Biosemiotics and literature

1 Introduction

In What is philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write: “it is literature that has constantly maintained an equivocal relationship with the lived” (1994: 170). The equivocation they are referring to is not an attempt to document perception or memory. Instead, the philosophers focus on the means by which authors compose elements of sensation in their works. In painting, line, color, and shading enter into a combination from which the image emerges. Literature likewise relies on such active relations. In Deleuze and Guattari’s estimation, Clarissa Dalloway is imperceptible against the London she moves through, just as Ahab can be said to actually perceive the sea, not because the character is a living, breathing human, but because it is set in an active part of the Ahab–sea compound – in other words, embedded within an active material–textual milieu (1994: 169). They write: “the writer’s position is no different from the painter, musician, or architect. The writer’s specific materials are words and syntax, created syntax that ascends irresistibly into [their] work and passes into sensation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 167).

Literature, therefore, is capable of doing much more than simply representing relations. It has the capacity to narrativize the activity of discrete elements in their emergent, affective, lived becoming, and it is in this way that literature becomes equivocal to a biosemiotic notion of life.

Deleuzean life is movement, what he terms “becoming” – a nonorganic, dynamic interplay of material forces and flows that actualize a set of virtual elements. However, such a notion of life as movement, as at once being and becoming, is not incompatible with theories of autopoiesis, biological systems, or biosemiotics. Deleuze writes that life “is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects” (2001 [1995]: 29). From both a Deleuzean and a biosemiotic/autopoietic point of view, life is an emergent, creative/aesthetic phenomenon. In fact, Jesper Hoffmeyer defines organic life as “not a stable being but a constant becoming” (2008: 28). Early in their discussion of art, Deleuze and Guattari tether art and life. Their description of the varieties of “compounds of sensations” – namely “the vibration” and “the embrace” or “the clinch” – reads like an overview of the activity of dynamic, autopoietic systems: “the vibration […] characterizes the simple sensation (but it is already durable or compound, because it […] implies a constitutive difference of level, follows an invisible thread more nervous than cerebral); the embrace or the clinch (when two sensations resonate in each other by embracing each other so tightly in a clinch of what are no more than ‘energies’)” (1994: 168). Congruent to the logic of dynamic systems, the vibration is akin to the movement across a threshold state resulting in a qualitative change in a system. John Protevi offers a concise description:

[C]hanges of a certain magnitude – beyond the recuperative power of the negative feedback loops or homeostatic mechanisms – will push the system past a threshold, perhaps to another pattern in its fixed repertoire or perhaps into a zone where there are no patterns. […] [A] trigger that provokes a response that overwhelms its stereotyped defensive patterns and pushes the system beyond the thresholds of its comfort zones will not result in death but in the creation of new attractors representing new behaviors. We can call this “learning,” […]. (Protevi 2013: 3–4)

From an autopoietic standpoint, the “clinch” defines the structural coupling or the continued congruent relations of perturbation and reaction between a system and its environment. The environment triggers structural changes within the system; thus, in the words of Fritjof Capra, “a structurally coupled system is a learning system” (Capra 1996: 219).

A more direct line to a biosemiotic appraisal of life as creative emergence can be read through Deleuze and Guattari’s use of theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll. As I have indicated elsewhere, Deleuze consistently relies on biological descriptions to support his definition of life/becoming (Lang 2024). In What is philosophy?, the philosophers consider the possibility of art as beginning with animal behavior, specifically niche construction, the ways in which organisms alter or change their environment: “the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions. […] This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already art […] in the songs and cries that mark out the territory” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 183–184). Uexküll teaches that every organism is at home in its own world, perfectly suited to its particular Umwelt. Deleuze and Guattari recognize this as a compound or play of forces between the body and its postures and the external, material world it interacts with. The generation of animal Umwelten, understood as compounding, change, process, is the very movement Deleuze and Guattari see as constitutive of life – a contrapuntal relation between inside and outside – organic, physiochemical processes and environmental, “nonorganic” forces.

The aim of this paper is to continue the development of a biosemiotic literary criticism. Following a Deleuzean/autopoietic approach to biosemiotics (Lang 2024) and presenting theory alongside examples from literature, I will explore how life, as an emergent, semiotic process, is narrativized and represented in literary texts. A key insight of biosemiotics is the assertion that human beings share a basic mode of biological and cognitive organization with other organisms. In turn, biosemiotic literary criticism productively addresses and empowers representations of subjectivity at all registers of human and nonhuman life. However, from the biosemiotic, autopoietic point of view, life is also an inherently aesthetic phenomenon. A notion of life grounded on semiosis is inherently creative. Literature, I argue, allows us to explore the aesthetic dimension of individual emergence and sense-making without undercutting or turning away from biosemiotics as a science. To make my case, I will present readings of the work of Virginia Woolf, focusing specifically on narrative and metaphor. Along the way, I will connect my readings to insights from biosemiotic and autopoietic theory in support of an understanding of life as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon.

2 Critical overview and key terms

Biosemiotics, as a discipline, bridges science, theory, and the arts. Recently, a number of scholars have been working to develop a biosemiotic literary criticism, most recently W. John Coletta, who in 2021 published his book Biosemiotic literary criticism. Ten years earlier, Wendy Wheeler (2011) proposed the “biosemiotic turn” to

take us beyond [an anthropomorphic] limitation into the “more-than-human world” where we understand not only that the natural world is perfused with signs, meanings, and purposes which are material and which evolve, but also that it is in the human use of signs in poetic language, wherever it is found, that this mythic understanding [that all nature speaks] has best been preserved. (Wheeler 2011: 279)

Timo Maran provides a methodology for understanding and analyzing both human and nonhuman sign processes, detailing levels for modeling the relationship between organisms and their environment, especially in nature writing. He states: “Biosemiotics […] has the potential to contribute to literary research by introducing biosemiotic interpretations of the semiotic processes which take place in the human body or the natural environment” (2014b: 299).^[1] Coletta follows Maran’s emphasis on modeling and also applies foundational biosemiotic principles in his development of a specifically biosemiotic criticism. He writes, “[B]iosemiotic critics, grounded in the field of biosemiotics, bring a specific and unique set of intellectual tools to the field of ecocriticism” (and to this I would add literary criticism as a whole). Coletta continues, “Biosemiotics represents a radical epistemological break with the mainstream, reductionist and mechanistic, paradigm in biology” and is “committed to exploring this epistemological break” (2021: 10). It is precisely this epistemological break which we need to continue to explore and work through. One way to do this, I argue, is to commit to the aesthetic, creative – that is to say, affective – dimension of biosemiotics/biosemiotic literary studies. I believe it is here that we might, in fact, approach the “mythic understanding” Wheeler alludes to and truly model semiosis across all subjective registers.

Wheeler, Maran, and Coletta have made significant contributions to this emerging field, however, their work largely focuses on either introducing biosemiotics to a non-scientific audience or directly or indirectly limits the application of biosemiotic readings almost exclusively to nature texts. It is important to now direct our attention to a wider literature. Coletta does make moves in this direction, as does Maran, the former in a discussion of Milton, the latter in his description of artistic modeling. Maran writes that it is through literature/artistic modeling in general that “we are describing material nature by making analogies with living organisms or humans” (2014b: 148) and that such analogies make it possible to comprehend the semiotic competences of the nonhuman (and the nonliving, nonorganic). We need to take this further and apply biosemiotic principles to literature in general, especially if we wish to shrink the epistemological gap between the humanities and the sciences and avoid falling into ultimately scientifically reductionist readings in the guise of literary criticism.

Before turning to literature, there are a few terms that require our attention: aesthetics, affect, autopoiesis, narrative, and metaphor. This essay follows Baumgarten’s (1735 [1954]) definition of aesthetics as the science of perception. Baumgarten relegates sense perception to a “lower faculty” separate from knowledge. This accords with the later distinction in biological systems theory between cognition and consciousness. N. Katherine Hayles distinguishes consciousness, the subjective narrative that details one’s life, from cognition, “a much broader capacity that extends far beyond consciousness into other neurological [and embodied] processes” (2017: 9). Aesthetics, it follows, must account for a complex of nonconscious cognitive/perceptual processes that support one’s experience of a world and guide our study toward an understanding of life as an emergent, creative process.

Affect is the capacity for various bodies to interact and the degree to which they do so. It is, most simply, change and variation, modification and transformation. Deleuze, in a 1978 lecture on Spinoza, offers the following: “In a first determination, an affection is the following: it’s a state of a body insofar as it is subject to the action of another body […] action always implies a contact, and is even a mixture of bodies” (Deleuze 2020 [1978]). Regarding affect as a capacity allows us to interrogate both “what” a body expresses and, more importantly, “how” from both a biosemiotic and a Deleuzean point of view.

Autopoiesis describes any self-organizing, self-maintaining system – the most common example being a living cell. The autopoiesis of a living system, its self-organization and self-maintenance, directly conditions the domain of possible interactions within an environment. In other words, the cognitive, material activity of the living system opens up a world (Umwelt) which is wholly system-relative. The organism creates its world.

Narrative is, quite simply, a connected account of events generally linked by a logic of cause and effect. However, this definition can be expanded. In this essay, I follow Timo Maran, who observes “the existence of deep structural parallels between the communication within and amongst living systems and those of human cultural manifestations […] suggests the possibility of using biosemiotic methods for describing literature or other representations in human culture” (Maran 2014a: 266). Semiotics, Maran teaches, describes the mediated change or dynamical aspect of signs. As Coletta expands, a biosemiotic approach to literary studies allows us to approach narrative as a dramatization of the ecological, semiotic interactions that take place in nature. Biosemiotics narrativizes organic emergence. While a full discussion of the narrative potential of biosemiotic literary studies is beyond the scope of this essay, it is not a significant leap to state that, from both a Deleuzean and a biosemiotic perspective, literature is capable of articulating, modeling, and representing human and nonhuman emergence.

Metaphor is an extension of Timo Maran’s (2014b) artistic/literary modeling, which expresses the individual’s spatial (embodied/embedded) and temporal (enactive/affective) relation to the world. According to Sebeok and Danesi: “Modeling is the innate ability to produce forms that stand for objects, events, feelings, actions, situations, and ideas perceived to have some meaning, purpose, or useful function” (2000: 1). In biosemiotics, the ways in which organisms perceive their respective worlds as a coherent unity and process sense data is a form of embodied, perceptual modeling. While, from a biosemiotic perspective, modeling and semiosis is present in all life, Sebeok and Danesi recognize a distinction between animal and human modeling systems, as the former includes both verbal and nonverbal modeling.

Maran follows Sebeok, detailing three levels of modeling: zoosemiotic (physical/nonverbal); linguistic; and literary/artistic (attributes value, provides representations of human–nature relationship) (Maran 2014b: 303). However, Maran distances himself from a categorical distinction between human and animal levels. We can see this in his description of metaphor. Modeling, for Maran, is “a situation in which a certain phenomenon or processes presented such that it can be understood, using (imaginary or material) representations which are at least partially based on analogy” (2014b: 301). The term “analogy” is central here. Hoffmeyer and Emmeche recognize analogy at work in the re-description central to an organism’s self-reference as well as in the emergence of its Umwelt:

The realization in space and time of the structural relations specified in the digital code [DNA] determines what kind of differences in its surroundings the system will actually select and respond to. In Uexküllean terms, these specifications determine not just the anatomical and physiological buildup of the organism but also the kind of Umwelt the organism will get through this realization. (qtd. in Hoffmeyer 2008: 82)

The organism and its Umwelt are the result of an active, expressive assemblage of sign relations. The Umwelt of a particular organism is a model of its life-world, contingent upon its sensorimotor/cognitive capacities, and both the organism and Umwelt are grounded on analogical relations to material interactions. Kalevi Kull reminds us that semiotics is a study of both conscious and nonconscious forms of awareness and that the “description of somebody’s Umwelt will mean the demonstration of how the organism (via its Innenwelt) maps the world, and what, for that organism, the meanings of its objects are within it” (Kull 2009: 43). As Coletta states, “life creatively interprets itself […]; what things come to mean as objects in the Umwelts of living things is an interpretive phenomenon that requires ‘representation at the interface,’ the membrane” (Coletta 2021: 24). The living system interprets its world (Umwelt) at the same time that it produces it, and what it produces is only an approximation of the brute material world. This is the basis of Uexküll’s return to Kant: the Umwelt, or perceived world of the organism, stands in for the world as it is in-itself.^[2] It is at all levels a representation and thus nonhuman. Biological meaning-making is analogous to the linguistic/artistic models by which humans attempt to make sense of and express the world.

3 Woolf and biosemiotics 1: narrative

In Virginia Woolf’s 1919 short story “Kew Gardens” we can see precisely how literature narrativizes life as a collective, active, emergent phenomenon. The story opens with a flowerbed stirring in the breeze. The colors of the petals “[stain] an inch of the brown earth beneath” and “flash into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens” (Woolf 2007 [1919]a: 188). Along with the verbs “to stain” and “to flash,” the reflections are described as “expanding” drops of rainwater with their colors and “revealing” a leaf’s “branching threads of fibre.” Finally, the light “spread [s] its illumination” and brings forth a collection of leaves. Throughout “Kew Gardens,” the image is the movement or coming together of elements. In the passages above (and in decidedly nonanthropomorphic terms), emphasis is consistently placed on the activity that pulls the various elements of the garden together; the narrative that emerges reads as a direct result of this interactivity.

Woolf’s emphasis on movement returns later in the piece as a snail drags itself across the flowerbed. Following the snail, it is apparent that, for Woolf, emergence is also expression. The snail is described as “having a definite goal in front of it” (189). It “[considers] every possible method” to make its crossing and is “doubtful” that a vibrating and crackling leaf can support its weight (191). Beyond simply deliberating what obstacles lie in its path, the snail, it seems, pulls the narrative along with it, providing connection and coherence to the story’s disparate parts. As with the active self-construction of the garden, the narrative is likewise predicated on movement. The narrative is very much an assemblage in the Deleuzean sense, an active arranging or organization. For example, as the snail is deliberating, a young couple crosses its path and the paragraph shifts to their conversation. In fact, it is as if the snail’s movement is the very thing which opens up the possibility of expression in the first place. Following this movement, the story’s ambiguous narration, emerging with and from the flowerbed, points to the expressive – in other words, intentional – capacities in and of nature.

Both living and nonliving things seem to take an active role in the various interactions Woolf describes. In spite of this, expression emerges from a complex or system of relations that begins and ends with lived bodies, and it is from this perspective that Woolf’s story is distinctly biosemiotic. A key insight of a biosemiotic perspective lies in its central assumption that human beings share a basic mode of biological organization and interaction with other organisms. Furthermore, it retains the contingent, active, emergent, material-affective engagements so readily accepted across posthumanist discourse; yet, in recognizing a semiosis fundamental to biological processes, biosemiotics secures a notion of subjectivity at all registers of human and nonhuman life.^[3] Recall that “Kew Gardens” was written in 1919. Jakob von Uexküll’s Theoretical biology was first published in 1920. The English translation was not published until 1926.^[4] “Kew Gardens” demonstrates that biosemiotic notions of life were a concern for authors before the development of a theoretical vocabulary to support such ideas. It is through literature (and, as I have argued elsewhere, philosophy) that we see a number of early, successful articulations of embodied cognition, emergent subjectivity, and the link between expression/biosemiosis and aesthetics.^[5]

4 Woolf and biosemiotics 2: metaphor

Woolf uses the metaphor of the nerve fiber in her 1931 novel The Waves to articulate how our embodied, sensorimotor activity opens up a coherent, meaningful world. In the novel, it is the character Jinny who most illustrates an interactive, expressive corporeality. Unlike her counterparts, she is always dancing, always active, embracing the world rather than isolating herself entirely in the mind (such as the characters Bernard, Rhoda) or retreating wholly outward into the world (like the character Susan). Moreover, for Jinny, life is an affirmation: “Yes […] our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of nerve that lay white and limp, have filled and spread themselves and float round us like filaments, making the air tangible and catching in them far-away sounds unheard before” (Woolf 1978 [1931]: 135). The pairing of the filament with “webs of nerve” distributes the relation between the individual and the world throughout the activity of the nervous system. From a neuroscientific perspective, the operational closure of the nervous system in its global functioning is precisely what opens up one’s experience of a world.^[6] Woolf’s attunement to neuroscientific discourse is further evidenced in The Waves as the character Neville intuits “to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds” (214), echoing Jinny’s “webs of nerve” that effect a sensory engagement with the world. In short, the metaphor of the nerve fiber grounds an examination of the fundamental cognitive, perceptual engagements that attend both biological and aesthetic emergence.

The neural metaphor informs both the form and content of The Waves. The novel develops through interweaving the lifelong interior monologues of six speakers. Together, the characters “make an unsubstantial territory” (16). As the voices coalesce, each individual flows into the others. The seeming lack of partition between identities betrays individuals (bodies) that are, as the character Bernard muses, “edged with mist,” and “territories” for interactive engagements (an idea that Woolf maintains in her work from “Kew Gardens,” through Mrs. Dalloway and into Between the Acts). Formally, The Waves circulates through a series of linked soliloquies, each section separated by a series of nine interludes. As a result, the entire lives of the six (speaking) characters are drawn out, as it were, over the course of a single day. The unity of the narrative is therefore grounded in movement. Capturing life as it surges, “breaks,” The Waves is not simply an experiment with stream of consciousness – it approaches life as art, as creative activity, and as such approaches a biosemiotics. In both form and content, the novel flows with physical as well as cognitive and conscious life, drawing out a world that, in form and meaning, is coemergent with the living body. Uexküll remarks that despite the bridges humanity has built between itself and nature, “we have detached ourselves from it” (Uexküll 2010 [1934]: 192). If the transformation or supplementation of nature has caused a loss of a sense of nature, it is through a rendering of life as art that we can regain the very sense we have lost, namely that of movement, rhythm, polyphony. The characters in The Waves are not making sense of a world that exists in spite of them, but one that emerges with them. In this way, “making sense” is synonymous with life and “world” and is inseparable from the signification the very act of living bestows upon an individual’s surroundings (milieu).

The image of the filament/fiber occurs as well in the early pages of Woolf’s earlier novel Mrs Dalloway during Septimus Warren Smith’s seemingly hallucinatory vision of the park. He considers, in rather biosemiotic terms: “A marvelous discovery indeed – that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions […] can quicken trees into life! […] [L]eaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement” (Woolf 1953 [1925]: 22). Reading this passage point by point, the effect of the voice on the growth cycle of trees – the invisible, fibrous, and seemingly innate connection between outwardly disparate organic bodies (by extension, the body within its immediate environment) and the concomitant movement between the arm and a branch – inscribes a subjectivity that is codependent and coemergent with its environment. Key here is the turn in the passage from the voice “in certain conditions” giving life to one’s surroundings to the effect of the tree as it stretches the body. From a Deleuzean standpoint, the “statement” is not the particular act that appears at the surface but rather its becoming, the how, that is expressed in the affective interplay of discrete material parts (here between Septimus and the tree).

Surface always implies an active depth, and every individual is in fact the expression of a multiplicity (the dynamic material interplay of elements in their relation). A neuroscientific perspective lends insight into the ways the individual is understood in terms of the consistent integration of a multiplicity of active, dynamic processes. The neural metaphor guides us toward an understanding of subjectivity as an assemblage; the “self” is in fact a series of linked elements or states – a material engagement grounded upon the contingent interaction of the individual and its environment. This does not negate the subject. Nor does it, for Woolf, relegate subjectivity to a secondary force subordinate to its environment or milieu. Rather, subject and world are equally contingent, the emergence of one codependent on the activity of the other.

Art, for Woolf, bridges (if not wholly balances) internalized, subjective experience with the habitual experience of the external world. Moreover, a subjective, aesthestic experience is simply an extension of the fundamental sense-making capacities of all living organisms (not just humans). It does not transcend the body or a biological concept of life. Woolf explains in “Modern novels” (1919) that the task of the writer is to convey life as an activity in all of its complexity and not simply record a conventional, linear account of one’s experience. In Woolf’s estimation, convention historically bars the novelist from writing what she refers to as the “that” of life, which lies in the “very dark places of psychology” (Woolf 2007 [1919]b: 179). In contrast to what she categorizes as the materialism of authors like Welles or Sterne, fiction must draw upon “every good quality whether of the mind or spirit” (181). This includes the embodied immediacy of both the mind and the body. Unsurprisingly, her descriptions of Joyce’s Ulysses (then in early serialization) have a neurophysiological undertone, writing that his works “reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (178). This follows Woolf’s characterization of mind. Sense data come as “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms,” and life, by extension, is “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (177–178). In order to capture life in the singular dynamic between body and mind, Woolf writes in her 1928 diary that she composed The Waves as a “playpoem” (1980: 203), fusing elements of prose, poetry, and theater in an attempt to make art come alive, unfolding a horizon of habit and instinct, in other words, revealing the material, nonconscious, and semiotic activity that undergirds life.

5 Biosemiotics as bioaesthetics

To conclude, I would like to briefly situate biosemiotics as a bioaesthetics.^[7] Baumgarten (1735 [1954]) defines aesthetics as the science of perception, “the science of sensory knowledge” according to Strathausen (2017: 2). Bateson defines it as the “responsiveness to the pattern which connects” (1979: 9). Andreas Weber (2001), following the work of Francisco Varela and echoing both Baumgarten and Bateson, defines aesthetics as a theory of sensory perception and therefore of the subjective presence of things. “Semiotic aesthetics,” he writes, “[is the key to] understanding nature, to deciphering living subjective meaning, and to understand the world thus created” (Weber 2001: 160). Leading biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer writes: “Since nothing in the natural world can be isolated from the rest of nature, the boundaries of all natural systems are indeterminate” (1993: 87).^[8] This is not an argument for a Spinozist cosmology, but is simply system-relative. A biosemiotic approach provides an awareness of life, cognition, subjectivity, and the world as coemergent properties of a single system. Biosemiotics, as an evolutionary science, narrativizes the processes from which the body, the subject, and meaning emerge. Meaning emerges as a result of the autopoietic activity of the living system as it strives to maintain itself and prolong its existence. Subject and world mutually inform each other by way of their structural coupling, or history of recurrent interactions. The maintenance of organic life, therefore, necessarily includes the production of meaning. A key factor in the self-organization and maintenance (autopoiesis) of a living system is the conservation of a boundary or membrane. The closure of a system from its environment opens up a domain of interaction, interactions which are tailored or “selected” by the activity of that system.^[9] The operational closure of a living system is therefore also its cognition. From an autopoietic, biosemiotic point of view, cognition is therefore always already aesthetic. Furthermore, as subjectivity and cognition are equivalent terms and the emergence of the organism is also the emergence of a world, biosemiotics is an affective aesthetics.

Kalevi Kull (2022) asserts that sensation and creation, aesthesis and poesis, are “driven by semiotic fitting,” or the habitual means by which an organism matches with its surroundings. Kull’s position is essentially a semiotic (aesthetic) description of the operational closure of an autopoietic system. He writes: “A primary result of semiotic fitting is the creation of an organism. An organism is internally fitted, and it is also fitted with its surroundings, with its umwelt. […] Thus an organism by itself is aesthetic” (Kull 2022: 12). Creativity is inherent to the affective activity of a living system as it emerges and interacts with an environment. Woolf, I contend, anticipates in her writing this fundamental relation between life and meaning-making, and it is through her work that we can observe a literary examination of life as a semiotic, creative, and therefore aesthetic, process.^[10]

In his book Signs of meaning in the universe, Jesper Hoffmeyer writes: “consciousness […] must be narrative” (Hoffmeyer 1996: 121). Biosemiotics recognizes consciousness as a distinctly human way of processing the swarming activity of the body, as it is situated in and consistently processing its Umwelt. The body is an assemblage of systems and states, from the individual cells that compose it to the higher-order functioning of the central nervous system. Semiosis begins at the most basic levels of biochemical life. Cognition and sense-making are therefore fundamental properties of all biological life. Cognition, as the lived activity that enacts a world, is an aesthetic phenomenon. The question that remains is how the arts can best represent the subjective experience of a mind as it is drawn out along lived, embodied experience. Biosemiotics accounts for the active process of individual, subjective emergence as that which gives coherence to a world. Moreover, it allows a keeping pace with a world in constant transition. The static, visual arts force us to recognize our embodied encounter with the world, and the precise ways in which the body thinks. It is literature (and, as I have argued elsewhere, film) that best provides a means of narrativizing this event.