Semiosis+(Wilcox)

Semiosis is the process by which meaning is generated from signs. This meta-concept encompasses and exceeds linguistics and applies not just to human perception and cognition but also to that of all forms of life. Implied in this broad application of semiotics is either an expansion of the communicative and social dimensions of reality or a dissolution of the boundaries between the natural and the social

The concept and term were primarily developed by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (semiotics) and Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (semiology) and derive from the Greek σημείωσις, meaning “sign” or “mark. [i] ” Saussureean semiosis revolved around the interplay between dyadic signifiers and that which they signified. For Pierce, the process of semiosis consists of three elements:

// All dynamical action ‥. either takes place between two subjects ‥. or ‥. is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by ‘semiosis’ I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant. [ii] //

//Image Source: Fortun & Bernstein (1998)//

Fortun and Bernstsein explain that the triad of Peircean semiotics consists of Firstness (the sign), Secondness (its object), and Thirdness (its interpretant) (which roughly correspond to thought, matter, and context; or to denotation, denoted, connotation). Moreover, signs (Peircean triads of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness) exist in a semiotic field, inextricably connected to the infinite number of other signs that constitute the cosmos. [iii] While semiotics has been used extensively as a lens through which to analyze human political and social affairs, Fortun and Bernstein note that Pierce’s triads apply to Feynman’s articulations of electron spin as much as they may apply to cultural studies.

//Image Source: Von Uexküll (1957)//

An important complementary concept distancing semiotics from anthropocentrism is that of the //umwelt//, or “phenomenal world,” first developed by biologist Jacob von Uexküll, which has been contemporarily developed as “zoosemiotics” and “biosemiotics.” The umwelt, as Von Uexküll describes it, combines the embodied, phenomological, sensory-perceptual qualities of life forms, with the communicative, meaning-bearing qualities of signs, represented by the figurative image of a “soap bubble” surrounding any living entity in which materiality, space, and time are contingent upon the qualities of its perceptual apparatus. [iv] Von Uexküll’s famous example is that of the tick, which waits for eighteen years on its blade of grass before the signifier of butyric acid emanating from a warm-blooded mammal crossing its path prompts it to drop and bite. In the //umwelt// of the tick:

// What we are dealing with is not an exchange of forces between two objects, but the relations between a living subject and its object. These occur on an altogether different plane, namely, between the receptor sign of the subject and the stimulus from the object. [v] //

//Image Source: Von Uexküll (1957)//

Yet for von Uexküll, subjectivity and objectivity are fluid with any living thing serving as both interpreting subject and meaning-bearing object in a myriad diverse ways for any other entity. With their concepts of autopoeisis and biological systems theory, Maturana and Varela contend by implication that semiosis and cognition occur in some form all the way down to the cellular level, driving and supporting the processes by which life self-organizes. [vi]

The semiotic lens figures the familiar world in unfamiliar ways and can lead to the discovery of strange problems. For example, semiotician Thomas Sebeok has written about the need to devise semiotic strategies for communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations that may exist during ten thousand year “life span” of the radioactive materials at nuclear waste disposal sites. [vii] Indeed, there is an excess of meaning and signification in the cosmos, and even without the planned intervention of government-contracted semioticians and linguists, the free floating signifiers and signifieds of nuclear radiation will enter into semiosis one way or another and eventually bear meaning by becoming subject to some form of interpretant or another.

[i] "semiosis, n.". (2011, December) //OED Online.// Oxford University Press.http://www.oed.com.libproxy.rpi.edu/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/175721 (accessed December 20, 2011). [ii] Quoted in //ibid//. Originally from Peirce, C.S.. (1960). //Collected papers//. (C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. W. Burks, Eds.). Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. V. iii. i. 332. [iii] Fortun, M and Bernstein, H.J. (1998). //Muddling through: Pursuing science and truths in the 21st Century//. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint. p. 67-69. [iv] Uexküll, Jacob von. (1957) “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.” In Schiller, Claire H. (ed. and trans.), //Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept//. New York: International Universities Press. [v] //Ibid.// p. 11. [vi] Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco ([1st edition 1973] 1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living. (R.S. Cohen & M.W. Wartofsky, Eds.). Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 42. Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. [vii] Thomas A. Sebeok (1984). Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia. Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation.