Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Hubert Zapf

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9783110394894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.

Part IEcocritical Theories of Culture and Literature

Wendy Wheeler

1The Lightest Burden: The Aesthetic Abductions of Biosemiotics

Abstract: This chapter argues that a biosemiotic understanding of life helps us to understand that all organisms, not only humans, are communicative and engaged in semiotic interpretation, and have teleological, self-organised purposes in co-evolutionary dialogue with their environments. The chapter further argues that this co-evolutionary biosemiotic account of all living organisms – bacteria, plants, fungi, human and nonhuman animals – helps us to avoid the twin pitfalls of the mind-body dualism and nominalist idealism that has gripped modernity from its seventeenth-century start. In doing so, this contribution describes how semiotic scaffolding is used in biological development and evolution in ways that are essentially poetic and abductive. In this way the chapter advances a nonreductionist, nondualistic, processual, co-evolutionary, ecological and realist, naturo-cultural theory of organismic meanings, purposes and knowledge.

Key Terms: Biosemiotics, meaning, teleology, poetry, abduction, semiotic scaffolding, Reformation, umwelt, realism, nominalism, Charles Sanders Peirce, Jesper Hoffmeyer, John Deely, Seamus Heaney

[…] poetry as divination, poetry as revelation of the self to the self, as restoration of the culture to itself; poems as elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has an importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants. (Heaney 2002, 14)

1Biosemiotics as the Bridge between Nature and Culture

One important purpose of religion is to address both fears of death and also transcendent longings such as the desire for cosmic meaning and understanding. But another of its important and related functions is to address the moral life, and to provide answers to questions such as “How should the good life be lived?,” “What should the relationship be between human beings?” and “What should the relationship be between human beings and nonhuman nature?” In other words, religion is a way of grounding social, cultural and natural relations. It offers to fix one of self-conscious mankind’s more pressing existential questions, one that is as pressing for science as it is for metaphysics, and that concerns the possibility and nature of the bridge (if one exists at all) between subjective experience and objective being. Even the child will soon encounter the question “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” As is well known, that dividing chasm has run through Western conceptions of reality since Descartes and, before him and informing him, Plato. Monotheistic religions build that bridge by placing the unshakeable strength of its foundations and its carrying capacity between the two shores of self and not-self in a transcendent god in whom, and according to doctrine, distinctions and meanings are all held firm.

In the philosophy of modernity, Kant’s Categorical Imperative seeks an answer to the moral aspects of this problem which does not rely on a transcendent god. He does this by grounding what it is right to do in the human capacity to reason about the good. The categorical imperative means to will only what you can will to be universally the case. This is how morality can be grounded in a godless world. This view has informed the development of the ideas and laws of Human Rights and of Equality of all before the law in Western cultures, although clearly the Christian influence is visible. Accordingly, many people argue that such rights are not accepted as rationally true by all human beings. Many across the world evidently also believe that it is safer to place (or to keep) the sources of morality and right action outside of fragile human definitions and in the realm of the unassailable divine. In a post-Enlightenment age, conscious reasoning is no longer accepted as the sole motivation guiding human thought and behaviour; warriors in opposing camps, both secular and religious, become ever more fractious and intransigent.

The Categorical Imperative was based on the nominalistic assumption that no direct access to reality as it really is (noumena) can be accomplished by human subjects. The latter have access to phenomenal experience alone, and nothing guarantees correspondence between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. The effects of nominalism (one side of the nominalist versus realist ‘battle’ between the ancients and moderns which took place in Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A. D.) were to lead to both the Protestant Reformation and also to the development of modern science. This latter was largely effected during the seventeenth century on the basis of contemporary beliefs that Adam’s fall had made human beings subject to potentially illimitable error. This meant that nominalist doctrine assured all who accepted it that subjective experience itself was not a source of knowledge because every perception and thought might well be simply a human-made fiction. This led to the scientific emphasis on empirical research, although even this had to be rescued from nominalist doubt by Francis Bacon (himself a nominalist). Bacon found himself forced to counter such catastrophic Protestant pessimism by arguing that the Fall “affected only man’s moral rectitude: it did not alter his sensory acuity or the things his senses observed” (Poole 2005, 2; Wheeler 2014b).

Another way, though, has been proposed through this apparent impasse, both before and after these typically modern nominalist conceptions: this other way is that of the bridge of living semiosis which joins all organisms’ experiences to the world they inhabit – even if only partially. This way of thinking began to be explored by Augustine of Hippo (354–430 A. D.), and was developed during the Middle Ages in Roger Bacon’s thirteenth-century recognition that “concepts (both perceptual and intellectual) are signs formally” (Deely 2015; Deely 2009). It was finally more comprehensively understood, by John Poinsot in the seventeenth century, in terms of a triadic semiotic relation necessary to meaning, although this came too late to stop the Cartesian move and the dualism inherent in the tradition of Western metaphysics (Deely 2001; Deely 2009). More or less lost for the next two centuries, a semiotic understanding was rearticulated and developed in the philosophy of American scientist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) in the nineteenth century. Finally, in our own time the understanding of the centrality of semiosis and meaning-making entered contemporary biology, in the form of a semiotic biology known as biosemiotics; this offered a mode of understanding that could answer the problems posed, and the questions unanswered, by the dominant mechanistic approach (Favareau 2010; see also ↗2 Earth’s Poesy).1

Semiotics offers an account of the world of living organisms in which what is external and internal (whether things or ideas), both subjective and (supposedly) objective, are treated by ‘readers’ (whether fungi, plants, nonhuman animals or human animals, cells and organelles, organs and body systems generally) equally as semiotic objects. In its most straightforward form, it is in the nature of the sign, as described by Peirce and by John Poinsot before him, that it makes a bridge of meaning between object and subject (Deely 2001). As Thomas A. Sebeok (2001, vii), one of the earliest re-discoverers of both Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll, put it, “[i]t is a crude mistake to oppose nature and culture, organism to environment. ‘Culture,’ so called, is implanted in nature; the environment or Umwelt, is a model generated by the organism. Semiosis links them.” Because the world is never experienced directly, but is always mediated by a modelling of experience (even cells and bacteria have experience, however minimal (Hoffmeyer 2008a) which excludes the perception of what is unnecessary to the organism (for example, visually: ultraviolet light in the case of humans, but not in the case of birds and some insects), it follows that mediation takes the form of representations (the model stands in for what causes it) which can function as signs (i.e., can have significance). Were these multitudes of suprasubjective signs not sufficiently successful in their bridging function (and this is what we must mean by realism), there would be no life, and certainly no evolution.

In the Peircean semiotic account, the sign is, more accurately, constituted in an irreducibly triadic sign relation. This sign relation is constituted between 1. the object (the foundation of the sign), 2. the representamen (the sign vehicle: that aspect of a sign which any living thing is able to grasp or potentially make sense of) and 3. the interpretant (the meaning of the sign whether expressed as a human interpretation or an act or acts or, in all forms of life, some change or other, whether in the chemical or nervous system or in behaviour, which makes a difference2). This latter is why Peirce’s philosophy is called pragmatism (or pragmaticism as he later came to call it because he thought it had been misunderstood by William James, John Dewey and others). Each part of the triad is capable of generating different semiotic pathways dependent, generally, on umwelt and context; but it is relatively easy to see that the human use of signs will tend to produce signs and interpretants as part of a dynamic process of growing more insight and more knowledge. This is obviously the case in science, and usually part of the aim in the arts and the humanities – although less directly. This process has both nonconscious and self-conscious elements, as I come on to discuss. Animals use signs, but do not know that they do so. Timo Maran (2011) has emphasised the use of animal mimicry in this regard (the carrying over of one sign use to another via imitation), and Maran and Karel Kleisner (2010) have together suggested the use of the terms “semiotic selection” and “semiotic co-option” in order to emphasise the agency of organisms in the processes of evolution.

Meaning is always a kind of doing.3 The meaning of a sign is to be found in the changes (actions or as above) which it brings about. Clearly, the semiotic object can be said to have an original form inasmuch as it really exists in time and space as intentional, even where (very often via the developmental movements of metaphors [Lakoff and Johnson 2003]) it has become an ‘internal’ semiotic object in the form of an idea. The representamen takes account of the fact that the object is subject to change inasmuch as it can grow in our understanding of it. This will potentially change the interpretant accordingly. Indeed, Peirce noted that both the object and the interpretant have a dynamic aspect (De Waal 2013, see esp. chapter 5, “Semeiotics, or the Doctrine of Signs”). Signs can and do grow. As Peirce himself said,

every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of the symbol changes slowly, but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones […]. Every symbol is, in its origin, either an image of the idea signified, or a reminiscence of some individual occurrence, person or thing, connected with its meaning, or is a metaphor. (1998a, 264)

A metaphor is, of course, a real thing, itself a bridge in the growth of meanings, and very far from ‘merely’ a figure of speech.

It is easy to see that the Peircean semiotic is a processual and evolutionary semiotic of life: the growth of semiosis in nature is what makes creative responsiveness and adaptation by the organism possible; semiosic growth in human culture produces more knowing.4 From this, it is also easy to see that the relationship between object and subject is bridged by the action of signs. As the American philosopher John Deely has argued, it is in the nature of the sign to be relational and intersubjective. It is worth quoting Deely in full here in his account of the seventeenth-century Portuguese monk Poinsot’s breakthrough in semiotic understanding:

In effecting his answer to the profound question of how the being of sign is able to bridge nature and culture, thought and being, Poinsot begins his Treatise with exactly the point that Augustine’s famous and first attempt at a general definition of sign had presupposed. Instead of simply stating what a sign is, Poinsot asks rather what a sign must be in order to function in the way we all experience it to function, namely as indifferent to the distinction between real and imaginary being, truth and falsehood, or as conveying indifferently cultural and natural objects. To answer this question Poinsot distinguishes sharply between representation and signification. This distinction becomes his basis for his differentiating between signs and objects: an object may represent itself, but a sign must represent other than itself. Thus representation is involved in the being proper to a sign as the foundation for the relation of signification, but the signification itself always and necessarily consists in the relation as such, which is over and above that characteristic of a material being or a psychological state of an organism upon which the relation itself is founded.

Signification is opposed from the outset to whatever exists as an individual material entity or aspect thereof, that is to subjective being in its entire extent. Signification is always something over and above its foundation in some individual being or material object, something superordinate thereto, something of its very nature intersubjective, either actually or prospectively. Signs act through their foundation, but the actual sign as such is not the foundation but the relationship which exists over and above that foundation linking it as a sign-vehicle to some object signified. (Deely 2001, 430–431)

There is a knowable world, but our knowledge of it is imperfect and incomplete, and is born out of a dialogic engagement with it; this grows mind and knowledge. Bodies and environments make minds, which in turn make more world. As Søren Brier (2015) notes, “evolution is neither completely random nor completely mechanical, but is a development of the reasoning powers of the universe.” Here, too, we can hear echoes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s sense of an intersubjectivity of all nature, human and more-than-human, which we have dangerously ignored. As Louise Westling writes in the present volume concerning the core of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic ontology of world and flesh, “Unless we recover this sense of a wider intersubjective and interdependent reality, our world will perish” (see ↗3 Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary). You do not imagine the environment which supports you, nor the microbes which live in and on you, and which keep you alive because 90 % of the DNA that keeps you going is not your own DNA but theirs. You do not need to imagine these things because you do not even know about them consciously. Nonetheless, these symbiotic, communicative and mutualistic bacteria not only keep you alive, but they also, as Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel (2009, 98) point out, “play an important role in the development of the host’s intestine, capillary networks, and immune system, as well as having important consequences for human health.” These unimagined things are not human-made fictions, and the fact that they have been (and mostly remain)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Part I Ecocritical Theories of Culture and Literature
• Part II Issues and Directions of Contemporary Ecocriticism
• Part III Between the Local and the Global: Cultural Diversity vs. Eco-Cosmopolitanism
• Part IV Ecologies of Literary Communication
• Part V Genre and Media Ecologies
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• List of Contributors
• Footnotes