Overview

The age of gene-centrism and mechanism is slowly passing. In its place, the biological sciences increasingly recognise that life isn't simply a genetically determined programme but is centrally a matter of information and communication systems nested in larger communicative systems. The latter include both internal and external, and natural and cultural, environments. But 'information' is an under-unanalysed term in relation to living systems. Accordingly, a new interdiscipline, biosemiotics, has grown up to study the ontology of sign relations in biological, aesthetic and technological ecologies. From the Greek bios for life and semeion for sign, biosemiotics is the study of these intertwined natural and cultural sign systems of the living. Expecting the Earth draws on the semiotic philosophy of the American scientist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, the semiotic ethology of Jakob von Uexkull's Umwelt Theory, Gregory Bateson's cybernetic ecology of mind, Jesper Hoffmeyer's development of biosemiotics, and briefly upon philosophical precursors such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Gilbert Simondon, as well as the growth of ecological developmental biology more widely. In this book, Wendy Wheeler formulates a history and theory of biosemiotic and proto-biosemiotic thinking in order to open up new possibilities of contemporary social, philosophical, aesthetic and technological engagement. This is essential reading for those interested in these groundbreaking new developments, and is relevant to the environmental humanities, social ecology and the life sciences more generally.

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9781910448670

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Reviews

'This is an amazingly good book. Wendy Wheeler explains why biosemiotics has become crucial for understanding culture. She shows how both nature and culture are made of meanings that evolve in semiotic relations between life and the Earthly environment life expects.' Kalevi Kull, Professor of Biosemiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia 'This is a commanding work of revisionist intellectual history, disclosing the proto-biosemiotic dimension of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, the gnostic influence constraining modern science, and the actuality of medieval theology and German Idealism. In her explorations of the poetic character of relational natural becoming, the organismic aspect of human works of art, and the unpredictable liveliness of our technological inventions, Wheeler shows how our humanly constructed worlds might be rendered more hospitable to the expectations of our own creaturely being, along with those of many other creatures. She demonstrates how biosemiotics provides the crucial intellectual wherewithal to help arrest industrial modernity's continuing slide towards ecocide.' Professor Kate Rigby, Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University, and Adjunct Professor, Monash University. Author of Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015).

Author Information

Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University and is currently a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London and in the School of Art, Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia where she is the London member of the Art, Ecology, Globalisation and the Interpretation of Science research group.

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