Transcending the mid-most target: Paul Cobley and the cultural implications of biosemiotics

1 Introduction

Collegial disagreement – especially when it is genuinely without rancor, and over issues of conceptual framing – is one of the more rewarding parts of being involved in a community of scholars. Paul Cobley and I hit it off instantly at our first meeting at the IASS conference in Lyon, France in 2004. Yet virtually from the very beginning, and in all the years following, he and I have been divided on the issue as to whether the interdisciplinary research agenda of biosemiotics is, as I have long believed, first and foremost a concerted effort to make a profound intervention in the ways that the contemporary life sciences elide, and in some sense even explicitly deny, the reality (much less the centrality) of semiosis in organizing both the bodies and the behavior of non-human organisms – or whether such an intervention, as Paul has long held, is at best a “mid-most target” (cf. Deely 2004, invoking Sebeok), necessary but not sufficient for its ultimate objective of re-orienting human beings to their true place in nature and society as thoroughgoingly semiosic and semiotic animals, with all of the self-understanding and responsibility that accrues to that latter aspect of their being.

Indeed, Paul has gone so far as to argue that biosemiotics’ goal of convincing the life sciences to finally grapple with the ubiquity of sign processes qua sign processes as they manifest across the multiple biological levels of living being – while an unquestionably worthy one in its own right, “seems rather modest and, even, desolate […] given the implications of biosemiotics for our understandings of human social life and culture” (Cobley 2008: 203).

Unsurprisingly, Paul and I could always agree that both these kinds of work: one, the effort to “semiotize” the natural sciences, the other, the effort to “naturalize” semiotics, must work in tandem in order to accomplish their complimentary goals (Cobley 2008; Favareau 2008). But until the publication of Paul’s monograph-length Cultural implications of biosemiotics in 2016, I must confess that, given my own background and deep interests in advancing the former agenda, I never fully appreciated all the nuances – and, especially, the urgency – of Paul’s argument for the latter. I do so now, however, after reading this absolutely seminal volume, and will attempt to explain why in the following long-overdue review of it.

2 A brief but deeply considered history of biosemotics

Germane to the above discussion, Paul (henceforth: Cobley) prefaces the volume by noting that “because biosemiotics is peopled by a truly transdisciplinary section of scholars, from both the sciences and the nonsciences, there are bound to be some differences in our self-conception as a group” (xi). The present monograph, he tells the reader, is thus addressed both to those who are already a part of the biosemiotics community and to those from other disciplines – especially those disciplines that we broadly call the humanities and the social sciences – who are as yet unacquainted with the project, in the hopes that they may find useful for their own investigations, some of its major tenets, findings, and ideas.

The volume proper begins, then, with what he self-effacingly characterizes as “a much truncated literature review” (xv), but that actually constitutes a concise yet extremely edifying introduction to most of the major concepts and concerns of contemporary biosemiotics – one that provides the reader with a firm foundational understanding of some of the most fundamental insights of Peirce, Deely, Hoffmeyer, Sebeok, Brier, Deacon, and von Uexküll that underlie and inform the present field.

The following chapter, continuing in this vein, reviews how earlier developments in general semiotic studies gave rise to the biosemiotic project – with an emphasis, quite rightly, on the sea-change introduced by Thomas A. Sebeok and colleagues in the last three decades of the twentieth century, as they expanded the study of semiotics beyond just that of human language and culture to examine sign-use in the animal, plant, fungi, and multicellular “endosemiotic” domains. This broadened the then-dominant structuralist and semiological perspectives of the discipline to incorporate, and often grapple with, the more fluidly processual and pre-linguistic perspectives of Poinsot, von Uexküll, and Peirce.

Here, Cobley argues convincingly that if our current historical moment is indeed, as he maintains, the dawning of “The Age of Biosemiotics” (as he entitles Chapter 1 in the volume), it is so precisely because of the work done by Sebeok and his colleagues in general semiotics in the 1970s through 1990s – and that Sebeok’s eventual inclusion of actual biologists such as Thure von Uexküll, Giorgio Prodi, Yoshimi Kawade, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Claus Emmeche, and Kalevi Kull into this community was a natural outgrowth of this effort, as opposed to an outsider-driven co-opting or takeover of it.

Thus far, all of the above might seem to be an expert, yet standard, account of the basic history, insights, and terminology of biosemiotics. Coming from a communications and semiotics background, however, Cobley is uniquely qualified to be able to perceive and draw out the implications of these ideas for human beings’ self-understanding (and misunderstandings) of themselves in ways that are not necessarily apparent to the biologists and related life-scientists contributing to, or even just interested in, the field. And making manifest those implications, indeed, is exactly what Cobley does so thoroughgoingly in the remainder of the volume.

3 Avoiding the pars pro toto fallacy of human semiosis

Introductory material out of the way, from Chapter 3 on, Cobley begins meticulously building his central argument that the continuity of nature and culture has become artificially dichotomized both by the sciences and by the humanities – the former “blind to the role of meaning” in the natural world, and the latter “blind to the role of nature” that informs and inheres in all acts of semiosis, and has done so since long before human beings arrived upon the scene. Such deeply ingrained pars pro toto fallacies have impoverished our understanding of ourselves and, in turn, our dealings with both society and nature, he argues. Accordingly, overcoming this false dichotomy and all of its dolorous downstream effects for human and environmental flourishing, and re-establishing, instead, a non-naïve and non-eliminativist continuity between natural and cultural being is thus the “synechistic perspective that this book is attempting to explicate as one of the main cultural implications of biosemiotics” (10).

Cobley makes the argument that examining this continuity more closely, as biosemiotics does, rather than denying it, reveals both how sign-use and meaning-making are active and embodied processes found in all of living nature – and how humans, as one small, recent subset of such living nature, have not only come to at least partially distinguish themselves in their capacity to model the external world itself through sign-use, as do also all other organisms, but, in addition, have become uniquely able to model their very own acts of modeling, using the displacive and abstractive signs afforded to them by human language.

Human language, Cobley notes, however, is not what creates sign-use; sign-use, rather, is what underlies and far predates the appearance of human language. Indeed, the most fundamental form of sign-use, as it is understood in biosemiotics, is von Uexküll’s (1928) functional circle, whereby an organism’s perceptual experience and its motoric experience of effecting causal action in the world join together to become meaningfully interpenetrative – resulting in an experiential world of meaningful relations that von Uexküll calls its Umwelt, through which the organism then acts and lives.^[1] The capacity for such sign-use and its resulting Umwelten is one we share with all living systems, and it is this capacity that underlies and makes possible all of the various higher-level forms of modeling, cognition, and – in the human case – symbolic discourse, each of which are progressively built upon it.

Drawing upon the work of the Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics, particularly as revised and extended by Sebeok and Danesi (2000), Cobley notes that “primary modelling in humans is the capacity for verbal and non-verbal communication,” which does not yet include words or language (e.g. as can be seen to be the case with our hominid ancestors, as well as all the other creatures that use sounds as signs by which to know the world and to communicate in it). Secondary modeling, accordingly, adds linguiform spoken and written sign-use into the toolkit of our collective acts of modeling, while “tertiary modelling is the extension, through the inevitable mutation in social exchange, of primary and secondary modelling to produce cultural forms (including predominantly verbal ones – e.g. novels; non-verbal forms – e.g. paintings; and mixed forms – e.g. theatre) which not only partake of the lower strata of modelling but also feed back into them” (34–35, italics added).

Accordingly, one of the key implications of biosemiotics for future cultural study, argues Cobley, is that it makes no sense to think of human being and human doing “only” on the level of their tip-of-the-iceberg linguistic symbolic discourse – as is still too often done in traditional cultural and humanistic inquiry – given that such relations cannot even intelligibly exist apart from the pre-verbal iconic and indexical levels of reference which scaffold them, nor from the hundreds of thousands, if not billions, of years of biological habit-taking, as well as from the perpetually ongoing and non-linguistic endosemiosis that constitutes our very being, and that likewise informs us constantly.

Even more importantly, “the point to be made about primary modelling – a point that runs through Sebeok’s post-1979 work but which was never offered in a definitive formulation,” writes Cobley, is that

primary modelling is an acute and developing cognitive capacity to differentiate within an Umwelt. The more humans differentiate, the more they enhance their Umwelt […]. [Such] differentiation is a (by-)product of proliferating semiosis – which inevitably incur sociality. Since taking signs in isolation is invariably an act of extreme abstraction, the object of semiotics, even biosemiotics, is concerned with this sociality of semiosis. (34–36, italics added)

These two points italicized above – the latter, that semiosis is ineliminably social, and the former, that the health of any semiotic system lies in its ability to preserve and facilitate the conditions under which the diversity of semiosis and the growth of signs can flourish – are, in my reading, the twin pillars undergirding the main, and penetratingly original, argument of the Cultural implication of biosemiotics volume, and Cobley goes on to develop both of them and their cultural implications in-depth, subsequently in the text.

4 Unblocking the path of inquiry

Having thus established that “language” is “rooted in the doings and development of hominids [and] is not to be considered as removed, like a sovereign, from all animals’ modelling, [but instead] contains elementary modelling processes as part of the more sophisticated process” (36), Cobley effectively urges not only a de-ontologization in the way that we understand the concept of language, but – even more consequentially for those already working in the field of biosemiotics – an even more thoroughgoingly de-ontologization of our understanding of Umwelt. Rather than being some private, interior, Kantian bubble in which individuals are trapped and cannot escape, Umwelt, Cobley reminds us, is first and foremost “a matter of being, for the simple reason that it is a species’ very mode of inhabiting” (38, italics added). Very few signs that guide us in our Umwelten are our own exclusive creations – quite the opposite: most we have created with, or are in full the primary creation of, others – many of whom are far removed from us in time and space. Umwelt, like semiosis, is thus essentially a social phenomenon – and its sociality far predates and exceeds what we usually think of as human “culture” in its familiar form.

Such de-ontologization is at the heart of most of the arguments in Cultural implication of biosemiotics. And throughout, one of the most paradigm-changing of the cultural implications that Cobley finds in biosemiotics is the transcendence of the concept of singular and discretely identifiable individuals – which, in turn, calls forth the transcendence of singular and discretely identifiable sign meanings, loci of agency, modalities of semiosis, and interpretive possibilities.

For in addition to “its insights into what it is to be human, biosemiotics also re-formulates what it is to be a human subject,” writes Cobley, and in so doing:

It upsets notions regarding the distinction between collectivity and the individual that have contributed to ‘common sense’ in the modern world, especially since the French Revolution... [Accordingly.] the Cartesian perspective on subjectivity, which focused specifically on the cogito or the ‘I’ providing sustenance for individualism, has been found to be particularly incompatible [with] biosemiotics’ insistence on continuity of semiosis across all of nature to the sphere of human affairs. (46–49)

Selfhood, as biosemiotics argues, is at best a heuristic term for a fluid and always intersecting milieu of bodily and cultural sign processes and exchanges, and not the innate private property of an autonomous Cartesian homunculus, much less the product of “cogito, ergo sum” (Hoffmeyer 1996). Rather, and sensu Peirce, “the barbaric conception of personal identity” (EP 2: 3) that holds that: “I am altogether myself, and not at all you” (CP 7.571) is at best a dangerous delusion and at worst “a metaphysics of wickedness” (quoted on 47; see also Cobley 2014a).

It is no surprise, then, that in Chapter 5, Cobley turns his attention to the similarly so often mis-framed discussion of human ethics, arguing strenuously that a naïve ethics of individualistic voluntarism will, like all of the aforementioned reifications and binaries, lead us only further into personal, interpersonal, and environmental wrongdoing and disaster.

5 Semioethics and anti-voluntarism

Cobley begins his discussion of a biosemiotically informed understanding of ethics as follows:

The idea of ‘ethics’ as a moral system which has developed from the early seventeenth century onwards contains a basic contradiction in that it implies both a programme for behaviour, and the will or agency to produce, adhere to and reproduce that programme […]. Clearly allied to the conception of will, certainly recognizable in the contemporary Western social formation is the sense of ethics as a phenomenon in discourse [and one that] remains allied to individualism, rationalism, Cartesianism and, among other things that are not ‘isms’, the potential for local and global failure. (61–62, italics added)

Both such glottocentrism and the misguided concept of effective autonomous willed agency make the concepts of voluntarism and vanguardism antithetical to the insights of biosemiotics, argues Cobley – noting that Engels himself realized the contradictions inherent in such a limited vision and, “in what was a socio-political discourse but could quite easily have been a biosemiotic one,” observes that:

That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances, numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient; thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. (Engels 1946 [1886], cited in Cobley 2016: 68, italics added)

“For Engels,” notes Cobley, “it is the vagaries of history which dictate the ground for political action or ethics […],” and similarly, “the biosemiotic concept of ethics is grounded in anti-humanist ^[2] principles which echo Engels, but they do so at the level of life, or living nature” (68). This is so because they take into account that large non- and pre-discursive part of all our sign-use that actually provides the motivations, possibilities, interpretative options, and – because of semiosis’ underlying, inherent realism – the non-self-made “conditions under which we choose,” so central to the ideas of Marx.

Such overdetermining “conditions” include not only the physical constraints of mind-independent reality, Cobley argues, but – and just as consequentially – the pre-given and now sedimented repressions, elisions, and overdeterminations of cultural history and interaction. Drawing upon the theories of “generative and facilitative constraints” found in Terrence Deacon’s (2011) work, Cobley then shows how such conditions of interacting constraints: (1) allow for both mutual intelligibility, as well as reliable predictability by reducing (or what biologists might call canalizing) the degrees of interpretative freedom in an individual's reaction to a a given sign, (2) while at the same time open up new possibility spaces on the emergent level of their collective use and re-use with transformation over time (see here also Goodwin 2018).

Thus, and as Marx and Engel’s (and Cobley’s) critique makes clear we cannot as individuals escape our ever-present situatedness with a matrix of signs not of our own making. “Like anxiety,” notes Cobley, the ground of cultural, institutional, and interpersonal canalization “is semiotic in nature: it contains an ‘idea’ and associations to that idea.” As such,

Capitalism, and latterly, global communication, has constituted a sustained repression of dialogue, a force blocking the ultimate inescapable demand of the other. Typically, individualism has been the touchstone of this enterprise, but this has been accelerated in late capitalism through the promotion of monologic identity. In short: one set of impulses and associations advances while another is impeded (93–94, italics added)

What we can do, however, as agentive loci of semiotic interaction and communication acting always within a collective, and given that we are “the exceptional animal that knows it uses signs,” Cobley argues, is to re-frame our understandings and our actions so as to more collectively “care for semiosis or, by association, all life on the planet” by “assuming some sort of stewardship over nature” that would actively maintain and promote “the diversity of semiosis” in both culture and the environment (123; and as also argued for persuasively in Cobley 2007).

Semiocide – the colonization or elimination of another culture’s or species’ signs of meaning (Maran 2013; Uslu 2020) – as well as ideology, the deliberate degeneration of semiosis into signals, and the subsequent hollowing out of their interpretative possibilities, sensu Bennett’s (2021) “tardo-signs” – are thus the twin existential threats to semiotic flourishing for human beings both individually and collectively, Cobley’s argument implies, as well as for the bio-/semiosphere as a whole. “In this light,” writes Cobley, “what might be considered ‘care of the self’, can only realistically proceed from a ‘care of others’, where ‘others’ must mean the entirety of the semiosphere” (65).

Enabled by the only Umwelten that we know of where signs qua signs and relations per se can and do show up as objects of experience, a truly biosemiotic ethics, argues Cobley, demands the active human maintenance of such conditions whereby semiotic openness and diversity are in such sufficient quality and quantity as to counter-balance the tendencies toward entropy and totalization that permeate, mutatis mutandis, both nature and culture.

Yet in order to remain consistent with the insights of biosemiotics, Cobley again warns us, this project must be an anti-volunteerist one. “Peirce was extremely suspicious of conceiving ethics as a scientific positing of the moral values of a community, and this tallies with his extreme disdain for the idea of the unified individual,” writes Cobley, noting that “biosemiotics shares this suspicion and disdain. Ethics in biosemiotics, because it arises from the displacement facility of humans, might be malleable and manifested in a number of ways; ultimately, however, it is a nested product of the continuity of semiosis” (70). Accordingly, notes Cobley, in summarizing one of the main take-away lessons of the book:

The implications of this [insight], for the temptations that might exist in current understandings to maintain the binary of self/other – as well as individual/collectivity, agent/subject, verbal/nonverbal, non-human/human, matter/mind, living nature/culture – are clear: not only are the binaries false oppositions, but the human Umwelt, characterized by its constant drive to expand its range, should not allow such binaries to hinder its enrichment. As Peirce (1.135) would say, “Do not block the way of inquiry.” That culture and the study of culture have the foremost role to play in this should go without saying. (139)

And indeed, the final chapter of the book, “Humanities are natural” brilliantly explicates Cobley’s central conceit that, both for ethics and for life, “[h]uman agency is not a matter of standing outside semiosis, and administering signs like an air traffic controller, as humanist understandings of the humanities would have it” (115). Rather, this chapter effectively argues, perhaps the central “cultural implication” that the adoption of the biosemiotic perspective can effect is the profoundly non-dualistic understanding that “[h]uman agency is the Umwelt; humans are within the products of semiosis that make up the objects of the humanities” (115, italics added).

Adopting that perspective not only changes our understanding of our place on the continuum with all other living beings – much as the “just do a good enough job semiotizing biology, and the knock-on effects for culture will automatically ensue” crowd might assume it would^[3] – but, and perhaps more importantly, forces upon us the uniquely human question of how we as “the symbolic species” might use this knowledge to cultivate, rather than to continue to decimate, the conditons under which we and all the other species survive  – and here is where Cultural implications of biosemiotics comes in to actually provide a program for such biosemiotic caretaking. It is to that program, which constitutes both the culmination and the central forward-looking vision of the monograph, that we now turn.

6 What are the humanities for?

Bringing together into a fine articulation a collection of arguments that he has been advancing for at least the last ten years (Cobley 2010, 2014b, 2014c, Cobley and Stjernfelt 2015; Favareau et al. 2017), Cobley in these final chapters begins with a reminder that what we call today the humanities “in their most familiar form are a product of nineteenth-century Western education” that

developed in tandem with the forging of a liberal hegemony in industrial society of that period and contributed to the reproduction, through instruction, in what is civilized and ‘good’ – of the bourgeois class in their mercantile and civic incarnations; [while the more recent so-called] decline of the humanities has arguably occurred steadily through the same period in the face of the rise of the natural sciences [and] most rapidly with Western governments’ promotion of STEM in the academy during recent decades, managed through a crisis of funding (108)

Not surprisingly, then, almost all contemporary attempts to “defend” the teaching of the humanities against threats of their elimination either: (1) make some specious argument about the “utilitarian benefits to the marketplace” of such an education, or (2) make an even more spurious argument of transcendent “arts for art sake” form of special pleading, as if to sully oneself with concerns of one’s “usefulness” is itself an affront to human dignity. Cobley, ingeniously and originally, eviscerates both of these cliched arguments.

In their place, and bringing together to a fine-edged point his earlier arguments in the volume about the intrinsic distributedness of semiosis across biological levels, individuals, collectivities, and history, Cobley argues that the role and the responsibility of the humanities is to document and analyze the manifold “ways in which agency is ‘inhabited’ in an [and our] Umwelt” (116), and to develop an ethics whereby the inhabitants of the only Umwelt that we know of who are able to recognize and use absential and sign relations per se to anticipate, model, and devise counterfactual trajectories and the probability of their consequences, can at least minimize the damage that it has been doing to its own species and others with its unrealistic and misguided ideas of individualism and human value-exceptionalism.

Such knowledge, again he reminds us, must be approached in an anti-humanist spirit of fallibilism, openness, and humility. It is not a call, as Cobley noted earlier, to think that we can “finally determine” and “take control” of the manifold consequences of semiosis. It is instead – once faced with the acknowledgement that we are mere inhabitants in the vast web of semiotic interdependence, the far majority of which is unknowable to us (especially at this stage, when the effort to even try to has been so little undertaken) – a call to maintain the diversity of, and to resist the over-management of, semiosis – for this alone will ensure the overall health and balance of the semiotic web.

To do that, of course, we must first learn what semiosis is – and what it is not. Not only evolutionary biologists but often even self-described semioticians themselves have fallen into the pars pro toto fallacy that semiosis is “for” the utilitarian purpose of either “knowing” the world and, for humans, using that knowledge (or even just the power of semiosis itself) for “control.” Surely those ends can be met, to an extent, by semiosis. But as Cobley shows so masterfully here, once one tries to reduce semiosis to a such a singular use-function – one whose only purpose is for knowing what is already there to be known, and/or as a tool for controlling it – one has drained of semiosis the very dynamism that allows it alone to generate true novelty, both in nature and in culture.^[4]

Developing the argument that he made in his inaugural address as the ninth awarded Sebeok Fellow entitled Enhancing survival by not enhancing survival (Cobley 2014c), Cobley shows that the aesthetic dimension of sign-use – from the rococo decorations of the satinbird bower to the human pleasures of creating and appreciating fiction, poetry, music, and visual art – literally furnishes the Umwelt with as-yet unfinalized, one might say pluripotent, signs, and in so doing furnishes it with the potential for even more novel and fine-grained distinction-making – and that these bring about, in turn, new semiotic relations and possibilities for living. In this way, notes Cobley, aesthetic behavior does not merely “enhance” survival. Rather,

aesthetic behaviour is survival – [as it] simultaneously embellishes and furnishes animals’ niches, while augmenting their basic modelling capacities. […] It is a form of modelling with its own specific procedures, practices and rewards [one that, especially for the ‘semiotic animal’] locates humans in their world and enables them to conceptualise the furnishing of that world. (121–128, and again, see Kull 2022)

Indeed, and as Cobley reminds us at the outset of the volume, “the more humans [or any animals] differentiate, the more they enhance their Umwelt” (36).

The re-imagined humanities he is proposing, accordingly, are ones which will be tasked with the responsibility of “learning the multifarious ways in which the world can be modelled. This is not a matter of discovering the many artifacts accruing to different cultures around the globe and fitting them into a Western definition of universal values” (117), writes Cobley, but the development of a community of inquirers equipped with the “foresight to recognize how seemingly non-purposive signs enhance the Umwelt […] as well as analytic acumen in understanding the relation of aesthetic signs to human existence in the past, the present and the future. [It is for this reason that], addressing the big question of aesthetic behaviour requires experienced, interdisciplinary technicians to be centrally involved” (128).

7 Conclusion

In sum, thirty-two years after Thomas Sebeok and his colleagues called for the development of a truly interdisciplinary semiotics that could “provide the human sciences with a context for reconceptualizing foundations, and for moving along a path which avoids crashing into the philosophical roadblock thrown up by forced choices between realism and idealism, as though this exclusive dichotomy were also exhaustive of the possibilities for interpreting experience” (Anderson et al. 1984: 8), Paul Cobley’s Cultural implications of biosemiotics lays out a visionary programmatic agenda for exactly how, from the side of the humanities and cultural study, this now finally can, and should, be done.

And though it took this masterful volume and almost 20 years of argument to covince me, I see that I must end this review now with a personal coda: You were right, Paul. There is indeed much more to the project of biosemiotics than just the “bio.”