Human Umwelten at the Crossroads of Biosemiotics, Biopower, Biopolitics and Self-Technology
Lei Han
The connection between biosemiotics, biopower and biopolitics has been a subject of debate among scholars, but there is still much scope for further research. With particular recourse to the biosemiotic concept of human Umwelten, this paper investigates this connection and further elaborates how combining these areas of study might constitute a transdisciplinary yet coherent object of research.
The paper argues that Uexküll’s human Umwelten, Michel Foucault’s biopower and biopolitics, all deal with the construction of human as subjects. It further argues that Uexküll’s Umwelt theory appropriates Kant’s concept of “transcendental subject”, but paradoxically infuses it into 19th century biology to regard life as a naturally living system, and a biological disclosure. The latter well elaborates the species-specific characters and individuality of human Umwelten in the perspective of biology, but leaves this question unsolved: how to explain the sensus commus among transcendental subjects within the scaffolding of Umwelt theory. Subject and biological life are precisely the issues with which Foucault’s work on biopower and biopolitics are most concerned. Foucault’s proposal that the subject is a product of knowledge and power relations extends Kant’s research on the transcendental subject to an empirical subject that is constructed through its biological existence, and existence in labor and language. It thus can be regarded as a response to Kant’s most significant and ultimate philosophical question, “what is human?” In this sense, Foucault’s conceptualization of “subject” might be helpful in tackling Uexküll’s unsolved question, and it would further highlight the significance of discourse in distinguishing the construction of human Umwelten from that of other species.
This paper argues that Foucault’s research on self-technology, or, to be precise, l’art de souci de soi, concerning a subject’s relation to itself and the turning of observation of the outside world back inside, inspires us with the idea that autocommunication is a critical or even prior step in the construction of human Umwelten. L’art de souci de soi is often taken as a kind of existential aesthetics, since it leads humans to pursue freedom in material and everyday life; thus, once again, it speaks, though indistinctly, to Kant’s idea of ascending from understanding nature to the pursuit of freedom which constitute the full scope of human’s capacity of recognition – the same realm of human Umwelten.
Given that contemporary biology regards life as molecularized and life science as engaging in the endeavor of re-devising life, which, consequently, complicates the relationship between a biological “ego” and the subject, this paper, through the lens of the concept of human Umwelten and its connection with self-technology, also attempts to have a dialogue with Nikolas Rose’s interpretation of self-technology as the positive and responsible conduct of humans’ ethical undertaking of their sign activities when encountering with this new reality.
References
Puumeister, O. (2019) “Biopolitical subjectification.” Sign systems studies, 47 (1/2), 105-125.
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2007.
Han, L. (2021) “The Idealistic Elements in Modern Semiotic Studies: With Particular Recourse to the Umwelt theory.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, March 2021, 107-128.