Deadline for abstracts - April 25, 2001

In the history of 20^th century semiotics since Peirce and Saussure, there have been two views of how nature should be approached from a semiotic perspective, the view of cultural, and the view of general semiotics.

The view of cultural semiotics is the one developed in the tradition of semiotic structuralism. Based on anthropocentric and logocentric foundations, cultural semiotics investigates in how far nature is interpreted from a cultural perspective and in how far various cultures interpret the same natural phenomena differently. This approach is essentially the one adopted by Umberto Eco (cf. Nöth 2000) and more explicitly by the Paris School of Semiotics. In their Dictionary of Semiotics, Greimas & Courtés (1979: 375), adopt this approach to the semiotics of nature in a programmatic way, when they describe the study of the “Natural world” as follows: “Nature is […] not a neutral, but a strongly culturalized […] and at the same time relativized referent (since ethnotaxonomies give different ‘visions of the world’). This means that the natural world is the place for the elaboration of a vast semiotics of cultures.”

In contrast to the cultural semiotic perspective of nature, the perspective of general semiotics investigates sign processes in nature as semiotic processes sui generis. Foundations of this tradition have been laid by C. S. Peirce, Ch. Morris, and T. A. Sebeok, and on the basis of this broader concept of semiotics, new fields of semiotic research have been explored during the last decades, which have led to a considerable extension of the field of semiotic research. Semiotics is no longer only concerned with signs that depend on culture and codes, since it has advanced to a theory of sign processes in culture and in nature. Contributions to this extension of the semiotic field come from the history of semiotics with its long tradition of the study of natural signs, which were sometimes defined in sharp opposition to other signs, but sometimes as a branch of the general theory of signs. Research in zoosemiotics and biosemiotics has proceeded with the lowering of the semiotic threshold from human semiosis to semiotic processes whose agents are animals and micro-organisms. More recently, the question has been raised whether precursors of semiosis should even be sought in the inanimate world and whether semiotics should also include the field of physicosemiotics: autocatalysis, order out of physical chaos, dissipitative structures, and other processes in dynamic physical systems, which testify to the possibility of a spontaneous increase of order in nature, have become the topics of study in the search for the origins semiosis and have led to a new field of protosemiotic studies.

This workshop, organized by Winfried Nöth (Kassel and São Paulo), Kalevi Kull (Tartu), Claus Emmeche (Copenhagen), and Osmo Kuusi (Helsinki), is the continuation of the Workshop Ecosemiotics: Studies in Environmental Semiosis, which took place during the Nordic-Baltic Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies at Imatra, Finland, on June 16-17, 2000 (cf. Nöth & Kull 2000; Kull 1998; Nöth 1998, 2000) and of the German-Italian Colloquium on The Semiotic Threshold from Nature to Culture at the Research Center for Cultural Studies of the University of Kassel from February 16-17, 2001.

Abstracts for papers should be sent to Kalevi Kull kalevi@zbi.ee and Maija Rossi Maija.Rossi@isisemiotics.fi.

For details concerning the conditions of admission to the Imatra International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies ask Maija.Rossi@isisemiotics.fi and see http://www.isisemiotics.fi/seminars/summer2001/summer2001_program.html.
 
 

References

Greimas, Algirdas J. & Joseph Courtés. (1979) 1982. Semiotics and Language. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.

Kull, Kalevi. 1998. Semiotic ecology: Different natures in the semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 26: 344-371.

Nöth, Winfried. 1998. Ecosemiotics. Sign Systems Studies 26: 332-343.

Nöth, Winfried. 2000. Umberto Eco’s semiotic threshold. Sign Systems Studies 28: 49-61.

Nöth, Winfried & Kalevi Kull. 2000. Discovering ecosemiotics. Sign Systems Studies 28: 421-24.


See also Gatherings in Biosemiotics