Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches

The Biosemiotic Turn: Abduction,or, the Nature of Creative Reasonin Nature and Culture

WENDY WHEELER The Biosemiotic Turn: Abduction, or, the Nature of Creative Reason in Nature and Culture In this essay I explore an ecocritical theory of cultural, and thus also literary, creativity from a biosemiotic point of view. While what follows might be thought broadly to fall within what is sometimes called the ‘‘post’’ humanities , in fact biosemiotics is a thoroughly interdisciplinary proto-discipline; it seeks not only to change how humanists think about culture, the arts, and the biological sciences but also to change how scientists and social scientists think about biological science and the arts and humanities. Essentially, the biosemiotic ‘‘project’’ first fully self-identified a quarter century ago consists in an elaboration, by biologists, psychologists, anthropologists , philosophers, semioticians and, more recently, the odd cultural and literary critic, of the observation that all life—from the cell all the way up to us—is characterized by communication, or semiosis. This insight, which places humans back in nature as part of a richly communicative global web teeming with meanings and purposes, and which makes human culture, and thus technology, evolutionary and natural, should be of particular interest to ecocritics. I begin with a brief summary of what biosemiotics is, and then focus on my main topic here, which is the nature of personal and cultural creativity— particularly as overtly manifest in aesthetic work. Two things, closely related , are central to my discussion. One is Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea of abduction/retroduction as the logic of creative thinking in all spheres. The second is the idea, found in Peirce’s related conception of ‘‘the play of musement,’’ that ‘‘Non knowing frames the ability to know.’’∞ As I hope will become clear, this involves a semiotic and biosemiotic turn concerning both the nature of reasoning and reason in nature. Intuitive ‘‘abductive’’ knowing —knowing but not knowing quite how you know, not being able to o√er normal inductive or deductive causal relations, depending on belief and on the significance of semiotic causal relations—forms the subject of my brief the biosemiotic turn ≤π∞ discussion of A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects, and more extended discussion of Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, toward the end of this essay. Since the late 1980s, English novelists have shown increasing interest in the question of what constitutes ‘‘knowledge’’ in both the arts and the sciences, and in whether there is really a great di√erence between these two supposedly di√erent systems of knowledge and belief. Since Black Dogs is centered around the modern estrangement of these two ways of understanding the world, and in particular around the question of signs, meanings, and causality, it o√ers a particularly rich object for biosemiotic meditation. ‘‘The play of musement’’ is Peirce’s account of the condition most conducive to that form of creative reasoning which he named abduction (and sometimes retroduction).≤ Although Peirce’s discussions of abduction were concerned only with the logic of creative thought in humans, his idea of abduction can be very fruitfully developed within the biosemiotic understandings which have subsequently grown from his own semiotic philosophy . I will suggest some of the ways in which recent work in epigenetics (‘‘evo devo,’’ or evolutionary developmental biology), and systems biology more broadly, allows us to begin to see the evolutionary continuity between the expression of communicative forms and patterns in nature, and those we are familiar with in culture and in aesthetic expressions. The Development of Biosemiotics A very full and thorough account of the development of biosemiotics can be found in Donald Favareau’s ‘‘The Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics.’’≥ Here, I o√er a much briefer account before moving on to some of the implications from an ecocritical point of view. The seeds of biosemiotics are to be found in the semiotic philosophy of the American scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). For Peirce, ‘‘the universe is perfused with signs,’’∂ and all living things—from the humblest forms of single-cell life upward—are engaged in sign relations.∑ I think it must be clear that all biological systems are relational—that is, informational— systems. But, for Peirce (as for many others), biological systems are never simply mechanical. What goes on inside an organism, and between an organism and its environment (the two processes being intimately connected), always involves what, for lack of a better word, we must call interpretations —however minimal. In purely physical systems, we can talk cybernetically of positive (excitatory) and negative (dampening) feedback; but, in living...