Biosemiotics by Giorgio Prodi: a Postscript

Biosemiotics by Giorgio Prodi: A Postscript Kalevi Kull Giorgio Prodi was a co-founder of the biosemiotic field—the biosemiotic science or the contemporary interdiscipline of biosemiotics1—due to his works from the 1970s and 1980s. Prodi wrote much, but almost only in Italian. Thomas Sebeok dedicated the first volume ever published under the title Biosemiotics to him, with the inscrip- tion “In memoriam: Giorgio Prodi (1928–1987): bold trailblazer of contemporary biosemiotics” (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1992: v). Donald Favareau included Prodi in his list of 24 essential authors of biosemiotics in the first ever anthology of biosemiotics (Favareau 2010a, b; Prodi 2010a). Thus, Prodi is a classic in the field. However, an in-depth analysis of his work from a biosemiotic point of view has hitherto still been absent. So it was obvious, after learning that Felice Cimatti has written both about zoose- miotics (Cimatti 1998) and about Prodi (Cimatti 2000a) in Italian, to ask him to publish an article on Prodi’s biosemiotics in English (Cimatti 2000b) and, since he had published a whole book about Prodi in Italian, to publish also an updated version in English—which is what we have here.2 Prodi was a very productive writer. The list of his publications (Prodi 1987) divides his works into two categories. The category “scientific” includes 10 books (all in Italian, except 1 edited volume of conference proceedings in English) and 324 articles3 (most of these with co-authors, 178 in English, a few in French, the rest in Italian). The category “philosophical and literary” includes 13 books (all in 1 Favareu 2010a: 280. 2 I am thankful for the brief but productive meetings with Felice Cimatti in Rome (April 2002), San Marino (June 2002), and Palermo (December 2016). On recent zoosemiotic (or ecosemiotic) work by him, see also Cimatti (2018). I also thank The University of Tartu for support via IUT2-44. 3 The first among these published in 1953. Kalevi Kull University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 135 F. Cimatti, A Biosemiotic Ontology, Biosemiotics 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97903-8 136 Biosemiotics by Giorgio Prodi: A Postscript Italian) and 66 articles (most of these single-authored, 6 in English, the rest in Italian). Works on semiotics are all listed in the latter category. Prodi’s first article on semiotics was “The prehistory of sign” (Prodi 1974).4 The (hopefully) complete list of Prodi’s works on semiotics which exist in English is the following: (1) “Material bases of signification”, published in Semiotica (Prodi 1988a). An abbreviated translation of Prodi 1977. (2) “Development of semiosic competence”, published in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics (Prodi 1986a; reprinted in Prodi 1994 and Prodi 2010b). First version of this text—with preliminary titles “Phylogeny of codes” and “Ontogeny of codes”—was written in 1981 (as mentioned in Prodi 1987: 60). (3) “Biology as natural semiotics” (Prodi 1989c), published in a Bochum semiotics series, was initially a talk given at the Third Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in 1984 in Palermo. An Italian version of this article has been published repeatedly (Prodi 1984, 1988e, 2002).5 (4) “Culture as natural hermeneutics” (Prodi 1989b), published in the proceedings volume of the 1986 Bochum conference The Nature of Culture. An Italian version published in Prodi 1988d. (5) “Signs and codes in immunology”, published in the proceedings volume of the 1986 Lucca conference The Semiotics of Cellular Communication in the Immune System (Prodi 1988c). Reprinted in Essential Readings in Biosemiotics (Prodi 2010a). (6) “Toward a biologically grounded ethics” in the Bologna University publication Alma Mater Studiorum (Prodi 1989d) is printed together with the Italian text, which was a talk given at the 1987 conference “Ethics of scientific knowledge” in Venice. As Prodi’s work on biosemiotics was highly evaluated by Thomas Sebeok and Umberto Eco, let us take a brief look at their reflections on Prodi’s semiotic thought and point at some relevant work and recent ideas that are close to Prodi’s approach. From Thomas Sebeok When speaking about the development of fields in academic endeavours, Thomas Sebeok often referred to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a psychology professor from the University of Chicago, who made a distinction between domains and fields (e.g. Sebeok 2004). Every scholarly field has its gatekeepers, they both said, who take responsibility for the limits as well as the purity (or rather productivity and 4 See also an interview with Prodi (Prodi 1986b). 5 Prodi attended also the Second Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in 1979 in Vienna, with a talk “The origin of meaning in phylogenesis” (as mentioned in Prodi 1983: 202), but his paper was not published in the congress proceedings (1984, edited by Tasso Borbé). Biosemiotics by Giorgio Prodi: A Postscript 137 creativity) of the field, letting some work or some researchers in and leaving others out as inappropriate for reasons such as quality, etc. Indeed, this is what the leading figures in academic fields often do. However, what is more important than gatekeeping and what our mentors should be praised for is window-opening. Gatekeeping is a negative function, while the window-opening is a positive and supportive one. The windows of fitting (recognition windows) are important instruments in how science works. Whom to follow, whom to take in or to take with, whom to mention just briefly, and whose ideas rather to avoid—each scholar has his or her windows: the windows of limits of knowledge and of hopes in understanding of study objects. The mentors’ windows are those that lead to groundbreaking paths in research, innovative research programmes. Scholars in the field of biosemiotics would describe their domain as covering everything related to the primary mechanisms of meaning-making or, from another aspect, to the mechanisms of embodiment.6 Biosemiotics deals with the meaning- making that is real in non-human organisms. The study field of the primary meaning- making has appeared stepwise, and it was Thomas Sebeok who introduced to us Giorgio Prodi as a pioneer of biosemiotics, mentioning him in several talks. Prodi incorporated semiotics into biology just at the time when Sebeok rediscov- ered Jakob von Uexküll. Sebeok paid attention to the fact that there was more in biology that belonged to the domain of semiotics than animal behaviour as studied by ethology. This happened in the late 1970s. Yet there were only a few researchers in biosemiotics at that time. Sebeok was famous for his ability to connect scholars. In a couple of his articles, he recalls a week spent in the company of Thure von Uexküll and Giorgio Prodi in Freiburg in 1979. For instance (Sebeok 2004: 87–88): Thure made arrangements for me to spend a week or so visiting him in Freiburg. […] Our Freiburg discussions about multifarious biosemiotic topics were carried out, with rare intensity, from morning late into every night, and were happily augmented by the continu- ous participation of Giorgio Prodi, Director of the Institute for Cancer Research of the University of Bologna. Prodi, an astounding polymath [Eco 1988b] who had become my friend several years earlier, encountered Thure for the first time on that occasion; the two of them met only twice more, first in Palermo in the Summer of 1984, then the last time in Lucca in the early fall of 1986. [Sercarz et al. 1988] He offers some additional details of that period (Sebeok 2004: 91): […] during the week we spent together in our open-ended 1979 ‘intensive seminar’ in Thure’s company in Freiburg on the practical and conceivable ins and outs of biosemiotics, the three of us got along extremely well; as I commented afterwards, ‘this uniquely stimu- lating experience enabled me to enhance my writings and teachings […] in biosemiotics in its various topical subdivisions’. [Sebeok 1998: 34–35] However, this does not mean that Sebeok would agree with all of Prodi’s views on biosemiotics. For instance, Sebeok was critical of some terminology used by Prodi (Sebeok 1997a: 436): 6 Cf. Emmeche (2007: 385): “biosemiotics—a qualitative organicist account of embodiment”. 138 Biosemiotics by Giorgio Prodi: A Postscript The quasisemiotic phenomena of nonbiological atomic interactions and, later, those of inor- ganic molecules, were consigned by the late oncologist Prodi (1977) to ‘proto-semiotics’, but this must surely be read as a metaphorical expression. Prodi’s term is to be distinguished from the notion ‘primitive communication’, which refers to the transfer of information- carrying endoparticles, such as exists in neuron assemblies, where it is managed in modern cells by protein particles. Sebeok did not accept Prodi’s term “natural semiotics” (“semiotica naturale”, Prodi 1988b: 149), which he said to be a poor substitute for “biosemiotics” (Sebeok 2004: 90). In Sebeok’s library, which now belongs to the Semiotics Department of the University of Tartu, there are ten books by Prodi, plus a set of reprints of his articles on semiotics. From Umberto Eco In our conversation with Umberto Eco in Milan in 2012, he mentioned: “When I discovered the research of Giorgio Prodi on biosemiotics I was the one who published his book that maybe I was not totally agreeing with, but I found it was abso- lutely important to speak about those things”. Two books by Prodi (Prodi 1979; Prodi 1982) appeared in the series edited by Eco (Espresso Strumenti, and Studi Bompiani: Il campo semiotico). Describing Prodi’s impact, Eco pointed out a major aim of biosemiotics (Eco 2004: 27–28): […] the assumption that both a genetic and an immunological code can in some sense be analysed semiotically seems to constitute the new scientific attempt to find a language that can be defined as a primitive par excellence, though not in historical, but rather in biological terms.

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