Scan barcode
alexander0's review
4.0
I'm surprised I didn't hear of this book sooner! This is the final book of the late Wendy Wheeler, a semiotician, and it is well worth a look for anyone interested in connections between what has scientifically been deemed "natural" phenomena and "cultural" phenomena. This book attempts to structure the project of biosemiotics around a synthesis of historical semiotics work synthesizing the developments of C. S. von Uexkull, Peirce, Deleuze, Simondon, the cyberneticians, and T.A. Sebeok.
It seems to me this book offers three impressive contributions. First, it offers an excellent literature review of biosemiotics and its relationship to adjacent areas of semiotics. Second, it offers a relationship between information and semiotics that has been developing for quite some time. And lastly, it offers an argument for why humanities and materialist sciences often fail to grasp key issues core to contemporary worldly issues when they act in isolation.
This is one of several books I've read in the past few years which has made analogous arguments about the relationship of evolutionary processes, knowledge, and enacting new humanities oriented science paradigms such that they are more holistic in how they address the world we live in.
I did have one main concern with this book that was awkwardly addressed. It seems that Wheeler early on develops information with some ambiguities that should have been clarified sooner. She actually offers arguments later in the book which do not appear to line up with her earlier arguments about information. That is, there is "Information-as-potentials" for meaning (semiotic processes) and "Information-from-pre-engineered-contexts". The first is most closely tied to the traditions of Peirce, Deleuze, and Simondon. The second is more closely tied to the behavioral interests of cybernetic interpretations of Bateson and Claude Shannon. Of course the second comes with an epistemology of semiotic processes (meanings are known) while in the first, there is a speculative epistemology of what is possible meaning. These are two different, but functionally connected, accounts of information although they are not the same. The first exists regardless of our awareness of the information and the second is the information which cues us into material expectations of the first. Another way of putting this is, we observe the context admit the designed aspects of information in the second case which is of actionable interest, while the first case is pure information which is primarily of philosophical interest. They're the same information in each case, but we can only empirically validate information's existence in the first case by witnessing potentials unfold in the second case through some form of causal relations being observed.
In addition to this, if we reinterpret Shannon's engineering problem such that the communication structure is an evolutionary system, it's not clear that we can so quickly write off sciences of information as existing symptomatically to semiotic phenomena. I think this book too quickly reduces Shannon's model to a fixed class of communication designs. While Shannon was primarily dealing with a precise communication problem, it is somewhat unimaginative to not take time to reinterpret his model within the paradigm the book implies simply because it is not obviously semiotics. His sender/receiver and protocol system of transmission and reception must also biosemiotic processes rather than structurally fixed designs within this paradigm. With that, would not the design/"natural" context of the situation become knit into semiotics as meaning potentials which are just as relational as biosemiotic signs? Signs are just structured meaning. Information is the context surrounding every sign's communicative process, mechanistically designed or not. Of course Wheeler makes this more apparently possible halfway through this work, but never admits it directly.
It seems to me this book offers three impressive contributions. First, it offers an excellent literature review of biosemiotics and its relationship to adjacent areas of semiotics. Second, it offers a relationship between information and semiotics that has been developing for quite some time. And lastly, it offers an argument for why humanities and materialist sciences often fail to grasp key issues core to contemporary worldly issues when they act in isolation.
This is one of several books I've read in the past few years which has made analogous arguments about the relationship of evolutionary processes, knowledge, and enacting new humanities oriented science paradigms such that they are more holistic in how they address the world we live in.
I did have one main concern with this book that was awkwardly addressed. It seems that Wheeler early on develops information with some ambiguities that should have been clarified sooner. She actually offers arguments later in the book which do not appear to line up with her earlier arguments about information. That is, there is "Information-as-potentials" for meaning (semiotic processes) and "Information-from-pre-engineered-contexts". The first is most closely tied to the traditions of Peirce, Deleuze, and Simondon. The second is more closely tied to the behavioral interests of cybernetic interpretations of Bateson and Claude Shannon. Of course the second comes with an epistemology of semiotic processes (meanings are known) while in the first, there is a speculative epistemology of what is possible meaning. These are two different, but functionally connected, accounts of information although they are not the same. The first exists regardless of our awareness of the information and the second is the information which cues us into material expectations of the first. Another way of putting this is, we observe the context admit the designed aspects of information in the second case which is of actionable interest, while the first case is pure information which is primarily of philosophical interest. They're the same information in each case, but we can only empirically validate information's existence in the first case by witnessing potentials unfold in the second case through some form of causal relations being observed.
In addition to this, if we reinterpret Shannon's engineering problem such that the communication structure is an evolutionary system, it's not clear that we can so quickly write off sciences of information as existing symptomatically to semiotic phenomena. I think this book too quickly reduces Shannon's model to a fixed class of communication designs. While Shannon was primarily dealing with a precise communication problem, it is somewhat unimaginative to not take time to reinterpret his model within the paradigm the book implies simply because it is not obviously semiotics. His sender/receiver and protocol system of transmission and reception must also biosemiotic processes rather than structurally fixed designs within this paradigm. With that, would not the design/"natural" context of the situation become knit into semiotics as meaning potentials which are just as relational as biosemiotic signs? Signs are just structured meaning. Information is the context surrounding every sign's communicative process, mechanistically designed or not. Of course Wheeler makes this more apparently possible halfway through this work, but never admits it directly.
More...