Event overview
Critical Environments is a series of lectures and events, which engages with the apprehension that we are living in end times through a wide variety of thematic and disciplinary perspectives.
An important theoretical underpinning of biosemiotics is the semiotic philosophy of American scientist and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his observation that ‘the universe is perfused with signs’. Semiotic biology was born from a similar insight, that living systems – cells, organisms, and ecologies – are not mechanical but are scaffolded by semiosis. Semiotic systems characterise life throughout. Sign relations are responsible for the efficacy of biological systems as much as they are for abstract human conceptual systems. All obey the same triadic Peircean semiotic logic. As Norbert Wiener long ago implied about information in cybernetic systems, such informational, or in living things semiotic, relations require material bearers (codes and channels), but are, themselves, immaterial. All sign relations are manifested in von Uexküllian semiotic species umwelten, and while these (including the human) are thus necessarily incomplete models of reality (there being, as Thomas Nagel has noted, ‘no view from nowhere’), sign relations nonetheless form a semiotic bridge between mind and nature, subject and object, and intentional concept and reality. This is the case for every living organism: semiotic relations bridge the supposed gap between mind and body, culture and nature, and idealism and realism.
Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University. She is also a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths and RMIT in Melbourne. In 2014, she gave the first annual University of Tartu Jakob von Uexküll Lecture to the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment in Estonia. She is the author of four books, two on biosemiotics, and many essays on the same topic in journals and edited collections. She is on the editorial boards of several journals – New Formations, Green Letters, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, and Biosemiotics – and is currently completing her fifth monograph The Flame and Its Shadow: Reflections on Nature and Culture from a Biosemiotic Perspective.
‘Critical environments’ names several senses. If the (Greek) krinein is to sift and kritikos is the ability to discern, then we are faced with the work of interpretation. Yet if we turn to the Latin criticare, then those environments are diagnosed as gravely ill. We know that what we call the ‘environment’ is indeed in a state of crisis – acidification renders the oceans increasingly inhospitable to life; deforestation threatens both local ecologies and global climate maintenance; the appetite for meat eats up land as well as nonhuman life. Many of us choose not to know this, or perhaps maintain the fetishistic logic of knowing that comes with simultaneous disavowal. Corporate interests ranging across agriculture, pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, and the super-saturation of all forms of media hamper the work of interpretation and the possibility of agency and intervention.
The event is free, no booking is required and all are welcome.
Series chairs: Lynn Turner & Wood Roberdeau
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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29 Jan 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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