I am currently in a doctoral program, studying semiotics—cultural symbols—which requires a great deal of reading. Probably the greatest benefit of an education is the wise guide (teacher) who can give a curated tour of the best there is in any given subject, and such is the case with this program. Dr. Leonard Sweet has opened the door to an entire world of scholars and theologians who look beneath the surface of things and reveal mysteries. Now I would like to open that world to you.
J. P. Moreland once wrote that in order to keep our minds agile and to grow our mental capacity, we should regularly read books that are a little bit too hard to understand.
Check.
This book, as slender as it is, was really hard. So, I am going to do my best, here, to describe what reading this book was like.
Semiotics
I was immediately drawn in with this idea that semiotics, taken at its most basic definition, is created by nonhuman living things (including both flora and fauna) and can also be made unintentionally, as it were (pp 1–3). Smog or pollution, for instance, come as afterthoughts to what produced them, and are apt signs of human excess, interfering in harmful ways with every other living thing (p 5).
This led to a discussion of the twentieth-century tendency to keep each object in discrete categories as apposite to the twenty-first century openness of objects and subjects occupying a more polyvalent, shared space—such as viewing the forest as a semiotic model (pp 5, 55–56). Maran’s proposal to use the forest model in reading a book, the book as modeling and integrated in the way a forest is, as a dialogic semiosphere (a sphere that shares certain signs), made me think of how speed-readers read. They take in the whole page at once, noticing not only the text itself, but the whole structure of the page, the placement of the words, and so on. (That probably works amazingly well for non-dyslexic people).
Polyvalent Signs
Notes I made to myself include this interesting thought that in the ecosystem—but also, actually, in human language and relationships—same signs can have different meanings to different species (p 6). Think about how, for humans, language is accompanied by facial expressions, hand motions, body posture, and vocal cadence. All of these factors add to what is being spoken, so that even the same sentence can be understood in any number of different ways depending on how it is communicated and how it is received.
I have always loved foxes, and it charms me that they are so smart. Turns out, foxes are voracious readers (gotta love that), reading everyone’s mail and thinking their own foxy thoughts about it all (pp 12–14). Humans can learn from foxes—in fact, hunters and trackers do what foxes do, and anyone who has been on a nature walk can learn to do the same (one of the ways in which language and nature can be positively intermixed is the trail signage).
Umberto Eco, one of the early pioneers of semiotic through, is quoted in this book as saying, “semiotics is in principle the discipline of studying everything which can be used in order to lie” (p 8). That is ably evident in nature.
- Camouflage, the lie that protects.
- Web, the invisible lie that feeds.
- Scent and aroma, also the lie that feeds the liar rather than the lured.
And then there are the terrible human lies, some made unwittingly such as shining asphalt which mimics water to the untrained insect and animal eye, and many made on purpose, that harm the natural world, the natural world that keeps us alive (p 7–8, 14).
Umwelt
There were quite a few words in this book that had technical, specialized meaning within the context of the subject, that took a lot of work to keep track of (and also the habit of making new words by tacking two familiar ones together). But Umwelt, the “focal point where different sources of information are put together, where interpretation and choices are made,” is thankfully German. Believe it or not, that is helpful to me, to have a new word carry the meaning rather than to repurpose a familiar word.
And the premise is clear.
This is envisioning flora and fauna actively engaged in their environment, reading all the signs, interpreting them and making choices based on their interpretation (p 9). This is an active nonhuman world, not passive as it so often is portrayed. Even the plants have agency!
Clipped Grass, a Natural Disaster
So it came like a blow to read about creatures’ incapacity to read the signs of their environment because of human pollution but also even from benign interference (pp 10–11). It got me to thinking about the disaster golf courses must be for local ecosystems, how even clipped lawns interfere with nonhuman life forms trying to read and interpret signs.
There has to be a better way to live in our earth!
We cannot continue to promulgate this sense of human superiority and entitlement to exploit whatever we can overpower (p 19). Maran sounds hopeful, describing various ecosystems’ marvelous resilience, able to integrate, adapt, and adopt into new ways of co-existing (pp 17, 56). So, though I probably only know the half of it, I am on board with the concept of a “semiotype,”what the sign means to the natural world, and learning them all so we can converse in more mutually helpful ways with our ecosphere (p 18).
And then came this discussion about abstraction (21).
Abstraction of Signs
Maran is saying we—humanity—substituted our primary way of interpreting signs for the symbology of language, and now we miss much of the semiotics of our real, earthly environment. This “adoption of abstract symbols” is what “dismantles” cultures that perceive the world in a less abstract way (read colonizers basically destroying indigenous people groups, what Maran terms “semiocide,” p 25).
The abstraction of language has made it possible to distance ourselves from our physical reality, and then in a purely symbolic venue, symbols can be reproduced at an accelerated rate until we are living, for all intents and purposes, in a virtual world, disconnected, except for our bodily functions, from the ecosystem of the physical world. What kind of semiotype, then have we made ourselves to be, where that becomes our “normal”?
Tacit Knowledge
The concept of tacit knowledge, our bodies’ reading and interpretation of ecosemiotics, fascinates me (p 28). We think of light, and the sun that light emanates from, as something good, not necessarily because our intellect has logicked it out, but because our bodies tacitly know—and have known for epochs—that this is so. It is this knowledge that can perhaps lead us back into a multilingual dialogic relationship with our physical environment (p 35).
Maran writes about the “idea of multispecies communities,” and I wondered what exactly he had in mind (p 39). Farming? Hunter-Gatherer? Cooperative living with bees and crops, bats and orchards, falcons in cities to deal with rats and pigeons?
Abstraction of Art
He also spent a good bit of time on the arts being a secondary modeling system (and I could not tell if this meant another level of abstraction beyond language, or still the first level of abstraction) to create analogues of nature (pp 48–53). Maran talked about some sort of integration between our ways of perceiving, knowing, and interpreting with symbols and with our ecosphere.
- Are we objectifying our environment, making it abstract, and therefore tamed in some way?
- Are we trying to understand with our minds what our bodies already intuit?
- Are we hoping to interact in more meaningful ways with our environment, or only with each other?
I am not really sure.
What often happens, though, is the capture, enslavement, and exploitation of nature rather than a mutually beneficial relationship (p 54). Maran’s conclusion is that we have a disaster on our hands, one that will limit us physically and existentially, and perhaps bring about our demise (p 59).
Guess who came to that conclusion a good five hundred years ago?
Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Landscape with the Fall of Icarus – Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium – Google Arts & Culture
You can see Icarus’s legs splashing into the sea on the lower right. Bruegel included every advancement of his day in his painting, and Icarus was his symbolical commentary on the disaster waiting for humankind that would over-tame, over-exploit, and over-enslave the earth.
Kind of a bummer to end on. Perhaps we view Maran in the way we might view a Hebrew Testament prophet, as one who is telling us the awful truth while there is yet time to do something about it.
