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A World Beside Itself View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Online Repository of Birkbeck Institutional Theses A World Beside Itself Jakob von Uexküll, Charles S. Peirce, and the Genesis of a Biosemiotic Hypothesis Matthew Clements MPhil Humanities and Cultural Studies 1 2 DECLARATION BY CANDIDATE I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and effort. Where other sources of information have been used, they have been acknowledged. Signature: ………………………………………. Date: …21/4/2018…………………………………………. 3 Abstract This thesis explores the conceptual origins of a biosemiotic understanding of the human as a consequence of the vital role of signs in the evolution of life. According to this challenge to definitions of man as the sole bearer of knowledge, human society and culture are not only characterised by the use and production of signs, human life and thought are the products of ongoing processes of semiosis. Along with Thomas Sebeok’s argument concerning animal architecture, examples from Modernist and Contemporary art are presented to introduce a new perspective on the natural and cultural significance of acts of inhabitation. By tracing its historical development in the nineteenth and twentieth century via the concept of the environment, this perspective on both human and non-human life is shown to contest those methods of modern science that are rooted in anthropocentrism The precedents of this perspective are then elaborated through an explication of the work of two of the forefathers of biosemiotics: the biologist Jakob von Uexküll and the philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt demonstrated that in order to make sense of its surroundings each living organism must be situated within an integral world of signs. Peirce’s philosophical account of semiotics explained the evolution of signs in terms of processes of habit formation and the abductive power of thought. Together Uexküll and Peirce provide an impetus for reconsidering the metaphorical implications of aesthetics in terms of the semiotic inheritance of ecological systems. While having critically interrogated their differences especially with respect to their derivation from Kantian philosophy and German Idealism, in conclusion, the ideas of Peirce and Uexküll on the reciprocity of life and signs are shown to mutually contribute to a more advanced comprehension of human subjectivity. 4 Table of Contents Preface (at the threshold of biosemiotics) 9 Introduction. The Life of Signs Prefigured 20 Part I. Inhabiting Sense Chapter 1. The Birth of the Environment: Contextualising the Biosemiotic 36 Episteme The Departures of the Human: Art and Knowledge after Las Meninas 36 Figures of Emergence: Space and Complexity 44 Conceptualising the Inhabited World: Milieu and Environment 52 From Environment to Umwelt 58 Chapter 2. Uexküll’s Umwelt and the Disappearance of Subjectivity 63 The Lesson of the Tick 69 Uexküll’s Contested Legacy 76 Pragmatic Parallels 84 Semiotic Freedom and the Constraints of an Umwelt 88 Chapter 3. Transition: Peircean Biosemiotics between Aesthetics and Ecology 95 The Dispersal of Aesthetics: Unsettling Kant 95 From Castles in the Air to Ecological Minds 102 Apnid Semantics 114 Part II. Abducting Thought Chapter 4. Uexküll’s Ecology: Biosemiotics and the Musical Imaginary 121 Imagining the Umwelt 125 Uexküll’s Symphony of Meaning 127 A Musical Amoeba 135 Chapter 5. The Sign of the Sphinx: On Peirce’s Semiotic 138 Beyond Linguistic Dualism 142 The Sign of the Sphinx 160 Chapter 6. Life’s Labour Abducted: On Peirce’s Methodeutic 168 Conclusion. The Telos of the Human and the Symbolic Differentiation of the 190 Self 5 6 Bibliographical Note References to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce are cited in brackets, with the initials CP, the relevant volume number, followed by the page number (e.g. CP x.xxx). Where relevant the title of the particular text is cited, along with any pertinent dates. These citations refer to the Past Masters Electronic Edition of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by John Deely <http://www.nlx.com/collections/95>, which reproduces Vols. I-VI ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-1935), Vols. VII-VIII ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). When referring to manuscripts by Peirce that are not included in either the Collected Papers or Peirce’s other published works the initials MS are cited, along with the number assigned by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Helsinki. Details of the publication in which the manuscript was quoted are also included. All other references to texts or collections of texts authored by Charles Peirce are cited in the same style as applies to other publications. Chapter four of the present thesis is a modified version of an article published by the author as ‘Uexküll’s Ecology: Biosemiotics and the Musical Imaginary’ in Green Letters 15 (2011), pp. 43-60. Some modified passages from this thesis, including the greater part of the conclusion, have appeared in another article, again written by the current author, entitled ‘The Circle and the Maze: Two Images of Ecosemiotics’, in Sign System Studies, 44, 1/2 (2016), pp. 69-93. 7 8 PREFACE (at the threshold of biosemiotics) On the one hand, it is true that we do not dwell in signs but in houses, and on the other hand, it is likewise evident that builders' tasks are not limited merely to providing us with dens and shelters. [...] Any edifice is simultaneously some sort of refuge and a certain kind of message.1 Roman Jakobson A Though for Celant [1969] The broken glass is like violin players, the stakes the organ, the bundles of branches have a marvellous sound, what more do you want? Of course we have to believe that the street and houses are full of people.2 Mario Merz The genesis of this project depended on an encounter with an igloo. In 2006, on a friend’s recommendation, I visited the London Gagosian on Britannia Street, and was confronted with an installation devised by the Italian artist Mario Merz. Merz’s igloos, as their name suggests, are dome-shaped hut-like structures which, superficially at least, look readymade for human inhabitation. Superficially because in fact these archetypal objects are far from being shelters fit for purpose. Sealed and so inaccessible, much of their appeal depends on their proportions, along with our perhaps instinctive urge to regard enclosures of this size and shape as potentially suitable dwellings. Rather than blocks of snow and ice, Merz made his igloos from a variety of materials. The first, ‘Giáp’s Igloo’, constructed in 1968, consisted of clay-filled plastic bags covering a metal cage, and was adorned in neon tubing, spiralling around and spelling out the words of the North Vietnemese general, Võ Nguyên Giáp: “If the enemy masses his forces, he loses ground; if he scatters, he loses strength.”3 This igloo, then, was not solely a memorial to a pre-industrial age, nor a testament to the nomadic identity of modern man, as some curators and critics have indicated, but a statement about territory, a sign that at the meeting point between humanity and nature exists not just a relationship of interdependence, but that of conflict and conciliation, a frontier fragile enough to collapse, if not integral enough to endure. The igloo at the Gagosian, entitled ‘8-5-3’, and originally built in 1985, comprised not one, but three hemispheres or domes, two adjoining one another, and the third centred within 1 Roman Jakobson, ‘Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems’ (1968) in Selected Writings II: Word and Language (The Hague: Morton, 1971): p. 703. 2 Mario Merz, ‘Pensierino per Celant’, in Arte Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art, edited by Germano Celant (London: Studio Vista, 1969). Qtd. in Arte Povera, edited by Carolyn Christov- Bakargiev (London: Phaidon, 1999): p. 252. 3 Mario Merz qtd. in Robert Lumley, Arte Povera (London: Tate, 2004): p. 41. 9 the larger of this pair. The two outer structures consisted, on the one hand, of a steel frame, studded with clamps, acting as scaffolding for large panes of glass, and on the other, a densely woven carapace of twigs. Again that neon signature of Merz’s work, this time the phrase ‘Objet cache-toi’, ‘object hide-yourself’, encircled the thatched material of the second of these domes rendered in bright red lighting. The third and smallest dome was visible through the glass of the first, plain black and mysterious, connected by three white neon tubes which each pierced the glass and converged on the surface of this opaque centre. The glass and steel dome also loomed over its somewhat smaller thatched neighbour, and the contrast – rigid ribs of metal together with smooth, sharp-edged glass, against an irregular, haphazard tangle of bundled up twigs – seemed almost too obviously evidence of a more general tension between nature and culture. The third dome, perhaps, the kernel of the contradiction contained within this opposition, the contradiction in which culture, born out of and yet poised to master nature, immanently becomes a second nature in its own right. In retrospect, as the third dome implied, Merz’s juxtaposition of organic and man-made material already went well beyond the straightforward staging of that conflicted interdependence which informs our conceptions of nature and culture. Such juxtapositions are a frequent motif in the work of not only Merz, but many of those artists associated
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