniques that fit each subject as a glove, if not as the skin of the hand sheathed in the glove.” Not content to channel existing semiosis, the dump insists on engineering the biological make-up of sign action and perception (Merkzeichnen and Werkzeichnen). This project of total replacement of endogenous sensitivities and exogenous inputs, the dump interprets all semiosis as machine-like, a decentralized puzzle whose pieces can be interchanged with fabricated ones without meaningful remainder.

In 723 CE Bonifatius, sent by the pope to Christianize Central Europeans, proved unable to convince them with stories to abandon their worship of wellsprings and sacred trees; so he sent in troops to desecrate their sacred sites. “The annihilation of the symbolic order aimed to destroy the social fabric that had empowered resistance to the invasion” (Scheidler, 2020, p. 79). But this was not just an annihilation of the symbolic order, but also a biosemiotic and ecosemiotic desecration; an early, crass, and deliberate form of semiocide, which seemed a more convincing method of untethering symbols from their power in ecological moorings than through proselytization alone. Indeed, colonialism was only possible because the colonizers themselves had already suffered the brutality of physical and semiological displacement. As Scheidler explains, “[b]efore colonizing the world, Europe itself had been brutally colonized” (p. 80). Wolf (1982) in Europe and the People without History makes a similar point: the homelessness of European displaced and conquered peoples had to occur before transcontinental colonialism could occur. Europeans’ willingness to leave their homes and the impetus for their drive to colonize others did not come out of nowhere, but resulted from a long history of hegemony and diaspora beforehand within the European continent itself.

As the majority of humanity now lives in cities, we have cocooned ourselves in artificial structures that perpetuate a mediated hyperreality, shaped by our own synthetic ecosystems; partial to be sure, feeding off ecosystems elsewhere in order to artificially sustain them. The adaption process has been both abrupt and gradual, forced and cajoled. Domestication of the human into standardized, homogenous models and constraints has indeed opened up new possibilities for innovation and invention within this structure. But ultimately, the variations have been played on the same theme. Instead of place-based plurality of culture and of human being, we have bred monoculture from a single template (globalized, western); foreclosing other acceptable ways of being human except for a single normative order, now globalized.

In a footnote, Marder suggests (2020, p. 164), (not in jest) that “Cultural studies should be rebranded dump studies, a title that, far from pejorative, would give them a wide ontological scope.” Just as critical studies of all sorts often resort to involuted infighting and angels-dancing-on-pinheads levels of discourse, which Freud (1930) called the “narcissism of minor differences,” disconnected from science and nature, contemporary cultural studies has become marginalized and a target of further dumping by reactionaries. Chronicling the dump through critique alone has provided little remedy.

Like the imperative “No illegal dumping!” seen on signs in all countries, such objections only serve to normalize legal dumping and the existence of dumps as official places in society, as long as they are state-sanctioned (Marder, 2020, p. 42). “In the twenty-first century,” Marder writes (ibid, p. 24), “the view that material existence as a whole is garbage has triumphed.” If everything is fungible, and we can create our desires ex nihlo into reality without reflecting on the nature or provenance of those desires, then nothing has any particular meaning, as it could just as easily have been be conjured otherwise. This is precisely where such magical thinking differs from biosemiotics: semiosis is deeply historical, and bounded by those entwined histories, thus histories of relations create enabling constraints.

Modulating semiocide and dumping into a political and social domain, Farmer (2004) and Susan Fiske have labeled the engineering of these phenomena of continual undermining of semiosis “structural violence.”Footnote 6 Structural violence operates as a sort of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), in which institutions and physical infrastructure distort semiosis on the basis of creating symbolic orders that produce pollution at all levels, materially and cognitively – that is, semiotically. Structural violence produces pollution because it enforces artificial distinctions of caste and hierarchy which superimpose a logic of hypostatic abstraction, jaundicing the decision-making of all members in the hierarchy, no matter their rank (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010).

For example, air pollution is “significant driver of climate change that has also been associated with increased risk of mental health conditions” (Corvalan et al., 2022). Air pollution occurs only because people believe that the air dump will not affect them, or that it is not so bad, or that the gains are worth the costs. These utilitarian analyses are based on separation, and the notion that pollution diffused will be inconsequential for those initiating it. The problems of air pollution, however, affect all, but especially those already impacted by other forms of ecocide, and semiocide (the two are intimately related). The looping effects of semiocide know no bounds, just as the dump that begot them makes no distinctions. Air quality affects mental health which in turn leads to poorer ecological conditions as people bypass their prefrontal cortex to act from the basal ganglia. The fact that air pollution can cause brain damage for our and future generations (Peeples, 2020), seems to acknowledge that the dump is like an avalanche, accreting more and more propensity for dumping to dominate as it continues its path.

Organism self-regulation (homeostasis) is mediated by the chemicals and other signatures of our environment. Too much DDT, PFAS, glyphosate, carbon monoxide, dioxin, or other persistent, even multi-generational pollutants – and self-regulation becomes impossible. Especially those toxins that hook into our endocrine system, mediating hormone balance, can disable these circuits which allow us to self-regulate, and to find resilience even in polluted environments (Bellanger et al., 2015). This is not hormesis, the theory that a little bit of toxicity can act as a vaccine or homeopathic against larger amounts of toxicity (Calabrese et al., 2019). This is not the thesis that a little pollution is good for you (Elliott, 2011). No, hormesis does have traditions, like Eastern Europeans drinking rattlesnake venom extracted in alcohol, or the habit of those living in central America of regularly getting and then becoming less affected by scorpion stings. No, instead, pollution is the constant bombardment of the organism – all organisms – by chronic pollutants that are byproducts of an industrial economy predicated on fouling its own ecosystem; an industrial economy of the remainder. Maximizing short-term economic return irrespective of environmental or social or semiotic damage, industrialism serially colonizes everything it possibly can, with destruction as a byproduct if such actions provide further short-term economic benefit. The costs are always compartmentalized in moral and other accounting, and when noticed are quarantined conveniently as ‘externalities’. This disjunct between the reductively framed exchange value and the negative use value (once the externalities are taken into account) requires a melding of interpretative frames across ecology and economics (Trucost, 2013).

At the same time, preoccupation with pollution – real or imagined – itself can become a type of pollution. Such obsessiveness is what Buddhism calls ‘the second arrow’, the adding of suffering to pain. While pain may be non-optional in the thrownness of our situation, suffering adds an additional layer of self-imposed pollution that destroys the possibility for peace, contentment, and response (instead of reaction), that is ever present as a possibility even in ravaged, polluted worlds. There are ways of attending to pollution without being consumed by it, without wallowing.

Attending to the myriad ways pollution creates semiocide without being consumed by it is an art. Serres (2010, p. 41) coins the term soft pollution, with which he means “tsunamis of writing, signs, images, and logos flooding rural, civic, public and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising.” Even though soft pollution does not have the direct biochemical interface as hard pollution, it nonetheless “result[s] from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate” (ibid). By attending to hard and soft, material and ideational pollution together, both as forms of appropriation through contamination, Serres helps us understand the colonial urge behind semiocide.

Like hard pollution, soft pollution can occur through additive or subtractive dimensions. Semiocide does not just involve introducing extraneous detritus, but by removing people from their contexts. Environmental gerontology, for example, looks at “person-environment fit” to ensure that elderly with dementia are not thrust into new situations where there is little capacity for adaptation (Kaplan et al., 2015, p. 534). Elderly ejected from their homes because family members cannot care for them lose their familiar settings when placed in nursing homes. The smells that guided them, the synesthetic senses that allowed safe passage around a place well-known, like going to the bathroom at night, are gone. Stripped of familiarity which was their guide, they are also stripped of the companionship of these stimuli. Far from being mere markers of custom, our affordances – which take time to create and make time from their consistency – erect frameworks of meaning through their stable sign relations which slowly develop over our lives. The conceit of cosmopolitan thinking is precisely the belief that we can rip ourselves from context and still be fine – precisely because we have made the world safe for this sort of behavior. Yet, such displacement is predicated on (infinite) adaptability, which favors adolescent exploration, versus those who are in other phases of life. By designing societies for youth (only), we dump the needs of other members of our society, failing to meet their semiotic needs of reliability and continuation. Thus the seeming unmitigated freedom of mobility is bought at the cost of displacement and arbitrariness for those unsuited to ersatz environments.

The dump often has more purchase than composting. This is because the dump provides an equal and opposite use, the ore excavated from the mine, the pelt of the animal, the fuel from the drilling. Composting is the slow art of putting of matter in the right place, whereas the dump creates “matter out of place” (Douglas, 1966, p. 40) quickly for the sake of distilling, concentrating, extracting, mining, or otherwise obtaining something that is to be put for industrial use immediately. The dump is the verso side of the goods achieved through extractivism, colonialism, and instrumentalism, which is seen as the highest good in industrial civilization. To get the materials to get the thing, to have more power over another is the progress trap of technology (Wright, 2005). It is the belief that nothing can be produced or achieved without hurting others elsewhere, and seeking no further. The dump and semiocide are cut from the same cloth, as they depend on sustaining life here not only through diminishing life there, but through cutting off the possibilities for meaning-making in the places they take from.

What is needed is not semiosis (or logos) strewn about harum-scarum, but the work of fitting, the mycelia of semiotic scaffolding – not to piece Humpty Dumpty back together again, but to engage in semiotic succession ecology. Ecological succession takes fire-burnt, oil-spilled, strip-mined, and otherwise dumped landscapes, and through waves of species recolonization, slowly builds up the conditions to recreate the soil, water, wind-blocks, and temperature constraints that previously obtained before the disaster. Just like Alan Weisman’s (2007) Our World Without Us describes, little by little, once the escalation of dumping stops due its tendency to gum up its own works and implode, the timespans beyond our care but through the patience of plants, bacteria and fungi, just like those original oxygenic photosynthetic cyanobacteria which populated the world with oxygen gradually over 1.5 billion years, killing many extant forms of microbiota but also enabling the future proliferation of phylogenies – out of our dump biosemiosis and ecosemiosis will complexify, mature, and find new forms most beautiful.

Predicates for Semiotic Scaffolding

Scarcity is part and parcel of living at the limits of one’s ecotone. But living at the centers, where habitats promote easeful flourishing is a different story. This is the conclusion Todes (1989) makes in comparing Kropotkin’s cooperative theory of speciation at fecund ecological centers versus the popular reading of Darwin’s competitive theory of speciation at the species’ border dwelling areas. In areas where organism and niche fit more snugly, there is more opportunity for freeing up semiotic vigilance in some areas as organisms are safer, to direct that increased slack in alertness for other experimentations in speciation.

Semiotic scaffolding is a basic concept of biosemiotics which can elucidate our conundrum. Jesper Hoffmeyer holds that “semiotic scaffolding” is “the primary mechanism behind semiotic emergence [and] the key to nature’s tendency to take habits in the biological realm” (2007, p. 156). It entails “analyz[ing] and conceptualiz[ing] the myriad of semiotic scaffolding mechanisms operative at different levels in natural systems [a]s the core subject matter of biosemiotics” (Hoffmeyer, 2014a, p. 25). Organisms are semiosic by virtue of their relations with their Umwelt, requiring our web of relations for any ontology at all. This scaffolding is not optional or additional, but constitutes all organisms. And mutualistic scaffolding permits flourishing, which begets more flourishing.

Such semiotic fitting between organism and Umwelt has been described by Hoffmeyer as inherent to “organic evolution.” “One of the few general trends that can be ascribed to organic evolution is the tendency towards the production of species exhibiting more and more semiotic competence or freedom” (Hoffmeyer, 2014b, p. 98). The concept of semiotic freedom can be thought of as the “increased capacity for responding to a variety of signs through the formation of (locally) ‘meaningful’ interpretants” (Hoffmeyer, 2014b, pp. 98–99). Though in this quote the word appears in parenthesis, “locally” may be the key term, as the formation of meaningful interpretants is not an abstract but visceral process. Orienting locality, proximity, in its various strands, makes semiocide difficult, as semiocide feeds on decontextualization.

Yet, the evolutionary trend of increasing semiotic freedom was only historically made possible by a lack of domination by other organisms, or of particular sign types. Once one organism monopolizes the ecology, not only does that action soon undermine the flourishing of that organism, but it also closes off the evolutionary possibilities for other organisms, which are never evolving on their own as individual species, but in interspecies syncological consortia. To address semiocide, understanding how robust semiotic scaffolding enables play and experimentation (intentionally and unintentionally) provides a clue to rehabilitating semiosis in an era of the dump.

Semiotic scaffolding entails habituated relationships with one’s Umwelt which allow accurate predictability, stable reliance, and dependable response. The more stable this scaffolding is in a given habitat, the more semiotic freedom organisms have available. Yet, when Umwelten rapidly shift, this new scaffolding does not immediately fit with the routinized (through evolution, genes, and sign fixity) forms organisms have grown accustomed to (Favareau, 2015). This biosemiotic understanding is exactly opposite the myth of the autochthonous self-made man who lives as an individual independent from the world.

Instead, we are our scaffolding. Exosemiotically and endosemiotically, we are wholly reliant and contingent on the state of our scaffolding. If our external world (Umwelt) changes abruptly, or becomes disorganized, we lose the ability to use the heuristics we have adopted and adapted to this specific ecological and social order. The acceleration of change (Beschleunigung) that Rosa (2005) and others have diagnosed as part of the destabilizing effects of the Anthropocene, impinges on semiosis. Life and signs proliferate within a certain window of change, outside of which, semiotic freedom decreases as the need to update and assimilate new modes of habit cannot be routinized fast enough to keep up with the change at hand. That which we must do consciously, or on purpose, is but a sliver of our total capacity of instincts and habits, which James (2001) and others identified as the bulwark of semiosis which allows any novelty or action at all. Cognitive as well as semiotic offloading is indicative of semiotic freedom. The more we have to keep our attention on consciously, with effort, the less we are able to do; or, we can perform these demanding tasks for very limited times before the burden becomes too much for the organism, and burnout or short-circuiting occurs, leading to erratic, often self- and other-destructive action.

Regarding the importance of continuity he identifies in Sebeok between semiosis and politics, Cobley (2016, p. 5) approvingly quotes Peirce (C.P. 6.101):

the principle of continuity… regard[s] matter as mind whose habits have become fixed so as to lose the powers of forming them and losing them, while mind is to be regarded as a chemical genus of extreme complexity and instability. It has acquired in a remarkable degree a habit of taking and laying aside habits.

Habit taking requires time, and stability. Semiocide, through ecocide and cultural dislocation, occurs through the act of decontextualization, which appears as the modern imperative, leaving us vulnerable to replacement symbols to fill the vacuum artificially where once authentic networked emergent signs once tended.

The “tightly wound web of checks and balances that gradually establishes itself through myriad semiotic interactions,” the membranes which foster semiosis (Hoffmeyer op. cite Favareau, 2015, p. 236), form the nonmaterial semiotic scaffolding which nonetheless necessitate differentiated materiality. The irony that materialists have the least respect for materiality finds its product in the dump.

Undumping, or How to Remove Barriers to Semiosis

However trenchant and apt for biosemiotics’ growing need to confront the unraveling of semiosis through industrially-wrought semiocide, breaking apart the physical basis for semiosis by disfiguring the flow of sign relations and instinctual heuristics, Marder’s (2020, p. xiv) diagnosis only briefly mentions saving powers: “strategies of undumping: uncluttering, revitalizing physiological, cognitive, ecological, and planetary metabolisms.” In the midst of planetary breakdown, diagnosis is no longer sufficient to combat the dump. Ecocide and semiocide are occurring at alarming rates, so that even our ability for logos is being compromised by the increasingly toxic composition of our air, water, soil, and temperature. The hotter it gets, the more violent we become (Lange et al., 2017; Miles-Novelo & Anderson, 2019). The more CO2 in our atmosphere, the less capacity we have to handle to problems we’re confronted with (Karnauskas et al., 2020). The more toxins in our water, the more likely maladaptive genetic mutations will occur (Graber et al., 2019). The more artificial our soil, the less crucial micronutrients available to us (Biklé & Montgomery, 2016). The need for retooling our relating is urgent.

Rather than a call to return to a prelapsarian moment, the contemporary question for semiotics and philosophy is how to nurture and protect the life remaining, and how do we rediscover organic naturecultural practices that are not made-up, fake, or with remainder, when we must not only think, but also act without banisters? One cannot resurrect the world—that is the orbit of artificial selection, and the conceit of artificial intelligence, which is not intelligence at all, but rather the rehashing of endless digitality without any of the analog components concomitant of living intelligence (Hoffmeyer & Emmeche, 1991). Rather, undumping constitutes a tentative rehabilitation through removing the source pollution and the debris of continued dumping. Such works allows latent or destroyed semiotic scaffolding to reconnect; not in previous forms, but according to the exigencies of succession ecology – meeting mutated, fragmented ecologies where they are at, and nurturing the conditions for more healthy relating (even if remaining open to varieties of what health can mean).

Semiotic freedom can be conceived as a form of Summum Bonum, not that of Spinoza’s per se, but the ability to act flexibly for all organisms is the opposite of the dump. Whereas dumping makes organisms more deterministic, more desperate, with grosser categories of determining and fewer discriminations, appropriate and dependable semiotic scaffolding grooves action that can increasingly be offloaded into the environment, enhancing sensitivities. As biosemiotics claims that all organisms have some agency (even though, many biosemioticians such as Hoffmeyer [2014] also indicate that animals and the human animal due to motility have more semiotic freedom than plants or bacteria), it would seem that to address the dump and to arrive at moments of undumping is to take an ecosemiotic approach to how semiotic scaffolding can be cultivated in the aftermath of devastation. To recover semiotic scaffolding from the wastelands of semiocide is indeed a brave new world, requiring not more prescription, but rather proscription (Hendlin, 2020). That is, undumping is a via negativa rather than a positive project.

This via negativa of undumping and semiotic freedom, of course, also emanates from well-known biosemiotic foundations. For example, Deacon’s (2013, p. 27) focus on the constraints that habit necessitates is encapsulated in his notion of ententionality, where ententional phenomena are “intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve something non-intrinsic.” That is, the satisfaction conditions of an organism’s decision-making and action rest on factors that are not necessarily present in a given situation. The moment we attempt to constrain action to only things present, which we can enumerate, we have created a totalizing scheme, interpolating rather than enacting life processes. Thus, the realm of simulation can never recreate the semiosis of actual relations in their infinite response-ability.

Effective strategies of undumping, the fight against omni-semiocide, deliver a two pronged approach, both addressing upstream dumping and taking a harm-reduction program of stopping the most devastating attacks at the highest coordinated levels (see Macy & Brown's, 2014 concept of 'holding actions'), while also cultivating local biocommunities more in the spirit of rambunctious gardens (Marris, 2013). It is via concord, that small things grow. Yoked together, these small things can overgrow ossified large things. Thus, the paradox of institutional change and challenge cannot be achieved by another top down enterprise, but rather a growing together of oases of semiotic freedom. In this cellular manner, properly networked, the network gains tensile strength despite any tragedies that may befall a given node. This distributed scaffolding, harness the mycelial intelligence of ecosemiosis, which decenters logos, finding it in the relations, the interstices, rather than in any object or substrate. This brings forth logos into process philosophy from its essentialist Scholastic interpretations. At its limit, logos is revealed as semiosis, where arriving at perfect semiotic fitting (Kull, 2022) results as semiosis manifesting logos.

Ernst Haeckel’s 1866 coining of Ökologie (ecology) brought together the Greek word for habitat and home oîkos, with that for arranging, structuring, and ordering, logos. How we arrange our habitat is not just a matter of Fung Shui (Chinese geomancy) that can be designed, engineered, or imposed. Instead, it is a reading of the signs, a way of attending to the relations in a system of living relations in a particular patch of earth. As Hegel put it: “Nature [is] the system of unconscious thought, or, to use Schelling's expression, a petrified intelligence” (Hegel, 2004, pp. 14–15, translation: Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2023). The Schellingian tradition of process philosophy perhaps creates an extension of the traditional Greek concept of logos. While logos in the Heraclitan tradition does travel and change as a sign, our reception of the concept in Western philosophy has ossified it into a correspondence rather than a coherence notion of truth. In other words, logos (or our modern fixed interpretation of it), has lost its semiotic flexibility. Part of this recovery, then, entails reinterpreting the semiotic aspects of logos as an in-between, an awareness that arises, rather than an unwavering form.

Living in an ecological world turns out to be non-optional. We cannot simply substitute a built environment based on waste for a multispecies ecology without plan or leader. The emergence that comes from nonlocal selection cannot be matched or mimicked by central planners selecting for comfort of the inhabitants at the cost of all other beings, humans included, for which the dwellings were not designed. Health itself is predicated on right-relation (conjoined semiotic fitting) with our ecologies, with alleviation of a variety of illnesses benefiting from nature exposure (e.g., DeVille et al., 2021; Hartig et al., 2014; Whitburn et al., 2020). The intuitiveness of such remedies makes one wonder why such studies are necessary in the first place. For it is not just physiologically or psychologically that being amidst the more-than-human world can benefit health, as in shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), but also via being amongst other creatures that have an abundance of place in their semiotic niches. The antidote to semiocide is re-embedment with organisms and ecologies that have created places, which then help us find our place, if we are willing to listen.

This rerouting of malaise into semiotic fitting allows for meaning to be “transframed” by intentionally reimagining the abnormality of the dump (Vervaeke, 2020). Transframing involves not just transforming the problems we confront, but the entire process of framing to elicit salience. By retaking account of the abstract givens which close down the senses, by intentionally throwing symbols back into the fluid play of icons and indexes, rather than their subordination, the symbolic fixity and power gives way to the sensible world of grounded semiosis. Fluidly reinscribing symbols and abstractions which generate dumps through their ignorance of ‘side-effects,’ semiocide thus can be viewed as a self-undermining will-to-power as it is occurring. Once acknowledged as such, the automatic dump of semiocide loses some of its inertia. Transframing transgresses established (dis)orders through superimposing a new meaning-making lens on the collection rather than the issue. When salience decreases, as it does in the fragmentation of semiocide or the pile of the dump, what is called for is reimagining but also reassembling what matters from time and space out of joint.

In an alternate interpretation of semiocide and the dump, Abram (1996, p. 28) writes that “Nature, it would seem, has become simply a stock of ‘resources’ for human civilization,” creating an “obliviousness” to other forms of semiosis by denying the ethical correlates for all but the narrowest range of human semiosis. Even for humans, we cover up all but the linguistic forms of semiotics, making it increasingly difficult for us to make sense even of each other. Improvisation lost and forbidden, the eccentricity of our social fragmentation directly results from the constraints on socially acceptable speech, which is itself a later development based in our censorship of diverse ways of human and nonhuman being.

Semiotics of Grace

Kull (2022) outlines beauty as a potential recuperative force that can arrest mimetic colonialism, interpreting beauty as awe-inspiring transframing to regenerate severed triadic semiotic relations. From Bennett’s (2021) conceptualization of tardo-signs as “post-semiotic” entities, degenerate signs reduce the role and importance of the interpretant, requiring revival of the agency of organisms, which in turn requires situated ecologies that afford fitting such agency within a supportive context. While the dump does not halt in the face of beauty, if beauty is understood only according to its truncated aesthetic dimension, more integrated modes of beauty – what Kull calls “perfect semiotic fitting” – fills up semiotic space without succumbing to that filling becoming bloat. Beauty full of breath is dialogical, not cellophane, not imposed, but arises through mutual appreciation. The fullness of beauty is spacious, not dense; recuperative in relations, not drifting off helium-filled. Neither is it a hologram, or cotton candy. Instead, the possibility of beauty attracting meaning rests in its offering, accepting, and most of all, maintaining relations, while and where those relations also proliferate in concordant attachments to other spaces and beings.Footnote 7

Writing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Abram (1996, p. 42) explains how the semiosis of nondomination flows: “In the act of perception […] I enter into a sympathetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style.” This action of embodied knowledge, relation-making as coordination between interdependent subsystems, does not aim to select just for one rhythm, but instead, diffuses the gaze from any particular end point. In a sense, it is awkward to even write about beauty, as perfect semiotic fitting is ineffable. It can never be recreated de novo or mimicked from a recipe. There is no algorithm that produces kismet, as entrainment depends on letting go of notions of leader and follower. Murmurations are often the analogy for this deep complexity, perfect semiotic fitting, without any organism superimposing ambition, idea, power, or control of the flitting, impossible pattern. Fluctuating according to beauty, can be seen as the opposite of semiocide.

Sympathetic relation enables curiosity as the positively valenced flipside of vulnerability. It does not deny that things can go wrong, but instead it is an investment in the principle of charity in interpreting the other. Respiration is a form of reciprocity, as it is a pneumatic exchange with the earth (Abram, 1996). Pneuma intends breath, wind, air, and spirit, as one enmeshed relation, rather than separate entities. Undumping involves recuperating respiration, understanding the unbundling of anxiety through unrestrained breathing. “Anxiety robs us of speech,” Heidegger (1998, p. 89) writes. Anxiety is “oppressive and takes away one’s breath—and yet it is nowhere” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 180). Breathing freely alleviates anxiety because it undoes the appropriations of our pneuma, our lungs, our nasal passages, our capacity to be at homeostasis with a changing air composition.

Marder’s focus on the elemental nature of the dump also suggests that an elemental attending figures central to undumping. Without collapsing all elements into one (which would be a dump), while also not seeing elements (air, fire, water, earth, etc.) as siloed, they instead find right relation. This Buddhist concept of “right relation” is more similar to Aristotle’s elastic notion of phronesis than a Vitruvian Man fixed model. Rather than separate individualism (atomism) nor undifferentiated Being (oneness), undumping parallels the contrapuntal nature of semiosis. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this interbeing, where organisms offer each other affordances as a gift without effort. Without doing anything extra, webs of relations afford each other in the biological world. One creature’s organic waste is another’s food. Thus, Kull’s “perfect semiotic fitting” of the nothing extra semiosis of beauty could be considered the process of anima mundi.Footnote 8

“Perception will save the world,” Serres (2010, p. 73) claims. If so, it is because matter and meaning are “inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder.... Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance” (Barad, 2007, p. 3). Thus, semiosis and logos play similar roles in the redemptive work they do against fragmentation and separation. This finds resonance in the undumping economics of degrowth, which consists of de-appropriating space and de-accelerating time taken up by polluting in the broadest sense, both hard and soft (Maran, 2023). Michael Marder’s phenomenology of the dump, the dump which destroys the possibility for phenomenology, serves as a useful parallel to Ivar Puura’s notion of semiocide. Both attend to the stripping of living relations of their moorings, the ungrounding of semiosis into arbitrariness. As unappealing as attending to dumping and semiocide is, letting each framework juxtapose the qualities of the other to better understand the phenomena is a necessary task for biosemiotics, so that we may return to the exquisite grace involved in the semiosis between organisms and our Umwelten.