FIGURE 4. Abstract Version of the Semiotic Triangle
We noted in chapter 3 that Peirce, by bringing the action along with the being of signs into the focus of a thematic inquiry, took one of the decisive steps in establishing the full possibilities for developing a doctrine of signs. This step marks the difference between the contemporary development of semiotics and all earlier stages, historically speaking, of a move toward semiotic consciousness. For, while the being proper to signs exists actually only within the context of experience (in precisely the sense that experience presupposes cognition), the action that underlies this possible being by no means presupposes cognition.
How to understand the actions of signs outside the context of cognitive life? If this could be achieved, the scope of semiotics as a possible science would become as wide as could be, for it would be commensurate with an activity and type of causality coextensive with the physical universe. Such a "broader conception" of the sign, as Peirce called it, would embrace all four of the levels identified in this book, to wit, the two levels of cognitive semiosis (anthroposemiosis and zoösemiosis), and two lower levels of semiosis not dependent on cognition as such (phytosemiosis and physiosemiosis), as appears in the following passage (Peirce c. 1907: 205-206):
The action of a sign generally takes place between two parties, the utterer and the interpreter. They need not be persons; for a chameleon and many kinds of insects and even plants make their living by uttering signs, and lying signs, at that. Who is the utterer of signs of the weather ... ? However, every sign certainly conveys something of the general nature of thought, if not from a mind, yet from some repository of ideas, or significant forms, and if not to a person, yet to something capable of somehow 'catching on', . . . that is, of receiving not merely a physical, nor even merely a psychical dose of energy, but a significant meaning. In that modified, and as yet very misty, sense, then, we may continue to use the italicized words.
Peirce's remark (1905-1906: 5.448n) that "this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" may be regarded as a kind of capsule summary of this broader conception, and his much earlier enigmatic assertion (1868: 5.314) that "man is a sign" would be a kind of corollary.
But can this broader conception be justified? Is it warranted by the nature of semiosis? Clearly, the very attempt at such justification would require going beyond the bounds conventionally established for scientific thought, which we may say had already by Peirce's day more or less dogmatically embraced the view of nature as engaged exclusively in chance interactions of a brute force character.
Conventional boundaries as such, of course, had no interest for Peirce when the inquiry demanded their violation, and such seemed the case with the problem at hand. To Peirce, the fact that a sign always signifies something to or for another suggested the need to reconsider the taboo notion of final causality, or so-called teleology.
At least in the context of the biological sciences, such a move was to some degree inevitable. Later biologists (for example, Simpson, Pittendrigh, and Tiffany 1957; Pittendrigh 1958; Mayr 1974, 1983) would prefer to speak of "teleonomy", to make the point that actual purpose in the individual sense is not necessary to account for the behavior (such as the rhythmic climbing of the female turtle onto the sand and laying its eggs) that the observer must ascribe to plan in nature in order to make scientific sense of the observations (a point also made by von Uexküll).
But, in the larger physical universe of atoms, stars, and intergalactic dust, even such a moderate version of teleology is extremely difficult to sustain as pertaining to the particles and interactions themselves, especially those of a more random sort such as meteor showers, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the dispersion of light, etc. True, there is the fact of stellar evolution and planetary formation, in relation to which the formation of the elements out of more primitive atomic materials and the distribution of matter seems to be law-governed in statistically determinable ways rather than random. This non-randomness led thinkers such as Henderson (1913: 305) to argue with considerable persuasiveness and empirical support that "physical science . . . no less than biological science appears to manifest teleology". But the "teleology" here, if such it can be called, appears to be entirely external to the interactions themselves.
The problem is that, before the advent of living matter and continuing in the inorganic environmental factors taken in their own right, the inorganic components themselves (no matter how much they may be modified and dominated by vital processes and organic symbioses in a gaia situation, the situation of a living planet), seem overwhelmingly to enter the process of cosmic evolution only indirectly, through the direct process of random or chance interactions. Once these have occurred, the inorganic components are inevitably redirected by the nature of the particles or bodies interacting and result, through this redirection, in processes of complexification and cosmic development overall. The consequent development overall, however, does not disguise the fact of the random foundation. This undeniable substructure of chance encounters in a realm of brute secondness seems to pose a barrier to any possible extension of semiosis beyond the boundaries of the living world.
Nonetheless, by linking the action of signs to future-oriented changes in the world of nature, Peirce had clearly pointed the way to what Sebeok called attention to in the early 1960s as "a vision of new and startling dimensions: the convergence of the science of genetics with the science of linguistics ... in the larger field of communication studies". In this view (Sebeok 1968: 69):
the genetic code must be regarded as the most fundamental of all semiotic networks and therefore as the prototype for all other signaling systems used by animals, including man. From this point of view, molecules that are quantum systems, acting as stable physical information carriers, zoösemiotic systems, and, finally, cultural systems, comprehending language, constitute a natural sequel of stages of ever more complex energy levels in a single universal evolution. It is possible, therefore, to describe language as well as living systems from a unified cybernetic standpoint ... A mutual appreciation of genetics, animal communication studies, and linguistics may lead to a full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis, and this may, in the last analysis, turn out to be no less than the definition of life.
This indeed is a grand vision. It falls, however, considerably short of the broader conception Peirce had in mind in linking the sign to final causality.
To provide this further ground and to establish the Peircean broader conception of semiotics, therefore, would be the same thing. This other decisive step, taken together with the Peircean one of bringing the action along with the being of signs into thematic focus, is what is required to establish the full possibilities for a doctrine of signs.
This step depends on the further discovery that there is a more general causality at work in the sign than the final causality typical of the vital powers. This more general causality specifies vital activity but specifies also the causality at work in chance interactions of brute secondness. It is this causality, not final causality, that is the causality proper to the sign in its distinctive function of making present what it itself is not, for it is this causality, not final causality, that transforms, for example, accidental scratches into a clue leading the detective to the apprehension of the murderer.
The causality distinctive of semiosis, in its contrast with physical modes of causality, need not be goal-oriented in any intrinsic sense. On the contrary, it needs to be a causality equally able to ground sign-behavior in chance occurrences and planned happenings. On any construction, final causality cannot do this.
The decisive step in this regard was taken fully neither by Poinsot nor by Peirce. It can be taken from what is set forth in Poinsot's Treatise on Signs (1632a: Book I, Question 4, and Appendix C)
To see how the dream becomes real, let us begin at the point where Peirce was tempted to despair of his broader conception. Then, by expanding outward from this point, removing step by step each of the reasons for a temptation to settle for a more restricted notion of the sign, we will be able to end up with a warranted version of the broader conception and of all four of the levels it implies.
Before there are actually signs, there are signs virtually, that is, there are beings and events so determined by other beings and events that, in their own activity as so determined, they determine yet further series of beings and events in such a way that the last terms in the series represent the first terms by the mediation of the middle terms. As Craik put it (1967:59), "It is only the sensitive 'receptors' on matter, and means of intercommunication ... which are lacking".
The actions and relations in such a series are actually at the level of secondness. But, even at that level, they anticipate the intervention of cognition and experience: they so stand to one another in relations of determining and being determined that they constitute a pattern of knowability, a virtual thirdness, which, should it come to be actually known in some context of experience, will exhibit precisely that element of thirdness, that irreducible elemental type of representation, constitutive of the sign relation.
The years 1908 and 1909, in this respect, seem to have been a period of crisis and some despondency for Peirce in his project of establishing semiotic. In 1908, in a letter to Lady Welby, he tossed in despair his famous "sop to Cerberus", introducing the notion of "person" into his definition of sign (1908a: 88-89):
I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediated by the former. My insertion of the term 'upon a person' is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood.
If, as is to be expected, the term "person" here is equivalent to "human being", then the term "sign" so qualified would be restricted to the region of anthroposemiosis. In order to reach Peirce's "broader conception", therefore, it is necessary to remove this qualification and consequent restriction, which we may do with the following abstract formula: a sign will be any A so determined by a B that in determining C that C is mediately determined by B. Thus, B determines A, and, precisely in the respect in which B has determined it, A determines C. Therefore C, in being immediately determined by A, is at the same time mediately determined by B. We see here the most primitive and abstract form of the semiotic triangle that is behind the "pyramid of anthroposemiosis" looked at in the last chapter.
In other words, C is passive to A in just the way that A is passive to B; but, precisely by reason of being passive in this way, C is virtually active respecting both A and B as a representation or representative element. Let B be rain and A the clouds whence the rain precipitates, and C be the experience of an organism caught in the rain. The effect of being caught in the rain will establish for the organism a new relation to B whereby A will henceforward exist for C as a sign of B, thus:
Or let A be the bone of a dinosaur buried in what we saw in chapter 4 would become a garden, and let B be the dinosaur long dead. C in this case would not be the effect of the bone on the gardener, for that, as we saw in concluding Chapter 4, did not result in any actualization of the transcendental relation—the representative element—of the bone to the dinosaur. The effect of the bone on the gardener did not make of this relation a sign. Nonetheless, the element representative in this respect was there, identical with the bone, but needing to be actualized. It was there, of a piece with the bone in physical being, but virtually distinct therefrom. When the paleontologist came along, however, this virtuality was actualized. The perceptual effect of the bone on the paleontologist, but not on the gardener, triggered the virtual element whereby the bone actually represents the dinosaur. Hence Poinsot's formula (1632a: 126/3-5): "It suffices to be a sign virtually in order to signify in act".
Thus, again, let B be the dinosaur, A the bone, and C a geological formation in which the bone has been turned to stone.
In this case the interpretant is a physical rather than a psychical structure but one that has been so determined by A as to represent through A also B. In this way the interaction is a virtual semiosis, that is, a series of interactions at the level of secondness that, at the same time, provides an actual pathway through time whereby it is possible that what happened long ago might be partially understood. The present, indeed, from such a standpoint, might be regarded as a mosaic of traces from the past, each providing the starting point, for a sufficiently knowledgeable present observer, of a journey into what used to be. Notice that it is not necessary that such possibility be actualized in order for it to be possible. Nor is it merely "possible" in some abstract, conceptual sense. Our example, for example, exists in the geological formation virtually. The bone (A), or the rock formation that used to be a bone (C), is "not a sign formally but virtually and fundamentally", as Poinsot puts it (1632a: 12-18):
For since the rationale of moving or stimulating the mind remains, which comes about through the sign insofar as it is something representative even if the relation of substitution for the signified does not remain, the sign is able to exercise the functions of substituting without the relation.
We see, thus, at once: how the interpretant is fundamental to the semiosis, that the interpretant need not be a psychological state or idea, and why the interpretant is itself a sign or link in what Eco calls the chain of "unlimited semiosis".
Since it is through its fundament that the sign is a representation, and it is through this being of representation that the sign is involved in the brute force interactions of secondness and physical existence, it follows that the virtuality of signs is present and operative throughout the realm of nature, and not just among the animals where signs exist and function in their proper being actually as well as virtually.
Moreover, this virtual semiosis prior to any cognitive life is not restricted to passive reflections in present being of past interactions, such as we have considered so far. Virtual semiosis is also at work in the ways that present interactions anticipate future conditions radically different from what presently obtains. In other words, present effects are virtual signs not just retrospectively, but prospectively as well. They portend, and do so in two ways. First of all, in any given interaction of bodies, over and above the resultant relations of cause and effect (acting and being acted upon), there is the fact that each of the bodies involved interprets and twists the action according to its own intrinsic nature. In this way, as Powell puts it (1986: 300), "the extrinsic specification of causal relations always reveals indirectly the intrinsic species of the bodies which are their extrinsic specifying causes". For example, if I strike the armor of a tank, a porcelain bowl, or the trunk of a tree with a hammer, the relation of agent to patient is in all three cases the same; or, as Powell again puts it (ibid.), "spatiotemporal/real causal relational systems do not have determinate intrinsic species as bodies do". However, owing to the intrinsically diverse properties of steel, porcelain, and wood pulp, the effect will be likewise diversified in each case.
Thus, dyadic interactions, as extrinsically specified by the bodies involved at the level of secondness, also project a virtual level of thirdness that anticipates changes in future states respecting the interactions occurring here and now. And the measure of these interactions occurs through precisely the same type of causality operative in the sign, whereby it achieves indifference to the being and non-being, presently considered, of what is signified.
Here, however, in the direction of future states, the virtuality of the semiosis is more complicated. The reason is that the direct deflection of the results of the interactions itself can lead to changes in the immediate constitution of what does the interacting—as, for example, when one of the interactants is destroyed by the interaction, or when the interaction triggers a new phase in the development of one of the interactants, or when a specifically new type of being (such as a new atomic elementary formation) results from the interaction. Here, Peirce's idea of scientific laws existing as habits in nature as a whole would seem to find, as it were, a semiotic grounding. For, over and above the individual interactions of bodies, there is a macroformation of the universe that takes place directionally, as it were, toward the establishment of conditions under which virtual semioses move always closer to actuality.
Out of cosmic dust, stellar systems form through subatomic, atomic, and molecular interactions. At various stages of the process, new elements not previously given precipitate from the interactions, even as now on earth we can in laboratories bring into being a few elements not yet existent in nature itself. These elements, in turn, provide essential to the formation in planetary systems of the conditions under which living beings become possible, and theses beings, in turn, further modify the planetary conditions so that successive generations of living beings are incompatible with the original conditions of life. Oxygen, essential for life on this planet now, for example, was originally introduced as a waste product of living beings who neither needed nor could survive within a heavily oxygenated atmosphere.
Through this entire series of intersecting and often conflicting processes resulting in cosmic evolution over-all, the specificity and identity of any given process at each step is guaranteed not by individual bodies but by systems of commonly specified real relations between bodies, that is, by specifically identifiable categorially determined systems of ontological relations. Within these systems individual bodies further determine their immediate interactions according to their own intrinsic natures. In the case of organisms this determination in turn depends on a whole sub-system of interactions indisputably semiotic in nature, as Sebeok has pointed out (1977a, 1988, 1989a). The relational systems as a whole and the interactions within them form throughout a single web of at least virtual semiosis, governed at each point by the objective causality of the sign virtually at work throughout. This causality corresponds to the plan in von Uexküll's distinction (1934: 42-46) between goal and plan in nature and is, as Powell points out (1988a: 180, 186), "prior to the well-known Aristotelian four causes, the agent, the final, the formal, and the material cause":
It is precisely the function of extrinsic formal causality to displace the agent and final causes by a more elementary cause which is not committed to explaining how interaction could be understood. Thus the solar system is explained as a mechanism specified by extrinsic formal causes without needing any explanation by agent causes (let alone by final causes which have not been recognized by science since the seventeenth century). For Einstein's general theory of relativity precisely eliminated gravitational forces from explanation of the solar system, by substituting the curvature of space time for gravitational forces (Hawking 1988: 29-30). Now gravitational forces are agent causes, whereas the curved space-time that governs the path of the earth around the sun is an excellent example of extrinsic formal causality . . . because that path consists of specified temporal relations between the earth and the other bodies of the solar system . . . plain cases of extrinsic formal causality.
Thus, Peirce's discouragement at establishing his broadest conception of semiosis proves unnecessary,
This is semiosis, but semiosis of a specific kind. I propose that we call it physiosemiosis, so as to bring out by the very name the fact that it is a question here of a process as broad as the physical universe itself. For this process is at work in all parts of it as the foundation of those higher, more distinctive levels of the same process that come into existence as the conditions of physical being themselves make possible the successively higher levels first of life, and then of cognitive life. Thus, the definition of semiosis is not just coextensive with the definition of life but broader than it.
Nonetheless, the transformation of physiosemiosis within specifically living interactions, even prior to any question of cognition as such, is dramatic, and requires a specifically identifying label. For physiosemiosis simply links the intelligibility of past and future, while looking to the future beyond interacting individuals only accidentally,
It is probable that orientation to the future is operative in semiosis from the first. Certainly this is true if Henderson's unorthodox early view (1913: 305) that "physical science . . . no less than biological science appears to manifest teleology" ultimately proves correct.
Krampen, basing his view on the work of J. von Uexküll, uses a contrastive "method of opposition" to show how the meaning-factors work in an environment which lacks the Umwelt-structure introduced by cognitive interactions (cf. T. von Uexkiill 1982: 5-6). "Using the example of the leaves of an oak tree", Krampen remarks (1981: 195), "Jakob von Uexküll shows how phytosemiosis functions":
One of the meaning factors, as far as oak leaves are concerned, is the rain. Falling raindrops follow precise physical laws governing the behavior of liquids upon striking a leaf. In this case, according to Jakob von Uexküll, the leaf is the 'receiver of m', coupled with the m factor 'rain' by a 'meaning rule'. The form of the leaves is such that it accommodates the physical laws governing the behavior of liquids. The leaves work together by forming cascades in all directions in order to distribute the rain water on the ground for optimal use by the roots. To put it in more common semiotic terminology, the leaf's form is the signifier and the physical behavior of the raindrop is the signified. The code coupling leaf and raindrop is the oak tree's need of liquid for the transport of nourishing salts into its cells. Of course, from the point of view of present planetary conditions, plants have played and continue to play, especially in the great rainforests, a crucial evolutionary role, one that began with bringing about an oxidizing atmosphere (about a billion years ago), then sustained ever afterward the basic matrix required for the development and continuance of all higher forms of animal life. Perhaps by reason of his reliance on von Uexküll,
There is one fundamental rule of correspondence between humans and animals on the one hand and plants on the other, this being of critical importance for life: Plants produce the oxygen all humans and animals breathe. In other words, the life of plants corresponds as a counterpoint to the breathing lungs of humans and animals as a point.
But, of course, there is considerably more to be considered here than a merely external correspondence and exploitive dependency. Here again we reach one of those points where the semiotic point of view exceeds the bounds of glottocentrism and in this sense manifests its affinity more with the ontological veins of ancient and medieval thought than with the nominalistic strains of renaissance and modern philosophy. Consider the following text, which is singularly uncharacteristic of the mainstream of modern philosophy as it waxes increasingly glottocentric in contemporary times. (I choose this text in part for its fortuitous extension of the phytosemiotic image of the oak tree cited above from Krampen on the basis of von Uexküll's work.) The text is from a turn-of-the-century philosopher, Jules Lachelier (1933: XVIII-XIX):
It seems to me, when I am at Fontainebleau, that I sympathize in all my energies with the powerful vitality of the trees which surround me. I am too encrusted in my own form to be able to reproduce their form; yet, on well considering the matter, it does not seem unreasonable to hold that all forms of being sleep more or less deeply buried in the ground of each being. Under the sharp contours of my human form any careful observer could see the vaguer contours of 'animality', which veils in turn the even more fluid and incomplete form of simple organic life. Now one of the possible determinations of organic life is tree, which engenders in turn the oak tree. So the "being of an oak tree" is somewhere hidden in the foundations of my being, and may even strive sometimes to emerge and appear in its turn dias in luminis oras [in the upper world of light]—but humanity, which has gotten ahead of it, prevents it from doing so and blocks its way.42
This text strikes us in our cultural milieu as something idiosyncratic or even bizarre. Yet in truth it is no more than a faithful echo of the older traditions of the Western philosophical mainstream. We need only recall the reflections in this area common to Greek and Latin thought, before the unique development of modern philosophy effectively shifted concern away from natural being to the universe of human discourse in such ways as effectively to close the range of philosophy within the conventionalized realms of human culture.
According to this older, broader mainstream, the life of the plant exists within the animal itself precisely as base and part of its proper life. That is to say, there is a common life principle that is the first principle of all planetary life as such. I quote from a typical medieval commentary (Aquinas, c.1266-1272) on Aristotle's original conception (c.330BC) of "psychology" as the science of living things:
Aristotle defines the primary principle of life, which is called the vegetative psyche or soul; in plants this is the entire soul, while in animals it is only a part of the soul .... To understand his definition, it must be seen that there is a definite order among the three operations of the plant soul. For its first activity is taking food, through which the living thing preserves its existence. The second and more perfect activity is growth, by which the living thing develops both in size and vital energy. But the third, most perfect, and fulfilling activity is reproduction, through which something already as it were existing perfected in its own right, transmits to another being and perfection. For, as Aristotle observes in Book IV of his Meteorology (c. 1, 4-18), anything achieves its greatest perfection when it is able to make another such as it itself is. Since therefore things are appropriately defined and named by their outcome, whereas the fulfillment of the activity of plant life is the generation of another living being, it follows that it will be a proper definition of the first principle of life, that is to say, of the plant soul, if we define it as what is generative of another like itself on the plan of being alive.43
This ancient way of conceptualizing the nature and essence of life in general, and of plant life in particular, coincides fairly squarely, in contemporary terms, with our understanding of the genetic code. Such a conceptualization places a wholly unexpected back-drop of tradition behind Dr. Sebeok's bold claim that, if indeed the genetic code is a semiotic system (such that genetics and linguistics, as codes, subtend the upper and lower reaches of semiosis), then indeed in the full perspective of Western philosophical tradition "a full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis" would, in the last analysis, "turn out to be no less than the definition of life".
At the same time, as our above remarks have suggested, the full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis also turn out to include yet more extension than the definition of life. For phytosemiosis in turn needs to be seen as an extension and specification at a new level of the more general process and processes of physiosemiosis, upon which plants too depend.
In this perspective it becomes also clear that the proposal of Krampen (1981: 187)
to establish phytosemiotics, i.e., the semiotics of plants, as an area of inquiry into sign processes, parallel and on an equal footing with anthroposemiotics, the study of human communication, and zoösemiotics, the study of sign processes occurring within and between species of animals, the three areas forming together the discipline of biosemioticsis a reasonable ramification of the "vision of new and startling dimensions" to which Sebeok pointed in the early 1960s. From the point of view of the analogy between linguistics and genetics, and within the dialectic of concepts set up thereby, the establishment of phytosemiotics alongside anthroposemiotics and zoösemiotics completes a tryptic. Within this analogy, phytosemiotics has already a right to existence, its place marked out in advance. What is surprising, perhaps, is less Krampen's proposal than the fact that twenty years elapsed between Sebeok's statement on the dimensions of semiotics and the concrete advancement of such a proposal. Far from being the aberrant proposal it seemed when viewed from a standpoint of more or less explicit glottocentrism, it appears in an integrally semiotic perspective as an important and daring step in the dialectical maturation of the doctrine of signs.
This is not to say that the notion is without difficulties or that its final status vis-à-vis anthroposemiosis and zoösemiosis is assured. In fact, even in Krampen's original proposal, two quite distinct possibilities for the definition of phytosemiotics are outlined. The first and explicit scheme is for a relatively autonomous area of inquiry, "on an equal footing with anthroposemiotics and zoösemiotics", as Krampen puts it, using opposition as "the method by which the specificity of plant semiosis can be shown" (p. 192). By the use of this method, Krampen is able to show, as the ancient philosophers also argued, that (p. 203) "many life processes within the animal and human organisms function according to the principle of the vegetative world, i.e., according to the principle of phytosemiotics", although of course "the phytosemiotic level is contained within the zoösemiotic one at a new level of complexity" (T. von Uexküll 1982: 5-6).
Rich as are the results of this method in Krampen's hands, I am not convinced that they succeed in establishing phytosemiotics on an equal footing. Or, to put it another way, I am not convinced that the communication among plants and between plants and the physical environment and the communication between plants and animals is, on the side of the plants themselves, fully an actual process of semiosis, such as it certainly is on the side of the animals.
My hesitations here are an extension of the distinction, as we have drawn it above, between virtual and actual semiosis. This extension can be couched in the form of a distinction between communication, which is virtually semiotic, and actual signification proper. The two have in common the nature of being thoroughly relational states of affairs—in addition to which all conscious communication, whether self-reflective or not, within or between organisms, is by means of signification. But, although it is true that all relational phenomena are communicative, it is not conversely true that all communicative events adequately realize, even when they virtually contain, the triadic character required for an action fully semiosic. All relation involves signification potentially, but this becomes actual only through the intervention of cognition.
With these distinctions in mind, the situation of semiosis in the context of communication phenomena (relations) can be outlined thus:
FIGURE 8. Semiosic Activity and Relational Phenomena
In this scheme, the dynamics of semiosis in the strict and full, or overt, sense are co-extensive with the dynamics of cognitive life rather than with the dynamics of life itself. My original objection (1978a) to Sebeok's proposal that the genetic code is already a semiotic network was based on this consideration.
At the same time, the genetic code is unquestionably a communication network and a communication network whereby the present shapes the future, both in its being and in its virtual knowability. Through the genetic code the limitless possibilities of organic life are opened up, just as through the linguistic code the infinity of cognitive life is rendered possible in anthroposemiosis—which is, after all, "le coeur de l'analogie", as Sebeok pointed out.
Although there are hierarchical distinctions to be made in the levels of semiosis as well as circular feed-back laces between the levels, the picture that now emerges shows the problem to be mainly one of according proper emphases. First of all, the quasi-presemiosic (the "merely virtually semiotic") character of plant life, or still more of the processes of formation of star and planetary systems in the first place, needs to be given due weight. Second, what needs to be given due weight is the remarkable ordering whereby semiosis (thanks to the inorganic processes of planetary formation and the organic processes of vegetable life), which is virtually present and operative throughout, first becomes sustained actually in its proper possibilities, then grows both in size and vitality, and finally transforms into itself (at least by tendency and right of domination) all that preceded and once lay outside its actualized sphere. As Henderson remarked (1913: 312):
The properties of matter and the course of cosmic evolution are now seen to be intimately related to the structure of the living being and its activities; they become, therefore, far more important in biology than has been previously suspected. For the whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric.Some recent speculations in physics (for example, Wheeler 1984) seem to bear out this point.
In any event, if it is true that "things are appropriately defined and named by their outcome", the semiotist is entitled to regard the universe in its very essence as 'semiocentric'. The "new and startling vision" of the sixties, which at first seemed too grand, proves, after all, not grand enough.
The post-modern era that semiotics introduces is no longer ontocentric as were classical and Latin times, neither anthropocentric as the renaissance nor glottocentric as the moderns, but semiocentric. Hence we can complete and complement the once-famous maxim of Aristotle, "anima est quoddammodo omnia" ("the soul in a certain way is all things"), by adding: "in a certain way, all things are semiotic" ("omnia sunt quodammodo semiotica"). That is, in a certain way (quodammodo), because of semiosis at work throughout the whole of nature transcendentally and virtually, inasmuch as physical nature sustains itself through interactions which also determine the possibilities of what is there to be known on the environmental side or in the physical dimension of objects within experience, as well as ontologically and integrally within experience itself as sustaining the network of objects as such (the Umwelt) in the first place.
Not only can anything signify through cognition, and not only through cognition can anything fully signify, but, also phenomena not in themselves actually semiotic are nonetheless entangled in semiosic virtualities. Such is the situation that has to be accounted for. We have to take account not only of the fact that all things become semiotic once an awareness of them, however partial, is acquired, but also of the fact that all things in the process of becoming objectified work as if to have a say in the semioticity of their objectification. They not only respond to the web they are caught in, they also make the web respond to what it has caught.
Semiosis is above all an assimilative interactive process, especially as manifested in a form of life, but not only there. Semiosis is the process whereby phenomena originating anywhere in the universe signify virtually in their present being also their past and their future and begin the further process of realizing these virtualities especially when life intervenes and, within life, when cognition supervenes. The process does not begin with the cognition, it merely enters a further phase, a new magnitude of thirdness.
Let me comment, finally, on the second of the two possibilities for the definition of phytosemiotics I see outlined in Krampen's work, namely, the study of plants from the point of view of their symbiosis with animals. From this point of view, phytosemiotics would be defined as the study of the peculiar dependencies of animal upon plant life and of the benefits to human life in particular that could be derived from such a study. The method of opposition used by Krampen would necessarily form a substantial part and lay the foundations for this study. "This semiotic analysis", Krampen remarks (1981: 192), "may well form the positive scientific basis lacking so far in the conservationist activities that have, until now, largely been based on negation and ideology." And yet, viewed in this way, phytosemiotics would be, to borrow an older terminology, a study subalternate to rather than on an equal footing with zoösemiotics and anthroposemiotics.
Since this definition is in my opinion unquestionably valid in establishing phytosemiotics as an important and new semiotic perspective or field of inquiry and since, furthermore, it includes the methods and results of the alternative definition, I might summarize by saying that from Krampen's work I am convinced of phytosemiotics, but not of its equal footing with zoösemiotics or still less with anthroposemiotics. There seems to me a basic sense in which semiosis is hierarchical, a series of irreducible levels or zones that are integrally actualized only in the final layer that folds back, as it were, and assimilates the previous levels into itself so as to give them their final being as semiosic.
With the notion of phytosemiotics, then, Krampen has outlined a new area important even to the future of semiotic development (Krampen 1981: 208):
Despite the impression of progress raised by the constant introduction of new and sophisticated tools between human effectors or receptors and the human Umwelt, the human organism cannot escape the basic vegetative rules of endosemiotics and remains locked together with plants by a mutual rule of correspondence: If men cease to care for plants, i.e., cease to understand their meaning factors and the meaning rules at the basis of their formation rules, they will asphyxiate themselves. As Thure von Uexküll has put it: 'Man is led, from his extravagant position as the observer positioned outside nature and as its unscrupulous exploiter, back into nature, in which he must arrange himself for better or worse.' Phytosemiotics can help to improve this arrangement.At the same time, phytosemiotics marks not the final step but only a penultimate one in reaching the outlines of the full extent possible for the doctrine of signs.
We have now seen that the Peircean idea of extending semiotic understanding beyond the sphere of cognitive phenomena to the whole of nature itself, as a network virtually semiosic in character, had already been grounded in Poinsot's original treatise on semiotic foundations. We have likewise seen that the development of the doctrine of signs, drawing on contemporary experience and standing as well on the shoulders of the giants who contributed to the establishment of its foundations, reveals that, as Peirce alleged, the universe is indeed perfused and virtually made up entirely of signs, among which "man" is one.
To sum up the relation between the signs of the universe and the human being as sign, I propose this formula: "man" is an interpretant whose ideas are signs, having the universe in its totality as their object.
Copyright 1990 John Deely, all rights reserved.