Does Biosemiotics Need a Theory of Reading?

Paul Cobley

Central to biosemiotics is the process of interpretation, which takes place across all species of life. General semiotics has been enlivened by the concept of ‘the text’ and the concomitant act of ‘reading’ (Lotman 1964), with interpretation embedded in it. The term ‘reading’ clearly invokes a linguistic metaphor, a derivation from literate culture with a fully anthropic bearing. Is such a metaphor of any use to biosemiotics in its resolute commitment to studying semiosis across species and within organisms, the overwhelming majority in both cases being non-literate? Is it even worthwhile as a supplement to interpretation. This paper proposes that a reconsideration of the phenomenon of reading in the light of recent research will contribute to a finer sense of biosemiotics’ mission in the academy and beyond. The paper will do this in two main ways. First, it will point to the emerging study of reading processes which demonstrates not a set of cerebral or socio-cultural co-ordinates that are enacted in acts of reading, but the invocation of distributed bodily apparatuses characterized by scalarity (Trasmundi, Toro and Mangen 2022). Second, based on studies of the use of close reading (Cobley and Siebers 2021), it will suggest that embodiment in reading offers indications of what readers seek to get close to when they carry out close reading. In particular, it will be argued that reading closely affords (or at least promises to afford) greater proximity to ‘the real’ as it is conceived in a biosemiotic frame by John Deely. Deely’s distinction between sign, object and thing offers both biosemiotics and the theory of (close) reading a configuration for the recognition of a realm beyond signification plus the possibility of signs signifying beyond themselves and objects. In biosemiotic terms, this entails constraints and agential opportunities. Effectively, ever closer reading, like Achilles’ progress in catching the tortoise, will be argued to expand the parameters of the human Umwelt.

 

References

Cobley, Paul and Siebers, Johan (2021) ‘Close reading and distance: between invariance and a rhetoric of embodiment’ Language Sciences 84 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101359

Lotman, Jurij M. (1964) Lektsii po struktural’noi poetike. Vvedenie, teoriia stikha. Tartu

University. (Brown University Slavic Reprint 5. Ed. Thomas Winner, Brown University Press, 1968).

Trasmundi, Sarah Bro; Toro, Juan & Mangen, Anne (2022). Human Pacemakers and Experiential Reading. Frontiers in Communication. ISSN 2297-900X. 7. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.897043.