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  • From Musicking, to StartNatural Signs and the Limit of the Human
  • Gary Tomlinson (bio)

Regarding the logic of the human/non-human limit in a deep-historical light reveals a distinction of human and pre-human. This might be thought to draw a border sharply on a timeline somewhere between the two, but it does not. Instead it offers multiple chronologies that work to efface borders—40,000 to 100,000 years for features of human modernity, 150–250,000 years for the appearance of our species, one to 2.5 million years for a broad vantage on the emergence of distinctive human capacities from earlier ones.

Nothing like modern human musicking could have existed until the last 100,000 years or so, but attempting to view musicking across that longer durée illuminates some important extra-musical distinctions and orientations—accumulated modes of sociality and of techno-sociality that signal capacities foundational for the musicking that eventually took shape. These were pre- or protomusical developments in communication, social organization, and response to environmental affordance, and they were at work long before Homo sapiens. Eventually they would coalesce in interaction with other coalescings of human modernity: language, new complex technologies, and a growing distance between perception and conception that led to (among other things) spiritual or metaphysical inklings. [End Page 223]

A deep-historical approach to musicking, in short, resituates it between human and non-human, thus redefining its place in our discourse. This approach also raises the question of musicking’s connection to a biosemiotics that can draw near to another limit: the limit of the sign in the biosphere as a whole. At this limit we glimpse the sign emerging from a universe of information indifferent to the presence of life and requiring no animate scaffolding.

Musicking across deep-history effaces the abrupt limit of our humanity in particular by asserting, in the midst of the proliferated symbolic behaviors of modern humanity, the semiotic priority of the index. This loosens the grip of language on our views of the emergence of human modernity, pushing us to confront beings experiencing the world without symbolic consciousness. Predicating humanness on an ill-defined “symbolism” is a gesture everywhere encountered these days, but it obscures a broader semiosis connecting the human to parahuman networks of signification and highlighting human participation, not exceptionalism.

Biosemioticians such as Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, and Paul Kockelman have devoted themselves to the analysis of this broader semiosis, relying particularly on ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce. The leverage Peirce offers to them comes from his focus on the process of signification rather than the structure of the sign. This process is a matter of nested relations among his types of signs, so that in nature indices rely on icons and symbols rely on indices and therefore icons as well. The infamous complexities in Peirce’s analyses of these relations point toward a simpler, stable foundation for signification, a logical and ontological a priori that Peirce termed “thirdness.” He realized that signification of whatever kind involves not only the relation of sign to object, but also the relation to this relation of a third element. This third element, arguably his signal contribution to semiotics, Peirce called the “interpretant.”

The interpretant is a response to perception that intersects obliquely with a dyad, such that one of its two elements becomes a sign in relation to the other, the object. It is an organism’s experience of a relation external to itself, the wrinkle in its engagement with environmental stimulus (incoming information) that constructs a relation to a relation and thus changes in some measure this environment. The interpretant represents the perceiving organism’s poietic projection of itself into its environment, a reactive making of signification. Kockelman refers to it simply as a change in attention—a description useful in showing that we can extend the intrepretant as far beyond the human as we are willing to expand attention itself. [End Page 224]

Semiosis thus understood is always niche-constructive, though niche construction need not be semiotic. Biocultural coevolution—as for example of hominins—is a type of niche construction that is necessarily semiotic, given the nature of culture; but...

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