The aim of the paper is to develop the concept of perceptual relation and to apply it to digital environments. First, the meaning of perceptual relation is phenomenologically analyzed and defined as the interaction between the whole and its parts, which is theorized by the founders of Gestalt psychology. However, this relation is not considered as an intrinsic, but as an extended one, implying also the relation with the surrounding world (Umwelt). Subsequently, this concept of extended relation is applied to (...) a chosen object (a ball) as it is perceived in four different kinds of digital dimensions (on-screen, virtual, augmented, and hybrid). Through a phenomenological analysis, I argue that, whereas the whole-part configuration remains the same, some modes of appearance of the object (multisensoriality, figure-ground interaction, affordances, and persistence) are different. In order to define this dynamic, I have coined the concept of transdimensional analogy. (shrink)

Evolutionary biologists, evolutionary epistemologists, and biosemioticians have demonstrated that organisms not merely adapt to an external world, but that they actively construct their environmental, sociocultural, and cognitive niches. Denis Noble demonstrates that such is no different for those organisms that engage in science, and he lays bare several crucial assumptions that define the scientific dogmas and practices of evolutionary biology.

Irigaray's critique of the phallocentric subject's implicit dependence on the maternal-feminine “outside” is compelling. Her postulation of nonhierarchical sexual difference gives the relational world of woman specificity and Irigaray brings the subject's worldview to earth as merely the relation of the male human to the world. But the focus of her transvaluation remains largely anthropocentric; and she maintains too many aspects of the privilege of the subject's sovereignty as proper to male subjectivity. I suggest that, we need to extend Irigaray (...) and to think sexual difference beyond the human. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Jakob Von Uexküll, I argue that we need to think life beyond the constitution of the organism as the continuous enmeshment of different milieus. Sexual difference is a force of differentiation that articulates relationships between organisms and organs as crucial aspects of many milieus that make up the Earth. Along with the sexually differentiated aspects of milieus, there are rhythms of difference constitutive of milieus that are not sexed. The first section of the essay describes Irigaray's conceptualization of sexual difference between humans. Then I turn to her engagement with the status of nonhuman animals in “Animal Compassion.” I suggest her approach in this essay is too anthropocentric and move to a discussion of Uexküll's thinking on milieus as a way to extend the concepts of difference and sexual difference into posthuman contexts. The essay concludes by reading Irigaray's concept of difference with Deleuze and Bergson. (shrink)

What role does environmental change play in Jakob von Uexküll’s thought? And what role can it play in a up-to-date Uexküllian framework? Admittedly, in hindsight it appears that the Umwelt theory suffers from its reliance on Uexküll’s false premise that the environment (including its mixture of species) is generally stable. In this article, the Umwelt theory of Uexküll is reviewed in light of modern findings related to environmental change, especially from macroevolution. Uexküll’s thought is interpreted as a distinctive theory of (...) phenomenology—an ‘Uexküllian phenomenology’—characterized by an assumption of the (in the realm of life) universal existence of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of experienced worlds. It is suggested that acknowledging this distinctiveness is critical for eco-phenomenology as well as for biosemiotics; the latter of which can only thus thrive as a true ‘semiotics of being’, rather than a mere ‘semiotics of functioning’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to study the idea of black visual intonation in the video-essay Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) by visual artist Arthur Jafa. With the aim at discovering the singularity of black cinema in filmic composition, the artist carried out an experiment to examine how embodied memories emerge in the form of songs and dances, recovering traditional cultural features that the Afro-Atlantic diaspora dissipated. We find that the aesthetic-political singularity of black (...) cinema emerges in the black verbal-vocal-visual intonation, which externalizes interactive inner energies and organizes a critical-discursive space in which black people can talk about themselves, their desires, dreams and sorrows. (shrink)

Since 2007, Tomás Saraceno has been developing a project that aims to break out of the anthropocentric understanding of communication and coexistence with other animal organisms. In this article, I point out the importance of using modern visualization technologies to analyze and investigate the structure of communication frameworks and their modalities in the animal world, specifically using the example of spiders. The visualization of what is normally invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear rearticulates the realm of the (...) visible and the audible, which Saraceno then uses for art-critical purposes, with the aim of forming a new type of posthuman attunement to the environment and other animal species. The condition for outlining and articulating Saraceno’s artistic vision is the use of the latest technologies of visualization, which operate on the principle of digital and algorithmic code. They synthesize different planes of affectivity and transform, modulate, and combine the different modes of signs into a single technical-organic complex: they offer new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Thus, hybrid ecology in Saraceno’s case does not imply a return to primordial ways of life, but on the contrary, it forms a semiosphere attuned to a specific plane of consistency that enfolds distinct modes of signs and develops them into an expression of hitherto unsuspected variants of life. (shrink)

In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses deceptive means to infiltrate the rich family. The term parasite refers nominally to the underling family, and their efforts to befriend and inhabit the class territory and social hierarchy of the rich family. How can this be of use for education? To answer this, we ask: what can we learn from Parasite to inform contemporary philosophy of education? Primarily, this experimental piece written from different (...) philosophical viewpoints, suggests that the images, narrative, and social context of the film cannot be read stereotypically. Using a blend of Deleuze and Stiegler ‘cinema-theory’, we present a heuristic perspective on the Parasite from three viewpoints: (1) South Korean society, and how a pedagogy of the parasite helps to understand the dynamics of contemporary philosophy of education in a global context. South Korea is uniquely placed at the cusp and threshold of deterritorializing Western capitalism, given its position next to the only in-tact communist state system; (2) The film shows how theorizing an exceptional notion of time contributes to the overall pedagogy of the parasite. Here, being a parasite is about waiting to attach oneself to a host, yet this waiting is an anxious, perceptive, adherent time, a reciprocal time, and one internally interconnected to that of the host; (3) The ethics of the parasite. The parasite chooses a host from a certain viewpoint before attaching itself and trying to be absorbed into the host. The pedagogy of the parasite suggests a unique ethical treatment of these assimilative processes and allows us to consider cinema as a parasitic means to shake the passive audience out of its stupor when bearing witness to the violence in the film and its own collusion in the trauma and reality of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

RESUMO O objeto de estudo do presente artigo é o conceito de entoação visual negra formulado pelo multiartista Arthur Jafa no vídeo-ensaio Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016). Com o objetivo de descobrir a singularidade do cinema negro na composição fílmica, o artista construiu um experimento e examina como memórias encarnadas afloram sob forma de cantos e danças, realinhando formas culturais tradicionais que a travessia diaspórica dispersou. Conclui-se, assim, que a singularidade estético-política do cinema negro emerge na (...) entoação verbi-voco-visual negra que, assim, exterioriza energias interiores interativas e organiza um espaço crítico-discursivo no qual pessoas pretas podem falar de si, de seus desejos, sonhos e aflições. (shrink)

The Umwelt investigated in this essay is a textualized world that a person dwells in, perceives, and experiences, as presented through classical Chinese poetry. It is a world formed and shared among other things and creatures in nature and it is a network of renewed correlations not so much descriptive of qualities as evocative of an environing world in which one feels himself as being-there disposed and attuned to things. What is universal is also mediated by the experience of a (...) particular person at a specific moment. In this essay, I shall delve into the correlation and the interaction between the environing world in reality and the Umwelt constructed in poetry in the Chinese context. I will examine the experiential patterns of the subject through various examples provided by the seventeenth-century poet and critic Ye Xie, and discuss how they coordinate and account for the Umwelt textualized in classical Chinese poetry. I shall probe particularly the notion qi for the construction of the Umwelt, and examine Ye Xie’s argument that the truth of the universe is revealed in poetry. I argue that nature does not appear in the poetic world as respective objects, but particular aspects or shades of things from the first-person point of view. The Chinese thought of “Being-in-the-world” means much more than the spatial location, but a sense of engagement and involvement. The oppositional relationship between the subject and the object is superseded by the resonance of oneself with his Umwelt through personal life experience. Ye Xie proposes that the highest function of poetry is to convey the ultimate truth of the universe. However, the truth expressed through poetry is not the transcendent order of reason; it is inherent in phenomena in the instance rather than being permanently universal. This is a Chinese way of truth setting itself into work, as truth is not a universal or definitive understanding of the world, but a guidepost and stimulus for the personalistic and concrete experience of one’s life. (shrink)

The following points, which represent a path to a semiotics of being, are pertinent to various sub-fields at the conjunction of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics) and semiotics of culture—semioethics and existential semiotics included. 1) Semiotics of being entails inquiry at all levels of biological organization, albeit, wherever there are individuals, with emphasis on the living qua individuals (integrated biological individualism). 2) An Umwelt is the public aspect (cf. the Innenwelt, the private aspect) of a phenomenal/experienced world that is (...) organism-specific (rather than species-specific) and ultimately refers to an existential realm. 3) Existential universals at work on Earth include seeking out the edible, dwelling in a medium, holding a phenomenal world (possibly an Umwelt) and being endowed with life, and consequently being mortal. 4) Human Umwelten include speechless Umwelten, spoken Umwelten and alphabetic Umwelten. 5) An Uexküllian phenomenology—stating that semiotic states represent the general class to which all mental/cognitive states belong—can draw on the works of the phenomenologists David Abram and Ted Toadvine (The notion of semiotic states is treated in Tønnessen 2009a: 62–63. For an introduction to eco-phenomenology, see Brown and Toadvine (eds.) 2003). 6) A task for such a phenomenology is to portray the natural history of the phenomenal world. 7) An imperative task in our contemporary world of faltering biological diversity is that of Umwelt mapping, i.e. a mapping of ontological niches. 8) The ecological crisis is an ontological crisis with historical roots in humankind’s domestication of animals and plants, which can be taken as archetypical for our attempted planet-scale taming of the wild. 9) The process of globalization is expressed by correlated trends of depletion of semiotic diversity and semiotic diversification. 10) Semiotic economy is a field which task it is to map the human ontological niche insofar as its semiotic relations are of an economic nature. All ten points will be commented (explicitly or implicitly) in due time. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 435-455.

In this article, creativity is defined as a semiotic phenomenon, as a process in which the boundaries of habits and norms of social communication are exceeded and by which the challenges offered by the environment are solved. Here it is indicated that there is a direct link between attention and animal creativity and shown that there are at least two possibilities for creativity to work – one that needs attention and one which doesn’t. Animal creativity can work through several different (...) mechanisms, which are here combined into a new model. Adding the Uexküllian concepts of the functional cycle and search tone to the model of creativity makes it possible to describe some additional mechanisms of animal creative behaviours. Additional concepts compared include dual memory systems, the theory of associations, and finally Gregory Bateson’s double description. By considering that approach, it is possible to understand how animals find and adapt new behaviours to their repertoires. Researching the creative behaviours of animals and the spread of innovation between populations is important from a wider perspective to understand how animals can adapt to changing environmental conditions. (shrink)

In the case of living beings – the very concept of “level” of organization becomes obscure: it suggests a value-based assessment, assigning notions like “lower” and “higher” with rather vague criteria for constructing the ladder of perfection, complexity, importance, etc. We prefer therefore the term “domain”, entities ranking equal. Domains may represent natural entities as well as purely human constructs developed in order to gain understanding of some facets of living things; living, evolved beings as well as those abstract constructs, (...) such as genotype and ‘niche’ which have been developed in the search for better understanding of such living things. Delimitation of such domains is sometimes a question of the dexterity of the researcher, and sometimes draws from the tradition in a given field. Such domains are not completely translatable to each other. Rather, they interact by a process that we call here reciprocal formation. Life is unique among multi-domain systems. In contrast to purely physical systems, life is a semiotic system driven by the historical experience of lineages, interpreted and re-interpreted by the incessant turnover of both individuals and their communities. This paper provides cases of domain interrelations, and addresses two questions: How do new qualities of inter-domain interaction emerge historically? How do new domains emerge in evolution. Two approaches, physical and biosemiotic, are discussed as we seek to get a better understanding of the overarching tasks. (shrink)