a peircean semiotic model for describing the anti-oedipal structure of "humanimal" selves

A Peircean semiotic model for describing the anti-Oedipal structure

h selves

W. John Coletta

The ?) self and of subjectivity is analysed especially in terms of the dangers of social Darwinism and of reductionist evolutionary psycho - ). A Peircean pictographic model is presented of an anti-Oedipal self, one that is neces-

s multiple self which necessarily generates environ-means and environmeants , avatars to encounter again in its future environments

grasshopper-locust and two micro-ontological selves as represented in novels by Octavia Butler and Greg Bear.

1. Introduction: T anti-Oedipal s

In what follows, I hope to demonstrate, both with a Peircean pictographic model of zoosemiosis and with three related examples, the anti-Oedipal (Deleuze and Guattari 2009 -anthat is succinctly explained by Cary Wolfe: the power and importance of the animal is almost always its pull toward a multiplicity that operates to unseat the singularities and essentialisms of identity that were pro (2003: 88). The model that I use to represent this multiple, anti-Oedipal self also represents my attempt to depict, in Car

Timothy Clark writes, summarising the work of Gary Snyder and ,

[h]uman subjectivity and language are possible only on the basis of

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deeper structures of signification and communication that have nothing exc : 53). Indeed, my model represents an attempt to depict in graphic terms something of the nature of these underlyand the hybrid ontologies that they represent as described, depicted, and dramatised by Hoffmeyer (1996), Audubon (2003), Butler (1984; 2007), and Bear (1999) are often denied by contemporary capitalist and humanist ontologies, the structure of which denial is explored in

divided into three parts, each of which is informed by an underlying Peircean model of the semiotic structures of the 1. discussion of the anti-Oedipal self (the present section); 2. a treatment

ontologies generally; and, 3. a further, Peircean, development of those notions of identity, including my analysis of some artistic and literary texts in support of my theoretical analysis.

I will present here, then, an anti-Oedipal and Peircean model of the ; [1868b]: 20 21; 1998 [1893]:

2 3; Sebeok 1991 [1979, 1989]: 36 48; Wiley 1994) one in which, in Deleuzean and Guatarrian terms, the Freudian conception of the

replaced by the m owever, note that I p in producer consumer

the Freudian theatre. Furthermore, and again in Deleuzean and Guatarrian terms, my model replaces the Freudian idealist conception of desire as lack a model of desire that, as Winfried Nöth writes

environment only according to [its] inner needs, that is, [its] desired 1990: 180) with a view of desire as a generative engine

-merely of maintaining equilibria between inner and outer between,

. It is also capable of representing itself to itself, of generating versions of itself (signs of desire, whether physi-cal, chemical, biological, or cultural) to be encountered at some other time and in such a way that the encounter with its environment is a

A Peircean semiotic model

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kind of reunion with itself. It is

my e . My model, therefore,

My attempt to model important structural aspects of

human) (Wolfe 2003: 17) that is, to help articulate the semiotic is to be understood as

attempted in the spirit so clearly outlined by Wolfe: As long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans. (2003: 8)

speciesist (nor social Darwinistic) but that are nonetheless bio-logical. Figure 1 is a nonhumanist (anti-Oedipal) and antispeciesist model of biosemiosis.

1.1. - necessarily multiple self will come to be seen as always already

as it is for the Oedipal self. Paradigmatic here then is not

dangerous crossroads of ego, id, superego; the tortured composite psyche of father, mother, child). Indeed, the traditional Sophoclean

against itself evokes a collision course or demolition derby, the

Leder calls this version of the self the Cartesian vision of body-as-

ap- when there is pain or discomfort. Leder offers a

new vision of the body [that] can encourage a cultivation of embodied relation [...]. [W]e are invited to realize these possibilities of communion which lie

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implicit in the prethematic structure of the body [...]. The profound interconnection between body and world invites an ontology and ethics of interconnection. But an interpretive vector is only suggested by experience, never compelled. The body can always be viewed in a multiplicity of ways. (1990: 160)

c-

pictographically and dramatically, respectively. What is paradigmatic of the prethematised and anti-Cartesian self as described by Leder may be found represented in a

Neuro-mancer. In the last scene of that novel, protagonist Henry Dorsett Case has a serendipitous encounter in cyberspace (an encounter in cy-berspace not at the crossroads of head-on collisions; an encounter in the fluid psychological roundabout of the virtual) of another and au-tonomous version of himself, his own avatar. This autonomous (virtu-

other ne that he created but now meets again, is always already a resource for that self. Located outside of the self,

and distributed phenomenon: mind in terms of what I call environ-means . Environmeans that confront us with their own autonomy are

they are used to structure our experience, such as pheromones do for a grasshopper. Environmeants are s of our-

systems operating on the . An example of

environmeants is a grasshopp (Figure 1).


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Note here a Peircean biovirtual self (after an example in Hoffmeyer 1996). The semiotic structure and the processes represented by the model are general and can be used to show how semiosis, which precedes and even subsumes human language, is a more-than-human endowment. In the particular instantiation of the model on the previous page, a grasshopper is

you t Norbert Wiley argues forms the definitive reflexivity of the primate self.

Numbers 2b, 3b, 4b, 5b, 6b represent the emergence of the

Dynamic Object, in this case, the locust as other to its grasshopper self. Numbers 1, 2a, 3a, 4a represent the force of

environmeants , systems oper-

itself as DNA. Num , those versions of ourselves that we have launched and given independence to but that confront us with their own autonomy, that we use to structure our experience, environ-means such as pheromones for a grasshopper.

self to create the triadic model that is represented. Note that the model combines Peircean synechism 1993]; the belief that between any two supposed phenomena there is always a third, a belief that undercuts essentialism) and tychism ( the

Colapietro 1993]), thereby illustrating the intertwined emergence of Firstness (feeling), Second-ness (fact), and Thirdness (law) with the emergence of signs, objects (that which signs stand for), and interpretants (the outcome of signs for someone of thing, outcomes which are themselves signs, and so on). Note also the emergence of the Dynamic Object (DO, a thing or phenomenon as it is experienced and as it grows in response to interpretations;


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-a-large-extent self-engineered set (in this case a pheromone

secreted by a grasshopper when that grasshopper senses over-crowding, a pheromone that causes the grasshopper egg to interpret its

Also, note how the DO (the emerging locust) becomes more and more semiotically powerful (real) and comes to exert a top-down control over various other dimensions of the unfolding sign process. Note further how the grasshopper here

about itself that characterizes most all signing structures (entities) ,

human HERV in our so- DNAenviron-

means and environmeants generated by and out of the self that then . By

means of the affordances a being, in this case a grasshopper, can call a locust out of itself, that is, bootstrap itself into a new self. See,

DNA) is seen to erupt into Firstness at the same time that that sign has e object as it is

genetically as such

meantinterpret its DNA as a locust, the grasshopper now an emergent Dynamic Object (DO) of itself.

1.2. The anti-Oedipal model o self may be understood as in opposition to the Freudian psychoanalytic bias. It

is clearly represented in the following summary from Deleuze and Anti-Oedipus:

At its most autistic, psychoanalysis is no longer measured against any reality, it no longer opens to any outside, but becomes itself the test of reality and the guarantor of its own test: reality as the lack to which the inside and outside, departure and arrival, are reduced. (2009: 313).

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of the Oedipal self and its tragic implosion, let me offer two preliminary (and necessarily simple) examples. First, explosion (outward) wh - That is, it s . As Deleuze and Guattari write, like a spore case inflated with spores, [it] releases them as so many singularities that [it] had improperly shut off [...] but which now become points-signs [...], all affirmed by their new dis-t (2009: 77). The second example is the potential for the opening in - , what Leder (1990: 160) calls the possibilities of communion which lie implicit in the prethematic

structure of the . It is a structure that represents the repressed evolutionary palimpsest of Your Inner Fish (Shubin 2008) and the Botany of Desire (Pollan 2001). 1.2.1. The contemporary American baseball player Nyjer Morgan offers a telling example of the paradoxes and struggles of the anti-

-like in Deleuze and

himself as alternately Nyjer Morgan (after his legal name, an amalgamation of his slave-family surname and a culturally inflected first name), Tony Plush (a slick, metro-sexual persona), Tony Gumbo (an earthy, New Orleans creolized character), and now Tony Hush as he is refusing to talk in public as a response to the conservative cultural pressure , to respect the

team also celebrate success on the field by going into what Morgan . This iconic gesture was first introduced on the

imitation of characters from the movie Monsters, Inc. A headline in the media reads, Roenicke [the team manager W.J.C.] a tad concerned with beast mode . Cary Wolfe writes, the power and importance of the animal is almost always its pull toward a multi-plicity that operates to unseat the singularities and essentialisms of identity that were proper to the subject of humanism (2003: 88). Indeed, the ambivalent reaction to Nyjer Morgan, the tremendous flow

m


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to assume a selfsame identity, serves as a clear example of the issues r a

discussion of how hybrid identities are denied by contemporary capitalist and humanist ontologies).

1.2.2. Similarly, if matter is effete mind , as Peirce believes, and -consciousness

distinction is important here), then the co-evolution of plant chemistry AND of human consciousness as well as of the human mind human brain infrastructure must be considered when looking into the palimpsest (the pre-Oedipalisidentity. Michael Pollan discusses in The Botany of Desire (2001) the co-evolution of the cannabinoid network in the human brain AND of the chemistry of marijuana. He also discusses the obviously market-based and logocentric repression of those states of consciousness and modes of being made possible by plant chemistry (not to mention the aesthetics of plant appearance, scent, and taste). 1.2.2.1. Derrida, as Cary Wolfe writes, in his formulation of the trace beyond the human speaks in two senses . First, in evolutionary terms, as the outcome of processes and dynamics not specifically or even particularly human that remain sedimented and at work in the domain of human language broadly conceived (quoted in Wolfe 2003: 86 7). To this end, I have demonstrated (19

In the context of the predator prey interaction between a Holocanthus

tricolor), that fish represents itself indexically, iconically, and symbol-ically as the visual equivalent of a verbal phrase:

spher-

itself appearing as a smaller yellow-

-doll-like -bar theory w

hierarchical syntax represents the way in which the three dimensions of the physical reef habitat get mapped onto the two-dimension

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surface of the rock beauty as a virtual ecological relationship (the virtual fish behind the virtual rock). Then, the two-dimensions of that visual puzzle get mapped onto the digitalised neural circuitry (neurons that fire or do not fire depending on whether a predator solves the complex visual puzzle and eats or not) of the barracuda. That neural circuitry represents a prototype of the one-dimensional representations of space in language. Of course, underwater photographers experience the same symbolic economy of language that the barracuda does; and

-serve in legislation these beautiful , into

, a kind of writing that has everything to do with the preservation of rocks, rock beauties, and barracudas. 1.2.2.2. plant self may be found in the musical icons and indices of plant movement, plant morphology, and plant presence as registered in Irish traditional music. A survey of the titles of these vestigial tunes reveals many that reference specific plants (and beasts), plant assemblages, and humanplant arrangements (e.g.

will be clear b huma selves I mean plantihumanwell. More importantly, my focus is not on how much consciousness may be assigned to this or that animal or plant species or to this or that assemblage or swarm, or even to humanity. Rather, I honour the Peircean split between mind and consciousness, which distinction allows me to explore the anti-Oedipal subjectivity that links plant, animal, and human and that speaks ultimately for plant and animal democracies (rather than kingdoms). 1.3. This notion of the anti-Oedipal or anti-Cartesian self as always

environmental phenomenon, is represented in tic systems

nature and natural history give evidence of patterns of self-organisation, autonomy, and even intentionality (what Peirce calls

ith or that parallel human patterns. It is simultaneously a model of Peircean semiosis generally


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figure is a representation of the possible ontological trajectories of the grasshopper-locust (as described in Hoffmeyer 1996), or, rather, of the

other to its grasshopper self (an insect version of Jekyll and Hyde). The figure also stands for the ontological

mentioned encounter in Neuromancer with his own avatar in cyberspace. The grasshopper uses a pheromone which it produces only to encounter it again in its own virtual environ-ment, Umwelt, or cyberspace, to direct its own egg and the eggs of other grasshoppers of its own species to reinterpret its own DNA as the DNA of a locust rather than that of a grasshopper. This relationship of the self to itself through the mediation of signs (here pheromones and DNA) is a triadic structure wherein things in the world (grasshoppers, Oedipus, Case, or Nyjer Morgan, or the rocks in

signs, objects, and interpretants, as follows:

1.3.1. through signs, and at least doubly: of Figure 1 (replicants of grasshopper DNA and I of Figure 1) and you of Figure 1) his avatar in cyberspace, an eternal and younger version of himself and a sign of the young me of Figure 1), of what Case thinks of when he thinks of who he was; or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These signs both determine and are determined by objects:

1.3.2. through objects (experienced things); first as immediate objects of

DNA to mRNA (messenger RNA)idea of what Hyde could mean for him

AND dynamic objects (DOs, the original thing itself as it [re]emerges or is perceived in new ways, of Figure 1). Second, new DOs are brought along through the mediation of the immediate object, the DO here being the emergent grasshopper OR locust egg. The outcome depends on the presence or absence of pheromones, avatars of the grasshopper (interpretants see 1.3.3 below), or the

kyll/jackal, or the se sitting at his computer deck. The

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-f other signs, interpretants:

1.3.3. through interpretants, both the outcomes of earlier signs for someone or thing AND signs that both determine and are determined by new objects, (in Figure 1, the effects that pheromones have on the first sign [the representamen (R)], the grasshopper DNA), or how Case is transformed, recoded like grasshopper DNA is (mis)inter-preted as locust DNA ( accidentally on purpose as Frost would say) by pheromones that the grasshopper itself introduced into the environment, which is to say the future. Interpretants are the environment understood as the future, an interpretive context of the

influence is represented by a sphere. Thus the interpretant field (the environment/future), along with (internal) immediate objects, represents how things come to shape the conditions of their own production, indeed, the natures of the original things. The grasshopper

esents you

. As Norbert Wiley argues, it forms the definitive reflexivity of

- believe that grasshoppers and locust have a primate kind of consciousness but because primate dialogic I you mepossible without the kind of triadicity that Peirce shows is general in the universe: the ecology of consciousness existed before con-sciousness of ecology did. The Peircean distinction between and consciousness will be further discussed below. 2. Hybrid o semiotic s

The anti- self will be seen as semiotic precisely because of its anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialising character. As Norbert Wiley 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 differing symbols and their interpretations. The social Darwinists were explaining human identities, particularly ethnicity, biologically, by what they

. The pragmatists explained the same differences non-


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biologically and semiotically, as a matter of signs, communication, and interpretation. (Wiley 1994: 10)

The tyranny of social Darwinism (the application of principles derived from biological systems to [human] social and cultural systems and

qualitative differences between all three) and evolutionary psychology (the view that human behaviour today can be understood and predicted by recourse to a study of the evolution of the brain) shall be lifted from animals, too. What makes my model and topic relevant to the present volume on the semiotics of animal representations is that this anti- the irreducible

emerged from the primates, defines our line of primates, [...] and is the common denominator, and therefore the democratizer (1994: 28). Of course, the fact that chimpanzees, orangutans, and the great apes in general are now understood to have had culture for at least 14 million years (van Schaik et al. 2003: 102) should extend our conception of who must be understood as irreducible democratic agents . Here the

culture is the six-step process-oriented one that both u . Outlined

by W.C. McGrew (1998) it casts, admittedly, a wide net across species. As Emma Marris writes, [c]himps even adopt what

fads and fashions that only persist for a short time, such as a hand flapping behaviour that was hip in some young chimps for a while (Marris 2006: 1). With self it is significant 1987: 232 309 and Abram 2010) requires us also to see that the animal is not just deep (as in deep ecology) but also delightfully

shallow, semiotic, fad-prone, and silly. If chimpanzees can fall prey to

(see Bataille 1985), and not assume that conservation or, better, environmentalism, requires a sour retreat in

is an economy of abundance.

2.1. a self-other-self reflexive loop (1994: 9 10 - I you me . It is an open, triadic, reflexive structure by means of which even the future self (the you , nfluence the

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I ) and the past self (the me self or the human cannot be reducible t the animal (so-called

) or to some transcendental idea (so-called . It can be expressed by

common coinage today but traceable to a short-lived American television programme seventies or eighties (Mitchell 2003: xiii). Of course, the animal as Derrida (2008) makes clear with his concept of the animot.

orge-Herbert-Mead-based model

. As Thure von Uexküll points out, the elder von

their environment only according to their inner needs, that is, their Nöth 1990: 180). In a similar manner, as we see it in

positive and negative cybernetic feedback loops, [a]s soon as the object is acted upon by the animal in some manner, the perceptual cue is thereby eliminated (Nöth 1990:

functional cycle or circle so as to better depict how living things create the perceptual and operational fields themselves. Within these fields, functional cycling takes place so that organisms are understood not only to react to their environments only according to their inner needs, that is, their desired state but to shape that inner state through shaping the environment a way of externalising desire through what

environmeans and environmeants , as Hoffmeyer (1996) writes. By doing this, living things represent themselves to the future and, more importantly, have that future determine a new present, in other words, of ha future get itself represented as an environment , but one that has been altered in one present so as to serve as the interpretive context to be encountered at some other present moment in time.

2.2. Significantly, Wiley makes an important distinction between this

usually refers to some long-term, abiding qualities which, despite their importance, are not features of


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human nature as such. . History is notorious with peoples who thought their historically specific identities were universal (1994: 1). Therefore,

[i]f some part of the structure, some identity, begins to masquerade as the whole

But it can do so only at the cost of a drastically diminished reflexivity, highly limited in range, inaccurate in what it reveals and distorted by the biases of its localism and historical specificity. (Wiley 1994: 37)

As Wiley concludes, hese disturbances create monsters [see identity politics; identity c conclusions of evolutionary psychology, social Darwinism, and eugenics] that duplicate all the functions of a self but perform these functions in a distorted, a self-destructive manner (1994: 39). Thus, for Wiley, [i]f structure and identity are not kept separate, it is easy enough to smuggle traits of the dominating elites into the (alleged) nature of the self (1994: 16). Such an analysis fits nicely with

dyad lacks a key element that defines the triadic structu he interpretant, the Peircean third, (see Coletta et al. 2009), keeps object (the me , the past) and sign (th I , the present) from collapsing into each other. In this context, versions of potential selves (environmeans and environ-meants) I , open (not closed as in the collapsed identities of essentialist identity politics). Indeed, as Sebeok writes, mind has an inherent capacity to launch ever more developed, enriched interpretants in its three Peircean varieties on their journey toward infinity (Sebeok 1991 [1989]: 48). This launching creates an environment, an interpretant sphere of influence that calls out aspects of the emergent self as it encounters this semiotic environment of its own making.

2.3.

paradoxically both biological AND anti-essentialist: one cannot say where the begins and the outer Other begins, but the

boundary is, clearly, beyond the skin (Sebeok 1991 [1979]: 39), and thus outside (literally) the Central Dogma of genetic determinism. As

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Timo Maran writes, however, paradigmatic, i.e. it proceeds from [an] understanding of the contextualisation of semiotic processes that do not allow treating the animal mind as a distinct entity (2010: 315) mind is, then, an environmental phenomenon.

Wiley explores explicitly the self as it is constituted by its social ]: 39). In

tion n the relationship between the

you (the Other to the self) and fuses it with George I and the me (the past self as Other to

the present). By combining the work of these two philosophers, Wiley claims to have formulated the above mentioned semiotic

related to the postmodern self with which it shares a cultural space? As summarised by Kenneth Allan:

Postmodernism posits a fragmented self that has no essence, only images. Jameson (1984) argues that the simple and indivisible ego-self existed at one time, during the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, but has come to an end in the postmodern era. The postmodern self is fragmented and decentered with a kind of emotional flatness or depthlessness. (Allan 1997: 3)

seems to enjoy the democracy of a self that has been liberated from social Darwinism (a liberation provided by the American pragmatists).

self emotional of postmodern, socially constructed selves. Peirce, Sebeok,

ial construction has not a random but rather a community-based, teleonomic function. As Donald Worster (1977: 156) writes, in summarising -arching theory, all survival on earth is socially determined . Indeed, evolution is a signing process wherein things and objects (experienced things), indeed selves, are more economically and powerfully represented as signs of themselves than as themselves. This is the


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3. A further (Peircean) development of the n anti-

Oedipal s semiotic s including an analysis of

some relevant artistic and literary texts

something real? That is, is it locatable withi as the human body considered as an evolutionary palimpsest of its own

that is, as a body

that allows access to its own evolutionary constitution and, of course,

expressed in his The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) and summarised by Cary Wolfe. Derrida, in his formulation of the trace beyond the human speaks in two senses : The first sense is quoted above; but as for the second sense, Derrida speaks

in terms of how language is traced by the material contingency of its enunciation in and significations that speak in and through us in ways that the humanist subject of

and history of signification not specifically human and yet intimately so. (Wolfe 2003: 86 87)

W me you in a number of instances.

(a) In the micro-ontologies (remember that there are between ten- and one-hundred-times more bacteria in our bodies than there are our own cells) of Lynn Margulis as dramatised (1984, the subject of analysis below), wherein a virus that has infected

w become the self) engages us in what Margulis (see Margulis and Sagan 2003) -

human choice and intention (b) I -

object

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in Figure 1, and represent my attempt to represent and extend

(c) Idramatised Snow Crash (1992). (d) In Shakespea invention , according to Harold Bloom (1999), of the human as a function of learning to overhear ourselves , a

model of self, such as Wiley has codified and traces back to the aforementioned primates. (e) In the Aristotelian model of dramatic climax that maps so well onto human sexual climax. (f) In [genetic and epigenetic] radio novel of the same name, 1999), whereby the ontogenetic trajectory of human -eye -eye view of the self

-like transmissions of genetic and epigenetic information from itself, from its (former) self, its lineage

), and then helps shepherd its emergent you , the other to itself that it may become). In Eva Jablonka and Marion J.

Four Dimensions of Evolution (2006), the authors describe

traces of intentionality in the sense implied by Peirce when he when starved of a

particular amino acid, the bacteria increased the mutation rate in the very gene that might, if mutated, enable the cell to make the amino acid missing from its food . (Here in longer an externalisation or erasure of semiosis or agency, and

.) (g) I

(200 end of

her Nobel Prize address,

In the future attention undoubtedly will be centered on the genome, and with greater appreciation of its significance as a highly sensitive organ of the cell, monitoring genomic activities and correcting common errors, sensing the unusual and unexpected events, and responding to them, often by restructuring the genome. We know about the components of genomes that could be made available for such restructuring. We know nothing, however, about how the cell


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senses danger and instigates responses to it that often are truly remarkable. (McClintock 1983: 198)

s

McClintock of three key levels of biological organisation?) Kahguyaht says,

We acquire new life seek it, investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it. We carry the drive to do this in a minuscule cell within a cell, a tiny organelle within every

] Because of that organelle, the ooloi [the Oankali third sex] can perceive DNA and manipulate it precisely. (Butler 2007: 41)

Indeed, the alien Oankali seem to represent with their perceptual integration of the three central levels of biological organisation (cellorgan genome), with their direct perception (they can see, smell, and

) of the structure of DNA and of the workings of the transcription

three sexes (Peirce would be delighted) an embodiment of the . As aliens, they are an

embodiment of e how language is traced by the material contingency of its enunciation in

kinesic and paralinguistic significations that speak in and through us in ways that the humanist

Wolfe 2003: 86 87). nicely identifies as humanist and speciesist structure of subjec-t 3.1. triadic structure of the self, which he claims emerged from the primates, defines our line of primates , is an effective bulwark against the identity politics of social Darwinism. structure is shared equally by all humans; the structure, argues Wiley, keeps the self or the human

the animal (so- -he structure self or human from being

reducible to some transcendental idea (so- .

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applicability widely enough. However, the dignity and irreducibility that Wiley claims for humans on the basis of the semiotic structure he outlines will ultimately be extended to all living things, perhaps to all things, for, as Cary Wolfe writes in Animal Rites:

[A]s long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever species or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference (8).

structure, shared as it is by all primates, is present (may be traced) proto-structurally if not always accessible intentionally (see

matter is effete mind and manifests itself through all things) in the relationships of all living things to themselves as boot-strapping phe-nomena and to the micro- and macro-communities (as described by Bear and Butler) within which living things are said to dwell. Michael

-

beyond merely tracing human intentionality and subjectivity:

his concept of teleology as anthropomorphic ]. But the mental, for Peirce, is continuous with types of teleological process other than those found in the human mind [that is, conscious ones]. Peirce can thus speak of the behavior of micro-organisms, biological evolution, and even the growth of crystals as exhibiting mentality. This does not mean that there is something occult callanimating inorganic processes such as crystal formation; rather that there are processes constituting human mentality that are also to be found in simpler form elsewhere throughout nature. (Shapiro 1985: 13)

3.2. me y1994: 37therefore always subject to wh parallexis , a process whereby the self is never so much itself as when it necessarily generates alternative images of (parallel words for, thus

lex lex trea , as it were. Indeed, for the self to stand outside the self that generates


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these versions of the self is to provide always a stereoscopic or parallax view (see Figure 1, grasshopper DNA, grasshopper identity, and, indeed, grasshopper survival, can only be understood in terms of a grass-

Other than itself: the locust, the swarm. The ontology depicted in Figure 1, unfortunately, rather than serving as an example of how all identity is multiple, of how the carnivalesque might in fact be the default of being, is really, in capitalist and humanist culture, which in many ways is to say in Freudian culture, merely a diagram of how the self is always already a sign of its own dissolution or abjectness. This ontological problem in capitalist and humanist culture is, as Larissa Budde describes it in her essay in this present volume, made manifest

insect hybridisations and assemblages.

3.3. Figure 1 helps establish the biosemiotic underpinnings of the kind of ontological richness of insect identity as described in this volume by Adam Dodd. While a grasshopper is always already a represent-ation of its lineage in terms of the central dogma of replicationtranscription translation, as Jesper Hoffmeyer articulates, a grass-hopper also, in response to environmental cues, has the capacity to release pheromones that can cause a fertilised grasshopper egg to interpret its own DNA as something other to itself. As Hoffmeyer writes, the same DNA is interpreted in a different way (1996: 21); it is lineage [living things as the authors of themselves or of the

others to themselves W.J.C.] rather than Nature as such that carries out the selective processes on which organic evolution is built (1996: 22). Indeed, Hoffmeyer illustrates how living things are always interpretive structures, how they invent themselves in terms of two

fertilized egg(1996: lineagetriads outlined in Figu me

if evolutionary biology and genetics teach us anything, it is that what I call

same essentialisms and identity politics of monotheistic religion and humanism are simply not appropriate frameworks within which to view the radical self-othering

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that constitutes life. The proposed model is an anti-representational view of the self, that being a view of the self as an abductive structure, a self that can survive precisely because of its excess, of its constitution in its own dividedness for (not against) itself, of the self as a series of guesses about or enactments of what it might be in the future, versions of the self that that self might in fact one day encounter in its own environment, and alternately ignore or rebuke, respond to, or even incorporate within itself in a kind of psycho-

with his psycho-, onto- ,

Neuromancer, of another and autonomous version of himself, his own avatar and of how that recognition of the

self writes, the power and importance of the animal is almost always its pull toward a multiplicity that operates to unseat the singularities and essentialisms of identity that were proper to the subject of humanism (2003: 88).

3.4.

spatialisations of evolutionary time (see Thomas R. Flynn on Foucault, spatialisation, reason 44; 2005: 96 98). By describing as

spatialisation of time, Flynn has helped me to see evolutionary time as being always already here and distributed synchronically, in the cultural and genomic spatial-isations of the present. That is, evolutionary time and progress are spatialised, not (and therefore ironically and somewhat paradoxically) temporalized. P is understood here in terms of a non-tempo-ralised time, in terms of the praffections, and in terms of various horizontal or synchronic, i.e. spati-alised or environmentally realised, changes (symbiosis and Lateral Gene Transfer for example) that occur as a result of non-vertical or non-germ-cell heredity. Evolution, when understood in the context of spatialisation and also in the context of symbiogenesis and Lateral Gene Transfer (LGT), as it is dramatised in the novels (1984) and (1999), is best mapped not so much as a


335

Tree of Life (TOL) but as what Rivera and Lake (2004) call a ring of life . In that case, an organism s environment, the , rather than its lineage (as in vertical inheritance) plays a significant role. The spatially based metaphor of a ring for an ethic of the shepherding of being (an evolutionary ethic) that avoids social Darwinistic and other fascist mappings of evolutionary

Male Fantasies 1987). Peirce (1992 [1868a]: 6) defined s ground as the pure ab-straction of the quality in respect of which the sign refers to its object, whether by resemblance or, as a symbol, by imputing the quality to the object ). pati-alisation of time can serve as grounds for organisms considered as semiotic selves. TOL ( a metaphor based on replication and vertical inheritance ) and the eugenics that are derived from it and represent rather a res-tor[ation of] the dispersive, Dionysian character [of] time (Flynn 1994: 43), whereby what was, what might have been, what is, and what might be all exist with an equal say, a synchronic or spatialised time. The time therefore locates counter-hegemonies (and counter-selves and alternative futures) as merely elsewhere rather than no-where (as in utopian literature) (Flynn 1994; 2005). But since the fu-ture is the only domain over which organisms can have any real con-trol, not only species (in terms of the variation of individuals in popu-lations) but individuals within populations too have evolved mecha-nisms whereby they create alternative versions of themselves. This is done either literally, that is, genetically, or virtually in terms of epige-netic, behavioural, or symbolic representations envi-ronmeans and environmeants as avatars, I speak of biovirtuality (biodiversity + virtual reality) so as to highlight the way individuals are able to adapt themselves to alternative futures in part of their own creation.

3.5. Evolution is usually thought of as working itself out in a temporal dimension, that is, through the diversity, the variety, that is always already available to us now, at any given moment. Martin Heisenberg,

horizontal space, that is, in spatialisation s always already constitution of animal will. While arguing for the precedence of motility over

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336

response, that is, for a reason why the evolution of the behaviour of organisms would favour pre-emptive motility or assertiveness, say the

E coli bacterium, in which it randomly twitches itself into a new spatial orientation so as to achieve a new point of orientation from which to respond to its environment, Heisenberg states that [t]he same [separation of behavioural output from sensory input] may have been true in evolution, as merely being dispersed in space should have been advantageous and should have favoured mobility (2009: 165). The selective advantage of being dispersed in space , either at the level of the individual or the population of a

between behavioural output on the one hand and sensory input on the other. Actual space calls out a physiological temporal spacing which then permits organisms to change their spacing or position and thus their environments or at least how they orient themselves to their environments. Heisenberg claims that this twofold spacing, as I call it,

pro s receptivity. Indeed, evolution understood in the context of spatialisation (rather than in the more familiar terms of temporalisation); understood in the context of a Foucauldian spatial heterotopia reveals the existence of an evolutionary and ontological richness always already available all

) compared to the uncertain richness of the far future (the utopian fantasy). It is in this context that we understand, in the origin of the lichen (a symbiotic living arrangement of alga and fungus) for example, the photosynthesis in its environment, in its Umwelt, in in the heterotopia distributed around itself in ontological space (not within the long-term temporalities of its genome) of a ready-made bodily infrastructure or fortress (an

) for itself (a saprophytic fungus), an infrastructure that would have taken generations to evolve out of itself genetically along the long branches of the Tree of Life. Thus living things actualise a (Foucauldian) vision (a heterotopia) of the diversity, the variety, that is always already available to us now, at any given moment as we see manifest in the viral infection and manipulation of metazoans (we are metazoans), whereby, for example, solar-powered sea-slugs eat algae and harvest chloroplasts (distributed in


337

ecological sincorporated into cellular functions, to help the sea- in the present the ability to photosynthesise. This, however, only happens in part because some nuclear-encoded chloroplast proteins are synthesized by the slug cells ( environmeants ) and because

occurred between the algal nuclear genome and the slug genome (plant-to-animal transfer) , with

] by way of a eukaryotic virus (Rohwer and Thurber 2009: 210). (Please note that these just mentioned ways and means, as dramatic as they may seem, do parallel the common biological categories of concurrence, symbiosis, parasitism, and mutualism DaRadio (1984) are precisely about such

, about various incorporations of others within the self (symbiogenesis), about viral infection (including self-infection by ancient viruses, retroviruses, in Darwi ) and about the manipulation of metazoans, humans that is, but with our own agency both invoked and revoked. As Foucault writes, t is comforting to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new

1973: xxiii).

3.6. In and , smells (and of course pheromones) have profound ontological powers. In both novels, pheromones and scent play a profound role in the genetic, epigenetic, behavioural, and symbol dimensions of the shepherding of new species into existence. Further, the models for identity in each novel engage the same bootstrapping structure of self as represented in the pheromone-driven ontology of Figure 1. What is a key in these novels is the extent to which this shepherding engages our will (unlike the trope of the mindless zombie so prevalent in the media) even as the

icro-ontological ocean -engineered by a virus such that one is

attracted to other mates than one would ever have chosen before, but there structure of the semiotic self remains. The many small changes in appearance and scent and taste in

and , and then the effects that those small

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physiological effects have on mating and feeding behaviour, changing the ecological niches of species spatially or heterotopically rather than through linear, familial descent in the Malthusian struggle for existence, show the tremendous role that symbols (pheromones as olfactory symbols) can have in natural and sexual selection. (Indeed, symbols can be more powerful than the objects they represent). And as we all know from being ill, viruses can change our sense of smell. Viruses in the novels, however, have not only pathological roles to play but ontological ones. Interestingly enough, virologists have studied mostly pathologies, though as Rohwer and Thurber remark, this [bias W.J.C.] will need to change if we are to appreciate the

diverse ways that viruses affect life on earth (2009: 211). Bear writes in : It is possible that viruses originally came from segments of DNA within cells that can move around, both inside and between chromosomes. Viruses are essentially roving segments of genetic material that have learned how to put on space suits and leave the cell (1999: 529). In (1984), humans are infected with an extra-terrestrial organism that uses human beings as their symbiogenetic space suits and that reprogrammes the human protagonists from the inside out both by altering their chemistry and thus their mating decisions (the band My Chemical Romance captures this idea) and by retro(virally) engineering the human germ cells. Butler anticipates by almost a generation the importance (still today undervalued within the central dogma of genetics) of various horizontal or synchronic, spatialised changes that happen through a non-vertical or non-germ-cell heredity and that represent a view of evolution that is Foucauldian, that is, evolution representing itself not so much as a Tree of Life (TOL) but as what Rivera and Lake call a

By now it must be clear the extent to which any attempt to split the Adam both a jackhammer and a feather.

Support for this study was provided in part by the Center for 21st Century Studies of

the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.


339

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a peircean semiotic model for describing the anti-oedipal structure of "humanimal" selves

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