By Matthew Cuffaro
Semiotics (the study of signification) has a deep tradition for
universalism. A deeper tradition in thought is the concession that humans hold
a special place among lifeforms as “conscious,” and semiotics is no different.
In Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective, the authors Petrilli and
Ponzio argue that if humans are conscious of the significance of things, then
they are responsible for their signification, curtailing polluting or destructive
cultures and practices in favor of “planetary semiosis [process of
signification]” (the analogue of the “Spaceship Earth” idea you might have
heard about). Petrilli and Ponzio define semioethics for us:
“…1)
invent a plurality of possible worlds; 2) to reflect upon signs; 3) to be
responsible for one’s actions; 4) to gain conscious awareness of our inevitable
involvement, of each and every one of us, in the sign network of life over the
entire planet; and 5) to be responsibly involved in the destiny of planetary
semiosis.” (3-4, Petrilli and Ponzio).
How does semioethics look in our day? For example, if I say
“forest”, I denote the complex of trees that scaffold a rich ecosystem, but I
can also expect to connote something in the listener that is met with a
response. There might be stress: the listener that is familiar with the films Silent
Running, Medicine Man, and Avatar is familiar with the disappearing
forest—something invaluable, yet mercilessly exploited, yet something
distant. There might be interest: the listener may be a logger who equates the
forest with their income, or an ecologist who sees the forest as a complex of
interdependent lifeforms. There may be religious or existential feelings to the
listener that knows the forest to possess supernal power or sagacity, healing
benefits, or the basis of their livelihood. Further still, the Puritan coming
to the New World sees the endless forests as ripe with resource to be drawn
from systematically through their labors. Through cultural and scientific
influence, our example paints the forest as something once a symbol of
innumerable economic plenty to something of indispensable ecological value. If
we follow these trends, we imagine the forest as a “life support system;”
something of personal and functional value, Thus, the forest is represented in
a way that alters its significance to the people.
Now I believe Petrilli & Ponzio’s project is bioethical because
they are both critical and imperative towards environmental practice, but their
focus on the human is uncharacteristic of the contemporary trends in semiotics
to extend its essentially pre-linguistic domain to lifeforms. If biosemiotics
wishes to construct a basis for extending signification to (all) lifeforms,
then can we depart from Petrilli and Ponzio to say that animals are in some way
semioethical? Prima facie, this is absurd, because the hare does not
have the logging companies, the socioreligious campaigns, NIMBY sieges on civic
projects, etc.; what the hare has is grassy flatlands, abundant cellulose, and
other “critters” that are supposedly significant to it.
The example I like is the
“fable” of the Fox and the Hare. In the introduction to Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics (of which I paraphrase): A
hare in a field becomes aware of a fox stalking close by. The hare stands up on
its hind legs and the fox, seeing this, aborts its foxing and trots away. An
ethologist reporting on this claims that the hare stood as a gesture to the fox
that chasing it would be a waste of everyone’s time and energy. The meat behind
this claim is that it does not argue that the behavior is instinctual. After
all, brains are calorically very expensive so the ethologist believes that the
hare’s act is an example of signification, or that standing up is a gesture invented
by the hare to communicate.
What is possibly semioethical
in this account of the fox and the hare is that the creative status of the
hare’s gesture leads us to ask the status of consciousness of the hare, which
leaves us with open questions. If the hare is communicating something to the
fox, then does it recognize the fox as something that can respond or react to
the gesture? Do animals of supposed creativity understand their
intercommunicants as “animated threats” (how the heck does the fox
appear to the hare)? If so, then can we attribute a variant of the semioethical
capacity we attribute ourselves to an animal that is cognizant of the
capacities of other animals?
Why is this semioethical
account useful to us?
If
we adopt a biosemiotic strategy of extending semiotics “globally,” then the
ideal common system for describing things semiotically allow us to
‘approximate’ ourselves beyond scientific prejudice of an unchecked human
exceptionalism—the notion that all “human” qualities are exclusively “human.”
If we form through our inquiries the grounds for suspecting the rudiments of
consciousness in other lifeforms, then we not only invite scientific interest
to explore and validate these suspicions but confirm the deep intuitions of
those who advocate for ecocentric (more like un-anthropocentric) thought.
Notwithstanding,
it is problematic already for us in the political arena to attribute animal
rights in the very least, but if we can extend an ethical basis to animals
first, then we have the philosophical freight to carry these arguments further.
We may look at the vegetarian
pamphlets thobbing the horrors of factory farms through the animal anecdotes
and praising soy diets, perhaps with Ryan Gosling’s testament in there for good
measure (I’m looking at you, Vegan Outreach.). In these pamphlets chickens
named Kevin, pigs named Emily, and fishes named Calvin are celebrated for their
ability to solve puzzles, count, communicate and especially escape, yet
the semioethical project underlying this is that these animals are worth
something by their apparent human attributes. We should treat these
arguments by not evaluating the animals by their humanness, but by the
attributes that allows us to understand the intentions of the animal (or plant),
at the threat that we continue to think “humanness” is superior to “animalness”
and is a standard beyond the niche of our circumstances. In a more fundamental
way, the semioethical problem I try to convey would, if realized, mark a step
in the scholarly imagination: those who could peer into the eyes of the rabbit
peering into the fox, or to surject themselves onto the mind of the plant.
Matthew Cuffaro is a philosophy student at the University of South Florida with a concentration in the philosophies of mathematics and religious studies.
