Metaphors of nature and organicism in the epistemology ofmusic: A "biosemiotic" introduction to the analysis ofJean Sibelius' symphonic thought

Author(s): Eero Tarasti / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2001

Metaphors of nature and organism play a central role in the episte-mes of the Western culture and arts. The entire project of the 'modern' meant a separation of man from the cosmos and its laws. Signs and symbols are thought to be arbitrary and conventional social constructions. However, there are many returns to iconic imitations of nature and biological principles — also in such an esoteric art as music. One of the highest aesthetic categories in Western art music is the so-called 'organic growth' which particularly manifests in symphony. The concepts of 'organic/inorganic' can be used as analytic terms, whereby one might even compare such composers as Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler. Music is said to be 'organic' when (1) its theme actors live in their proper Umwelt (or isotopy); (2) all music material stems from the same themes (it is innerly iconic); (3) all musical events follow each other coherently (inner indexicality or the principle of Growth); (4) music strives for some goal (temporality). Moreover the Uexkull idea of a particular Ich-Ton of every organism can be turned back to music. Hence we can say that every musical piece is like an 'organism' which has its Ich-Ton determining which signs it accepts and how it acts in the musical environment of its own and formed by other musical works.

Prosody and versification systems of ancient verse

Author(s): Maria-Kristiina Lotman / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2001

The aim of the present study is to describe the prosodic systems of the Greek and Latin languages and to find out the versification systems which have been realized in the poetical practice. The Greek language belongs typologically among the mora-counting languages and thus provides possibilities for the emergence of purely quantitative verse, purely syllabic verse, quantitative-syllabic verse and syllabic-quantitative verse. There is no purely quantitative or purely syllabic verse in actual Greek poetry; however, the syllabic-quantitative versification systems (the Aeolian tradition) and quantitative-syllabic versification systems (the Ionian tradition) were in use. The Latin language, on the other hand, has a number of features, which characterize it as a stress-counting language. Since at the same time there exists also the opposition of short and long syllables, there are preconditions for the syllabic, accentual and quantitative principle, as well as for the combinations of these. The Roman literary heritage shows examples of purely accentual, syllabic-quantitative, quantitative-syllabic, as well as of several other combinatory versification systems.

Sociosemiotic perspectives on studying culture and society

Author(s): Anti Randviir / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2001

The article analyses the position of sociosemiotics in the paradigm of contemporary semiotics. Principles of studying sociocultural phenomena are discussed so as they have been set for analysing the inner mechanisms of sign systems in the semiology of F. de Saussure on the one hand, and for studying sign systems and semiotic units as related to referential reality in the semiotics of C. S. Peirce on the other hand. Three main issues are touched upon to define the scope of sociosemiotics: the general methodology of sociosemiotics, its particular methods, and possible objects of analysis. The relevance of the features of objects in different humanitarian disciplines (cultural unit, historical fact, social fact, institutional fact, social process, etc.) is surveyed to define the object of study in sociosemiotics. Also, the article comments on the description of social organisations via cultural processes and on relations between an individual and society as controllable by social action models.

Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature

Author(s): Winfried Nöth / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural environment is discussed as a determining factor of ecosemiosis.

Beyond "universal grammar"

Author(s): Noam Chomsky / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

Dear Professor Barbieri, Just found this book at my office today, in the usual huge stack of mail, books, papers, etc. It looked so intriguing that I started reading it on the way home. Luckily for me, the bus was late, so I had more than the usual amount of time. It is really fascinating. About half way through before the bus stopped, I got back to it later. Your book is very much along the lines of my own recent work, in some ways. Since the modern subject of the study of language took shape about 50 years ago in what's sometimes called a "biolinguistic" framework, it seemed clear to me that some day we would have to try to go beyond "universal grammar" — the relevant genetic endowment — and try to find out not just what it is but why it is this way, looking for the kinds of factors you mention in discussing cellular epigenesis. I was much intrigued by work of Turing (1952) on morphogenesis, and D'Arcy Thompson's classic work (Thompson 1942). In recent years, enough has been learned so that the questions seem perhaps open to serious inquiry, and what seems to be a sensible research program has taken shape, with I think interesting results.

The emergence of signs of living feeling: Reverberations from the first Gatherings in Biosemiotics

Author(s): Claus Emmeche / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

What is biosemiotics and why bother — or gather — around it? During the final decade of the twentieth century, biosemiotics grew from being an idea conceived by a few semioticeans, biologists, ethologists and other specialists to becoming a more widely recognized perspective for the study of the "signs of life" as well as the "life of signs". Due to its unifying vision biosemiotics has implications, not only for a diversity of separate fields inside physics, biology, medicine, psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy as well as cross-disciplinary research programs such as cognitive science, artificial life or autonomous agents, but also for our very idea of living nature. Biosemiotic analysis may also offer interesting new ways of evaluating biological technology, and may also be seen as a fundamental new approach to theoretical biology. Biosemiotics has been on the agenda of many interna¬tional meetings, and the 1990s saw a couple of publications devoted to biosemiotics proper (e.g. Sign Systems Studies vols. 27 and 28; Semiotica vols. 120(3/4) and 127(1/4), etc.).

Cognition as expression: On the autopoietic foundations of an aesthetic theory of nature

Author(s): Andreas Weber / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

In memoriam Francisco J. Varela This paper attempts to put forward an aesthetic theory of nature based on a biosemiotic description of the living, which in turn is derived from an autopoietic theory of organism (F. Varela). An autopoietic system's reaction to material constraints is the unfolding of a dimension of meaning. In the outward Gestalt of autopoietic systems, meaning appears as form, and as such it reveals itself in a sensually graspable manner. The mode of being of organisms has an irreducible aesthetic side in which this mode of being becomes visible. Nature thus displays a kind of transparency of its own functioning: in a nondiscursive way organisms show traces of their conditio vitae through their material self-presentation. Living beings hence always show a basic level of expressiveness as a necessary component of their organic mode of being. This is called the ecstatic dimension of nature (G. Böhme, R. Corrington). Autopoiesis in its full consequence then amounts to a view reminding of Paracelsus' idea of the signatura rerum (C. Glacken, H. Böhme): nature is transparent, not because it is organized digitally as a linguistic text or code, but rather because it displays analogically the kind of intentionality engendered by autopoiesis. Nature as a whole, as "living form" (S. Langer), is a symbol for organic intentionality. The most fundamental meaning of nature protection thus is to guarantee the "real presence" of our soul.

Vital signs: An ecosemiotic perspective on the human ecology of Amazonia

Author(s): Alf Hornborg / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

Ecosemiotics represents a theoretical approach to human ecology that can be applied across several disciplines. Its primary justification lies in the ambition to transcend "Cartesian", conceptual dichotomies such as culture/nature, society/nature, mental/material, etc. It argues that ecosystems are constituted no less by flows of signs than by flows of matter and energy. This paper discusses the roles of different kinds of human sign systems in the ecology of Amazonia, ranging from the phenomenology of unconscious sensations, through linguistic signs such as metaphors and ethnobiological taxonomies, to money and the political economy of environmental destruction. Human-environmental relations mediated by direct, sensory and (oral) linguistic communication have tended to enhance biological diversity, suggesting modes of calibrating the long-term co-evolution of human and non-human populations. Economic sign systems, on the other hand, have rapidly and drastically transformed human-environmental relations in Amazonia to the point where the entire rainforest ecosystem is under threat. In detaching themselves from the direct, "face-to-face" communication between humans and their natural environments, flows of money and commodities — and the decontextualized knowledge systems that they engender — have no means of staying geared to the long-term negotiation of local, ecological co-existence. It is argued that the ongoing deterioration of the biosphere can be viewed as a problem of communication, deserving semiotic analysis.

Biosemiotics and ecological monitoring

Author(s): Luis Emilio Bruni / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

During the recent decades, a global cultural-institutional network has gradually grown up to project, implement, and use an enormous techno-logical web that is supposed to observe, monitor, communicate, inventory, and assess our environment and its biodiversity in order to implement sustainable management models. The majority of "knowledge tools" that have been incorporated in the mainstream of this "techno-web" are amply based on a combination of mechanistic biology, genetic reductionism, economical determinism and neo-Darwinian cultural and biological perspectives. These approaches leave aside many of the qualitative and relational aspects that can only be grasped by considering the semiotic networks operative in complex ecological and cultural systems. In this paper, it is suggested that a biosemiotic approach to ecology may prove useful for the modelling process which in turn will allow the construction of meaningful monitoring systems. It is also advanced that it may as well serve to better integrate our understanding and monitoring of ecosystems into the cultural process of searching for (human) sustainability.

S/E≥1: A semiotic understanding of bioengineering

Author(s): Jesper Hoffmeyer / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

Natural (non-cultivated) systems are tuned to economize their use of energy as much as possible, and thereby to produce minimal amounts of entropy. It is suggested that this has been obtained by optimizing the evolutionary creation of semiotic controls on all processes of life. As long as biological (ultimately photosynthetic) energy sources satisfied most human needs for energy consumption, these biosemiotic controls remained largely undisturbed, with the result that production systems remained sustainable. The industrial revolution instantiated a rupture of this balanced situation. The semiotic control function (S) would no longer match the size of the energy flow (E). In the industrial production system, energy flows have dramatically been increased, while the S component has not been taken care of. This has created a dangerously low S/E ratio, and it is suggested that this low S/E ratio constitutes a fundamental explanation of the environmental crisis. In order to restore a sustainable production system, we will now have to develop technological means for a strong increase in the S factor of the production system. It is sug-gested that this can be obtained through a development of considerate, gentle, and clever forms ofbiosemiotic technology.

Ecosemiotics and cybersemiotics

Author(s): Søren Brier / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

The article develops a suggestion of how cybersemiotics is pertinent to ecosemiotics. Cybersemiotics uses Luhmann's triadic view of autopoietic systems (biological, psychological, and socio-communicative autopoiesis) and adopts his approach to communication within a biosemiotic framework. The following levels of exosemiosis and signification can be identified under the consideration of nonintentional signs, cybernetics, and information theory: (1) the socio-communicative level of self-conscious signification and language games, (2) the instinctual and species specific level of sign stimuli signifying through innate release response mechanism and sign games, and (3) the level of structural coupling, signal recognition, and languaging, where cybernetic feedback loops evince differences. Signification and communication levels arise whenever autopoietic systems interpenetrate (1) with the language system's semiotic and the psyche's phenosemiotic processes based on imaging, emotion, and volition and (2) between the psyche's phenosemiotic and the body's endosemiotic processes. It is at these two levels that we have the ecosemiotic signification processes of nonintentional signs in nature. Humans are linguistic cyborgs as animals are sign cyborgs because signs at different levels interpenetrate and form our embodied processes. Sign producing and interpreting capability has had selective influence on both animals and humans in evolution.

Ecosemiotics and the sustainability transition

Author(s): Max Oelschlaeger / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

The emerging epistemic community of ecosemioticians and the mul-tidisciplinary field of inquiry known as ecosemiotics offer a radical and relevant approach to so-called global environmental crisis. There are no environmental fixes within the dominant code, since that code overdetermines the future, thereby perpetuating ecologically untenable cultural forms. The possibility of a sustainability transition (the attempt to overcome destitution and avoid ecocatastrophe) becomes real when mediated by and through ecosemiotics. In short, reflexive awareness of humankind's linguisticality is a necessary condition for transforming ecologically maladaptive cultural forms. As a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research program integrating the human and natural sciences, ecosemiotic inquiry closes the gap between biophysical ecology and human ecology. A provisional outline of a pragmatic theory of ecosemiotics attempts to describe the processes by which adaptive cultural changes might be facilitated and points toward substantive content areas that constitute sites for further research. Ecosemiotic inquiry frames cultural codes as these shape and reproduce the ongoing stream of individual and societal choices that shape distinctively human existence in a larger context of biophysical realities that drive natural selection. However, while ecosemiotics is a necessary condition for the sustainability transition, it is not a sufficient condition.

Biosemiotics and the problem of intrinsic value of nature

Author(s): Kalevi Kull / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

This article poses the hypothesis that the problem of the intrinsic value of nature that stems from the work of G. E. Moore and is widely discussed in environmental philosophy, has a parallel in a contemporary discussion in semiotics on the existence of semiosis in nature. From a semiotic point of view, value can be defined as an intentional dimension of sign. This is concordant with a biological interpretation of value that relates to biological needs. Thus, a semiotic approach in biology may provide a useful tool for further analysis of the intrinsic value problem in the biological realm. From an ecosemiotic point of view, the problem is also related to the concepts ofbioart and ecoart. Ecoart viz environmental art is that which encompasses the human ambience, e.g., landscape or its components. Bioart can be defined as the art whose material ("clay") is a living body, living matter or communication of organisms (which may include, e.g., genetic engineering). It is concluded that the acceptance of biosemiotic view has implications for a large area of ecological philosophy.

Introduction: Special issue on semiotics of nature

Author(s): Kalevi Kull,Winfried Nöth / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

Bioinvasion, globalization, and the contingency of cultural and biological diversity: Some ecosemiotic observations

Author(s): Claus Emmeche / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

The increasing problem of bioinvasion (the mixing up of natural species characterising the planet's local ecosystems due to globalisation) is investigated as an example of an ecosemiotic problematic. One concern is the scarcity of scientific knowledge about long term ecological and evolutionary consequences of invading species. It is argued that a natural science conception of the ecology of bioinvasion should be supplemented with an ecosemiotic understanding of the significance of these problems in relation to human culture, the question of cultural diversity, and what it means to be indigenous or foreign. Bioinvasion, extinction of native species, and overall decrease in biodiversity, may go along with decreased cultural diversity; as when the loss of local agricultural traditions lead to genetic erosion. There are possible ecosemiotic parallels between language extinction and species extinction, both being related to globalisation. It is argued that the case of bioinvasion reveals the existence of two kinds of ecosemiotic contingency, (1) evolutionary open-ended and partly random generation of new species and extinction of old ones; (2) the historicity of culture in general and "culture's nature" specifically in the demarcation of a set of landscapes characteristic to a particular nation and piece ofhuman history.

Wilderness from an ecosemiotic perspective

Author(s): Christina Ljungberg / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

"Wilderness" is a concept which has undergone a radical change in recent years. Owing to the scale of global destruction of the wilderness and its various ecosystems, the idea of wilderness has been transformed from its original negative sense as an Other into a matter of public concern. This as replaced the understanding ofwilderness " not only as a place but as a category closely linked with the development of human culture. As the result of human practice and representation, nature is thus also political. Models and concepts of nature in the creative arts can be indicative of a certain culture's relationship with nature, as they communicate prevailing ideologies. This is particularly pertinent to concepts of nature in Canada where wilderness includes vast tracts of forests, lakes and an Arctic North, which has led to a distinctively Canadian relationship between Canadians and their natural environment. The change in the literary representations of interactions between humankind and environment in Canadian fiction — from the "double vision" resulting from the view of the wilderness both as a threatening Other and free space; to the view of threatened nature as a means of identification; and, finally, as a postmodern place of transgression and possibility — invites questions about both the semiotic threshold between nature and culture, and about the function of boundaries in the constitution of identity.

Mimicry: Towards a semiotic understanding of nature

Author(s): Timo Maran / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

Mimicry has been an important topic for biology since the rise of the Darwinian theory of evolution. However, by its very nature mimicry is a sign process and the quest for understanding mimicry in biology has intrinsically always been a semiotic quest. In this paper various theories since Henry W. Bates will be examined to show how the concept of mimicry has been shifted from perceptual resemblance to a particular communicative structure. A concept of mimicry will then be formulated which emphasizes its dynamic properties, and finally, mimicry will be considered in the framework of ecosemiotics.

Table of Contents

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

Physiosemiosis in the semiotic spiral: A play of musement

Author(s): John Deely / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

A main question for semiotics today is how far does the paradigm for the action of signs, semiosis, extend. There is general agreement by now that semiosis extends at least as far as awareness or cognition occurs, which includes the entire domain of animal sign usage, or zoosemiosis. The open question today is whether semiotics is broader still, and on this question two positions have emerged. The comparatively conservative position would extend semiotics to the whole of living things. This extension was first formally proposed and argued under the label phytosemiotics, the study of an action of signs in the realm of vegetable life. The conservative faction has rallied around the label of iiosemiotics. The more radical faction argues that even this extension leaves something out, namely, the physical universe at large which surrounds and upon which depends all life. The radical argument is that what is distinctive of the action of signs is the shaping of the past on the basis of future events, a shaping that can be discerned even in the rocks and among the stars — a veritable physiosemiosis, theoretical justification and practical exploration of which marks the final frontier of semiotic inquiry.

Towards a semiotic definition of trash

Author(s): Riste Keskpaik / Language(s): Issue: 1/2001

The phenomenon of trash has rarely been addressed in the cultural theoretical literature. However, its structural similarity with the concept of taboo as well as its role in the dynamics of culture has been stated. Current paper aims to summarize the partial contributions that have been made so far, localize them in a larger semiotic framework, and deriving from Lotman's approach to culture suggest a few further ideas for a semiotic definition of trash. It is proposed to define trash as a phenomenon marking the boundary between culture and non-culture/nature. In the context of the deepening environmental crisis (to which accumulation of trash contributes) a semiotic approach opens a new perspective for identifying the origin of the problem in our mind/culture rather than in nature.