Abstract
The following points, which represent a path to a semiotics of being, are pertinent to various sub-fields at the conjunction of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics) and semiotics of culture—semioethics and existential semiotics included. 1) Semiotics of being entails inquiry at all levels of biological organization, albeit, wherever there are individuals, with emphasis on the living qua individuals (integrated biological individualism). 2) An Umwelt is the public aspect (cf. the Innenwelt, the private aspect) of a phenomenal/experienced world that is organism-specific (rather than species-specific) and ultimately refers to an existential realm. 3) Existential universals at work on Earth include seeking out the edible, dwelling in a medium, holding a phenomenal world (possibly an Umwelt) and being endowed with life, and consequently being mortal. 4) Human Umwelten include speechless Umwelten, spoken Umwelten and alphabetic Umwelten. 5) An Uexküllian phenomenology—stating that semiotic states represent the general class to which all mental/cognitive states belong—can draw on the works of the phenomenologists David Abram and Ted Toadvine (The notion of semiotic states is treated in Tønnessen 2009a: 62–63. For an introduction to eco-phenomenology, see Brown and Toadvine (eds.) 2003). 6) A task for such a phenomenology is to portray the natural history of the phenomenal world. 7) An imperative task in our contemporary world of faltering biological diversity is that of Umwelt mapping, i.e. a mapping of ontological niches. 8) The ecological crisis is an ontological crisis with historical roots in humankind’s domestication of animals and plants, which can be taken as archetypical for our attempted planet-scale taming of the wild. 9) The process of globalization is expressed by correlated trends of depletion of semiotic diversity and semiotic diversification. 10) Semiotic economy is a field which task it is to map the human ontological niche insofar as its semiotic relations are of an economic nature. All ten points will be commented (explicitly or implicitly) in due time.
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Notes
Note that they do not necessarily exclude each other, as any being’s somatic self (cf. Sebeok’s ‘semiotic self’) is always delimited negatively, vis-à-vis an ‘other’.
This dialogue is an excerpt from my own transcription based on the audio recordings available at http://www.ut.ee/564132 (01:11:25–01:14:15).
Petrilli and Ponzio 2005—see particularly chapter 12, ‘Global communication, Biosemiotics, and Semioethics’.
As a phenomenology of economy with a social and ecological perspective, semiotic economy will in the main favour Purchase Power Parity (PPP) measures of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rather than exchange-value measures thereof. While exchange-value measures of GDP tell us only ‘how much you could have bought abroad’ for a certain production, PPP measures tell us the real, local value of that very same production (for human stakeholders) in a comparative perspective, and are thus most often nearer-to-life.
Cf. Tønnessen 2003: 290, where I list 7 distinctive features of the human Umwelt.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (Abram 1997) treats what I could have called the transition in the human Umwelt at large from spoken Umwelten to alphabetic (literate) Umwelten. Cf. also Lotman 1991, where Yuri Lotman refers to the emergence of ancient bureaucracies, observing that their colossal growth (in terms of infrastructure and architecture) in the time of the first empires and states was made possible by the invention of writing.
In an interesting passage, von Uexküll (1982[1940]: 77–78) describes the hypothetical extinction of all night moths, and their replacement by a life form carrying out similar ecological functions. An example of Uexküllian evolutionary theorizing!
Observations about the immature (undetermined) character of human newborns are centuries old. The Umwelt transition at hand here is in a sense that of becoming human (or rather becoming a particular human being, in its earliest stage). “In all other mammals”, in the words of Barbieri (2010), “the wiring of the brain takes place almost completely in the dark and protected environment of the uterus, whereas in our species it takes place predominantly outside the uterus, where the body is exposed to the lights, the sounds and the smells of a constantly changing environment.”
As a result, large groups of domesticated animals held for their meat never live to experience adulthood. This is not to suggest that wild animals are necessarily better off—the difference is the calculated deliberation with which we shorten the life spans of many domesticated animals.
Here, the proper price of carbon, and the recent disagreement between the prominent economists Nicolas Stern and William Nordhaus at this point, can serve as an illustrative example.
Note that a function of global ontological maps could be to give empirical foundation for prioritization of what animal welfare issues matter the most. This kind of mapping, or modeling, in short, can be a way to help us see clearly what potentially problematic relations are significant in the sense of being widespread, or ecologically central.
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The current work has been carried out as part of the research projects The Cultural Heritage of Environmental Spaces: A Comparative Analysis between Estonia and Norway (EEA–ETF Grant EMP 54), Dynamical Zoosemiotics and Animal Representations (ETF/ESF 7790) and Biosemiotic Models of Semiosis (ETF/ESF 8403) and partaking in the Centre of excellence in cultural studies (CECT).
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Tønnessen, M. Steps to a Semiotics of Being. Biosemiotics 3, 375–392 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9074-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9074-0