Volume 2014, Issue 198 - Double Special Issue: Dimensions of zoosemiotics␤Observation ↔ Text/e ↔ Culture

This introductory paper of the zoosemiotic issue of Semiotica gives an insight into the history of zoosemiotics and into contemporary developments of the field. Temporal distance allows for a fresh perspective on Thomas A. Sebeok's zoosemiotic writings, periodization of his works and their relations to other studies of animal semiotics. In the present time, zoosemiotics can provide a necessary space of dialogue between biosemiotics and general semiotics. It is claimed that, for contemporary zoosemiotics, a pluralistic approach is the most suitable for the purposes of historical description, object-level studies, and paradigmatic theorizations. It is also relevant to see zoosemiotics as contextualized within recent developments of environmental humanities. In this paper, the classical era of zoosemiotics is contrasted with the more recent post-linguistic zoosemiotics, with special attention paid to the synthesis between zoosemiotics and cultural and literary criticism, to zoomusicology, and to the inclusion of semiotic arguments in animal ethics. Several practical methods and applications of zoo-semiotics are discussed.

The fact that agency is an essential aspect of life introduces new explanatory avenues into the map of evolutionary thought. There is hardly any process in animate nature that is not, in one way or another, regulated communicatively, i.e., through the ability of living systems to read and interpret relevant signs in their environment. Semiotics – the science of signs – therefore ought to become a key tool for the “life sciences” in general and biology in particular. The paper analyzes the ways semiotic interactions in nature have been developed to scaffold the web of physiological, developmental, and ecological pathways. Semiotic scaffolding is only very indirectly based on genetic scaffolding. The gene products, the proteins, are not just molecules, but are always also semiotic tools, and what the genes really do is to specify the efficiency of semiotic modulators. In addition to the concept of the genome we need in biology a concept of the semiome: the entirety of an organism's semiotic tool set: i.e., the means by which the organisms of this species may extract significantly meaningful content from their surroundings and engage in intraor interspecific communicative behavior. The semiome thus defines the scope of the organism's cognitive and communicative activity. The theoretical question raised in this paper is the question of the interconnectedness between genomic and semiomic changes.

The concept of code has a long and varied history across the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. In the interdisciplinary field of biosemiotics it has been foundational through the idea of code duality (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991); yet it has not been free from controversy and questions of definition (see, for example, Barbieri 2010). One reason why code has been so central to modern semiotics is not simply a matter of the linguistic heritage of semiology and the work of Jakobson who straddled both semiology and semiotics. Rather, it has been the programmatic reconceptualization of code that is woven through the work of modern semiotics' founder, the father of both biosemiotics and zoosemiotics, Thomas A. Sebeok. A biologist manqué, a communication theorist influenced by cybernetics, and a semiotician deriving from the “major tradition” of Peirce, arguably Sebeok's most systematic considerations of code were offered in his essays on zoosemiotics, largely from his 1963 coining of the term onwards. The present article principally revisits the 1972 collection of Sebeok's zoosemiotic essays and suggests that his particular observations in respect of analogue and digital codes and their relation to evolution in the world of animals harbors an opportunity to rethink and potentially resolve, through an ethological lens, current controversies regarding the status of code.

This article characterizes briefly the central aims of the semiotic study of animal life. Semiotic sciences in general can be defined as approaches to the study of various forms of knowing (as different from physical sciences, which study various things in the world), considering that knowing is possible only due to semiosis. The semiosphere is the sphere of knowing (knowing being always related to learning and acting). The basic types of knowing (as well as semiosis) include the vegetative, the animal, and the cultural. Zoosemiotics is focused on the animal type of knowing. Animal knowing is characterized by its use of iconic and indexical relations, whereas the extensive use of symbols is a prerequisite of specifically human (cultural, language-based) semiosis. However, the human organism also includes animal knowing as an inevitable part of its knowing. Knowledge cannot be credible if it is exclusively symbolic; it requires that iconic and indexical semiosis be involved.

As a category, poiesis can be extended beyond the standard anthropocentric use and applied across three radically different scales: auto-poiesis in everyday self-organization of every living creature, phylo-poiesis in the shaping of a species by sexual selection across various generations and onto-poiesis as an individual's development of formal skills and creative modification of its environment. In this paper, I apply these distinctions and argue, following Darwin and Sebeok, for the possibility of considering poietic and aesthetic manifestations among various animal species in their ability of both appreciating and expressing rhythm, visual decorative patterns, and chromatic qualities. In music we can find song and equivalents to instrumental playing (cicadas and crickets), theater in representing fictitious situations (killdeer's broken wing act and playing), acrobatic skills (various types of woodcocks and paradise birds) and dancing (cranes and eleonora cockatoo). I do not claim there is animal art, since the very concept of the “artistic” is a result of convention. What I do assert, however, is that human aesthetic appreciation did not emerge ex nihilo nor was granted by God to humans only (as Wallace believed) but has evolutionary relevance and is preceded by the zoo-aesthetics in many other species.

Our attitude towards animals is highly inconsistent. Linguistic evidence of this is the many animal names that we use for characterizing other humans. Although terms like “beastly” draw a clear dividing line between mankind and the animal kingdom, we also see numerous similarities across species and coin expressions such as “eagle eyes” or “ostrich policy.” A treasure trove for such comparisons can be found in animal-based insults with which we mock the appearance or behavior of others. Based on English and German examples, this contribution intends to give some ethological reasons for the fact that we choose specific animals for insulting humans. As this topic has not yet been widely explored, the result can only be a general overview, combining ethological and linguistic aspects. There are many expressions preferably used in “joshing,” but the never-ending creation of new expressions is proof of human creativity.

The immanent and empirical foundation of zoosemiotics grounds a theory of moral value. According to this theory, semiosis is a morally relevant and natural property of all animals, human and nonhuman. A consequence of this semiotic theory is that all individual animals are accorded inherent moral value based on their natural ability to signify. This paper argues that such a theory of moral value offers a justificatory strategy for our contemporary moral intuitions concerning our semiotic and moral relationships with nonhuman animals while also productively pushing our normative ethical boundaries.

It is a truism among ethologists that one must not forget that animals perceive and represent the world differently from humans. Sometimes this caution is phrased in terms of von Uexküll's Umwelt concept. Yet it seems possible (perhaps even unavoidable) to adopt a common ontological framework when comparing different species of mind. For some purposes it seems sufficient to anchor comparative cognition in common-sense categories; bats echolocate insects (or a subset of them) after all. But for other purposes it seems necessary to find out more about how organisms organize their perceptions into biologically significant and perhaps cognitively meaningful states. Complex animals have high bandwidth sensory channels that feed into large nerve networks with very complex dynamics. Even for relatively simple animals belonging to species believed to have a small, fixed number of neurons, the odds are very much against any two animals of the same species, let alone different species, having exactly the same couplings to the environment, the same dimensionality in their nervous systems, or the same dynamics. Given such diversity (which von Uexküll himself recognized), how should we think about shared representation, shared meaning, and cognitive similarity between individuals and species?

An Umwelt trajectory can be characterized as the course through evolutionary (or cultural) time taken by the Umwelt of a creature, as defined by its changing relations with the Umwelten of other creatures. The Umwelt trajectory of a creature is thus the historical path of its perceptual and behavioral dispositions considered from an ecological and phenomenological point of view. This notion represents an aggregate, collective (and evolutionary) equivalent to Uexküll's notion of the Umwelt-tunnel of a single individual creature. Some underlying conceptual and methodological developments are presented, including the notion of Umwelt transition, visual representations of phenomenal fields and a tripartite model of the human Umwelt. The notion of Umwelt trajectory is related to the notion of Umwelt alignment, which is asserted to be a chief regulatory mechanism in enacting subsequent phases of a trajectory, and to the notion of Umwelt assemblage. The semiotics of the ecological crisis is sketched out and related to the key notions of this paper. The very last section presents a prolegomenon to Umwelt futurology, the study of future Umwelt trajectories.

This article discusses the basic preconditions to bring about meaning change in animals using the “phantom man” method of training guide dogs as an example. In this method, the body plan of the dog is extended with a special cart imitating a human being. By incorporating the cart into the animal's bodily self, the dog is brought to discover in the environment those objects that are meaningful for the blind person but not for the dog in its everyday dog world. The method was developed in the 1930s and 1940s by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll and his colleague Emanuel Sarris and is used by some Central European guide dog schools and trainers even today. The motivation for developing the method was tightly bound with the core premises of Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt theory as well as the empirical research on dogs done at the Insitut für Umweltforschung in Hamburg. For modern discussions of zoosemiotics the “phantom man” method offers a rich and revealing source to analyze how one species can be brought to use the meanings of another species. The Umwelt change of the animal as induced by this training method is here divided into three phases. Each phase is examined in conjunction with a corresponding theoretical problematics: the transition of a prior object to a constitutive part of the subject, one subject operating in multiple Umwelten , and the formation of a shared interspecies Umwelt .

Many studies of children and apes realized in psychology address issues that are highly relevant to semiotics, but they often do so indirectly, or they use a terminology that is confusing and/or too vague from a semiotical point of view. The studies reported here, however, follow the paradigm of these psychological studies, but they are couched in an explicit semiotical terminology. They involve three classical semiotical issues: the nature of the sign, as opposed to other meanings; degrees and/or types of iconicity and their relevance for understanding; and the importance of temporal focus in different kinds of semiotical resources. The studies all involve one subject, the chimpanzee Alex, and all issues were studied looking at the actions accomplished by the subject after being exposed to different semiotic resources.

The soundscape, which is defined as the entire acoustic environment of an area, is a relevant biosemiotic ingredient of environmental complexity. It is composed of geophonies, anthrophonies, and biophonies where, in temperate biomes, birds are the major producers of the latter. The soundscape is heterogeneous in terms of space and time, and is affected by landscape features such as vegetation cover (patch size and shape, length of edges, etc.). It also operates as a communication network in which intra- and inter-specific interactions create a complex, eavesdropping-broadcasting network, namely, the soundtope. This acoustic context provides public information for tracking resources like territory, mates, food, safety, and roosting sites and it can be considered a multifunctional eco-field. The Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI) is a new metric that is used to efficiently process the sound files that, when collected by sampling matrixes, return by interpolation the spatial distribution of a soundscape. High quality soundscapes are sought to guarantee the biosemiotic mechanisms among species, but polluted conditions (noisy acoustic environment of anthropogenic origin) degrade and mask biophonies, thus reducing communication efficiency, with severe consequences for both individual and collective fitness. Preserving high quality soundscapes is therefore an important conservation issue and a target to aim for if we are to assure animal and human wellbeing.

The genealogy of lexicography represents an ideal standpoint to reveal how sign-making practices may shape cultural objects. In this paper I discuss the revolution that lexicography undertook during the nineteenth century, showing why this process required the availability of a specific set of concepts, and then how it led up to the emergence of new social techniques, to the coming into being of a new kind of people, and to the introduction of new practices of sign-manipulation. Finally, I confront the historical development of lexicography with the project of the dictionary of Newspeak that Orwell envisioned in 1984.

Résumé La culture peut-elle être un objet d'étude à part entière? Les sciences de la culture le donnent implicitement à penser par leur intitulé même. Néanmoins, les caractères définitoires de la culture – à la fois totalité et singularité – dérogent à l'objectivité scientifique ordinaire. On considérera d'abord trois tentatives d'objectivation de la culture menées en sémiotique, sous le rapport de la sémiosphère (Lotman), de l'esthésie (Rastier) et de la langue (Benveniste). Le crédit accordé à la troisième tentative nous invitera ensuite à interroger le rapport entre langue, texte et culture à partir de la distinction théorique proposée par Hjelmslev entre analyse et fragmentation.

Résumé Au Brésil, les autobiographies intellectuelles sont écrites pour des concours à l'université. Il s'agit de textes qui racontent le parcours intellectuel et institutionnel du professeur-chercheur. Quelques oeuvres plus récentes , cependant, dépassent cette thématique et traitent aussi de la vie privée du candidat. La position réservée aux affects a aussi changé. Tout cela nous révéle que le genre n'est plus exactement le même. Ce travail fait une analyse de la façon dont la vie est observée et recréée par le langage dans ces autobiographies, en tenant en compte les notions d'événement et d'exercice (Zilberberg). Le but est d'examiner les tensions entre les contraintes du genre et l'observation du vécu.

This paper deals with the capacities of human voice to create meaning outside verbal or musical structures. Voice is viewed as human bodily expressive sound, ephemeral and traceless. If text is defined as any cultural object, voice may be considered a text as soon as the fetus develops the ability to hear. If text is defined as an analytical tool, voice must be analyzed as a process and not text-result. Voice is in the constant process of becoming text without ever attaining the status of text-result other than by being profoundly altered by writing or recording.

Résumé L'analyse se fonde sur un corpus qui a pour particularité, au XIIIe siècle, d'interpoler des poésies issues du répertoire de la lyrique d'oïl. l'isotopie est la figure phare dans ces romans où pullulent les connections entre octosyllabes lyriques et narratifs. Sont alors mises en place des instructions interprétatives exigeant une lecture attentive, dans une culture où l'oralité prédomine encore. La “médiatisation” des premiers romans à insertion lyrique entre alors en conflit avec les pratiques et stratégies de l'écrivain qui participe à la création d'une nouvelle forme de réception . . .

Semioticians obsessively talk about texts and their analysis. Yet, in the history of semiotics, few texts have been analyzed. One might even argue that semiotics has never analyzed texts. Indeed, semioticians, including the fathers of the discipline, have rather turned texts into pretexts: what mattered in their analysis was not to bring about a hermeneutic result (for instance, changing the way in which a community receives the significance of a text) but to demonstrate the validity of a method (for instance, reassuring a community, usually composed of other semioticians, about the epistemological soundness of a certain analytical procedure).

The paper aims to show how argumentative uses of cultural keywords can help to recover shared values and beliefs of a certain community. To follow the path from text to culture, a specific corpus will be collected to verify if interactivity can be considered a cultural keyword and to find out cultural values it evokes. Also, the analysis of argumentative moves will reveal the basis on which the discourse on the investigated keyword is founded. The proposed methodology is supposed to shed light on the relation between text and culture by helping to reconstruct, to some extent, the cultural common ground of a given community in regard to a certain keyword.

Résumé Dans La Sémiologie de l'écriture , Harris s'étonne de la définition de la science des signes de Saussure. “La vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale”: comment comprendre l'insistance? Quelle(s) relation(s) ces deux vies entretiennentelles? En définissant le texte comme un “fragment culturel” et le travail scientifique comme un processus d'attribution d'une “fonction documentaire” au texte, cet article propose d'apporter des éléments de réponse à ces questions à partir de l'élaboration de trois scénarios d'observation qui montrent, ensemble, comment la textualisation de l'objet engage déjà une représentation de sa place dans la culture.