My half-century saturated in semiotics: A spiralling confessional

My half-century saturated in semiotics: A spiralling confessional

Streams Touching Consciousness: Sensoriality and the Ontology of Repetition

The nature and the role of sensation sit at the heart of classic enlightenment debates about the nature of knowledge.  While these debates, in their modern form, came into being several hundred years ago, many key words from them remain with us today.  As a result, a number of culturally particular assumptions also remain as part of the semantic composition of these words (e.g. Wierbicka 2010).  In the following, we examine such assumptions, particularly in relation to sensoriality.  We contrast the classic empiricist and rationalist views on sensation, including their broader epistemological stakes, and bring forth a third account through Peircean semiotics.  We suggest that the classic debate between rationalists and empiricists can be re-examined by asking how repetition exists in the world.  By thinking about the ontology of repetition, and by highlighting some of the basic semiotic principles of this, we suggest that sensoriality needs to be recognized as a dynamical system rather than a system that exists for the documenting of "what there is".  In this account, neither sensoriality nor the nature of existence, including the physical world, are anchored toward absolutes on any level.  This point, however, does not lead us toward rationalist claims about the non-importance of senses or the body, but toward recognition that while patterns and stability play a significant role in living systems, there is always room for plasticity and open-endedness.  It is in this space between stability and change, where meaning is brought into being

The end of Sebeok’s century meets twenty-first century pandemic : modeling through and beyond Sebeok’s systems, semiotics, science

Thomas A. Sebeok’s name became all but synonymous with semiotics during the last half of the twentieth century. Sebeok located neglected semioticians in antiquity, and convinced many contemporary scholars that they were semioticians. One of his most fruitful encounters was with Juri Lotman of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics, who had published in 1967 an ambitious model of human sign systems in which language would constitute a primary modeling system, and cultural phenomena a secondary modeling system. We inspect how Sebeok amended Lotman’s system, inserting another primary modeling system before language. This brings biological precursors to human language as a syntactic and learned faculty that builds on many nonsyntactic and sometimes nonconscious senses, including emotion, affect, and memory. We note how, in Sebeok’s final book in 2000 on modeling systems theory, co-authored with Marcel Danesi, there is a suggestion that the three layers of modeling systems may be colored by Peircean notions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness; we clarify how these layers are analogue. Finally, the fundamentals of the primary modeling system leak into languaging, as better understood through post-Sebeok cognitive and neurological sciences, and rendering less mysterious some of the strange effects of the COVID-19 pandemic’s proxemics crisis

Rothschild’s ouroborus

Review: Friedrich Salomon Rothschild, Creation and Evolution: A Biosemiotic Approach

Sharing G. Evelyn Hutchinson's fabricational noise

One of the seminal constructs in 20th-century biosemiotics is G. Evelyn Hutchinson's 'niche'. This notion opened up and unpacked cartesian space and time to recognize self-organizing roles in open, dynamical systems — in n-dimensional hyperspace. Perhaps equally valuable to biosemiotics is Hutchinson's inclusive approach to inquiry and his willingness to venture into abductive territory, which have reaped rewards for a range of disciplines beyond biology, from art to anthropology. Hutchinson assumed the fertility of inquiry flowing from open, far-from-equilibrium systems to be characterized by 'fabricational noise', following Seilacher, or 'order out of chaos', following Prigogine. Serendipitous 'noise' can self-organize into information at other levels, as does the 'noise' of Hutchinson's contributions themselves

Runne-Beana: Dog Herds Ethnographer

Saami society in Lapland (now often called Saapmi), particularly the seasonally-nomadic reindeer-breeding sector, is predicated upon mobility and autonomy of its actors. Runne-Beana, a talented reindeer-herding dog, exhibited both mobility and autonomy when allocating to himself a peripatetic ethnographer, on the first day of five years of doctoral dissertation fieldwork in arctic Norway in 1972. That family’s and the wider community’s reactions to Runne-Beana’s behavior, and mine, highlight the tensions when mobility and autonomy compound with ideologies of ownership and control. At the same time, his companionship profoundly shaped all field relationships, engendering an understanding of dog culture as it is manifest in the herder/herding dog/reindeer triad and in the interpenetration of assumptions concerning child/dog enculturation.</span

A Note on the Montessori of Ethnobiology, Hal Conklin

A Note on the Montessori of Ethnobiology, Hal Conkli

Biopower, Biopolitics, Biosemiotics: Entangling Mortalities and Moralities

While biosemiotics moves in the direction of liberating both biology and semiotics from strict observance of the paradigms of the 19th and 20th centuries – via evo-devo-eco models and the ontological turn – we propose a glance backwards as well as a sharper focus on the social and sexual conditions of the present and foreseeable future. We bring together contemporary discourses on feminism, biophilia, biophobia, essentialisms, and denial, with the prescient ideas of biopower developed by Michel Foucault with respect to the nation-state. He addressed a bevy of pathologies endemic in the societies he witnessed at that time; these conditions persist and indeed have flourished, ranging from sexism, to racism, to classism, to technologism, to the outsourcing of work and the exporting of refuse, to the addictive mantra of “sustainability”, all culminating in society’s exercising of power over both life and death, both living and dying, both near and far. We also find biopower a suitable critical lens for pursuing the pathologies surrounding population – population as generated, as regulated, as ignored, as denied, whether or not acknowledged as being the work of wombs.La biosémiotique tend à se libérer des paradigmes biologique et sémiotique stricts des XIXe et XXe siècles – recourant à des modèles écologiques, évolutifs, et développementaux, et en tirant parti du tournant ontologique. Nous proposons cependant un regard en arrière ainsi qu’un recentrage sur les conditions sociales et sexuelles du présent et du futur proche. Nous réunissons les discours contemporains sur le féminisme, la biophilie, la biophobie, l’essentialisme et le déni, avec les idées visionnaires de Michel Foucault sur le biopouvoir et l’État-nation. Foucault aborda une série de pathologies endémiques dans les sociétés dont il fut témoin; ces conditions persistent et se sont même accrues, allant du sexisme, du racisme, du classisme, de la technologie, de l’externalisation du travail et de l’exportation des déchets, au mantra addictif de la « durabilité », le tout culminant dans l’emprise sociale sur le vivant et sur la mort, sur l’acte de vivre et celui de mourir. Le biopouvoir se révèle aussi comme une lentille critique appropriée pour expliciter les pathologies qui entourent la population – générée, réglementée, ignorée, niée, reconnue ou pas comme étant le résultat du travail des utérus

Culture as Habit, Habit as Culture: Instinct, Habituescence, Addiction

We consider Charles Sanders Peirce’s insights regarding the dynamics he associated with the concept of habit, so that we might periscope into some realms he left under-explicit: first, culture itself, and then, addiction, the forms of which are necessarily relative to particular cultures at particular times. Peirce’s groundwork on habit includes deliberations on instinct, habituescence (the taking of habits), the habit of habit-taking, and the changing of habits, enabling us to think through individual habits that are both marked and unmarked (that is, noticed or not), and how these feed into contemporary cultural practices whether deemed to be innocuous or extreme. With respect to extreme habits, we use the term “addiction” as a suitable gloss for behaviors marked by actual or perceived dysfunction, regardless of any involvement of use or abuse of substances. Finally, we propose that Peirce’s reflections on habits (perhaps colored by his own habits-unto-addictions), and particularly his phanaeroscopy (phenomenology) of thirds—moving from vagueness to generality, from belief to doubt, from habit-taking to habit-breaking—suggest paths for exploring the debate surrounding the “reversibility” or “irreversibility” of addictions, including implications for self-control, and in turn, for our increasingly domesticated 21st-century society