Paul Cobley’s impact on biosemiotics: Thomas Sebeok’s next century

1 Introduction

The depths of British intellectuals are somewhat hard to fathom for a Finno-Ugrian, since the former are so culturally rich and nuanced, while the latter rather undisciplined. Surprisingly, my encounters with academics of that country, several of whom are leaders in their fields, have all turned out to be truly positive, productive, friendly, and lasting. Notably so with Paul Cobley, from lovely Whitstable, already for around 25 years.

Paul Cobley has identified himself with communication and media studies (Kotov 2003), and he is certainly a narratologist and a literary scholar, but foremost of all he is a great semiotician. Although a semiotician of humanitarian background, Cobley’s attention to and writings in biosemiotics stand out as essentially remarkable.

Leaders of a field may to a considerable extent redesign their area. This is not only through their writings, research, and theoretical work, but also due to their editorial and organizational impact, which may play an important role in it. Paul Cobley has been actively involved in all these facets of semiotics.

The history and development of biosemiotics consists of contributions both from and to biology and semiotics. The core of biosemiotics is in biology, since this encompasses the problems of meaning-making in organisms, relationships between action and perception, plasticity and capacities to learn, and organisms’ umwelt (or subjective world) and knowing, together with the role of communication in the organization of social groups, species, and ecosystems. These all belong to the main study area of biosemiotics, without which biology is fundamentally incomplete or – to put it otherwise – without which life as such cannot be understood.

On the other hand, biosemiotics belongs to semiotics. The foundations of semiotics certainly lie deeper than those of human language and thought. The origin of subjectivity and the primary organization of meaningful communication became settled far before the origin of human species. Therefore, semiotics cannot build up its theory without delving into the studies of pre-linguistic models: semiotics cannot ground its theory without biosemiotics.

Semiotics is millennia old, whereas this aspect – the necessity of biology – has been specially studied in semiotics only during three or four recent decades. Paul Cobley’s activity in semiotics began in the 1990s, so he fits entirely into this new era in the history of semiotics.

Below, I’ve attempted to gather a bibliography of Cobley’s explicitly biosemiotic publications. These works, certainly, have to be understood in the context of Cobley’s larger role in semiotics as a whole.

2 An integrator

Working several years as a “Reader in Communications” at London Metropolitan University, later as Professor of Semiotics and Communications at the same university, and since 2013 as Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University, London, he would publish The communication theory reader (Cobley 1996), The media: An introduction (Briggs and Cobley 1998), and soon after that the monographs The American thriller (Cobley 2000) and Narrative (Cobley 2001a), and many more.

With what is apparently his first publication in semiotics – the graphic guide Semiotics for beginners (Cobley and Jansz 1997) – he made himself immediately known all over the semiotics world. This little volume is amazingly balanced in presenting the whole field of semiotics and its history. Among other things, it describes Jakob von Uexküll’s and Sebeok’s zoosemiotic work. In fact, this book became the most widely translated and reprinted one among all semiotics books (see Kull et al. 2015). This book was followed by a semiotics dictionary that he compiled and edited (Cobley 2001b), the second edition of which – The Routledge companion to semiotics (Cobley 2010a) – provides a remarkably wide inclusion of biosemiotic material.

I would say more. Every semiotician should be familiar with the influential work by Greimas and Courtés (1982), Semiotics and language: An analytical dictionary, which listed semiotic concepts as used in 1960s and 1970s, before the biosemiotic turn. What Cobley (2010a) did is devise a dictionary for the new era of semiotics, overtaking the work of the Greimas school.

Indeed, Paul Cobley’s academic life coincides with the period when biosemiotics established itself stepwise within semiotics. This was not a seamless process, since a suspicion toward biologization was widespread in the humanities – for a serious reason, because of justified opposition to neo-Darwinian ideological outcomes. The fact that biosemiotics provides an alternative to neo-Darwinian biology might not have been immediately recognized. Biosemiotics is a biology that follows, among others, the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas Sebeok. Cobley’s integrative approach to semiotics, which includes non-human material in general semiotics, largely follows Sebeok’s view on semiotics. Several of Paul’s preferences in semiotics are rather similar to Sebeok’s.

Still, Paul Cobley almost did not include animal communication material in his earlier communication theories reviews. He and Peter Schulz explain this in their introduction to a communication theories volume:

At the root of communication science, to be sure, it is possible that a broad conception of communication would be tenable. This would include communication among animals and plants. However, communication scientists have been mindful of the fact that the entire field would be untenable if its central conception of communication was too broad. The way that communication science has so far manifested itself has meant that the key concern has been with human communication. (Cobley and Schulz 2013b: 6)

But time goes on and Cobley now stands even closer to biosemiotics (Figure 1). Since 2015, he has been a member of the Board of the International Society for Biosemiotics Studies, and in 2016, he wrote a monograph on biosemiotics (Cobley 2016; see discussion in Favareau 2023).

Figure 1:

Gatherings in Biosemiotics 2017, Lausanne, Switzerland. From right to left: Paul Cobley, Timo Maran, Donald Favareau, Kalevi Kull, Luis Bruni.

3 Some further points of emphasis

In his remarkable book, Cultural implications of biosemiotics (Cobley 2016), Cobley sets out a whole program describing the importance of biosemiotics for humanities, cultural studies, and more. He formulates eight implications, of which the first two are these (Cobley 2016: xiv):

Implication 1: Potentially, this is the age of biosemiotics. There is now a consolidated and focused literature in the field.

Implication 2: Semiotics holds the key to understanding culture, but semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a biosemiotic basis.

There have appeared several reviews on Cobley’s Cultural implications of biosemiotics. Some of these, particularly from the scholars who have not used a Peircean approach, are slightly critical, like Boklund-Lagopoulou (2017) and Cowley (2018), as the former writes: “I am not really convinced that biosemiotics as it currently stands has many implications for culture” (Boklund-Lagopoulou 2017: 139), while most others are strongly supportive, such as Brier (2017), Hope (2017), Zhou (2018), and Favareau (2023).

A conceptual statement that Paul Cobley repeatedly makes is that there is no biosemiosis, there is semiosis. Which means: there is already true semiosis in the life of organisms of species other than humans, and the humanities should take account of this. Thus all semioticians should look at the developments of biosemiotics and use general semiotics, which introduces a series of fundamental semiotic concepts that are valid in the realm of cognitive meaning-making in a large variety of species.

A central concept of biosemiotics-based semiotics is umwelt. As Jesper Hoffmeyer (1996: 58) wrote: “[…] umwelt theory tells us that it is not only genes, individuals, and species that survive, but also – and perhaps rather – patterns of interpretation.” This is followed by Cobley. The special issue of The American Journal of Semiotics titled as “Umwelt Explorations,” which includes essays by Paul Cobley, the 9th Semiotics Society of America’s Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow, includes three essays by Paul Cobley (Cobley 2014b, 2014c, 2014d).

Cobley explores many aspects of biosemiotic semiotics. For instance, he provides an analysis of implications of biosemiotics for ideology (Cannizzaro and Cobley 2015; Cobley 2016; cf. Puumeister and Ventsel 2018). In a collective paper “How can the study of the humanities inform the study of biosemiotics?” (Favareau et al. 2017), Cobley contributed two sections: “Semiotics” (14–16) and “Biosemiotics and learning” (with Frederik Stjernfelt, 18–20). He has repeatedly contributed to the journal Biosemiotics (Cobley 2010b; Cobley and Stjernfelt 2015; Ireland and Cobley 2022) and to other biosemiotics volumes (e.g. Cobley 2017a, 2017b).

Paul Cobley has carried on Thomas Sebeok’s tradition in semiotics, taking care that it does not become too narrow, while not losing its creative potentials. Similarly to Sebeok, he is a “pollinator” between groups and people, greatly facilitating transfer of ideas.

4 A writer about biosemioticians and their work

Paul’s attention to other scholars’ work in semiotics is remarkable. His lovely home-garden office is completely full of books. Of scholars in biosemiotics, he has published writings about Thomas Sebeok (Cobley 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Cobley et al. 2011), John Deely (Cobley 2009; Cobley et al. 2017), Søren Brier (Cobley 2010c; Thellefsen et al. 2011), Jesper Hoffmeyer (Cobley 2012b; Favareau et al. 2012), Marcello Barbieri (Cobley 2014a), Donald Favareau (Cobley 2017b; Kull and Cobley 2017), and Kalevi Kull (Cobley 2012a, 2022).

We should also mention Cobley’s book reviews. Among them we find a review of Sebeok’s Global semiotics (Cobley 2002) and two reviews of our first collective Springer volume on biosemiotics, Introduction to biosemiotics (Cobley 2008a, 2008b).

5 An organizer of biosemiotic meetings

Besides organization of semiotics on a global scale (see Cobley and Bankov 2016), Paul has done much in helping to organize biosemiotic events and meetings. He has himself been a main organizer of some of these, which notably have had a remarkable impact.

One of these, probably the first biosemiotic meeting organized by Paul Cobley, took place on March 23, 2005, in London. It was a small symposium, with four guest lectures, given by Jesper Hoffmeyer, Frederik Stjernfelt, Søren Brier, and Kalevi Kull. The meeting was attended among others by Wendy Wheeler, whose writings and network facilitated the following biosemiotic turn in literary studies and ecocriticism.

Another remarkable symposium, which later became an annual roundtable, was “Integrationism and Biosemiotics” (January 9–10, 2019, London). It was organized by Paul Cobley together with Adrian Pablé, Christopher Hutton, and Johan Siebers and sought the links between the linguistic integrationism of Roy Harris and biosemiotics. It resulted in a special issue of the journal Sign Systems Studies titled “Integrationism, biosemiotics, philosophy of communication” (Cobley et al. 2020a). Let me quote an important point from the introduction:

Signs come into being the moment they are needed and they perish as soon as an individual act of integration has been completed. Not only language is a practice of integration; any relationality that we can think of comes about on the basis of integrating cotemporal activities of various kinds. Integrationism takes the radical nature of its proposal seriously: as sign-making is a radically contextual and individual affair, there is no objective outsider-perspective, no view from nowhere that could claim priority with respect to the nature of first-order sign-making practices as they occur in real life. (Cobley et al. 2020b: 7–8)

Moreover, Paul Cobley has become a regular participant in and contributor to Gatherings in Biosemiotics, including organizing one of the gatherings himself – the fourteenth in the series (June 30–July 4, 2014, in London). He is an active participant on the Board of the International Society for Biosemiotics Studies and has attended many biosemiotics seminars, also in Estonia.

6 An editor

Paul has been a most efficient editor in semiotics, in the footsteps of Thomas A. Sebeok, editing the journal Social Semiotics (together with David Machin), the book series “Semiotics, Communication and Cognition” (with Kalevi Kull), the volumes of Communication theories (Cobley 2006), the multi-volume Handbooks of communication sciences (with Peter J. Schulz [Cobley and Schulz 2013a]), and several individual volumes (e.g. the recent Pelkey and Cobley 2022), including dictionaries (Cobley 2001b, 2010a). Among these publications, we should not forget the special issue of the journal Biosemiotics “Agency and (the built) environment,” which he edited together with Tim Ireland (Ireland and Cobley 2022).

What Paul does as an editor is not just compile volumes or interact with authors and publishers. He invests a great deal of time in helping contributors to improve their texts, often himself doing language editing or technical work with their manuscripts.

7 Coda

A recipient of the Sebeok award (2014), the highest existing award to semioticians, and the President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (since 2014), Paul Cobley is an acknowledged leader of contemporary semiotics in the world. This is the semiotics of the twenty-first century, the development of the program set up by Thomas A. Sebeok and many others according to which "semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a biosemiotic basis.” And above all, Paul is a good friend, a lover of music and books, and a person who meets the world with a great sense of humor.