Introduction: The Genesis of Biosemiotic Literary Criticism: How The Future "Presents" The Past

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Genesis of Biosemiotic

Literary Criticism: How the Future
“Presents” the Past
Abstract In this chapter, I provide a theoretical overview of the newly emerging

field of biosemiotic criticism (aka “biosemiotic literary criticism”). I discuss (1)
how that field relates to literary criticism and to ecological criticism (ecocriticism),
(2) what concepts and principles from biosemiotics (and from other fields with par-
allel research agendas) inform biosemiotic criticism, and (3) what approaches prac-
titioners of biosemiotic criticism might take to their subject matter, including
especially the use of semiotic modeling techniques drawn from MST (Modeling
Systems Theory) (Sebeok, Marcel D, The forms of meaning: Modeling systems
theory and semiotic analysis. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, 2000) and from
Maran (Green Lett Stud Ecocritic 18(3):297–311, 2014a).
1.1 Quick Hits
Before presenting my more fully developed essay on biosemiotic criticism, let me

offer several strands that will run through this book. Note that, throughout the chap-
ters to follow, I will use the term coined by Timo Maran, “biosemiotic criticism”
(2014a and 2014b), the term currently in use in the ecocriticism community, instead
of the term “biosemiotic literary criticism” (the phrase chosen for the title of this
book so as to prevent any ambiguity of meaning for newcomers to ecocriticism).
• Biosemiotic criticism is a form of literary and cultural criticism that is based on
the science of biosemiotics, that field which studies “sign processes in nature in
all dimensions” (Emmeche 1992), but because biosemiotics itself has deep roots
in the humanities (Wheeler 10 in Favareau et al. 2017), as does the “doctrine of
signs” (semiotics), biosemiotic criticism is a solidly interdisciplinary school of
literary and cultural criticism, one that collapses the “Two Cultures” distinction
of C. P. Snow (1959); in fact, it can be said that biosemiotic criticism embraces a
methodology in which the sciences order concepts and direct thinking in a
humanistic field and the humanities order concepts and direct thinking in a sci-
entific field, the latter being a check on any reductionist or mechanistic ideologies
in the former;
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

W. J. Coletta, Biosemiotic Literary Criticism, Biosemiotics 24,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72495-5_1
2 1 Introduction: The Genesis of Biosemiotic Literary Criticism: How the Future…
• as a school of literary criticism, biosemiotic criticism is a subfield of ecocriti-

cism—primarily, however, because of the historical precedence of ecocriticism;
• as a school of literary criticism based on biosemiotics, practitioners of biosemi-
otic criticism hold, with biosemioticians, the view that “sign processes take place
also outside of human culture at various levels: as intra- and intercellular pro-
cesses inside an organism, as signals in animal communication, and as semiotic
regulation in ecosystems. Correspondingly, human cultural and literary activities
should be interpreted in this wider context of semiotic processes” (Maran and
Westling 2017: 26);
• also, (a) because biosemiotics has as its central focus “semiosis,” that process
whereby ecological relationships and the evolution of life itself are understood as
a function of the “life of signs and the signs of life,” as interpretive phenomena;
(b) because “semiosis” is understood as that process by which the “increase of
information (not just its transfer)” is paramount in the continuation and growth
of life (Kull 2017:16–17), (c) because, as Jakob von Uexküll writes, “meaning”
replaces “progress” as our dominant ideology with reference to evolution and the
status of living things (1982: 69), and (d) because biosemiotics is “all about”
“finding the poetic or poetic-like processes in living systems” (Kull 2017: 17)—
biosemiotic criticism is a field of literary and cultural criticism that
–– can be as powerful as science itself in helping to reveal the structure and func-
tion, the signing action, of life; and,
–– escapes the reductionisms of the fields of literary Darwinism and evolutionary
psychology;
• biosemiotic criticism is a form of literary and cultural criticism that strongly
relies on modeling, on MST, Modeling Systems Theory—as extended and devel-
oped by Sebeok and Danesi (2000). Because life itself is semiosis, and the “abil-
ity to make models is … a derivative of semiosis” (2000: 5), biosemiotic criticism
may be considered as a modeling enterprise involving, as Timo Maran (2014a)
writes, “zoosemiotic modeling,” “linguistic modeling,” and “artistic modeling”
(see Tool 6 and passim below)—which three modeling strategies may be applied
(a) to a study of how humans perceive their environments OR (b) to the study of
how human beings represent those perceived environments in literary works.
(See Fig. 2.1, Tool 6, Chap. 2, below). Maran also helps practitioners of biosemi-
otic criticism manage in their criticism three types of semiotic relations (explained
in depth below): “motivated” relations (most iconic and indexical ones), “repre-
sentational” relations (the textual, symbolic, representation of the world in a lit-
erary work by means of modeling), and “complementary” relations (those
relations in the world that authors can reference in their writing but which remain
incomplete until the readers fill in blanks—a kind of literary “outsourcing”
whereby authors learn to conjure in the minds of their readers those large sys-
tems that otherwise would be impossible to describe in their entirety in a finite
literary text) (again, see Fig. 2.1, Tool 6 and passim below). In MST terms, biose-
miotic critics will explore a threefold hierarchy of modeling as it is found in the
world: “semiosis” (the “biological capacity to produce and comprehend forms
1.1 Quick Hits 3
[models]”); “modeling” (“the activity of actually producing forms”); and “repre-

sentation” (“the capacity to refer to the world in terms of singularized, compos-
ite, cohesive, and connective forms”—which is to say to produce and comprehend
“signs,” “texts,” “codes,” and “metaphor” [Sebeok and Danesi 2000: 4–5]);
• biosemiotics is a discipline that moves beyond the simplistic binary oppositions
of subject and object, nature and culture, mind and nature, science and literature,
and energy and information—and so gives us terms, to be defined and discussed
below, such as “Umwelt” (Jakob von Uexküll 1909); “semiosphere” (Lotman
[1984], Hoffmeyer [1996a, b, c: 59], Kull [1998: 305]); “semiosis” (Peirce [EP
1998: 411]1, Sebeok [1977: 180–183]; Hoffmeyer [1996a, b, c: 13, 2008: 4], Kull
[1998: 301], Barbieri [2008a]); “semethic interaction” (Hoffmeyer [2008: 188
ff]; “interpretance” (Hoffmeyer [2008: 196]); “biotext” (Kull 2002: 327);
“nature-text” (Maran 2014a, b); “renewable historicism” (Coletta et al. 2009);
and “habitext” (an assemblage of ecological “habitat,” Peircean “habit,” and
“text,” see below). As Kalevi Kull writes in his review of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s
Signs of Meaning in the Universe (1996a):
The problems which biosemiotics can solve, according to Hoffmeyer, are among the deep-
est known in science and philosophy. Hoffmeyer has listed some of them [page numbers are
from Signs of Meaning in the Universe 1996a]:
a. to reformulate the concept of information;
b. to transcend (overcome) the dualism of mind and matter, i.e. the mind-body problem (69,
94, 124);
c. to solve the incompatibility of humanities and natural sciences (94);
d. to unite cultural history to natural history (p. 95);
e. to give humanity its place in nature (p. 94).
• The origin of language, and the origin of consciousness seem to belong to the
same list. (Kull 1998: 305–306)
•
• Practitioners of biosemiotic criticism will discover that the terms supplied by
biosemiotics will be of great use in analyzing the literary representations of
nature, and that, reciprocally, many literary terms will be of great use to biosemi-
otic critics in their evaluation of semiosis in living systems. Recall that, as Kalevi
Kull writes, and as I cited above, biosemiotics is “all about” “finding the poetic
or poetic-like processes in living systems” (Kull 2017: 17). Also, many of the
epistemological and ontological problems that biosemiotics is primed to solve
are those that have been of interest to literary writers and philosophers for ages.
Practitioners of biosemiotic criticism will be well situated to evaluate literary
and philosophical texts concerned with the intellectual problems laid out by
Hoffmeyer above;
• biosemiotic perspectives are spreading, and biosemiotic criticism has laid down
roots. Joni Adamson, in her chapter entitled “Cosmovisions: Environmental
Justice, Transnational American Studies, and Indigenous Literature,” from The
Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014), explicitly speaks of “biosemiotics”
(184) as a “seeing instrument” (181) providing “interesting insights into the
social, political, economic, and ecological meanings of ‘cosmovisions’ that
encompass multinatural relationships” (2014: 184). Note that the term here is
“multinatural” not “multinational”—“multinatural” itself referencing other key
biosemiotic terms, terms such as “endosemiotics” (Sebeok [1985 (1976): 3 and
Hoffmeyer 2008: 213 ff]); “swarm intelligence” (Hoffmeyer [1996a, b, c: 113
ff]); and “superorganism” (Hoffmeyer [2008: 258–259]). Without explicitly
using the term “biosemiotics,” Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding
Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of
Plants, brilliantly represents the long pedigree of biosemiotic themes in her
weaving together cutting-edge science, indigenous wisdom, and, though she
doesn’t use the terms, phytosemiosis and zoosemiosis;
• biosemiotic criticism grounds its epistemology and ontology in Peirce’s Ten and
Twenty-Eight Sign Types. (See Tool 15c below). We can perceive things, but can
we perceive systems? Or are we always at the mercy of the hegemony (domina-
tion) of things? Yes, the Peircean Dynamic Object must constrain our thinking.
The British Romantic poet Wordsworth knows as much when he writes that
some birds may be used by poets to represent “melancholy,” “But ne’er could
Fancy bend the buoyant Lark/To melancholy service” (“A Morning Exercise”).
However, when I ask young students to draw a picture (create a model) of how
the world works, of the system of the world, that is, to divide the world into its
simplest ecological parts and show how those ecological parts are also evolution-
ary steps, they inevitably fail to capture “system” and instead present me with
static representations of things. Peirce’s Ten and Twenty-Eight Sign Types repre-
sent a nested, evolutionary, ecological, and cognitive scaffolding that allows
practitioners of biosemiotic criticism to trace how things become objects become
emotions and feelings (qualia), facts, and finally laws and habit structures—tools
for modeling systems, emergence, and “how the world works”;
• biosemiotic literary criticism is deeply informed by “semioethics,” a concept
deriving from ancient Greek “semeiotics,” the “Significs” of Victoria Welby, and
the work of Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio (2005: 87–110). As Susan
Petrilli writes,
Welby’s approach has contributed to the formation of “semioethics,” an expression I have
introduced with co-author Augusto Ponzio, also related to our proposal of a new form of
humanism …. Semioethics reflects the idea of semiotics recovering its ancient vocation as
“semeiotics” (or symptomatology), with its focus on symptoms. Semioethics concerns
itself with the “care for life,” but from a global perspective whereby semiosis and life coin-
cide. Similarly to significs and recalling authors such as Levinas, but also Bakhtin, and
others still, semioethics intends to summon the “semiotic animal” (see Deely et al. 2005),
indeed better still the “semioethic animal” to authenticity and commitment at a pragmatic
level, the level of action, beyond the purely theoretical, to participation and involvement
with the other beyond individual separatisms and interests, to care and love for the other
(Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” in Levinas 1991, Eng. Trans.: 103–121).
(2009: 281)
Humans, as the “semiotic animal,” are the only beings capable of conscious ethi-
cal choice and action on behalf of each other and the “other,” and, as such,
humans are the “semioethic animal.” In short, “semioethics” explores “the
connection between the problem of humanism and the logic of alterity”—the
1.1 Quick Hits 5
logic of the “other” (Petrilli 2005: 82), but not only of the logic of those “other”
conscious minds and sentient beings in the semiosphere but also of the logic of
all that is agentive (of semiosis itself), the logic of what Tønnessen (2017: 23)
calls “semiotic agency.” Accordingly, biosemiotic literary criticism is ontologi-
cally committed to what Tønnessen calls “a biosemiotic ethics [that] goes beyond
sentience … , because semiotic agency, which a biosemiotic ethics can take as its
defining morally relevant characteristic, constitutes a wider category in the realm
of life than that of sentience” (2017: 23). “Semiotic agency” rather than “sen-
tience,” then, defines what should serve as the platform for “biosemiotic ethics”;
similarly, Petrilli and Ponzio (2005) argue that “semioethics” has as its goal “the
care for semiosis” (89), the maintenance of “the health of semiosis” (89). As
Petrilli and Ponzio (2005) write, “By ‘semioethics’, we understand the propen-
sity in semiotics to recover its ancient vocation as ‘semeiotics’ (or symptomatol-
ogy), with its focus on symptoms. A major issue for semioethics is ‘care for life’
in a global perspective according to which semiosis and life coincide” (88).
Indeed, “semiosis” and “semiotic agency” are endangered, Petrilli and Ponzio
(2005) argue, are threatened by the homogenization of “globalization,” and so
“[t]he semiotician today must be ready to interpret the symptoms of semiosis and
its malfunctioning as produced by globalization in today’s global communication-
production society” (89). Practitioners of biosemiotic criticism, then, will find
that John Deely’s concept of humanity as the “semiotic animal,” as the only spe-
cies on the planet capable of “semioethics,” as a key concept around which a new
epistemology and ontology may be built, as the “semiotic animal” “displaces
Descartes’ notion of the isolated thinker with a contextualized animal whose
behavior is distinctive in the realization that there are signs upon which the whole
of life depends for successful continuance” (2005: 156–157). Here, Deely links
“signs” (semiosis) with “the whole of life,” with integrity, and with sustainabil-
ity. In this context, if we are in fact the “contextualized animal” (and recall that
Peirce writes, “a person is not absolutely an individual” [CP 5.314])2; if we are,
then, in part a function of others; if the individual is a function of community, and
if, as biosemioticians tell us, signs and “signing” are now endangered species,
then we are called to serve “semiosis,” and so we will find the concepts of the
“semiotic animal” and the “semioethic animal” particularly compelling ones, as
they join the study of the nature of “semiosis” with the ethical imperative to “care
for” it. (See “The Semioethic-Animal Principle” in Chap. 5 of this book);
• Biosemiotic criticism is informed by the subfield of ReNewable Historicism
(Coletta et al. 2009), a pragmatic branch of the New Historicism that focuses on
the renewing of texts (on how newly generated interpretants renew the sign, the
text) rather than on the interpretation of them (fitting the sign, the text, to the
historical object) and on the renewability of history as a renewing of the text
(through ficticism and the teleophor). If history is a “text that needs to be inter-
preted” rather than “a set of fixed, objective events” (Abrams 1999: 183), the
future is a text that needs to be enacted or renewed. Renewable Historicism is
grounded in a Peircean semiosis in which biological forces or wholes (see
Peirce’s “final causation” [1.220]) have always already (or at least “in futuro”
[2.92]) “called out” their parts; indeed, the future can influence the present.
Renewable Historicism is also interested in how signs may be understood to have
a life and trajectory of their own. In Levinas’ words, “Works have a destiny inde-
pendent of the I” (qtd. in Newton 1995: 69), and that sometimes “a novel shuts
beings up in a fate despite their freedom” (qtd in Newton 53). ReNewable
Historicism is dependent on theorists such as Levinas for showing how words,
signs, may sometimes have a life and an agency, a morality, separate from the
texts and codes and metaforms in which they are embedded—and from the
author’s intentions. Accordingly, practitioners of biosemiotic criticism may be
interested in Umwelt futurology (Tønnessen 2019), “the study of future
Umwelten: i.e., subjective, semiotic lifeworlds,” involving both “Umwelt predic-
tions” and “Umwelt” scenarios” (401)—for what can be more important to a
sustainable future than modeling, for one can’t make changes today to achieve a
sustainable future without a clear idea of what such a future might be like; what
habits will lead to habitats?
• Practitioners of biosemiotic criticism, because they acknowledge the agency of
the living world—cells, organisms, ecological communities—needs must be
concerned with “the rights of living things”/“land rights,” which terms may be
understood to encompass the whole range of values from
–– the rights of the “land” itself (of the rights of each living individual that con-
stitutes a natural community and of the rights of the natural community itself)
(see for example, Should Trees Have Standing: Toward Legal Rights for
Natural Objects, by Christopher D. Stone); to
–– the rights of the “landscape,” of the commons, of land “held in common” as
the “ground” of the freedom of the people who lived on and managed it before
its enclosure (privatization; colonial appropriation). However, “[g]lobally,
2.5-bn people live on some 6b hectares of communal land” (“Leaders,” Who
owns what? Economist 12 September 2020), but these people have no legal,
“enforceable property rights,” so the issue is still alive today. British poet John
Clare (1793–1864), in his poem “The Lament of Swordy Well,” tells the story
of a “piece of land” (“Swordy Well”) that was at one time “famous for its
wildlife” (Thornton, “Notes” 1997: 110; Clare 1997 [originally published
in 1820]) but has now been turned into a quarry and “stripped” of its auton-
omy, its status as a sustainable ecosystem, and, its role as the “commons.” As
Swordy Well, speaking for itself, says, “There was a time my bit of ground/
Made freemen of the slave.” Here, of course, is the ground note of the com-
mons—of that thousands-of-years-old arrangement whereby the wealth of a
people was a function of how successful they were in managing their com-
mons—the opposite of Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis
(1968), an argument for the privatization of the commons that ignored the
history of its successful management. Indeed, the poetic voice or persona of
the poem is the land itself, thus Clare employs the trope of personification or
prosopopoeia—except that a case can be made for Clare’s actual belief that
the land has in fact agency and (should be given) a voice; to, at least,
1.1 Quick Hits 7
–– the rights of people (especially people in poor countries) to “own land.” As

we read in the Economist, “Twenty years ago, a Peruvian economist made a
startling observation. People in poor countries are not as poor as they seem.
They have assets—lots of them. But they cannot prove that they own them, so
they cannot use them as collateral. Hernando de Soto estimated that the total
value of informally owned land, homes, and other fixed assets was a whop-
ping $9.3 trn in 2000 ($13.5 trn in today’s money) …. Property rights would
make the poor richer,” de Soto argued (20 Sept 2020: 16). Practitioners of
biosemiotic criticism are free, of course, to think and work at any one of the
three levels above, as there is no one political position for biosemiotic critics.
However, a school of literary and cultural criticism that studies nature litera-
ture (and the representation of nature in literature) and that takes seriously the
biosemiotic point-of-view that all life has agency and that “sign processes
take place also outside of human culture at various levels: as intra- and inter-
cellular processes inside an organism, as signals in animal communication,
and as semiotic regulation in ecosystems” (Maran and Westling 2017: 26),
must necessarily concern itself at some point with “land rights”;
• Practitioners of biosemiotic criticism, then, might even “grade” a literary work
with respect to the following:
–– Is “The Environment” treated in a given literary work as an immutable, uni-
form monolith, or, rather, is it the case that “environments” are treated as
“constructs,” as Umwelts (within which “ecological niches” are explored with
respect to their semiotic dimensions—see Hoffmeyer’s “semethic interac-
tions” [2008: 188–197] and “semiotic niche” concept [2008: 181–211])?
–– Is there an attempt in a given literary work to understand (to represent or rec-
reate) the world from the point of view of, within the unique Umwelt of, an
animal or plant? As Tønnessen et al. (2018: 328) write, “Umwelt theory chal-
lenges central dogmas in current phenomenology, starting with the misguided
idea that all phenomena are human phenomena.” Practitioners may therefore
justifiably ask how well a given literary work escapes the orbit of an anthro-
pocentric phenomenology. Because phenomenological approaches to literary
study have been popular for decades, there is a ready niche for a biosemiotic
approach to phenomenology and its anthropocentricism. Practitioners of
biosemiotic criticism should not be afraid to apply to their analyses of literary
texts perspectives drawn from research in the emerging fields of what
Tønnessen et al. call “applied Umwelt theory” or “Biosemiotic
Phenomenology” (2018: 328); because Peirce’s approach to phenomenology,
what he later dubbed “Phaneroscopy,” is so theoretical (328), practitioners of
biosemiotic criticism may enjoy using the theoretical scaffolding of Peirce’s
10 and 28 Classes of Sign as cognitive categories in need of a natural history.
For example, in John Daniel’s essay “Pack Rat,” discussed in some depth in
Chap. 4, Daniel dramatizes how even human commerce, the “trading habit,”
is shown to have zoosemiotic roots. Daniel (2017 [1992]: 179) writes, “The
trading habit … is common to wood rats. They’ll drop what they were carry-
ing to pick up something else, especially something bright. No one knows

why, but I understand it.” What Daniel understands is that the rat is capable of
experiencing “value” as more than just a measure of an item’s utility within
the phenomenological category of Secondness; indeed, the rat’s “trading
habit,” when “what they were carrying” (food or building material) is traded
for “something bright,” and not in any way usable, is an example of how the
experience of Peircean Secondness is replaced by that of Peircean Thirdness—
the symbolic experience replacing the indexical experience, the sizzle replac-
ing the steak. Daniel explains too how the pack rat will hoard these shiny
objects, although it has no apparent use for them—again, it just enjoys the
experience of “something bright.” And since “whatever an organism senses
also means something to it” (Thesis 8 of a “Biosemiotic Building,”
in Emmeche et al. 2002: 20; Tool 1 in Chap. 2), Daniel helps us to understand
that the experience of symbolic levels of meaning is something available to
animals. Practitioners of biosemiotic criticism can “grade” works of literature
based on the extent to which they explore what Tønnessen et al. (2018) call
“Biosemiotic Phenomenology,” dimensions of shared experience and cogni-
tion with animals in ways to which traditional science has been blind;
–– Is there in a given literary work any attention given to how language con-
structs our world and our relationship to it? (See the “Linguistic modeling”
[Level II.2] and the “Representation of linguist modeling” [Level II.3 of Fig.
2.1, Tool 6] above. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013: 48–59), in her study of “lin-
guistic modeling,” speaks of the “grammar of animacy” (see below), and
Koichiro Matsuno (1996) describes the grammatical bias built into the modal-
ities of a synchronic versus a diachronic pattern of representation in science,
the former, the dominant “synchronic,” being a function of what is called
“externalism” in science. As Hoffmeyer writes, citing Matsuno,
[I]nternalism is concerned with situations where a system finds itself in a state that
might be grammatically characterized as its present progressive tense: the state of being
in the midpoint of action—going towards, changing, recognizing, etc. Science never
deals with such states but only with states that belong to the present or past tense.
According to Matsuno (1996), this omission by science of considering the unique prop-
erties of states in their present progressive tense—states of becoming rather than
being—springs from the universalist and externalist ambitions of science” (182).
We are always on the outside; the question is, “Can we get inside the process
and represent it as such?” As Matsuno (1996) himself writes, in the “Internalist
stance and the physics of information,”
[D]iachronic information is the one met in a historical context relating to phenomena as
they occur or change over a period of time (Matsuno 1989; Kippers 1990).. .. Synchronic
information can be viewed as an abstract form of the former at the hypothetical limit of
being able to ignore the historicity of events. Our objective is to highlight the physical
significance of diachronic information to any material participants, especially in rela-
tion to the process of measurement that is ubiquitous internally. (111)
And so, while “[i]nformation concerned with evolutionary processes at large

is diachronic,” (Matsuno 111), the synchronic nature and bias of the
1.1 Quick Hits 9
methodologies and language of science valorize a process of “abstraction”

that “ignores the history of events”—or the very processual nature of events
in the first place. Kimmerer speaks of a similar bias when she compares natu-
ral languages, the grammar of English and the grammar of the native American
language Potawatomi. English, Kimmerer writes, is a noun-heavy language
(“Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that propor-
tion is 70 percent” [2013: 53]); she then speaks of how there are words (verbs)
in Potawatami such as “to be a Saturday,” “to be a hill,” and “to be a bay” (55).
As Kimmerer writes, “the verb wiikwegamaa,” “to be a bay,” “releases the
water from bondage and lets it live” (55). To what extent do authors represent
these semiotic phenomena in their literary works? In fact, literary works could
be “graded” (formally or informally) not just with respect to “linguistic mod-
eling” but with respect to how well they embody, in biosemiotic terms, all the
categories laid out by Maran (2014a): “zoosemiotic modeling,” “linguistic
modeling,” and “artistic modeling”;
–– Literary works could be “graded” with respect to the number and complexity
of “semethic interactions” described (Hoffmeyer 2008: 188 ff); or, to what
extent does a literary work recognize levels of “interpretance” in nature,
“interpretance” being “a measure of the capacity of a system to respond to
signs through the formation of meaningful interpretants.” Hoffmeyer then
goes on to say, “High interpretance allows a system to ‘read’ many sorts of
cues in the surroundings ….” (196). For example, indigenous agriculture has
“high interpretance”; corporate agriculture “low interpretance.” Robin Wall
Kimmerer (2013) writes of the polyculture of the “Three Sisters,” of beans,
corn, and squash grown together (and their cultivated, intertwined, “semethic”
interdependencies)—squash leaves shade out weeds, corn scaffolds the beans,
beans provide nitrogen-derived nutrients through “chemical communica-
tions” between the nitrogen-fixing bean plant’s roots and “microscopic rod[s]
of Rhizobium bacteria” (133). “Acre for acre, a Three Sisters garden yields
more food than if you grew each of the sisters alone” (132)—precisely
because of the cultivated and natural semethic interactions, of what Kimmerer
calls “polyculture complementary knowledges” (139). As Kimmerer writes,
in language that speaks in so many words of “semioethics,” “The squash cre-
ates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing” (139).
Monocultures, especially those involving GMO plants, have a “low-level”
interpretance, partly because of the monoculture but also because, as research
has shown, genetic modification, for some reason, affects the altered organ-
ism’s ability to engage in interpretance. For example, Cheeke et al. write, “We
found that Bt maize had lower levels of AMF [mycorrhizal fungal] coloniza-
tion in their roots than did the non- Bt parental lines” (2012: 700). The mycor-
rhizal fungi playing a large role in creating underground communication
channels, and thus semethic interactions, between plants. As we read in The
Overstory, a judge at a hearing involving a lawsuit against a timber company:
“I never imagined! Trees summon animals and make them do things? They
remember? They feed and take care of each other?” (Powers 2018: 283).
Much of this feeding of some trees by others takes place through the agency
of mycorrhiza (Hoffmeyer 2008: 99) and their helping to tie together root
systems into communication and distribution centers. Indeed, practitioners of
biosemiotic criticism can “grade” literary works on the extent to which they
present evolution as scaffolding the “semiotic emergence” (Hoffmeyer 2008:
232–3) of such Peircean habit structures, of “semiotic freedom” (Hoffmeyer
2008:185–188, and Principle 13 in Tool 1; see Chap. 2), of “a polycultural
of complementary knowledges” (Kimmerer 2013: 139). Interestingly, Timo
Maran’s “complementary relations” (2014a)—those semiotic relations that
represent how authors may outsource some of the description in their writing
of a given natural phenomenon to a reader’s a priori knowledge of that phe-
nomenon by presenting readers with just those signs, those hints, that will
allow the reader to fill in the text, to do the writer’s work, to complement what
the author has written (the author’s “insight,” with their own “outsight,” and
thus to create what Maran calls “nature-text” (a complementary text)—remind
me of how trees reach out and create shared realities for each other through
the signing agency of the mycorrhizome. Biosemiotic principles lend them-
selves to literary criticism because, again, biosemiotics is “all about” “finding
the poetic or poetic-like processes in living systems” (Kull 2017: 17).
1.2 Biosemiotic Criticism: A Narrative Overview
“Biosemiotic criticism” is a form of science-informed literary and cultural criticism

that I would place under the heading of “ecocriticism”—but only to acknowledge
the historical precedence of “ecocriticism” over “biosemiotic criticism” within the
literary-critical world. For example, Timo Maran’s seminal essay, “Biosemiotic
Criticism,” is Chap. 14 in the important volume entitled The Oxford Handbook of
Ecocriticism (2014b), edited by Greg Garrard. “Ecocriticism,” as defined by
Lawrence Buell (1995: 430), is the “study of the relationship between literature and
the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis.”
And while practitioners of the developing field of “biosemiotic criticism” (called
“literary biosemiotics” by Coletta [1999] and then “biosemiotic criticism” by Maran
[2014b]) would likely share the just-mentioned content and commitment of eco-
criticism and ecocritics, biosemiotic critics, grounded in the field of biosemiotics,
bring a specific and unique set of intellectual tools to the field of ecocriticism, tools
sharpened by the field of biology as transformed by the field of semiotics (which is
to say, by biosemiotics). Combining as it does the disciplines of biology and semiot-
ics, biosemiotics represents a radical epistemological break with the mainstream,
reductionist and mechanistic, paradigm in biology. Biosemiotic criticism, therefore,
is itself committed to exploring this epistemological break. In addition, as a science-
informed approach to literary and cultural criticism, biosemiotic criticism is
grounded in the several sub-disciplines of biology (ethology, genetics,
1.2 Biosemiotic Criticism: A Narrative Overview 11
microbiology, evolution, ecology, animal communication); of course, each of these

sub-disciplines is transformed by biosemiotics in substantial ways. I should men-
tion, however, that this transformation is done so as to create a better biology, a
stronger scientific discipline with more explanatory power, and that is because
semiotics allows biosemioticians (and practitioners of biosemiotic criticism) to
explore and describe biological functionalities that have been ignored or erased by
conventional biology. As we shall see later, these functionalities are best described
as “semiosis,” the “signing action of nature.”
The approach to “doing” biosemiotic criticism that I take in this book is based
primarily on both (1) applying models of semiotic and biosemiotic processes and
(2) applying specific principles of semiotics and biosemiotics—in the context of
primarily a Peircean semiotics and a Peircean understanding of “semiosis”—to the
interpretation of literature and culture. As Kalevi Kull (2017) writes in “Biosemiotics
and the Humanities: A Manifesto,” citing Perron et al. (2000), “What connects biol-
ogy with the humanities is exactly and precisely semiotics” (16). Indeed, I take the
following words of Kalevi Kull as my starting point in this book: “In order to pro-
fessionally use semiotic models or theories, one inevitably requires a good orienta-
tion in the semiotic conceptual apparatus…. Most of contemporary semiotic theory
has been developed on the basis of a humanities background. There is therefore a
need for a link to the humanities … for any semiotician. Semiotics itself cannot have
a congruent theory without a well worked out relationship between biological semi-
otics and humanities semiotics. In this, much work has yet to be done” (2017: 17).
It is my desire in this book to do some of this work.
In more specific terms, I have chosen to use the following tools and approaches:
(a) “modeling systems theory,” especially as “recast” by Thomas Sebeok and Marcel
Danesi (2000); (b) the work of Timo Maran with respect to “modeling the environ-
ment in literature” (2014a) (See Fig. 2.1, Tool 6, in Chap. 2); (c) the “13” and “Eight
Theses” of biosemiotics (of Emmeche et al. [2002] and Kull et al. [2009], respec-
tively, cited above as Tools 1 and 2); and (d) my own work with modeling semiosis
(Coletta 1993a, 1993b, 1996, 1999, 2014a, 2015; Coletta et al. 2009)—see “30
Principles of Semiotics,” Tool 4, Chap. 2 below, and my “Giving Simple Names to
Peirce’s 10 and 28 Sign Types,” Tool 15c, Chap. 2 below. As Sebeok and Danesi
write, “the science which studies models and their function is semiotics” (2000),
and so my taking a modeling approach to biosemiotic criticism falls clearly within
an expected and prepared path. Indeed, in “Models and Metaphors” by Randy
Moore, Dr. Moore, a plant biologist and editor of The American Biology Teacher,
writes, “I argue that the use of models by scientists is analogous to the use of meta-
phors by poets” (1993: 452). This isomorphy—anchored in the “semeiotic gram-
mar,” “critical logic,” and “universal rhetoric” of Charles Sanders Peirce—underlies
much of the book to follow.
Marcel Danesi, in his “Foreword” to Thomas Sebeok’s Signs: An Introduction to
Semiotics, elegantly and succinctly gives us both an historical and a technical sum-
mary of the relationship between biology, semiotics, and modeling:
Like the great biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944)—whose “discovery” by North
American scientists is due in large part to Sebeok’s efforts—Sebeok finds a point of contact
between a mainstream scientific approach to the study of organisms—biology—and that of
a strictly semiotic tradition. J. von Uexküll argued that every organism had different inward
and outward “lives.” The key to understanding this duality is in the anatomical structure of
the organism itself. Animals with widely different anatomies do not live in the same kind of
world. There exists, therefore, no common world of referents shared by humans and ani-
mals equally. The work of von Uexküll and Sebeok has shown that an organism does not
perceive an object itself, but according to its own particular kind of pre-existent mental
modelling system that allows it to interpret the world of beings, objects, and events in a
biologically-programmed way. For Sebeok, this system is grounded in the organism’s body,
which routinely converts the external world of experience into an internal one of representa-
tion in terms of the particular features of the modelling system with which a specific species
is endowed.
Sebeok has transformed semiotics back into a “life science,” having relocated it, in
effect, to its roots in medical biology. In other words, he has uprooted semiotics from the
philosophical, linguistic and hermeneutic terrain in which it has been cultivated for centu-
ries and replanted it in the larger biological domain whence it sprang originally. (2001: xv)
Biosemiotic criticism, then, grounded as it is in the field of biosemiotics, neces-

sarily introduces the formal study of signs (semiotics) into the field of ecocriticism
because, for biosemioticians, “[s]igns, not molecules, are the basic units in the study
of life” (“Thesis 1” in Reading Hoffmeyer, Rethinking Biology, by Claus Emmeche,
Kalevi Kull, and Frederick Stjernfelt 2002). Accordingly, Timo Maran defines
“biosemiotic criticism” “as the study of literature and other manifestations of human
culture with an emphasis on the biosemiotic understanding that life is, down to its
most fundamental levels, organized by sign processes” (2014b: 260). Indeed, Jesper
Hoffmeyer defines “biosemiotics” as “the name of an interdisciplinary scientific
project that is based on the recognition that life is fundamentally grounded in semi-
otic processes” (2008: 3); for practitioners of biosemiotics, Hoffmeyer continues,
“life is understood as essentially driven by, or actually consisting of, semiosis, that
is to say, processes of sign relations and their signification—or function—in the
biological processes of life” (4). For literary critics unfamiliar with the field of
“biosemiotics” (but who are, of course, quite familiar with the reductionist para-
digms of much of contemporary biology), Hoffmeyer’s characterization of “biose-
miotics” is likely to be surprising and exciting, for the whole of the biological world
would now seem to be continuous with the sign-driven world of culture with which
they are familiar. Hoffmeyer writes,
[Biosemiotics], then, implies that processes of sign[ing] and meaning cannot, as is often
assumed, become criteria for distinguishing between the domains of nature and culture.
Rather, cultural sign processes must be regarded as special instances of a more general and
extensive biosemiosis that continuously unfolds and acts in the biosphere. It is important to
emphasize … that the biosemiotic project in no way whatsoever contradicts the conven-
tional scientific understanding of living systems as originating from molecular processes.
Biosemiotics accords entirely with this viewpoint but expands upon it by noting that molec-
ular processes cannot be exhaustively described in chemical terms, since such processes, by
virtue of their participation in the constitution of the fundamental processes of life, func-
tionally become distinctive bearers of life’s critical semiotic relationships. (4)
Literary critics would be pleased to hear a scientist say that “molecular processes
cannot be exhaustively described in chemical terms,” as, again, such an epistemo-
logical stance would fit the anti-reductionism of most literary critics. However, the
notion that “processes of sign[ing] and meaning cannot … become criteria for dis-
tinguishing between the domains of nature and culture,” while opening up all of
nature to the interpretive methodologies of literary criticism, might cause literary
critics to ask about any latent social Darwinism in biosemiotic criticism. As we shall
see below, however, biosemiotic criticism is the antithesis of social Darwinism.
If the chemistry of life cannot be fully explained by the language of contempo-
rary chemistry, then I would think that ecocritics, especially those who are not
familiar with the paradigm of biosemiotic criticism, would be interested in the ques-
tion of whether ecosystem function can be fully described using only the language
of contemporary ecology. The answer, of course, from the point of view of biosemi-
otic criticism, must be no. Take for example how it would be impossible to fully
understand “energy flow” and “material cycling” rates in ecosystems without taking
into account so-called “insubstantial” “signing actions,” the carbon-footprint or
“weight” of which signs is negligible, though the energy savings that they bring
about are substantial. Hoffmeyer writes,
When a brown hare spots a fox approaching in the open landscape, the hare stands bolt
upright and signals its presence instead of fleeing. The explanation for this behavior,
according to ethologist Anthony Holley (1993), is that a hare can easily escape a fox simply
by running—a fact that the fox seems to ‘know’ (whether by learning or instinct).
Apparently, then, what is happening in this behavior is that the hare is telling the fox, “I
have seen you”—and as a result, they can both be spared the effort of running. (2008: xiii)
Such a “semiotic agreement,” such a “semiotic symbiosis” (as Sebeok writes, “The
biologist’s notion of symbiosis … is equivalent to the philosopher’s notion of semi-
osis” [1991: 110]), involves what Hoffmeyer calls “semethic interaction” (Hoffmeyer
2008: 188–195)—and actually helps promote energy efficiencies for the whole eco-
system. Indeed, as I intimate above, while systems ecologists, in calculating rates of
“energy flow” and “material cycling” in different ecological seres (stages of eco-
logical succession), might not include in their calculations signs that cannot be mea-
sured by mechanical or electronic means—nature does. In fact, such “semethic
interactions,” such “semiotic symbioses”—as that one involving the brown hare and
the fox and the power of the interpretation of a mere stance and a glance—are
highly efficient, evolutionarily scaffolded, replacements for the long trajectories of
more cumbersome biogeochemical processes. Consider how a weightless sign, say
the visual image of your getting out of a Land Rover, connected to a flee-or-fight
habit-structure, can cause a two-ton elephant to mobilize quite quickly. For biose-
mioticians, then, evolution is a “cosmic semiotic process that Peirce often described
as a tendency of nature to ‘take [i.e., to form] habits’” (2008: 5). Accordingly,
“semethic interactions,” of the brown hare-fox type, may be defined as follows:
“Whenever a regular behavior or habit of an individual or species is interpreted as a
sign by some other individuals (conspecifics or alter-specific) and is reacted upon
through the release of yet other regular behaviors or habits, we have a case of
semethic interaction” (2008: 189). Such “semethic interactions,” the result of what
Hoffmeyer calls the emergence of “semiotic freedom,” are incredibly “cheap,” then,
from an evolutionary point of view (consider the conspecific, semethic, energy-
savings shortcut for emperor penguins of their “huddling behaviour, the key factor
that allows them to assume their incubating task while undergoing a long fast”
[Gilbert et al. 2008]); such a “semethic interaction” can create a “virtual” metabolic
system in the single generation that it might take to learn to huddle rather than the
millennia it would take to evolve a new physiologically-based metabolic system
from the inside out). Yet such “semethic interactions” are often overlooked or under-
valued in contemporary biology and ecology. The take-home point: just as “molecu-
lar processes cannot be exhaustively described in chemical terms,” neither can the
ecological ones be exhaustively described without taking into account “semethic
interaction.”
Indeed, the first four of the “Eight Theses” from Theses on Biosemiotics:
Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology, by Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, Claus
Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and Frederik Stjernfelt (2009), speak to the depth to
which any attempt to study life without a commitment to semiotics as a research
methodology is a hollow one:
1. The semiosic/non-semiosic distinction is coextensive with the life/nonlife dis-
tinction, i.e., with the domain of general biology;
2. Biology is incomplete as a science in the absence of explicit semiotic grounding;
3. The predictive power of biology is embedded in the functional aspect and cannot
be based on chemistry alone;
4. Differences in methodology distinguish a semiotic biology from non-semiotic
biology.
Therefore, unlike the field of “literary Darwinism,” a field that also combines bio-
logical with literary theory, biosemiotic criticism has been grounded from its begin-
ning in a thorough going critique of the scientific status quo of biology. Indeed, as
summarized above in the powerful indictment of contemporary biology: “biology is
incomplete in the absence of explicit semiotic grounding.” Accordingly, Jesper
Hoffmeyer writes about how the same gene (ApoB), in different contexts, specifies
different outcomes—that it actually means something different, and that therefore
heredity isn’t merely a deterministic (indexical) process free from the semiotics of
interpretation; and when Hoffmeyer then proclaims that “[t]he gene here is a sym-
bol rather than an index” (300), which is to say that it functions according to con-
ventional rules, as in grammatical relationships, rather than according to the dictates
of a pure cause-and-effect relationship, as with a weathervane—traditional literary
critics will again be surprised and pleased, as they have tended to think that symbols
and interpretation are parts only of the realms of literary and cultural studies.
As I mention above, for biosemioticians, and for one of its pioneers, the afore-
mentioned Jesper Hoffmeyer, “[s]igns, not molecules, are the basic units in the
study of life.” The powerful paradigm shift embodied in this assertion allows us to
speak of the “signing action of nature” and turns all living things into signing agents,
transforming, in the process, our conventional understanding of the so-called “natu-

ral world” as a world of instinct and of mechanical, indexical, programmed response
(of the deterministic, gene-driven “Central Dogma” of the Watson and Crick model),
into the “semiosphere,” which Hoffmeyer defines as, expanding on the coinage and
definition of the term as provided originally by Juri Lotman (1984), “a sphere just
like the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the biosphere. It penetrates to every cor-
ner of these spheres, incorporating all forms of communication: sounds, smells,
movements, colors, shapes, electrical fields, thermal radiation, waves of all kinds,
chemical signals, touching, and so on. In short signs of life” (vii). As Hoffmeyer
also writes, “Biosemiotics seeks to analyze [a] sequence of events that traditionally
has been considered a simple causal signaling process in no need of interpretive
modulation” as in fact an interpretive process, one that generates and then interprets
its self-generated interpretations (2008: 23). In biosemiotics, then, the “natural
world” is understood to be one in which information is not conceived of as indexi-
cally “bound to the gene” (biosemiotics thereby undermines “social Darwinist” and
“literary Darwinist” agendas); rather, as Hoffmeyer tells us, for biosemioticians, the
“natural world” is one in which information is “context” dependent, the “context”
itself being one that living things shape. It is in just such a context that Hoffmeyer
and Emmeche can introduce their notion of “code duality,” that “life at the most
fundamental level [is] characterized by a dynamic trait … called code-duality—i.e.,
a recursive and unending exchange of messages between analog and digital coding
surfaces” (2008: 80). “Seen from this perspective, life must be understood as semi-
otic survival—survival via a fundamental code-duality” (2008: 80); note that
Hoffmeyer also speaks of “semiotic fitness” (107)—“semiotic survival” and “semi-
otic fitness” meaning something much different from the more familiar Spencerian
“survival of the fittest.” Indeed, the concept and phrase “survival of the fittest” is
another example of what Emmeche calls “spontaneous semiotics” (qtd in Hoffmeyer
2008: 15), where the failure to provide a semiotic explanatory framework for “sur-
vival” and for “fittest” leads to all kinds of deterministic, “social Darwinistic”
explanations. Again, then, for literary critics, Hoffmeyer permits them to under-
stand even evolution as sign-driven, as, in a sense, textual, as deploying “symbolic”
(conventional) codes, as a meaning-generating, interpretive phenomenon. And
whereas according to the “Central Dogma,” digital coding is usually synonymous
with a kind of deterministic worldview, for Hoffmeyer, biosemiotics presents the
emergence of digital codes in nature as part of the emergence of “semiotic free-
dom”: digital codes, in nature and in human language, are “alike in that they are all
based on discrete sign tokens as well as on an arbitrary (conventional, historical, or
customary) relation between the sign token and the signified. This property endows
digital codes [whether in genetics, in animal behavior—see Thomas Sebeok’s dis-
cussion of ‘arbitrariness of tail work in dogs, cats, and horses’ (2001: 58)—in
human language, or in computing] with certain special advantages that are unique
to the phenomenon that we call life and culture” (86). As Hoffmeyer writes, digital
codes (1) “do not have to observe the limitations of freedom imposed by natural
law”; (2) they are “time independent,” and (3) “they can be used as tools for abstrac-
tion—and this is why they are necessary for making meta-messages, messages that
deal with the way other messages should be understood” (87)—or interpreted. For
most literary critics, who are used to thinking of heredity and the digital DNA cod-
ing process in terms of the “Central Dogma” of the Watson-Crick paradigm,
Hoffmeyer’s description of digital codes in terms of their symbolic release from,
rather than their indexical dependency on, brute necessity will be a liberating one.
Indeed, from a biosemiotic point of view, code-duality, and especially digital cod-
ing, are part of the story of the emergence of “semiotic freedom”—and “novelty.”
As Marcello Barbieri writes, “(1) … the cell is a real semiotic system, (2) … the
genetic code is a real code, (3) … evolution took place by natural selection and by
natural conventions, and (4) … it was natural conventions, i.e., organic codes, that
gave origin to the great novelties of macroevolution” (2008b: 577). Perhaps surpris-
ingly, novelty requires “convention,” conventional signs and codes, what literary
critics call “symbols”!
In Peircean semiotics, of course, “symbols” are linked to the objects that they
represent by “convention,” as Barbieri writes above. Despite their reputation in the
mainstream scientific community and in the public imagination as ineffectual and
decorative, symbols are anything but. Indeed, as Charles Sanders Peirce writes, “A
symbol is something which has the power of reproducing itself, and that essentially,
since it is constituted a symbol only by the interpretation. This interpretation
involves a power of the symbol to cause a real fact” (“New Elements” EP 1998:
322). Peirce, here, biologizes the symbol—as does the poet Theodore Roethke
when he writes, with his poem about evolution, “Unfold! Unfold!”: “Sing, sing, you
symbols! All simple creatures, /All small shapes, willow-shy, /In the obscure haze,
sing!” (1975 [1951]). Peirce’s characterization of the symbol as having “the power
of reproducing itself” and of being “constituted a symbol only by the power of inter-
pretation” beautifully links Barbieri’s “natural conventions” of genetic codes to the
more familiar “cultural conventions” of the symbol.
Similarly, the work of Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and his revolutionary
concept of the Umwelt (the ecological niche of a species as perceived by an indi-
vidual of that species) are semiotically conceived “context spaces” (Hoffmeyer
2008: 89), spaces constructed by signs, or “symbols.” In von Uexküll’s terms, “each
Umwelt is at base filled only with meaningful symbols” (1982: 77).
Let us allow the Umwelts to pass in review before our mind’s eye. The silhouette of, and the
water currents produced by, the fresh-water mussel are the love symbols of the bitterling.
The earthworm uses the difference in the taste of the tips and stalks of leaves as a symbol
of their shapes. The same tone symbolizes ‘friend’ to a bat but ‘foe’ to a night moth. And so
on … and on.
Indeed, traditional literary critics will be excited to see that “symbolism” is not just
an aesthetic category; symbolism is related to the very way in which all species
construct their environments, their Umwelts, both over phylogenetic and cultural
time frames. As we read in Thesis 8 (Tool 1, Chap. 2 below, from Emmeche et al.
2002), “Whatever an organism senses means something to it” (Emmeche et al.
2002: 20). Indeed, it appears to be the case that it is “meaning … all the way
down”—a boon to literary critics.
Here we see that biosemiotics, from its beginning in the work of scientists such
as von Uexküll, by detailing precisely how the environments, the Umwelts, of all
living things are symbolic constructions that collapse the distinction between sub-
ject and object, between inner desire and outer form, thereby collapses the distinc-
tion between scientific and literary study. Again, as Hoffmeyer writes, “Biosemiotics
seeks to analyze [a] sequence of events that traditionally has been considered a
simple causal signaling process in no need of interpretive modulation” as in fact an
interpretive process, one that generates and then interprets its self-generated inter-
pretations (2008: 23). As I show below, literary genres, as Joseph Meeker (1974
[1972]) argues in The Comedy of Survival, are both aesthetic categories and active
agents of evolution, themselves evolutionary adaptations, “the teeth and claws, the
thick animal hide,” of human evolution. As Peirce writes, a symbol is the “complex
whole” of the “main body of thought”; the index consists of the “hard part of the
body,” “nails, teeth, hair, and bones,” which structural scaffolding “holds us stiffly
up to the realities”; and the icon, “likeness,” functions as the “blood” and “supplies
the nutriment for the main body of thought” (EP 1998: 10). A literary genre, and
the “body” of work it supports, from this point of view, can be studied in terms of
how it receives its scaffolding of Symbol upon Index upon Icon (see this Peircean
taxonomy immediately below). (Models of such scaffolding are also to be found in
the “Tools” section of Chap. 2.) For now, suffice it to say that the literary genres of
tragedy or comedy are symbols, and a “symbol,” as Peirce writes, “is something
which has the power of reproducing itself, and that essentially, since it is constituted
a symbol only by the interpretation. This interpretation involves a power of the
symbol to cause a real fact” (“New Elements” EP 1998: 322). Literary genres, and
works representing those genres, get themselves reproduced and help to create the
realities within which we live, as Joseph Meeker shows below. And so, for practitio-
ners of biosemiotic criticism, interpreting literary genres and texts is also the inter-
preting of ourselves into our own future.
Indeed, it appears that conventional signs and interpretation have a role to play
“all the way down” and “all the way up” in a beautiful lattice of evolutionary scaf-
folding that practitioners of biosemiotic criticism can help to reveal in literature
about nature and in nature about literature. The Peircean scaffold or category of
signs according to how they relate to their objects, introduced above, is as follows:
• icons (iconic signs) are signs that stand for their objects through resemblance
(like the eyespots on moth wings standing for the eyes of an owl; or a photo-
graph; or a novel in the genre called “Realism”);
• indices (indexical signs) are signs that are connected to their objects as a func-
tion of cause and effect (like the hoofprint of a deer standing for the size [and
maybe age and sex], the physical and mental state, and the direction/location of
a deer; a pointing “index” finger; or the characters caught in a
“tragic” Darwinian labyrinth of causes and effects in a novel representative of the
genre called “Naturalism”); and,
• symbols (symbolic signs) are signs that relate to their objects through conven-
tional codes (such as the words “moth,” “eyespot,” “photograph,” “hoofprint,”
“deer,” and “finger”—or the word “genre,” open to endless new encodings, new
“comedies of survival”).
Hoffmeyer then writes, with reference to a Peircean triadic scaffolding of icon,
index, and symbol above—about the scaffolding of “semiotic freedom”—that “just
as we saw that indexicality presupposes the transcendence of the non-dynamic, self-

catching operation of iconic relations we see now that symbolic reference presup-
poses a transcendence of the indexical bonds” (290). For example, while the eyespot
or photograph is passive and can never escape the orbit of its encoded resemblance,
the eye itself is a dynamic object, and so a wink obliterates the “eyespot’s” resem-
blance; and the person in a photograph can lose weight. Similarly, the words a per-
son uses or the money they have can render them highly attractive—irrespective of
any weight loss or gain; and the word “eye,” as in an expression “you are the apple
of my eye,” can change forever how someone looks at you—or the simple causality
of “an eye for and eye” is transcended by the symbolic register of forgiveness. Yes,
at one time, as Hoffmeyer writes, the universe was mired in “the non-dynamic, self-
catching operation of iconic relations” (a kind of enforced Narcissism), such that
the evolution of indexical, cause-and-effect relationships and efficiencies, which
subsumed but didn’t obviate the iconic, were essential to growth and development.
Indeed, who would guess today that the “indexical bonds” of cause-and-effect
(think, from the vantage point of today, of the characters, referenced above, who are
caught in the “indexical bonds” of a novel from the genre called “naturalism”) would
have been at one time liberating for life? The evolution of conventional signs, of
symbols, in natural coding functions, took growth and development—and semiotic
freedom—to another level, as the symbolic register of sexual reproduction, for
example, replaced the indexicality, the mere cause-and-effect, of parthenogenesis.
As we shall see in more detail in Chap. 2, Tool 10, the early metabolic process of
fermentation produced a waste product (CO2) that at that time had scant indexical or
iconic value—this is why, in semiotic terms, it was a “waste product.” (Note that
biosemiotic criticism adds semiotic specificity to ecocritical terms such as “waste.”)
In Charles Sanders Peirce’s terms, CO2 and fermentation were in the process of
becoming “symbols”—signs that have lost their resemblance to (iconicity) or real
physical relationship to (indexicality) their signifying or ecological contexts or
environments—their semiotic objects. In language, this is how “dead metaphors”
(or dead “genres,” like “naturalism”) evolve and are replaced by new symbols
(genres such as cyberpunk, bitpunk, bizarro, or Cli-Fi). This “terrible freedom” of
the symbol, then, can be a bad thing or a very good thing (just as “dead metaphors”
can be digitalized or invented anew). In this case, it was precisely this symbolic
detachment, of course, from the constraints of indexicality that made the reinven-
tion or repurposing of CO2 in photosynthesis possible.3
Biosemiotics opens up both the natural world for literary interpretation and the
literary world for biological interpretation; in a biosemiotic context, literary inter-
pretation opens up the world for scientists to employ literary critical terms in their
study of life. Take, for example, the term “underdetermination,” popular in post-
modern literary theory. “Underdetermination,” as defined by Wikipedia, is “the idea
that evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what
beliefs we should hold in response to it.” “Underdetermination” allows humans to
be open, flexible, to not engage in essentialisms and totalizing ideologies but rather
to use uncertainty to reach out and form networks and communities with other
scholars and their ways of thinking. While we humans may have made “underdeter-
mination” into a philosophical and social strategy, nature and evolution have always
already been using “underdetermination” as a biological strategy.

“Underdetermination” is a requirement for what Alan Rayner calls “open contextual
borders,” a necessary biological orientation for symbiosis. As Hoffmeyer writes,
“fungi are considerably more underdetermined than even plants. Hyphae spread
away from each other when there is plenty of food, and then re-assemble to form
fruiting bodies (e.g., mushrooms) when such stores of nutrients are exhausted.
Because of their ‘open contextual borders’ … , fungi are involved in numerous
symbiotic interactions. In many natural environments, fungi provide the hidden
energy-distributing infrastructure—like the communication pipelines and cables
beneath a city—that connects the lives of plants and animals in countless and often
surprising ways (Rayner 1997)” (224). So, if “underdetermination” can be under-
stood as both a literary-critical mode of description and a biological strategy for
creating communication pathways in nature understood as text, what other literary
and philosophical ideas and concepts might find a place in our understanding of
how nature works and thereby be of value to biosemiotic criticism?
So, for students of the “text,” that is, for literary critics who are used to hearing
administrators speak of the irrelevance of the humanities, of textual exegesis, of
literary interpretation, could anything be more exciting than biosemiotic criticism,
for now textual analysis and the study of modes of interpretation, their field of study,
includes not just literary texts but all of nature, “landscape as text,” as Andrew
Stables puts it (1997: 108). Stables very deftly fuses postmodern theory with eco-
logical theory, arguing that the “death of the author” notion growing out of the post-
modern study of “texts” opens the door to our understanding that all “texts” (literary,
social, or natural) are complex constructs that do not require an outside agent but,
rather, are emergent phenomena, complex networks—a “natural text” (1997: 105)
or “landscape as text” (108). Stables’ argument, while focused on applications in
environmental education, will apply equally well in biosemiotic criticism:
Environmental education through textual study can go beyond texts about the environment
and should embrace the notion of landscapes as texts, since a prior preconception (i.e. that
landscapes cannot be texts because they have not been created by authors) has been shown
to be invalid, or at least unproven. There is no case for arguing that this should replace the
study of landscape features as the objects of natural science, but a strong case for arguing
that it should complement it. (1997: 111)
Timo Maran’s coinage of “nature-text” is another way “to integrate in a single

research model representations of nature in culture and nature in its own semiotic
activity.” Maran continues,
Nature-text refers to the unit that is formed through meaning relations between the written
text that speaks about nature and points to nature and the depicted part of the natural envi-
ronment itself. Such interaction can significantly shape possible interpretations of the text,
especially in cases when sign relations with the local environment are more intense than
cultural meanings. It is remarkable that in the case of “nature-text,” the written text does not
need to convey all meanings, as they are present in the env and are familiar to the reader.
(2014b: 269)
Maran’s coinage here beautifully represents in literary terms the kinds of interde-
pendencies of which nature has always already been capable; indeed, “nature-text”
is the product of a kind of symbiosis, here between the author, the text, and nature.
As Sebeok writes, “The biologist’s notion of symbiosis … is equivalent to the phi-

losopher’s notion of semiosis” (1991:110). Furthermore, Maran here writes about
“nature-text” in ways that align themselves beautifully with Jakob von Uexküll’s
Umwelt theory, as our species’ Umwelt (or individual Eigenwelts, or our shared
community environments) is a scaffolding for our literary imagination and for our
readers’ responses—our species’ Umwelt representing, as it were, both the function
of out-sourcing and in-sourcing. Like our minds, which use writing as a way of
outsourcing memory and thought, our Umwelts (the environment as constructed by
our species-specific experiences) always already contain in three dimensions our
species (or community’s) shared environments—which authors then merely need to
reference with a small two-dimensional sign in order to conjure a large three-
dimensional object, space, or relation. Maran speaks of there being “at least three
types of relation between the natural environment and literary works: motivated,
representational and complementary” (2014a: 301). As we shall see below, these
three relational modalities are tools of the trade for biosemiotic criticism. Motivated
relations are those relationships whereby the objects of nature call out to us by
means of iconic and indexical signs (signs that stand for their objects based on
resemblance or cause-and-effect). When Mary Oliver writes, recreating her walk
through a marsh, that “three reeds wrinkle into egrets,” the resemblance between
“reeds” and “egrets” itself asserts something about the nature, literally, of biological
mimicry, and the role of the writer or “predator of images,” Mary Oliver, is not
unlike that of a predator of egrets—"motivated” relations insist on themselves, both
directing and limiting our responses to nature. “Representational” relations may
best be understood as ways of modeling the environment. Indeed, a literary works
or even genre may be considered as ecological models of human ecological niches.
As von Uexküll writes, “the Umwelt is the ecological niche as the animal itself
apprehends it.” Literary works and genres are models of our apprehension of the
world. For example, as Joseph Meeker has clearly shown in his book The Comedy
of Survival (1974 [1972]) literary genres (aesthetic objects: comedy, tragedy, epic
poetry, science-fiction novels, etc.) have survival value—in politically progressive
terms. Songs, stories, poems, and plays may best be thought of as “songs in
common(s),” as that (mostly historically) oral tradition whereby people “wrote
themselves into” and thereby creatively managed the “commons”—that shared sus-
tainable space of their own invention. This is to say that literary tropes and genres
are involved in “niche construction.” As Joseph Meeker writes, literary works or
genres are models that organize concepts and direct our thinking. According to
Meeker, literary genres are, like all models made by species of their environments
(see MST, Sebeok and Danesi 2000), real biological adaptations, no less so than a
lion’s tooth or the thickness of an antelope’s hide (which are models of each other)—
and that our society’s valorization, say, of the tragic mode over the comic one (dra-
mas get an hour on TV; comedies only a half hour) represents our taking ourselves
too seriously in real life. Tragic heroes in literature appeal not to the values of the
comedic or picaresque hero (those of adaptability, of not taking oneself too seri-
ously, of making due, of working with the system, of a MacGyver or of a Timon and
Pumba [of “hacuna matata,” of “tastes like chicken!”])—all values that serve,
Meeker says, to sustain community; rather, tragic heroes (like Shakespeare’s King
Lear) appeal to rigid, abstract values (usually associated with a sky god and located
outside the system to which they are then applied)—values that bring community
crashing down around the stones of their righteousness. Joseph Meeker’s The
Comedy of Survival (1974 [1972]) suggests, in its substitution of “comedy” and
“survival” for Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968), an alternative
narrative tradition and an alternate biology, one based on the comic and picaresque
values of adaptation, the view of life as play, accommodation, reconciliation.
Indeed, as Meeker writes, “Though the comic, ecological view of life may be mod-
est and unheroic, it is anything but simple” (38).
As we saw above in the example of “the reinvention or repurposing of CO2 in
photosynthesis,” if it is now “interpretation all the way down and all the way up,” it
is good to know that even literary textual analysis might now have something to
offer biology. For example, for Juri Lotman, literary “texts,” as Timo Maran helps
us to understand, “are characterized by inner heterogeneity” (2014a: 300), and thus
cannot be fully appreciated through a single act of interpretation or by means of a
single language (300). Similarly, “In analysing the relationship between literature
and the environment, it is important to realise that the nature of the environment
itself which the literary work relates to is manifold” (300). “This means that,” as
Maran states, “the relationship between literature and the environment is a relation-
ship neither between two unimodal phenomena nor between a unimodal and a mul-
timodal phenomenon, but rather one between two structurally and semiotically
multimodal phenomena which employ multiple ‘languages’” (300). Literary critical
concepts such as Lotman’s “heterogeneity” or the postmodern resistance to “grand
totalizing narratives” mirror ecological concepts such as “diversity” and “hybrid-
ity.” Literary criticism and biology have much to learn from each other. Consider in
this vein how “phenomenology,” a popular philosophical and literary field of inter-
est, intersects with the science of ecology (under the sway of the biosemiotic para-
digm): “the Umwelt is the ecological niche as the animal itself apprehends it,”
writes Hoffmeyer about one of Jakob von Uexküll’s founding principles of
biosemiotics.
Speaking of “interpretation all the way down and all the way up,” practitioners of
biosemiotic criticism are also interested in how meaning is, in fact, part of the very
structure of life, that is, “all the way down” to the very surfaces, membranes, that
constitute life. (Thesis 3 of Tool 1, Chap. 2 below, from Emmeche et al. 2002, reads:
“The simplest entity to possess real semiotic competence is the cell.”) Jesper
Hoffmeyer, in his chapter “Surfaces Within Surfaces” (from Biosemiotics [2008]),
discusses the “semiotics of a slap” by way of illustrating how mediating relation-
ships, surfaces, say the “skin” (the “semiotics of the skin” [21]) help to illustrate the
“bifacial” nature (the outside-inside asymmetry) of the triadic sign. (Recall that “the
skin and the brain both originate from the same germ material, i.e., the embryo’s
ectoderm layer” [17] and that “if any agency in the body deserves to be called direc-
tive or controlling, it would not be DNA but instead the membranes that permeate
the body” [31]). Indeed, surfaces are signs and signs are surfaces. (See, in Chap. 2,
Figure 2.3. Tool 8, The Cell as a Semiotic Function.) One good example of this reci-
procity, though operating at what Hoffmeyer calls the semethic level (the level of
behavioral interaction, not the biochemical level) is the role of the “face” in the
philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. As Adam Zachary Newton tells us, summarizing

one of Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas, “ethics originates from … the other to me, in the
sensible experience of the face which he or she presents to me” (1995: 12–13).
Emmanuel Levinas writes, “The approach to the face is the most basic mode of
responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells
a relationship of rectitude. The face is not in front of me but above me … In relation
to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other” (13, qtd. in Newton,
Narrative Ethics). Levinas’ example beautifully fits the ecological dynamics of ter-
ritoriality and predator-prey relationships—and the complex semethic relations
between members of the same or different species as they vie for territorial rights or
survival, which processes entail cooperation as much if not more than competition
and which build a self precisely through a very real recognition of an other—the
“verticality and uprightness” and “rectitude” being terms that have both a physical
and a moral resonance. Structurally, Levinas’ example here conjures Hoffmeyer’s
example of the semethic relation between the brown hare and the fox. If the hare
spots the fox, it “stands bolt upright and signals its presence instead of fleeing”
(xiii); this “rectitude” on the part of the hare, this standing upright so as to reveal its
skin/fur, at one and the same time a sign of its vulnerability and of what the fox can’t
have, is triggered by the face of the fox but also represents the instantiation of two
ideas: the hare knows that it can outrun the fox; the fox knows that what the hare
knows is correct (the fox depends upon surprise, stealth). The outcome of this
semethic deal is that both the rabbit and the fox “can both be spared the effort of
running” (xiii), but the overall energy budget of the ecosystem is also reduced. The
faces and bodies of hare and fox are the surfaces upon which are “written” the pro-
gram for the energy savings of the ecosystem. Here we see the basis for an argument
that “personal ethics are always already structurally environmental”: If “[t]he logic
which binds narrative and ethics … is really a pragmatics, implying an interactive
rather than a legislative order” (Newton 1995: 13), and if this interaction, to be pro-
ductive of an ethics of relation, must needs be always between the “skin” of the self
and the “face” of the Other (Levinas), and if literature (narrative or descriptive,
explicitly nature-oriented or otherwise) is a record of this encounter, and, if every
encounter inscribes on the vulnerable “skin” of the self (our prey brain [according
to René Thom (1990) and his concept of “nervous system lateralization”]) a visceral
sense of our being a “usurper of the place of the other” (face is the Peircean sign of
the place [the Object] of the other—with ethical response being the Peircean
Interpretant), THEN individual and environment cannot after all be separated
because a sense of “environment” (one’s own and an other’s) is born at the very
moment of and is structurally inseparable from the birth of the Other and of ethics.
Another way of making this point is as follows: Environmental ethics are insepara-
ble from personal ethics because (1), as we say above, a sense of “environment,” of
“place” (of an other’s place, of our being a “usurper” in and of that other’s place, of
our vulnerability and thus our need then to stand up [“rectitude,” Levinas calls it]
and face that face of the other)—and so our first embodiment of what will become
an ethic—is born at the very moment of and is structurally inseparable from that
personal encounter (Levinas).
“Face,” for Levinas, resonates with Hoffmeyer’s view of the role of “membrane
formation” in the origin of “pre-biotic evolution” (2008: 36) and of his view that
“Living systems consist of surfaces inside surfaces which turns inside exterior and
outside interior” (Emmeche et al. 2002: 17). If “the skin and the brain both originate
from the same germ material” (17), the face is a semethic equivalent of a cell mem-
brane in terms of the whole self-other binary; as Hoffmeyer writes, quoting Dan
Zahavi, “I am always a stranger to myself, and therefore open to others” (2008: 26).
Interestingly enough, although signs for Peirce are irreducibly triadic with
respect to how they work, Sebeok speaks of signs as “bifacial” (2001: 39–40), as
having “two indispensable moieties,” one “perceptible (or sensible)” and the other
“intelligible (or rational)” (39), “the signifier, an appreciable impact on at least one
of the interpreter’s sense organs, and the content signified” (39–40). This perceptible-
intelligible bifacial structure could be thought of in terms of how the sign always
has an outside (“perceptible”)-inside (“intelligible”) function, as in Jakob von
Uexküll’s “function cycle,” whereby living things face, efface, erase, and ultimately
create the environment (the Umwelt) to which they then must respond via their
Innenwelt, a “model” of that very world. In Hoffmeyer’s words,
Uexküll uses a wild flower to illustrate his Umwelt theory. How, he asks, does this flower
fit into the umwelt of different creatures: (1) A little girl picks the flower and turns it into a
decorative object in her umwelt; (2) an ant climbs up its stalk to reach the petals and turns
the flower into a ladder in its umwelt; (3) the larva of the spittlebug bores its way into the
stalk to obtain the material for building its “frothy home,” thus turning the flower into fod-
der in its umwelt; (4) the cow simply chews up the flower and turns it into fodder in its
umwelt. Each of these acts, he says, imprints its meaning on the meaningless object, thereby
turning it into a conveyer of meaning in each respective umwelt. (1996a: 54)
“Each of these acts” von Uexküll calls an “effector,” and each “perception” a “recep-
tor”; this effector-receptor (effector organ-perceptual organ) feedback loop is one in
which the same “object,” say the stalk of a flower, is transformed into a ladder for
the ant, a drilling site for the larva of the spittlebug, and a mere “handle” to grab and
pull for the flower-plucking girl. Thus, according to von Uexküll’s meaning-
assigning “functional cycle,” the same object (the flower stalk), unlike the purely
physical process whereby “the gravity from the moon’s mass pulls the tides” (see
Favareau below), the same perceptual-cue carrier is transformed in different ways
by the “perceptual organs” (the inside) of ant, spittlebug larva, human (the tides
don’t “transform” the “meaning” of the gravitational force of the moon). How the
Innenwelt interprets the Umwelt, how the hand interprets the stalk as that part of the
plant that is most susceptible to picking, is how life differs from the tides—where
no flexible model-making is found to exist.
The work of Jakob von Uexküll, and his revolutionary concept of the Umwelt
(the ecological niche of a species as perceived by an individual of that species) as a
semiotically constructed “context space” (Hoffmeyer 2008: 89), a space constructed
by signs, or “Symbols,” allows us to see how this turning “inside exterior” and
“exterior interior” (Thesis 4, Tool 1, Chap. 2, Emmeche et al. 2002) works, as the
same “thing” may become many different “objects” (or no object at all) in the
Umwelts of many different beings. In von Uexküll’s terms, as we mentioned above,
“each Umwelt is at base filled only with meaningful symbols” (1982: 77): recall
how “[t]he silhouette of, and the water currents produced by, the fresh-water mussel
are the love symbols of the bitterling.” As von Uexküll writes, though, “The pure
mechanists deny this scheme. They assert that the receptor organs of animals pos-
sess no inner boundary at all but serve only to collect various kinds of external
stimuli and put them through to the corresponding parts of the brain” (1982: 47).
They reduce what von Uexküll calls “performance,” the manner in which living
things create their environments (over phylogenetic time at the species level), to
tropisms: “Instead of performances, he [Jacques Loeb] named these actions tro-
pisms, with the result that he transformed all living animal subjects into nonliving
machines that arrange themselves separately in space. Even the simple magnet, by
attracting iron, acts as a positive ferrotop, and the magnetic needle as a negative
polotrop” (1982: 45). However, for biosemioticians, all life is a meaning-generating
and interpretive process—not merely a mechanical responsiveness: Consider, Don
Favareau asks, a single-celled organism moving toward a sugar gradient:
[T]here is no chemical nor “magnetic” property in the sugar molecule exerting some kind
of attractive force that makes it do so. The organism is not being “pulled” towards the sugar
the way that gravity from the moon’s mass pulls the tides. Rather, the detection of the sugar
gradient, through its representation at the interface, has been organized by the evolution of
the system of relations that is the organism itself so as to result in certain end-directed
behavior not otherwise demanded by the laws of physical necessity. (2015: 245)
Similarly, the fact that “the silhouette of, and the water currents produced by, the
fresh-water mussel are the love symbols of the bitterling” or the fact that “the same
tone symbolizes ‘friend’ to a bat but ‘foe’ to a night moth” cannot be reduced to
mere tropism—to the effect of some gravity-like attraction. The only way that the
“same tone” can have two different outcomes is if that “tone” is mediated by a sign,
by a surface, by a membrane, by a cell.
For example, consider how, employing the sign-text-code-metaphor model of
MST (Modeling Systems Theory), the same DNA can mean different things in dif-
ferent interpretive contexts (from Tool 4, Chap. 2: Principle 12). Again, life cre-
atively interprets itself, doesn’t mechanically respond to, its multiple futures; rather,
what things come to mean as objects in the Umwelts of living things is an interpre-
tive phenomenon that requires “representation at the interface,” the membrane/
mem-brain. Consider (Hoffmeyer 1996a, b, c: 20–21; Coletta 2014b) that grasshop-
per DNA (a sign/representamen) can be interpreted by grasshopper cells as locust
DNA (the same sign; two different interpretations) when the number of grasshop-
pers (a text, if each single grasshopper is a sign) is too high for their survival (they
have reached the carrying capacity of their habitat [an ecological code]), and so the
pheromones (another sign) that grasshoppers always give off in small amounts
become super concentrated when there are too many grasshoppers, the pheromone
concentration (another text) becoming potent enough to permeate the germ cells of
grasshoppers and change the “meaning” of grasshopper DNA—which is now inter-
preted to “mean” locust DNA (another sign)—and the next generation (of locusts)
is then able to fly off into new habitats only to breed again, this time giving birth to
grasshoppers, as populations of the newly dispersed locusts are too thin for their
pheromones to have any accumulative effect on their own DNA—of course, thin
populations mean more food, which was the whole point of the semiotic enterprise
of the grasshoppers’ reinterpretation of their own DNA. The paradigm: the ecology
of evolution. The code(s): ecological carrying capacity. The text: grasshopper pop-
ulation numbers, pheromone concentration levels sufficient to change the “mean-
ing” of grasshopper DNA. The sign: grasshopper DNA and small amounts of
pheromone—amounts insufficient in themselves to make a genetic difference.
Indeed, there is no such thing as The Environment to which livings things adapt.
As Hoffmeyer writes, “life’s emergence was inseparable from that of its environ-
ment, much in the same way that a carpet is dependent upon the existence of the
rug…. But by positing the cellular membrane as the essential locus around which
life originated, biosemiotics from the beginning sees the inside-outside asymmetry
of agents in the world—and the semiotic bridge that joins the two—as the turning
point of life’s ongoing evolution” (2008: 37–38). Thus the fact that the same tone
can mean “friend” to a bat and “enemy” to a moth tells us clearly that something
more than a mechanical registering is going on; perception is a performance; our
bodies, our skin, or retinas, are the curtains, the stage, and the spot lights. Indeed,
speciation is performative; and thus we find “performative” theories of sex, gender,
race, and species. Indeed, for Darwin, “all survival on earth is socially determined”
(Worster 1994: 58). As R. C. Lewontin writes, “there is no ‘environment’ in some
independent and abstract sense. Just as there is no organism without an environ-
ment, there is no environment without an organism. Organisms do not experience
environments. They create them. They construct their own environments out of the
bits and pieces of the physical and biological world and they do it by their own
activities” (“Science as Social Action,” 1993a [1991]: 109). Similarly, the work of
Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and his revolutionary concept of the Umwelt (the
ecological niche of a species as perceived by an individual of that species) are semi-
otically conceived “context spaces” (Hoffmeyer 2008: 89), spaces constructed by
signs, or “Symbols. In von Uexküll’s terms, “each Umwelt is at base filled only with
meaningful symbols” (1982: 77), as when he describes how “[t]he earthworm uses
the difference in the taste of the tips and stalks of leaves as a symbol of their shapes.”
Furthermore, since for biosemioticians “[w]hatever an organism senses also
means something to it” (“Thesis 8” in Reading Hoffmeyer, Rethinking Biology, by
Emmeche et al. 2002) (Tool 1, Chap. 2), “meaning” cannot be separated from the
most elemental of life processes—again a boon to biosemiotic literary critics, for
“meaning” is now to be found “the way down’.”
Biosemiotic literary critics certainly have a broader niche than most literary crit-
ics; accordingly, biosemiotic literary critics must be, ideally, trained not only in lit-
erary and cultural criticism but in semiotics and biology as well.
Of critical importance, here, though is that biosemiotics and biosemiotic criti-
cism fully undermine the grip that “social Darwinism” and the more recent fields
known as “literary Darwinism” and “evolutionary psychology” have on some liter-
ary critics with a biological orientation. “Literary Darwinism” is a field that often
leans on the kind of essentialisms that biosemiotics, with its rigorous Peircean view
of semiosis, so powerfully undermines. Biosemiotics furnishes the ontological and
epistemology basis for a non-essentialist, non-reductionist, non-deterministic,
egalitarian vision of life. As Hoffmeyer writes, “The biosemiotic idea actually con-
sists in a diametrically opposed understanding [from that offered by sociobiology
and later by evolutionary psychology], requiring a diametrically radical approach—
i.e., if we would build bridges between the human and the natural, let us assume that
nature already possesses semiotic competence” (2008: 7). So biosemiotic criticism
is free from the reductive essentialisms of “Literary Darwinism” and “evolutionary
psychology” precisely because, properly understood, so is nature—and Darwin.
A significant moment in the emergence of biosemiotics as a field that is support-
ive of and relevant to literary criticism takes place in the essay “Cosmovisions:
Environmental Justice, Transnational American Studies, and Indigenous Literature,”
by Joni Adamson, an essay that appears as Chap. 9 in the aforementioned The
Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014). In that essay, Adamson, an important
scholar in the field of environmental humanities, explicitly references “biosemiot-
ics” and the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer, one of the first such references, in North
America at least, with which I am familiar within that field. Adamson references
“biosemiotics” as providing
1. the scientific underpinnings for visualizing (thus the term “cosmovisions,” the
first word in the title of her essay) a non-essentializing, non-deterministic biol-
ogy, a biology that represents the concepts of “race” and “species” as social,
interpretive phenomena, thus providing for an “eco-cosmopolitanism” that tran-
scends “biologized” notions of race and ethnicity while still honoring diversity
of all kinds at the local as well as the global level; and,
2. the scientific underpinnings for visualizing, as Adamson writes, “multinatural
[not “-national”] relationships,” including so-called “superorganisms” (and
“swarm intelligence”)—assemblages such as ant hills and beehives (in which
“multiple biological and organic systems are constantly responding to stimuli,
but not in deterministic ways” [Adamson 184]); whole forests linked by mycor-
rhizae, performing “supple experimentation” “with their elaborate vocabularies”
(Powers 2018: 283); the “plasmodium phase of the slime mold” (Hoffmeyer
2008: 219–222); or “semethic interactions” generally (Hoffmeyer 2008:
188–195), such as that between the brown hare and the fox, a sophisticated
energy-saving mutuality (xiii) based on a “stance” and a “glance”—nature’s way
of using “signs” to great material and energetic effect. Biosemiotics helps liter-
ary and cultural critics understand precisely how these “multinatural
relationships” demonstrate in their agentive nature “the permeability of boundar-
ies between the ‘human’ and the ‘more-than-human’” (Adamson 2014: 176),
which “permeability” has political implications for the legal rights of natural
objects, “multinatural” ones (understood now as agentive “subjects”); therefore,
given that the modern political state was based on an absolute severance between
“things and humans” (Adamson [referencing Bruno Latour’s work] 2014: 182),
the “permeability” explored by biosemiotics can have profound political impli-
cations. For Adamson, biosemiotics becomes itself a “seeing instrument” in the
tradition of the “Mayan codices and Books of the Chilam Balam (Jaguar Priests)
that were continuously written and rewritten in the Yucatan peninsula from the
sixteenth century to the nineteenth in phonetic Mayan, Latin, and classic Spanish
and passed down to succeeding generations”(2014: 181). And what all such
“seeing instruments” (from the Books of the Chilam Balam to biosemiotics)
allow us to see are “multi-scale relationships between species [what Hoffmeyer
calls ‘semethic interactions’] functioning in systems that heretofore have not
been considered deserving of the same legal rights and protections as humans”
(181–182).
Thus, biosemiotics can help to liberate people and non-human persons from nar-
row, deterministic, pre-biosemiotic “biologized notions of identity” (Adamson
2014: 176). Joni Adamson’s referencing of biosemiotics as a “seeing instrument”
will help set a powerful agenda for future biosemiotic critics to follow.
Certainly, written texts, as Joni Adamson shows us, novels such as Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La
Frontera, can be powerful “seeing instruments.” Indeed, Timo Maran’s concept of
the “nature-text” is itself a powerful “seeing instrument,” as it can help us to see that
no author writes in a vacuum, that, in a sense, we are deeply dependent both upon
“the signing action of nature” and on our ability to “outsource onto our readers what
we assume they also know” for the scaffolding of our writing. (Tool 15c presents
this scaffolding in terms of Peirce’s 10 and 28 Classes of Sign.) Therefore, we can
use “nature-text” as a kind of Google Earth or GPS unit; indeed, with our nature-
text in hand (essay, novel, short story, article), we can walk ourselves backward
through the landscape that, through some mostly unconscious symbiosis of mind
and matter (“matter is effete mind,” writes Peirce), has written itself into our nature-
text. In other words, we can use our own writing (or that of another) to reconstruct
our understanding of the world, to understand what was given and what taken. As
Jakob von Uexküll writes, describing the interactions of living things even at the
dawn of the evolution of living things, “meaning” replaces “progress” as our domi-
nant ideology (1982: 69). And even at the beginning of life on earth, the biosemiotic
principle, that life is organized and driven by meaning, was always already in play:
[E]ach meaning-carrier was always confronted with a meaning-receiver, even in those ear-
lier Umwelts. Meaning ruled them all. Meaning tied changing organs to a changing
medium. Meaning connected food and the destroyer of food, enemy and prey, and above all,
male and female in astonishing variations. In every case an advance occurred, but never
progress in the sense of the survival of the fittest; never selection of the superior one,
through an unplanned, furious struggle for existence. Instead a melody prevailed, embrac-
ing both life and death. (1982: 69–70)
And so the idea of “imperfect beginnings” giving way to “increasingly higher per-
fection” was a formula that von Uexküll calls “a bourgeois speculation on the prag-
matics of the market place” (69). Biosemiotic critics, then, as they walk back
through their Umwelts, with nature-text in hand, so to speak, will need to apply the
tools provided in the last section of this Introduction so as to be able to understand
the scaffolding that necessarily underlies any of our attempts to represent nature in
written form.
Certainly, in this context, literary techniques for the analysis of meaning produc-
tion in literature come to have a biological application in biosemiotic criticism (as
we saw with “underdetermination”), and new literary techniques may be created
through our understanding (courtesy of biosemiotics) of the meaning-making
agency of all life. Indeed, just as we may say that it is meaning “all the way down,”
we have come to see that even heredity is, far from being a deterministic affair,
“interpretation all the way up.” As Jesper Hoffmeyer writes, heredity in the age of
“digitalism” has come to see the gene as an active, deterministic agent; however, it
is precisely “due to its passivity” that “the DNA code is capable of conserving expe-
riences (in the sense of nucleotide sequences) shaped by past survival outcomes
under the then prevailing ecological conditions. Such structures are inherently signs
of these past relations, and this is exactly why genes are not functional in them-
selves, but must be unfolded through the operation of an interpreting agency”
(2008: 87). Even heredity, then, is an interpretive function. And, again, if literary
criticism might traditionally be understood as something of the science of interpre-
tation, biosemiotics seems to again have made literary criticism relevant again—as
biosemiotic criticism, of course. Indeed, as Hoffmeyer has said, “digital pre-
specifications are essentially dependent on the agency of autonomous structures and
mechanisms acting in space and time” (80)—the digital requires the analogical
“agency of autonomous structures and mechanisms acting in space and time”; this
is Hoffmeyer and Emmeche’s “code duality,” which principle will then apply both
to how life interprets itself into its own future and how biosemiotic literary critics
understand nature to be a kind of self-authoring text-like phenomenon: itself a
“habitext” (part habitat, part Peircean “habit” structure, part “text”) wherein the
analog and the digital, the real and the virtual, are involved in an intricate chiasmus.
Biosemiotic criticism is grounded in this anti-determinist vision of the manner in
which living things interpret themselves into their (often shared) futures—there is
no genetic, deterministic basis for racism or sexism.
As Jesper Hoffmeyer writes, “Biosemiotics attempts to analyze [a] sequence of
events that traditionally has been considered a simple causal signaling process in no
need of interpretive modulation” as in fact an interpretive process, one that gener-
ates and then interprets its self-generated interpretations (2008: 23). For example, as
R.C. Lewontin writes in “The Dream of the Human Genome” from Biology as
Ideology,
A deep reason for the difficulty in devising causal information from DNA messages is that
the same “words” have different meanings in different contexts and multiple functions in a
given context, as in any complex language. No word in the English has more powerful
implications of action than “do”. “Do it now!” Yet in most of its contexts “do” as in “I do
not know” is periphrastic, and has no meaning at all. While the periphrastic “do” has no
meaning, it undoubtedly has a linguistic function as a place holder and spacing element in
the arrangement of a sentence. Otherwise, it would not have swept into general English
usage in the sixteenth century from its Midlands dialect origin, replacing everywhere the
older “I know not.”
So elements in the genetic messages may have meaning, or they be periphrastic. The
code sequence GTAAGT is sometimes read by the cell as an instruction to insert the amino
acids valine and serine in a protein, but sometimes it signals a place where the cell machin-
ery is to cut up and edit the message; and sometimes it may be only a spacer like the peri-
phrastic “do,” that keeps other parts of the message an appropriate distance from each other.
Unfortunately, we do not know how the cell decides among the possible interpretations. In
working out the interpretive rules, it would certainly help to have very large numbers of
different gene sequences, and I sometimes suspect that the claimed significance of the
genome sequencing project for human health is an elaborate cover story for an interest in
the hermeneutics of biological scripture. (1993a [1991]: 66–67)
Note here how life is always already linguistic, how biology is not about mecha-
nism but about interpretation. And here is an intimation of what biosemiotic critics
look for in literary texts and in the cultural and biological forces that those texts
encode or reveal: literature that reveals how living things, again, interpret them-
selves into their (sometimes shared) futures will prove to be more interesting than
those texts that deny or ignore such emergence. And such a view, one that liberates
us from genetic determinism, from digitalism, is intrinsic in semiotics. Indeed, the
semiotics of Peirce and pragmatism provided a model of the “self” that replaced the
“deterministic” and essentializing models provided by social Darwinism. As
Norbert Wiley (1995) tells us, the American pragmatists introduced the concept of
the “sign” into the North American debate on identity:
Human variation into identity groupings and unique individualities was a matter of differ-
ing symbols and their interpretations. The social Darwinists were explaining human identi-
ties, particularly ethnicity, biologically, by what they called “instincts.” The pragmatists
explained the same differences non-biologically and semiotically, as a matter of signs, com-
munication, and interpretation. (10)
Thus, a biosemiotic view of the world is a liberating one, and one that, as mentioned
opens up new vistas for literary and cultural critics.
As Wiley tells us, for the American pragmatist, “human variation … was a matter
of differing symbols and their interpretations,” not, as for the social Darwinists, a
function of a different underlying biology. Interestingly, this pragmatic view beauti-
fully dovetails with Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory, a theory, as Hoffmeyer
writes, of “the ecological niche as the animal itself apprehends it”—a phenomeno-
logical ecology. “Meaning,” therefore, “is a decisive factor in nature; it appears
always, often in novel and surprising guises,” writes Jakob von Uexküll (1982: 77).
“[E]ach Umwelt [‘the ecological niche as the animal itself apprehends it’] is at base
filled only with meaningful symbols” (77), as we saw above with “bitterlings” and
“earthworms.” Ecocritics interested in biosemiotic criticism will note several cor-
respondences revolving around the use of the term “symbol” in biosemiotics and
biosemiotic criticism: (1) the American pragmatists characterize the differences
involved in “explaining human identity” not based on “instincts” but on “symbols
and their interpretation” (as Peirce wrote, “The man is a symbol” [EP 1998: 324]);
Charles Sanders Peirce also writes, “A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed
with power of growth into the very truth” (EP 2: 324); and poet Theodore Roethke
writes in “Unfold! Unfold!,” his hymn to evolution, “Sing, sing, you symbols! All
simple creatures” (1975 [1951]), while Jesper Hoffmeyer proclaims that “[t]he gene
here is a symbol rather than an index” (300).
There is humility to be found, however, in this newly expanded role of the liter-
ary critic as biosemiotic critic. As I discuss in the “Tools” section of Chap. 2 below,
we literary critics, under the traditional sway of our anthropocentric views of lan-
guage and culture, are accustomed to believing that linguistic signs, say, for exam-
ple, the similes and metaphors that we purport to invent and that we hold up, with
language itself, as signs themselves of our difference from nature, have been, in
fact, in many cases, always already invented for us by nature. In some cases, then,
our languages (our signs) don’t magisterially and simply refer (point) to nature (and
its repository of compliant objects); rather, the signing action of nature (as “habi-
text”) might even sometimes be better understood as referring to language (under-
stood now as nature’s object). Language, then, can sometimes be the object of the
signing action of nature. We may sometimes be the artifact and nature the artisan.
Accordingly, literary critical techniques may have ecological relevance, and bio-
logical phenomena may have literary significance. Timo Maran, in “Biosemiotic
Criticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, lists the following central
principles of biosemiotics—in ways that will be helpful for biosemiotic critics. All
five principles are informed by, as Maran writes, the “biosemiotic maxim,” that
“semiosis is intrinsically connected with life,” a view of life only made possible by
the “meeting,” as Maran puts it, of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and the
phenomenological biology of Jakob von Uexküll. The mind of Thomas Sebeok, for
whom “living systems are constituted as sign systems” (Kull et al. 2011: 1), the key
figure in the development of the field of biosemiotics, was one of the “hosts” of this
“meeting.”
1. “Living systems” give evidence of “self-organization and self-regulation.”
Biosemiotic critics, therefore, must reveal how life has agency and whether a
given literary work or school does or doesn’t acknowledge, honor, and explore
this agency;
2. “Living systems” operate by means of “code-duality,” which is to say that
they take advantage of both digital and analogical modes of coding and
operation. “Code-duality,” as posited by Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, of course, is
a non-essentialist and non-deterministic mode of creating the future, of both
organisms and ecological communities, a mode by means of which the world
interprets itself into existence, a process that Peirce captured in his pragmaticist
triad of Sign-Object-Interpretant. In the context of code-duality, “digitalism” (a
supposedly interpretation-free mode), whether in the digital world of computers
and algorithms (in which, we are told, what algorithms want is what we want) or
of genes and inheritance (and the racist ideologies based on the false doctrine of
digitalism), is not an accurate view of how the world works—and so biosemiotic
literary and cultural critics, trained in “interpretation,” are more relevant than
ever, as nature is itself a complex interpretive process!;
3. Cells and organisms function by creating an “inside-outside boundary” that
serves as “a semiotic filter or translation mechanism”;
4. “Living systems” use “sign processes as regulators of ecological relations

and ecological communities,” which is to say, following Hoffmeyer, that what
most biologists have treated as mechanical or physical phenomena are in fact
interpretive ones; again, the brown hare-fox relationship illustrates how efficient
sign processes. Indeed, a simple tap on the back or a Mercator can move a two-
thousand-pound horse;
5. “Organisms” are “active shapers of their semiotic niches or Umwelten”—
there is no such things as The Environment”; rather, there are environments
(Umwelts) (von Uexküll), and these environments are created out of the “bits
and pieces of the world” over phylogenetic time by the individuals that constitute
a species (“Science as Social Action,” Lewontin 1993b [1991]: 112, 113); in a
phenomenological sense, only individuals have environments, which is to say
that, while each species writes itself analogically into an Umwelt and then cre-
ates a digital copy of that Umwelt—DNA being a digitalized model of a species’
environment as it is relevant to it—that Umwelt is experienced by each individ-
ual of a species as its unique Eigenwelt;
6. Biological evolution gives evidence of “the growth of complexity of semiotic
process,” of what Jesper Hoffmeyer calls “semiotic emergence” (2008: 232),
“semiotic freedom” (2008: 185), and “semethic interaction (188-195). As
Hoffmeyer writes, “I have argued that the agency of life has an experience-like
component, and I have sketched evolution as a perpetual increase in semiotic
freedom produced through the semiogenic interactions of organisms” (211).
While neo-Darwinians will object strongly to the idea of “the growth of com-
plexity” as somehow a teleological dimension of organic evolution, that is, as a
process “obeying a deeper ‘directedness’ of any sort” (Hoffmeyer 2008: 210),
this resistance is only because most modern biologists do not include “semiosis”
(“semiogenic interactions”) in their mechanistic models. Furthermore, the notion
of “the growth of complexity of semiotic process” also supports a non-social-
Darwinist view of the “semiotic self”—as well as of “race”: As Norbert Wiley
tells us in his book The Semiotic Self (1995: 11), American Pragmatism substi-
tuted for the social-Darwinian view of the “self” based on racial essentialisms a
semiotic model of the origin and nature of variation in human selves. Wiley
writes, “The key insight of the pragmatists, for the politics of identity, was in
seeing human variation as the result of a highly plastic, semiotic process. This
process explained identity variation in a way that was compatible with democ-
racy” (13). Similarly, in “Why Biosemiotics? An Introduction to Our View of the
Biology of Life Itself,” Kull et al. (2011) describe how structuralist models both
in the domain of language and culture (based on the semiology of Ferdinand de
Saussure) AND in the domain of biology (based on the work of René Thom and
of the “Osaka Group for the study of dynamic structures”) serve to produce a
“Non-Darwinian evolutionism” (7). Kull et al. write, a
system of phonemes is not a consequence of physical laws, but it forms an interrelated
system of differences, based on communicative recognition between speakers. Similarly, in
biology, the system of biological species can be seen as relational in a similar way, as based
on mutual recognition in the process of biparental reproduction. This fundamental analogy
of phonological and speciational mechanism has been noted by some biologists and lin-
guists … and deserves attention in semiotics (2011: 6).
This “analogy” is already deemed to be deserving of special attention in biosemiotic

criticism. Fortunately, the commendable neo-Darwinian refusal to speak of evolu-
tion as having a trajectory toward greater complexity of “form” fits nicely with the
biosemiotic commitment to “the growth of complexity of semiotic process”: “pro-
cess” trumps “form”—a key biosemiotic notion, as developed by Hoffmeyer in his
principles mentioned above of “semethic interaction,” “semiotic emergence,” and
“semiotic freedom.”
Timo Maran also nicely situates biosemiotic criticism:
For the humanities, the emergence of biosemiotics widens the sphere of semiotic processes
to embrace all living organism on Earth, thereby ensuring that human cultural and semiotic
activities cannot be treated as a semiotic island in the vast ocean of unsemiotic void. Rather,
human culture should be considered as being surrounded by a multitude of other semiotic
systems, some partly accessible, some rather different from ours. (2014b: 262)
In the following, I merely streamline Timo Maran’s useful list of “issues that biose-
miotics can bring to the attention of the humanities” (2014b: 262) presenting three
foci that biosemiotics may bring to studies of the humanist or literary critic:
1. The possibility and nature of the communication between human subjects and
“other semiotic subjects” in the world or in literary and cultural contexts;
2. The status of literary texts as ecological adaptations themselves and/or as carri-
ers or transmitters of environmental sign (clues and cues); and,
3. How the human body may or may not be encoded in literary texts, cultural rep-
resentation, and material culture.
Professor Maran also delineates “five types of relations bridging the human-
nature divide” (2014b: 263) that might be useful in mapping out five research
domains for the nascent field of biosemiotic criticism:
1. a non-social-Darwinist, a non-biological-determinist, and a non-evolutionary-
psychological evolutionary approach to understanding our place in nature;
2. the communicative approach “to widen the sphere of subjects that have culture
or communicative ability”;
3. the hierarchical approach, which argues that “we are not uniform subjects, but
rather hierarchical structures that contain many interacting layers of o rganization,
all of which have their own subjectivity, memory, and semiotic competence”;
4. the significational approach, an exploration of how it is that the world is always
already a meaning-making, agentive, significant (sign-using), even ironic pro-
cess and therefore that in some sense human language and culture have been
called out of this greater whole. Metaphor-making, for example, such as made
manifest in the lines “a toad folds into a stone” (from “The Shape of Fire” by the
poet Theodore Roethke, 1975 [1948]), or “three reeds wrinkle into egrets” (by
the poet Mary Oliver, 1983), has often been used as itself a sign of a capacity that
separates us humans from nature; however, as the two previous examples show,
1.3 The Reality and Power of “Experience,” a Literary and a Biological Category 33
biological mimicry (iconic, indexical, even symbolic representation and misrep-

resentation) was already at work in the natural world and only borrowed and
digitalized in the human linguistic codes of poets; as Timo Maran writes, a “sig-
nificational approach may lead to describing literature or other human cultural
representations, human experience and the nonhuman environment as a nonhier-
archical complex bounded together by sign relations”; and,
5 . the analogical approach, which is grounded in an argument for ‘the existence
of deep structural parallels between the communication within and amongst liv-
ing systems and those of human cultural’ provenance, “and suggests the possi-
bility of using biosemiotic methods for describing literature or other
representations in human culture on this basis. Such a possibility is historically
influenced by studies of the genetic code and its possible analogy to human lan-
guage, noted by linguists in the 1960s.” The analogical approach and the signifi-
cational approach may or may not be one and the same approach. Or perhaps the
difference if any is methodological: working by analogy is a convenient way of
studying biological processes, especially if the analogy itself reflects a real
underlying biological parallelism. For example, the use of biological mimicry in
the evolution of predator-prey relations is analogous to lying in human language.
Biosemiotic criticism is, then, as the analogical approach helps us to see, both a
type of literary criticism and a way of doing science. Biosemiotic criticism might be
seen as having its roots in the “Romantic science” of Alexander von Humboldt
(1769–1859), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and John Muir (1838–1914), for
whom, as Malcolm Nicolson (1990) writes in his discussion of “Alexander
Humboldt and Vegetation,” “aesthetic and emotional responses to natural phenom-
ena counted as data about those phenomena.” Indeed, von Humboldt, who strongly
believed in “the importance of landscape painting for the study of nature” (Rupke
2018: 80), not coincidentally invented the isoline map (itself a form of landscape
“painting”), making possible the first iconic and indexical visual representations
(one kind of “writing”) of regional and global phenomena (rainfall, plant and ani-
mal distribution, human disease, and the first inklings, pun intended, of a modern
vision of the meaning of “climate” and climate change) and producing thereby a
“veritable revolution in visual representation and communication” (Rupke 2018:
80)—semiotically relevant modalities indeed. So, biosemiotic criticism is, explic-
itly, both a type of literary criticism and a way of doing science.
1.3 T
he Reality and Power of “Experience,” a Literary
and a Biological Category
As Jesper Hoffmeyer writes, “I have suggested that the agency of organisms has an
experience-like component, and I have sketched evolution as a perpetual increase in
semiotic freedom produced through the semiogenic interactions of organisms”
(2008: 211). When Hoffmeyer writes that “life has an experience-like component,”

literary critics not familiar with biosemiotics may be both surprised and delighted—
as “experience” is generally considered to be a qualitative or subjective, and thus
not a scientific, term. Accordingly, what are called “qualia” in analytical philoso-
phy, “a designation for … the inner feel of lived experience—e.g., the feel of red-
ness when you look at a red tomato” (244), have not “qualified,” pun intended, as
data for serious discussions about the nature of consciousness. For those familiar
with Peircean semiotics, there is a hint in Hoffmeyer’s example here of the impor-
tance that he will assign to “qualia,” for the example that Peirce often uses for the
first of his ten signs types, the “Rhematic iconic qualisign,” is “a feeling of redness.”
Hoffmeyer writes, therefore, “I decline to accept … that qualia belongs in this same
drawer as imaginary constructs” (245). Hoffmeyer asserts, “Qualia is thus the
essentially subjective dimension of consciousness” (2008: 244); however, when we
understand that “subjectivity” is in fact the great achievement of evolution—not the
realm of imaginary constructs, that “subjectivity,” as we shall see, is an advanced
modeling type, everything changes for the biosemiotic critic. Experiences (under-
stood by Hoffmeyer to be “correlations” or “calibrations” [180] “between the pat-
terns of emotional reactions … and the brain’s sensoro-motoric coordination
schemas” [180]) may also be thought of as advanced modelling techniques for sur-
vival and growth. The evolution of “experience” is the evolution of a strategy
whereby experiences serve as platforms for qualisigns (qualisigns themselves being
understood as already-crunched “big data,” which data are thereby an advantage to
even so-called advanced organisms—qualisigns being advance scouts and simple
yet powerful ways to represent complex systems). Indeed, the evolution of the sub-
jective is the great achievement—not something to be explained away with, as
Hoffmeyer writes, “biochemistry (or in algorithmic terms)” (248). And while ana-
lytical philosophy has not given much credence to “qualia,” perhaps because it
lacked the ability to organize such subjective “data” in rigorous terms, Peirce didn’t:
“qualia” are rhematic signs, and occupy, in five permutations, five spots in Peirce’s
Ten Sign Types (see Tool 15c, Chap. 2), a taxonomic model that is also an ontologi-
cal and epistemological model, as well as a functional model of the evolutionary
and cognitive scaffolding for the emergence of semiotic freedom and conscious-
ness, a nested model of the emergence of mind, demonstrating how it is “that matter
is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” (CP 6.25). In other words,
“qualia” in Peircean semiotics are significant. Rhematic signs in Peirce’s Tenfold
taxonomy include Sign type 1, the HOLOSIGN (Rhematic iconic qualisign), a feel-
ing for a quality of something—not yet for facticity or lawfulness; Sign type 2, the
DIAGRAM (Rhematic iconic sinsign), a feeling for a difference that makes a differ-
ence; Sign type 3, the ENVIROGRAM (Rhematic indexical sinsign), a feeling for
the Other or of space as an exploitable place; Sign type 5, the IDEOGRAM
(Rhematic iconic legisign), a feeling for an idea; and, Sign type 6, THE DEICTICISM
(Rhematic indexical legisign), a feeling for the logic of a place and the reality of the
things in it. Clearly, “qualia” (and not just “qualisigns,” feelings for the quality of
something, but Rhematic signs generally, that is, feelings for facts and feelings for
1.3 The Reality and Power of “Experience,” a Literary and a Biological Category 35
ideas—even if one has not yet an understanding of the internal logic of the idea—as
when one can have a feeling for the force of exponential growth without under-
standing the mathematics behind it) are powerful scaffolding devices, models, for
thought and action.
In the context of the importance of “experience” as a biological concept and of
the importance of the “qualitative” as an important scaffolding device, biosemiotic
criticism takes “qualia” as merely analytical philosophy’s failure to understand
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s “bodily consciousness” (Hoffmeyer 247). In my mind,
then, the evolution of “experience” is the evolution of a platform for qualisigns (a
scaffold for scaffolding), and qualitative data are thereby an advantage even to
organisms with linguistic capacities—“qualisigns” being “advanced scouts,” simple
yet powerful ways to represent complex systems. From this point of view, literature
is of great practical importance and represents a cognitive and social process as
sophisticated, complex, and important as science. Indeed, the evolution of “subjec-
tive experience” is the great achievement—not something to be explained away
with, as Hoffmeyer writes, “biochemistry (or in algorithmic terms)” (248). The
“couplings,” as Hoffmeyer calls them, of qualisigns (“felt emotional reac-
tions”—249) and “senso-motor functions” (249), are, therefore, very efficient algo-
rithms for creating responses with survival value. Qualisigns are thus sophisticated
not simple signs. Consider the implications for poetry criticism! Wordsworth’s defi-
nition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” is serious business if the
logic of emotion may sometimes be more rational than logic itself. Indeed, science
and art involve each other at the deepest levels; thus, for Alexander von Humboldt
(1769–1859), as I mention above, “aesthetic and emotional responses to natural
phenomena counted as data about those phenomena” (Nicolson 1990: 180). In fact,
von Humboldt’s “aesthetic and emotional” responses to the mountains of South
America contributed the perspective and data necessary to his invention of the con-
cept of the “biome” (Nicolson 1990); and his artistic vision of the world, what
Nicolaas A. Rupke calls his “aesthetic-holistic epistemology” (2018: 79), led to his
invention of the aforementioned “isolines,” which representational technique made
possible, for the first time, the mapping of regional and global ecological phenom-
ena—including climatic phenomena (2018: 79). Qualisigns evolved to help steer
the body away from danger and toward arrangements of stability and survival; they
were also useful to von Humboldt in developing maps to help us navigate even
today our way to planetary “stability and survival.” Indeed, what is more rational
than a feeling (a qualisign) that I don’t feel safe here? In fact, one could argue that
the “qualisign” drove Wordsworth’s emergent arrangement of his poems into three
categories (with an anticipation of Peirce, as we shall see), “Poems Founded on the
Affections” (interestingly enough, poems about Peircean Firstness); “Poems of the
Fancy” (Peircean Secondness); and “Poems of the Imagination” (Peircean
Thirdness). The British Romantic poet Wordsworth, in fact, makes such scaffolding
the theme of much of his poetry, as when he writes, “… And I have felt/A presence
that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts” (“Tintern Abbey” ll. 93–95).
Note the progression from a “presence” that “disturbs” to a feeling of “joy” to
“elevated thoughts.” As Domasio writes (quoted by Hoffmeyer 250): “the apparatus

of rationality, traditionally presumed to be neocortical,” the “elevated thoughts” of
Wordsworth, “does not seem to work without that of biological regulation, tradi-
tionally thought to be subcortical. Nature appears to have built the apparatus of
rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it
and with it”—which subcortical scaffolding Wordsworth captures with his visceral
“disturbs.” As Hoffmeyer tells us, citing Damasio, “Thus, feelings,” the “felt” in
Wordsworth’s lines above, “are as fully cognitive as any other perceptual image”
(2008: 250).
Hoffmeyer, drawing on Damasio, distinguishes between emotions and feelings
(2008: 251): “[B]ut while the emotional response, to a high degree, works much the
same in all vertebrate animals, feelings, in Damasio’s terms are far more specific for
humans—for feelings consist in the experience of emotions”—which is why
Wordsworth, famously, asserts that “emotions” need the incubation time and place
of “tranquility” before they become “feelings,” poetry being “emotion recollected in
tranquility.” The raw emotion before the reflection is not as powerful a cognitive
product as it is after reflection.
1.4 Modeling Biosemiotic Criticism in Its Ecocritical Context
Biosemiotic Criticism is a field that is predicated on the belief that literary and cul-
tural criticism (and an ethics of reading and writing) can be rooted in evolutionary
biology and yet still manage to escape the orbit of social Darwinism, evolutionary
psychology, and literary Darwinism. Peirce’s “Evolutionary Love” article (EP
1992: 352–371) beautifully supports this perspective. Therefore, biosemiotic criti-
cism provides a map for plotting the ethical, that is, the social-and-environmental-
justice, trajectories of a given piece of writing in terms of that writing’s having
aligned itself, or not, with the emergence of what Jesper Hoffmeyer has called
“semiotic freedom,” which “freedom” seems to emerge in a context of community
(both natural and human) well-being. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s thesis as
expressed in his famous “Union differentiates” supports this perspective: the mea-
sure of the unity of a system is not its homogeneity or uniformity; rather, the true
measure of the unity of a system is its heterogeneity, its diversity, the freedom that
it confers on individuals. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 below may serve as “maps” of the dif-
ferent possible ethical stances that practitioners of biosemiotic criticism may take.
Of course, there is no one correct stance. Also, the figures below do not so much
stand on their own as they are meant to be consulted as readers move through the
chapters to follow.
Figure 1.1, “Plotting the Ethical Territory Underlying Biosemiotic Literary
Criticism (Part 1),” models the axis of TIME /EVOLUTION (of temporality as a
function Hoffmeyer’s “semiotic freedom” & von Uexküll’s “meaning” ↔ [versus]
the mainstream cultural view of “evolution as “progress”) (the Y axis) and the
axis of SPACE/DISTRIBUTION (of spatiality and distribution as a function of
1.4 Modeling Biosemiotic Criticism in Its Ecocritical Context 37
TIME / EVOLUTION
Hoffmeyer’s “Semiotic Freedom”;
Von Uexküll’s “meaning” over “progress”
II I
SPACE /
DISTRIBUTION:
Anarchy / Individual
SPACE /
DISTRIBUTION:
III IV Community
TIME / EVOLUTION:
Evolution as “progress”
Fig. 1.1 Plotting the Ethical Stances Underlying Biosemiotic Criticism

I. “The Semioethic Animal” of Susan Petrilli and John Deely
II. The Social Ecology (The Eco-Anarchism) of Murray Bookchin
III. “The Great Man Theory” of History (Thomas Carlyle 1841)
IV. The Social Ecology (Eco-Fundamentalism) of Rudolph Bahro
prioritizing anarchy/the individual ↔ [versus] prioritizing “community,” which

functions represent the polarized social ecologies of Murray Bookchin and Rudolph
Bahro respectively (the X axis)
The Y axis, the evolutionary axis, is based on Jakob von Uexküll’s notion that
“meaning” replaces “progress” as the dominant ideology in evolution—short-
circuiting right away the notion of evolution as being about the production of “infe-
rior” and “superior” forms as a function of being “more” or “less” “evolved.” Even
SPACE/TIME: HETEROTOPIA
Hoffmeyer’s “Horizontal semiosis” (1996), Foucault’s “Heterotopia”
(1971) , & the “spatialization of reason” (Flynn 1994, 2005)
II I
ECOLOGY:
Sustainability
“One Nature”
ECOLOGY:
“Discordant
III IV Harmony”
(Botkin 1992)
“Many natures”
SPACE/TIME: UTOPIA
Fig. 1.2 Plotting the Ethical Stances Underlying Biosemiotic Criticism

I. Posthumanism
II. Back-to-Nature Movements
III. Sustainable Growth
IV. Transhumanism
at the beginning of life, when living things were “less complicated,” as von Uexküll
tells us, the biosemiotic principle, that life is organized and driven by meaning, was
always already in play. In this context, Hoffmeyer’s notion of the emergence of
“semiotic freedom” serves an equally “progressive” view of evolution as a meaning-
scaffolded functionality. (Tool 15c in Chap. 2 represents these scaffolds as Peirce’s
10 and 28 Classes of Sign; each sign type is presented as both a scaffold for the sign
above it and an emergent freedom from the sign below it.) The pole opposite
Hoffmeyer’s and von Uexküll’s is that represented by the conventional cultural view
of “evolution as progress.”
1.4 Modeling Biosemiotic Criticism in Its Ecocritical Context 39
The horizontal axis (the X axis) helps biosemiotic critics think about the polar-
ized social ecologies of Murray Bookchin’s eco-anarchism and Rudolph Bahro’s
“eco-fundamentalism” John Barry (2001a, b) in his entries on both authors in Fifty
Key Thinkers on the Environment, 2018, very nicely lays out this important yet divi-
sive polarity in the environmental movement.
Quadrants I–IV (described in the caption for Fig. 1.1) will help biosemiotic crit-
ics map out different ideological territories with respect to how people and literary
works represent what is believed to be necessary or inevitable or desirable. Quadrant
I reflects the domain of the “Semioethic Animal,” a distinctly biosemiotic form of
ethics discussed in the chapters to follow.
Figure 1.2, “Plotting the Ethical Territory Underlying Biosemiotic Literary
Criticism (Part 2) models the following:
• the Y Axis represents the SPACE /TIME relation, combining Jesper Hoffmeyer’s
notion of “HORIZONTAL SEMIOSIS” (1996a, b, c: 32) and Michel Foucault’s
HETEROTOPIA (1971), which domains stress modes of adaptation and assem-
blage achieved through what Hoffmeyer calls “semethic interaction” in the
fecund present and through what Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible”
(the Posthumanist view) ↔ [versus] the more conventional UTOPIAN vision,
which always sees the present as inadequate and in need of re-engineering, usu-
ally by an “enlightened elite” (the Transhumanist view). (See Chap. 3, Sect. 3.4,
“Evolutionary Ethics in Dan Brown’s Novel Inferno” and Chap. 2, Tool 4,
Principle 13: The Binary-Vertical Bias.) This axis is set up against …
• the X Axis, which is the axis of ECOLOGICAL relation, defined by, on the right-
hand side of Fig. 1.2, DISCORDANT HARMONY (Botkin 1990 [1992]), by the
notion that there is not one Nature but rather that there are “many natures, a
postmodern ecological view of nature as “a nature that we make” (193) (see the
social ecology of Murry Bookchin in Fig. 1.1), ↔ [versus] (on the left-hand side)
the pole of SUSTAINABILITY, the view that there is “one Nature,” which pole
represents a vision that is committed to living sustainably with nature (perhaps
even returning nature to what it once was), and thus this pole may represent a
somewhat nostalgic view of nature that often fosters a reactionary, “back-to-
nature,” “people-are-a-problem” perspective.)
Jesper Hoffmeyer’s “horizontal semiosis” (1996a, b, c: 32) (see Fig. 1.2) repre-
sents how individuals and communities shape themselves and the future via “the
exchange of signs through the three dimensions of space rather than through time.
Not so much genealogical semiosis as ecological semiosis.” Similarly, Foucault’s
HETEROTOPIA (1971) should be understood as a “spatialization of reason” (Flynn
1994: 40), in which the future is not merely ahead of us but is something always
already distributed in the wide space of the present. The future is now—if only we
know where to look in the diverse landscape of the present. This epistemological
perspective has more in common with the “posthuman” perspective than the “trans-
human” one, the latter perspective being that one found more often in those who
believe in the efficacy and necessity GMO foods and of engineering a better future,
even a better human being (see Ray Kurzweil and the “Coming Singularity”), rather
than seeking change through the creation of new relationships through using the
resources always already available in the “adjacent possible” (Kauffman) of the
present, in the working out of Hoffmeyer’s “horizontal semiosis” (the ecological
versus genealogical form of “heredity”) in the “natural play” (Hoffmeyer 2008:
197) of the HETEROTOPIAN field. (In contrast, the UTOPIAN vision understands
the present as never quite good enough.) In the “HETEROTOPIAN” field of play,
“time” and “progress” are spatialized not temporalized, and “progress” is under-
stood in terms of a non-temporalized time, in terms of the progress made through
widening one’s affections. Such a perspective “undermines the telic nature of tradi-
tional historical accounts, even as it restores the dispersive, ‘Dionysian’ character to
time” (Thomas Flynn 1994: 43). Recall that neither Darwin nor Jakob von Uexküll
believed in “superior” and “inferior” forms of life but saw all as always already
equally evolved in a diverse, horizontal web of life. The “Binary-Vertical Bias”
(Tool 4, Thirty Principles of Semiotics, Principle 13, Chap. 2), on the other hand,
describes that view of the world that always sees the present as broken, but a better
world, a Utopia, as and the future as merely (and dangerously) that which an elite
class or engineers must the past in need of restoration. In Fig. 1.2, the various ethi-
cal perspectives and points of view are laid out as a function of the relationship
between the concepts of Heterotopia and Utopia on one hand and Sustainability and
“Discordant Harmonies” on the other. Figures 1.1 and 1.2, which I will refer to
explicitly and implicitly through the chapters to follow, are offered not as prescrip-
tive but only to remind readers that ethics, “semioethics” as we shall discover, can-
not be separated from literary and cultural criticism—or from science itself.
Notes:
1. References to the Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings will be
referred to by EP and then either 1992 (for Volume 1) or 1998 (for Volume 2)
followed by the page number.
2. References to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce are designated
with a CP followed by Volume and paragraph number.
3. My discussion of the semiotics of the evolution of photosynthesis and respiration
(now updated), which appear in several sections of this book, first appeared in
“The Signing Action of Nature: The Metaindex and the Ecological Origins of
Metaphor,” pp. 43–66, in The Peirce Seminar Papers: An Annual of Semiotic
Analysis, Volume I, 1993, ed. Michael Shapiro, and in “The Semiosis of Nature:
Toward an Ecology of Metaphor and a Biology of Mathematics,” in The American
Journal of Semiotics, 10 (3–4), 1993: 223–244.
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Chapter 1

Introduction: The Genesis of Biosemiotic

Abstract In this chapter, I provide a theoretical overview of the newly emerging

1.1 Quick Hits

Before presenting my more fully developed essay on biosemiotic criticism, let me

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

• as a school of literary criticism, biosemiotic criticism is a subfield of ecocriti-

[models]”); “modeling” (“the activity of actually producing forms”); and “repre-

–– the rights of people (especially people in poor countries) to “own land.” As

ing to pick up something else, especially something bright. No one knows

And so, while “[i]nformation concerned with evolutionary processes at large

methodologies and language of science valorize a process of “abstraction”

1.2 Biosemiotic Criticism: A Narrative Overview

“Biosemiotic criticism” is a form of science-informed literary and cultural criticism

microbiology, evolution, ecology, animal communication); of course, each of these

Biosemiotic criticism, then, grounded as it is in the field of biosemiotics, neces-

transforming, in the process, our conventional understanding of the so-called “natu-

as we saw that indexicality presupposes the transcendence of the non-dynamic, self-­

already been using “underdetermination” as a biological strategy.

Timo Maran’s coinage of “nature-text” is another way “to integrate in a single

As Sebeok writes, “The biologist’s notion of symbiosis … is equivalent to the phi-

philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. As Adam Zachary Newton tells us, summarizing

4. “Living systems” use “sign processes as regulators of ecological relations

This “analogy” is already deemed to be deserving of special attention in biosemiotic

biological mimicry (iconic, indexical, even symbolic representation and misrep-

(2008: 211). When Hoffmeyer writes that “life has an experience-like component,”

“elevated thoughts.” As Domasio writes (quoted by Hoffmeyer 250): “the apparatus

1.4 Modeling Biosemiotic Criticism in Its Ecocritical Context

Fig. 1.1 Plotting the Ethical Stances Underlying Biosemiotic Criticism

prioritizing anarchy/the individual ↔ [versus] prioritizing “community,” which

Fig. 1.2 Plotting the Ethical Stances Underlying Biosemiotic Criticism

Barbieri, M. (2008a). Life is semiosis. Cosmos and History, 4(1–2), 29–52.

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1.1 Quick Hits

1.2 Biosemiotic Criticism: A Narrative Overview

as we saw that indexicality presupposes the transcendence of the non-dynamic, self-

1.4 Modeling Biosemiotic Criticism in Its Ecocritical Context