Semioethics, voluntarism and anti-humanism

Semioethics, voluntarism and anti-humanism PAUL COBLEY London Metropolitan University That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation, or the means of attaining them are insufficient thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy ‘Part 4: Marx’ (1886) The idea of ‘ethics’ as a moral system, an idea which has developed from the early seventeenth century onwards, contains a basic contradiction in that it implies both a programme for behaviour and the will or agency to produce, adhere to and reproduce that programme. The latter, ‘willed’, ethics has roots in the Greek ethos and its concern with matters of character and the personal. Most recently, poststructuralism has rightly cast suspicion on the notion of ethics, but has also tried to re-draw its programmatic aspects by calling for an ethics characterized by ‘openness’ to the other. Even here, the idea of openness itself suggests a programme of initiative activity or will by which dialogue can be achieved. Clearly allied to the conception of will, and certainly recognizable in the contemporary Western social formation, is the sense of ethics as a phenomenon in discourse. The programme of ethics is discursive, often appearing in institutional space precisely as a written code, and the grounds upon which ethics can be challenged or adjusted are likewise discursive ones. Indeed, much of the problems associated with the (lack of) efficacy of ethics, particularly in the era of multiculturalism and tolerance of the other, are derived from the belief in the putative discursive nature of ethics. The idea that many of the determinants of human life are ‘constructed in discourse’ has been a powerful one during the last thirty years, especially in relation to understanding subjectivity. Calvin O. Schrag’s (2003) positing of ‘communicative praxis’1, for example, constitutes an important logical argument regarding the contiguity of communication and action, showing how such enterprises as ethics – willed and programmed - are necessarily conducted through discourse. Yet, there are other sources of the ‘discursive imagination’ that have lent weight to the perspective in which human affairs and the effecting of change in human affairs are determined by the vicissitudes of discourse. The ‘linguistic turn’ in social thought, inaugurated by Richard Rorty’s 1967 collection2, has been influential in areas of knowledge where the volume is seldom if ever cited. More important still, perhaps, and arguably more nebulous, has been the work of structuralism and poststructuralism and their basis in a philosophy of the sign derived from Saussure that is often critiqued but infrequently rejected altogether. This has been elaborated upon, disseminated through the human sciences in the West and almost naturalized in Francophone academia from the 1950s onwards and from the late 1960s onwards in the Anglophone world. There is an increasing realization, however, that both of these ‘discursive’ perspectives are not only past their sell-by dates but that they were always fundamentally flawed. The former has been exposed for its ahistoricism and its promotion of a complacent theory of knowledge in which linguistic and logical qualities are overvalued to the detriment of knowledge’s artifactual grounding.3 The latter perspective is being deposed: the Saussurean version of the sign which has held such sway in the human sciences has been superseded by a more radical perspective on signs; this in its operations, demonstrates the blinkered view that the iron grip of structuralist and poststructuralist sign theory has promulgated in the Western imagination. To help in understanding the way in which ethics and other forms of human action have repeatedly and erroneously been taken to spring from a will functioning on a plane of discourse, it is necessary to briefly review, then, the superseding of semiology by semiotics. Semiology and semiotics Semiotics, as opposed to semiology, is the study of all signs. Historically, semiotics precedes semiology. The term itself is derived from a Greek root, seme, and was taken up by the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, who sought to classify all types of signs in the universe. Semiotics therefore constitutes the major tradition of sign study ultimately derived from the ancient semioticians, medics such as Hippocrates of Cos (460-377 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (129-c.200) who developed a science of symptomatology4 (Sebeok 2001a). However, in Europe especially, it was the immense success and fashionable ascent of ‘semiology’ which initially brought the notion of broad sign study to the attention of the public and the academy in the latter half of the twentieth century. Semiology, of course, was inspired by the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Cours de linguistique générale (1916) predicted the growth of a general science of signs that might be possible if his principles were followed. In the latter part of the twentieth century, Saussure’s call was taken up by semiologists5 who confined their analyses to a limited range of cultural artefacts which might be susceptible to elucidation using broadly linguistic principles. Semiology prospered in Anglophone academia from the 1960s to the 1980s, gelling with the currency of (English) literary studies and sociology, as well as the popularity of Marxist politics. Not only was semiology the basis for the assumption that much of human life was ‘constructed in discourse’, it also underpinned efforts to conduct ‘communicative praxis’. Barthes’ programme of ideology critique launched in 1957 with his much translated work, Mythologies, provided an agenda for systematically analysing and rejecting the superstructural products of capitalism.6 The systematic aspect of Barthes’ critique of ideology derived from Saussure’s separation of two sides of a linguistic sign into a) a ‘sound pattern’ in the mind which represented sensory impressions of sound outside the mind; plus, b) a ‘concept’ consisting of an abstract formulation of phenomena in the world such as ‘house’, ‘white’, ‘see’ and so forth.7 Saussure referred to these as signifiant and signifié, respectively, and the first principle regarding their connection that he emphasized was its arbitrariness.8 Saussure’s Cours was first translated into English in 1956 and signifiant, signifié and signe were rendered as ‘signifier’, ‘signified’ and ‘sign’. The first item gave the impression to English natives that the signifiant was anything that did the work of signifying or, to put it another way, a sign – precisely the formulation that Saussure wanted to avoid. The term for the signifié, at the same time, seemed to be anything that was the object of signification. At a stroke, Saussure’s psychological conception of the sign was lost and versions of semiology were given free rein to look at all manner of cultural artefacts as if they embodied a signifié/signifiant relationship. The matter was compounded by the currency of Barthes’ influential primer, Elements of Semiology, translated into English in 1967. In order to enable semiology to be extended beyond linguistic signs, Barthes effected a slippage from Saussure, suggesting that “the signifier [signifiant] can, too, be relayed by a certain matter . . . the substance of the signifier is always material (sounds, objects, images)” (1967: 47). Barthes is not shy about the reasons for this un-Saussurean assertion: it was made so that the matter of all signs, including those in mixed systems, could be considered in the same way (1967: 47). Not only was there an encouragement to focus on those sign systems that were dominated by verbal modes, then, semiology also insisted that even nonverbal modes were susceptible to analysis based on the principles of Saussurean linguistics. In all cases, however, the sign systems to be analysed were human in origin. Semiology therefore thrived in the humanities and, especially, along with ‘discourse study’, in established disciplines such as linguistics. Curiously, however, semiological principles are often given the name ‘semiotics’, largely because the anthropocentric endeavours of semiologists were brought together with those of semioticians for the formation of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in 1969 (see Sebeok 2001b). If semiology created the impression that the terrain of human action was discourse and the human sign, as well as the possibility that change could be effected discursively by will, semiotics, derived from Peirce and the major tradition dating through scholasticism to the ancient medics, demonstrated something very different. The very localised study of the linguistic sign, a sign type used by humans alone, is only one component of the study of the sign in general. The very human phenomenon of language is just one aspect of semiosis, the action of signs in general, throughout the universe. Put this way, language looks very small compared to the array of signs engendered by all interactions between living cells. Moreover, the issue of what is living is crucial: many semioticians of the major tradition, influenced by (Sebeok 1994: 6), see semiosis as the “criterial attribute of life” and, consequently, conceive signs in a ‘global semiotics’. Sebeok, building on the work of his teacher, Charles Morris, as well as the sign theory of Peirce, carved out the study of non-human semiosis originally with his work in zoosemiotics (1963). Superseding this has been a fully fledged biosemiotics (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1992; Barbieri 2007), in which it is recognized that not just a semiotics of human communication is needed, but, in addition to zoosemiotics, a semiotics of plants (‘phytosemiotics’), of fungi (‘mycosemiotics’) and of the 3.5 billion year old global prokaryotic communication network within and between different bacterial cells (‘microsemiotics, cytosemiotics’). Indeed, contemporary semiotics recognizes that the human, while s/he is a sapient user of signs, is not just a discursive entity: in fact, the human is a mass of signs enacting message transfer nonverbally within the body (‘endosemiosis’ – the neural code, the genetic code, the metabolic code, etc.). Partly as a result of growing interest in Peirce and the major tradition, in addition to the decline of the Saussurean perspective outside circles where serious sign study is conducted, semiotics is superseding semiology. Far from being a de-politicization of sign study and a withdrawing from the putative political dimension of discourse, semiotics heralds a major paradigm shift in relation to many political matters but, especially, the issues of will, voluntarism and ethics that are considered here. What contemporary semiotics demonstrates, bluntly, is that interventions for change at the level of discourse alone are the equivalent of a gnat biting an elephant. Yet, while the glottocentrism of semiology’s influence in Western intellectual life has attempted to paper over this fact, semiotics does offer the opportunity for the reconceptualization of the place of human affairs on the planet, by placing humans as thoroughly semiotic entities within a vast environment of semiosis. As such, it provides a corrective to the voluntarist impulse and, in the idea of a semioethics, allows an alternative to the stalemate experienced in the prison-house of language. Nevertheless, as will be argued below, nascent semioethics itself is not without its own potential voluntaristic pitfalls and still requires an antihumanist refinement. The problem of voluntarism In the context of what follows, it is tempting to cite the opening words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word . . .” In spite of the fact that contemporary semiotics eschews blinkered glottocentrism, there is a reason why John’s proclamation remains politically powerful. Written as many as seventy years after Christ lived, John’s gospel - and its differences from those of Matthew, Mark and Luke – is well known as an evangelical speech act, the forging of a ministry rather than an eyewitness account of a life. In the present it also has its own resonances in opposition to a Trotskyite position in left politics. In Literature and Revolution (1923), Trotsky castigated the “pure art” claims of Russian Formalism (and, by extension, ‘formalism’ in general) in contrast to the thoroughly utilitarian perspective on human semiosis evinced in materialist dialectics. He writes: The formalist school represents an abortive idealism applied to the question of art. The formalists show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that ‘in the beginning was the Word’ But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow (1992: 41). Trotsky is at pains to point out that artistic communication has only ever been wielded through class interests. In the process, he predicts that while the art of the slave-owning class dominated for thousands of years, that of the bourgeoisie took over only for a matter of hundreds of years (1992: 44). A proletarian art might be possible within decades. Yet, crucial to this would be a proletarian intellectual vanguard, a voluntarist movement which would complement the vanguardist success of November 1917. Voluntarism and vanguardism have constituted a thorny problem for Marxism, pre-dating even Lenin (see, for example, the lineage presented in Gouldner 1980). In fact, they have also informed political debate beyond Marxism. In the Leninist mould, the vanguard constituted an absolutely necessary corollary to a forthcoming revolution. It entailed revolutionary theory but also, and especially later with Trotsky, a voluntarist push for the implementation of that theory. On the one hand, vanguardism is envisaged as arising from the proletariat; yet it has been associated in the history of Marxist states with authoritarian attempts to force revolutionary conditions. Like its philosophical counterpart, voluntarism in politics emerges through acts of will and, as such, complements the vanguardist impulse. Extreme voluntarism is sometimes viewed as an impetus which might ‘corrupt’ the organic basis of real political struggle. Semioethics and agency Both vanguardism and voluntarism are mentioned here because, with any political impetus, there is always bound to be a degree of the latter. In a post-Marxist environment, the extent of that voluntarism will be derived from the theoretical basis upon which it is predicated. This dilemma, apparently, is the one that a nascent semioethics faces. The discussion that follows is based on the proposals for a semioethics put forward by the leading semioticians, Petrilli, Ponzio and Deely who have, together and separately, effectively carried the torch of Thomas A. Sebeok’s teachings with aspects of this project. They proceed from the observation that the human is the only ‘semiotic animal’ (Ponzio, Petrilli and Deely 2006); whilst all organisms are bound up in semiosis, only the human possesses a self-consciousness about the signs s/he uses. The crux of semioethics is that the self-consciousness of the human constitutes an absolute compulsion to all others in the environment of semiosis, a duty of care not just to humans but to all living things. A preliminary discussion of the status of this consciousness is germane to the issues of semioethics, voluntarism and anti-humanism, and will take place below. For now, however, it is worth noting that Deely (2005a: 11, 26) demonstrates that the formula of the human as ‘semiotic animal’ first appeared in 1897 in the work of the German mathematician, Felix Hausdorff (writing as Paul Mongré; see Mongré 1897: 7). Deely suggests that the designation and the conception that goes with it supersedes the modern notion of the human as res cogitans. As such, the human is not so much the thinking being of Descartes, but the being who comes “to realize that there are signs distinct from and superordinate to every particular thing that serves to constitute an individual (including the material structure of a sign-vehicle) in its distinctness from its surroundings” (2005a: 73). He adds, With the definition of the human being among the animals as the only semiotic animal, that is to say, the only animal capable of recognizing that there are signs (as distinct from their practical recognition and use) and capable of developing accordingly a semiotic consciousness of the radical role played by signs as well in the inescapable realism of animals as in the growth of all experience and of human understanding in particular, with its symbols everywhere in culture, we locate ourselves along a way of signs which leads ‘everywhere in nature, including those domains where humans have never set foot’ (2005a: 75). The three important points in this formulation, then, are that the human needs to be considered in his/her kinship with other animals (a perspective usually associated most strongly with evolutionary biology), a sign-user in common with all life-forms, including those that humans may not have even encountered; that the human, thus conceived, is not defined by the power of thought as in the ‘modern’ paradigm, but, instead, by its existence within the whole web of semiosis, including endosemiosis; and, importantly, that the attribute that the human does not share with other forms of life on the planet – the attribute that makes the human distinct - is consciousness of the existence and use of signs. Clearly, the idea of the semiotic animal is closely tied to the recognition of the anthropocentrism of semiology. For Deely, especially, it also marks the human ability “not merely to distinguish things within objectivity, but further to explore them as they are in themselves” (2005a: 58), the key point in semiotics’ recovery of the ens reale (see also Deely 2003). Yet, the human consciousness of signs also entails that humans are in a position to make the adjustments necessary from the metasemiotic standpoint for the wellbeing of human life precisely in its dependency upon the semioses which link human animal within the signosphere with the forms of life and semiosis by which the biosphere as a whole and the physical environment form ‘one system’ (Deely 2005a: 58). In the concept of “adjustments” in this quote, we see the roots of a semioethics, as well as, seemingly unavoidably, voluntarism – the action of human will on signs. Figuring the other The idea of semioethics originates with, and has been extensively developed by, Ponzio and Petrilli, who, along with Deely in the 1990s, reconfigured the conception of the semiotic animal first posited by Hausdorff. The more local influence on semioethics is Sebeok’s global semiotics and, in particular, his embrace of the “one system” to which Deely refers. In ‘The evolution of semiosis’, Sebeok cites Lovelock’s ‘Gaia thesis’, noting that All living entities, from their smallest limits to their largest extent, including some ten million existing species, form parts of a single symbiotic ecological body dubbed Gaia . . . Should a view, along these lines, of a modulate biosphere prevail, it would in effect mean that all message generators/sources and destinations/interpreters could be regarded as participants in one gigantic semiosic web . . . (2001a: 29-30). In this light, what might be considered ‘care of the self’, can only realistically proceed from a ‘care of others’, where ‘others’ must mean the entirety of the semiosphere. It is in this sense that Petrilli and Ponzio’s semioethics delineates not just a limited ‘responsibility’ but an “unlimited responsibility” to “all of life throughout the entire planetary ecosystem, from which human life cannot be separated” (2005: 534). Furthermore, central to their semioethics is the theorizing of otherness. For them, Levinas, Bakhtin and, crucially, Peirce, reveal that Otherness is inherent in the sign and at the same time the precondition for the sign’s capacity to transcend itself. Signs – or better, signifying routes generated by the relations among signs in the macroweb of semiosis, or semiosphere – emerge from the tension between determination and indeterminacy; between a particular configuration of the sign and its continual displacement, transformation and deferral to the other; this other being both imminent to the sign and external to it, transcendent with respect to any given instance of semiosis. The other – this surplus or excess – prevents the sign totality from closing in on itself and thereby invests it with the character of openness and potential for creative generation. Openness or detotalization of the sign totality is the precondition for questioning and criticism, for the possibility of evaluating the operations of the ‘mind’, of semiosis, as good or bad (2005: 39-40). Otherness, therefore, is thoroughly grounded in the sign. This implies that human will is, at the least, mediated – an agency that is compelled into compromise with circumstances. Yet, Petrilli and Ponzio insist that “the entire planet’s destiny, in the final analysis, is implied in the choices and behaviour of human beings” (2005: 549). Moreover, they risk introducing further voluntarist overtones which seem at odds with the grounding of responsibility at the level of the sign, suggesting that “semioethics can be considered as proposing a new form of humanism” (2005: 545). Although Petrilli and Ponzio point out that their semioethics comprises a Levinasian “humanism of alterity” (2005: 546), semioethics, for reasons that will be revealed, needs to spell out as clearly as possible its position in regard to vanguardism and voluntarism. At present, Petrilli and Ponzio go some way to dispelling anthropocentrism and traditional humanism. Yet the Levinasian phrase, “humanism of alterity”, may yet prove unfortunate, despite Petrilli and Ponzio’s worthy desire to avoid reasserting “humanity’s (monologic) identity” (2005: 547). Likewise, the stress on the other and, especially, commitment to the other, requires an even greater evacuation of its voluntaristic aspect than Petrilli and Ponzio have achieved so far. There are some good reasons for this which are germane to the present geopolitical moment. Humanism in anthroposemiosis It has been argued elsewhere (Cobley and Randviir, forthcoming) that the variegated analysis of anthroposemiosis that makes up the domain of sociosemiotics, is characterised by attempts to understand the ‘motivation’ in the relations that make up the sign. Drawing on a seminal article by Kress (1993), sociosemiotics is described as an endeavour which untangles the relations between sign users, their circumstances, history and the materials that they use to make signs. These relations require elucidation because of the ways in which they are shrouded in opacity and because they obtain, frequently, at points when ‘motivation’ could not be revealed in its pristine state to an observer. Now, if this is the case, then one can easily deduce that the humanist imperative in respect of signs, which misconstrues the nature and limitations of agency in relation to sign-making, re-casts motivation as an entirely voluntarist affair. This is precisely symptomatic in the liberal conception of dialogue – a conception whose poverty Ponzio and Petrilli’s work, individually and collaboratively, has been instrumental in demonstrating – where contact and ‘communication’ with the other is the result of a choice, disposition or other individual act. For many, and in common parlance, dialogue retains the vanguardist tinge whereby one reaches out to another or, in sociosemiotic terms, where the relations of motivation between signs and their users is supposedly subject to an act of will. [Schrag 2003: 125-6, for example, has a typical liberal conception of dialogue as intersubjective consensus in discourse] The endeavour of some resolutely anti-humanist Francophone thinkers, on the other hand, despite its many flaws, provides some instructive examples for semioethics. Such thinkers, constituting a backlash to the dominant humanism of Sartre and the changed priorities – particularly in respect of voluntarism - of a post-War, post-Resistance Europe, have grappled with the encroaching nature of humanist vocabulary. Althusser, to name one, went some way to ameliorating humanist tendencies even in the writings of Marx (Althusser and Balibar 1970). Ultimately, Althusser sees Marx as breaking, radically, with every theory that based history and politics on an essence of man. From about 1845 onwards, Marx began to work with new concepts, including the social formation, production forces, the relations of production, the superstructure, ideology, determination in the last instance (by the economy) and specific determination of other levels of the social formation. For Althusser, this is not a mere detail; it is “Marx’s scientific discovery” (1977: 227). That this break is necessary is spelled out by Althusser when he writes: Strictly in respect to theory, therefore, one can and must speak of Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism, and see in this theoretical anti-humanism, the absolute (negative) precondition of the (positive) knowledge of the human world itself, and of its practical transformation. It is impossible to know anything about men [sic] except on the absolute precondition that the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes. So, any thought that appeals to Marx for any kind of restoration of a theoretical anthropology or humanism is no more than ashes, theoretically. But, in practice, it could pile up a monument of pre-Marxist ideology that would weigh down on real history and threaten to lead it into blind alleys (1977: 229-30, emphasis in the original). This statement is extremely apposite in the context of the project of semioethics. It is certainly a stark warning, even over forty years since it arrived in print. Indeed, there may be reason for Althusser’s exhortation to be taken even more seriously in the present. To be sure, Althusser does suggest that ‘humanism’ has its uses, as an idea and in ideology (1977: 231); but he is absolutely forthright about the need for absolute anti-humanism in theoretical work of the kind that semioethics might be taken to be. It can also be argued that the Althusserian call for anti-humanism is coterminous with Sebeok’s eschewal of humanism in the work that informs current semioethics (see, for example, Cobley 2003). Sebeok traced his intellectual, semiotic lineage back through Peirce to Locke and, ultimately, Hippocrates; he was in no way moved by the humanist appeals of Condillac and other Enlightenment thinkers. In fact, his concern with endosemiosis and the immensity of the web of semiosis in general, disqualifies the absurdities of much humanism from his thought. In theoretical terms, communication among humans amounts to pretty small beer. Sebeok calls for a consideration of the human body which consists of some 25 trillion cells, or about 2000 times the number of living earthlings, and consider further that these cells have direct or indirect connections with one another through messages delivered by signs in diverse modalities. The sheer density of such transactions is staggering. Only a minuscule fraction is known to us, let alone understood. Interior messages include information about the significance of one somatic scheme for all of the others, for each over-all control grid (such as the immune system), and for the entire integrative regulatory circuitry, especially the brain (2001c: 14-15). The communications to be found in the human body are merely extensions of the kinds of communication carried out by the earliest, and most enduring, organisms on the planet bacteria. There is no doubt that communication between humans, particularly in the formation “communication-production”, the profit-making imperative of global communication as identified by Petrilli and Ponzio (2005), has assumed a crucial position and has become, potentially, disastrous for the planet. Yet, where theory is concerned, there is a need to adhere to the larger picture of semiosis that Ponzio and Petrilli attempt to present, and there is a need, then, to maintain semioethics as an anti-humanist perspective. Maintaining anti-humanism Maintaining anti-humanism in theory is not easy. Althusser’s successors have attempted to do so with varying degrees of outcome. One of the most celebrated of recent attempts is the project of Alain Badiou. His Ethics (2001) constitutes a summing up of his position which, although embracing human action and agency, rejects humanism and voluntarism. This rejection revolves around the co-ordinates of new situations, what Badiou names ‘the event’ (2001) and the fidelity that such events demand and which some humans can meet when they are seized by them. Baldwin gives probably the most concise summary possible: The murmur of something new coming to happen interrupts the norm of a situation – that is, an event occurs. Those who correctly investigate the consequence(s) of the event and maintain fidelity to this interruption are subject to, and produce, a truth resulting from that event. This truth transforms existing knowledge and is universal – intelligible for everyone (Baldwin 2004: 1). Badiou locates ‘events’ in a number of spheres: in explicitly political developments; in the act of falling in love; in the sphere of cultural practice. Likewise, fidelity will involve, respectively: continued commitment to a political idea; commitment to a relationship (that all one’s friends might say is getting out of hand); and consistent faith in an artistic vision and practice (Badiou gives the example of Haydn as a revolutionary innovator). It should be noted that there is much that is problematic about Badiou’s project (see Subject Matters 2004). In fact, it can be seen in this very brief account that Badiou’s work has an almost theological dimension, returning to the figure of St. Paul, his faith and, especially, his conversion. However, in the idea of ‘the event’, it amounts to a sustained attempt to re-cast what might be thought of in other political circles as voluntarism. Implicitly, ‘fidelity’ – which is fidelity to an event – supplants the role of the will and inverts the relation of will exerting itself on a situation. This inversion – or its opposite – should be familiar to semioticians, particularly as an analogous inversion has been discussed by Sebeok on numerous occasions. In ‘Looking in the destination for what should have been sought in the source’ (1979), a classic essay in scepticism, Sebeok listed some ways in which scientists should “be ever on the lookout against deception, but beware, above all, of self-deception” (1979: 95). The case that runs like a thread through Sebeok’s work is that of Clever Hans, the ‘intelligent’ early twentieth-century horse who ‘deceived’ observers. The lesson of Sebeok and Rosenthal’s collection on Clever Hans (1981) is, perhaps, above all, that deception is not just unwitting, but often “witting”, in the sense that the deceived collude in their deception. They are often willing to be deceived at the outset, whether they believe it to be the case or not. The British ‘magician’, Derren Brown, is the master of this logic, performing ‘tricks’ in his television series – ‘cold reading’ was a recent example - which he invariably reveals to be successful merely as a result of the willingness of participants to be deceived. Sebeok’s observations on witting/willing deception are germane to Badiou’s attempts to invert the relationship of will to situation. To put it another way, the source is responsible for the outcome observed in the destination, although all eyes are usually on the latter. Likewise, the event creates the fidelity, the latter of which seems to interested eyes to be rather a voluntarist act. Will, therefore, has to be uncovered; it has to be revealed where deceptions occur. Even in Badiou’s problematic ethics, it is clear that deceptions between event and fidelity take place. Badiou cites the case of Heidegger, an intellectual who, in Badiou’s estimation, mistook Nazism for a revolution (2001: 73) and thus fell prey to a simulacrum. In the same way, those who have suffered a recent family loss are usually the most suggestible to ‘mediums’ or ‘spiritualists’ in the way that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was (see Stashower 2000). Such individuals are far too willing to participate; their will overcomes their ability to see the source, let alone look at it searchingly. It should come as no surprise, then, that there is willing in political projects, even if it is not always couched in such obviously sceptical terms. Any political project which foregrounds its objectives as immediately achievable by will, is prone to utopianism, voluntarism and, sadly, disappointment. Semioethics is grounded in anti-humanist principles which should work to prevent this and, certainly, it has been accompanied by some circumspect statements from Ponzio and Petrilli. Yet, the fundamentals of semioethics and a vocabulary for discussing it are still open to debate. One of the key areas of this debate concerns the definition of life. The signs of life and the state of exception In his theory of a ‘state of exception’, Agamben (2005) suggests that the modern political situation arises from a profound contradiction. Since at least the state of siege characterising the Paris commune, where traditional laws were suspended, the modern state has been built on an uncertain terrain between living being and law. This terrain has largely been hidden from view, preventing a proper appraisal of the differences between public law/political fact and life. Undoubtedly, the state of exception is seen in the public arena as a response to exceptional political events which demand extreme measures; yet, Agamben argues that, as a foundation of the modern state, exception has come to constitute its very being. In semioethics, the distinction between the realms of law and life would seem to be of considerable importance. Already, Petrilli and Ponzio have adumbrated the distinction in their discussion of how “human life in all its aspects has been incorporated into the communication-production network” (2005: 478). As they show, global communication – an evident consequence of the long-term state of exception identified by Agamben – has transformed the human experience with serious implications for development, well-being, and consumerism, or underdevelopment, poverty, and impossible survival; for health or disease; for normality or deviance; integration or marginalization; for employment or unemployment; for transfer of people functional to the workforce (which is characteristic of emigration) or transfer characteristic of migration, where the request for hospitality is denied; and for exchange and trade of legal merchandise or traffic in illegal merchandise, be it drugs or non-conventional weapons or human organs (2005: 478). In spite of this indicative list, a more nuanced distinction in the domains of life is needed. This is again offered by Agamben. In his 1998 book, Homo sacer, Agamben investigates the notion of sovereignty. Clearly, sovereignty is bound up with the capacity to proclaim a state of exception. However, referring to the classical political science of Schmitt, Agamben traces the notion of sovereignty as embodied in an exceptional entity. This entity, Homo sacer, is derived from a classification of person in classical Roman law: the sovereign who can proclaim a state of exception is, at once, inside and outside the law. For Agamben, the life of Homo sacer, bare life, is clearly included in the juridical order since it can be the subject of legislation; but it is also, at once, excluded from that order because of its capacity to be killed. This paradox is based on the fact that the Greeks, in formulating a concept of the Polis, did not rely on a single term to express ‘life’. As Agamben notes, for them, two terms were in play: bios, “which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or group” (1998: 1) and zoē, “which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animal, men, or gods” (1998: 1). Agamben further notes that simple life (zoē) is excluded from the Polis in the classical world and that its entry into the mechanisms and decisions of state power at the threshold of the modern era is mentioned by Foucault in his fragmentary discussions of biopolitics. The distinction and its consequences would seem to be of paramount importance for semioethics. In the analysis of Petrilli and Ponzio, there is a clear sense of the parlous effects on well-being of capitalism’s omniscient manipulation of bios through communication-production. Additionally, there is a definite concern with bare life or zoē: human organs are undoubtedly a bare life constituent caught up in the struggle for biopower. Furthermore, Petrilli and Ponzio refer to zoē indirectly in their comments on the need for care of the planet and ecosystem in general: it is clear that the state repeatedly attempts to devour zoē and bios as one. Yet, there is good reason to place the bios/zoē distinction at the forefront when analysing the state’s constant attempts to subjugate life as a general category. The state’s superintending of bios is inevitable: it is associated with the political existence of humans in groups, where ‘life’ is automatically elided to the ‘good life’ sought by the Greeks (cf. Agamben 1998: 7). As such, bios is in the seemingly ineluctable position of maintaining life insofar as it appears to best serve human groups. However, humans may be best served by a bios that is thoroughly predicated on zoē. This may be a more cogent formulation of Petrilli and Ponzio’s reference to the fate of “human life in all its aspects” (2005: 478) since it clarifies the distinction in the quote from Deely, above, in which “the well-being of human life” is precisely dependent upon the animal- and plant-inhabited semiosphere. Whereas the state conflates bios and zoē in order to devour life, semioethics might insist on their distinction as a crucial means of drawing attention to the cul-de-sac of anthropocentrism. In the sphere of ecological debate this distinction has already been made in the opposition of anthropocentric and biocentric views on the environment, although it has occurred, significantly, without the benefit of the global understanding afforded by semiotics (see Taylor 1986 and Stenmark 2002). Anthropocentrism, unsurprisingly, is intimately related to ‘will’ in its placement of humans alone as prime movers on earth; semioethics places humans among their cohabitants of the semiosphere and must therefore remain suspicious of untrammelled will. Whither semioethics? One might ask, then, what semioethics can do and where it should place itself without the ‘will’ that is putatively the motor of politics. Given the foregoing misgivings about voluntarism, it seems that semioethics might be restricted to the role of an ‘armchair marcher’, allowed to get worked up about the injustices and abuse inherent in late capital but prevented by its theoretical parameters from being involved in action. Indubitably, this would make for rather a desolate conclusion. Nevertheless, there is little sense in placing semiotics in the role of a social or ecological advocate in order to say simply that action is taking place. An obvious response in such circumstances - to injustice and inequality on the one hand and ecological imbalance and human impingement on biodiversity on the other - would be policies of tolerance towards other peoples, a pursuance of multiculturalism and a local voluntarist impetus in respect of the environment. Yet, ideological imperatives of this kind have been such an integral feature of social democratic governments in the West in the last decade or so – the same governments, of course, who wage wars, exploit Third World labour and favour fuel production over long-term environmental legislation – that it would be wise to be suspicious of them. The work of semioethics, then, should be carried through in three places. The first of these, palpably, is semiotics. That is to say, the practice of semiotics in the academy, sustained and furthered by scholars who are seized by the key contemporary developments in the field such as biosemiotics and, of course, semioethics. If semiotics as a field can progress its scholarship and cause its presence to be felt in the further reaches of the academy, then the imperatives of semioethics must eventually permeate those areas where semiotics is currently understood merely as a method of deconstructing advertisements (in the manner of the 1957 model of Roland Barthes). In addition to this, some parts of the academy will have to come to terms with science in the way that semiotics, especially through semiotics of nature, has. This will mean that the further reaches of the humanities, especially areas such as cultural studies, will have to face up to the possibility that their dismissal of science as masculinist, mechanist, ‘ideological’ and so forth, is, perhaps, apposite to nineteenth-century modes of thought but is rather misplaced in the context of the twenty-first century. It is possible to see these developments in the work of those who are currently marrying semiotics of nature and culture. In her book, The Whole Creature (2006), for example, Wendy Wheeler is seized (in Badiou’s sense) by biosemiotics in her incisive critique of the ultimately unworkable possessive individualism of bourgeois ideology and the liberal philosophy and political economy that are its correlates. From a slightly different angle, Sebeok’s teaching emanates from a formidable figure who was far from being a fellow traveller of left causes; yet so seized was he by scientific and global principles that his fidelity to them provided semiotics with a template for thinking through and instituting a plethora of research projects that promise to bring semioethics so much closer. Ponzio and Petrilli, while conversely more sympathetic to left causes, have also maintained fidelity in the global vision of semioethics: in the face of demands made by dogma that is sometimes to be found on the left, they have gone some way to bringing voluntarism and vanguardism into question and have also committed what might be considered by some on the left as the cardinal sin – taking the study of biology seriously. For many, semiotics can be pejoratively taken to be ‘apolitical’ because of this fidelity. To assert as such, of course, is tantamount to saying that semiotics is politically conservative. For those who are of this view, it appears that semiotics has no project and the only way in which it can be co-opted is through those desultory attempts at what Barthes (1977), in dismissing some of his earlier work, called ‘mythoclasm’. More accurately, perhaps, what these critics of semiotics deplore is that semiotics is not voluntaristic. There is an echo, here, of the 11th thesis on Feuerbach where Marx remarks that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways and that the point is to change it. Marx, of course, does not propose that this can be achieved through straightforward individual voluntarism such as being nice to people or recycling individual waste – humans, as a collective, will have to decide to do such things by themselves. Likewise, Petrilli points out that Semioethics does not have a program to propose with special aims and practices, a decalogue, a formula to follow more or less sincerely, more or less hypocritically. From this point of view, semioethics is alien to stereotypes as much as to norms and ideology (Ponzio 1992, 1993, 1998). Semioethics proposes a critique of stereotypes, norms and ideology, of the different types of values as described, for example, by Charles Morris in his various writings (Morris 1948, 1956, 1964). Therefore, semioethics presupposes the human capacity for critique. Its special vocation is to evidence sign networks where it seemed that there were none, therefore connections and implications from which escape is impossible where instead there only seemed to be net separations, boundaries and distances with relative alibis. Such alibis serve to safeguard responsibility understood in a limited sense and, therefore, consciousness in the form of good consciousness, clean conscience (2005: 43-44). Semioethics in semiotics, then, is a matter of fuelling biocentric human responsibility with theoretical practice. The second place where semioethics must be carried through, in association with semiotics, is the public sphere. The term ‘public sphere’ is obviously invoked with reference to Habermas’ groundbreaking thesis in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). Despite various critiques of this liberal conception – including Habermas’ thesis, which is itself a critique of the clay-footedness of public sphere discourse - the importance of the discourse sits deeper than its surface appearance (for example, in the coffee houses of eighteenth-century Europe). Divorced from domestic and business concerns, the public sphere was, for Habermas, political in quite a ‘pure’ sense, a ‘rational’ discourse, not simply dictated by, or the epiphenomenon of, the accumulation of capital. It is here, above all, that semioethics, through semiotics, needs to make its presence felt. That is, it needs to install itself, in a convincing manner and avoiding the pitfalls of fashion, as part of the new way of seeing things in general. Biosemiotics might have a relatively straightforward role to play in environmental considerations; for example, Hoffmeyer’s (2001) sketch of a semiotic view of bioengineering points to potentially revolutionary implications for farming. But, more generally, there would appear to be two major areas for the development of semioethics in the public sphere. The first is in relation to ‘complexity’ as it gains a foothold in the public purview as exemplifying the way that matters of reality are actually addressed by science in the twenty-first century (Lewin 1993; Goodwin 1994; Laughlin 2005; see, also, Wheeler 2006). The second is in relation to the feeling that the West inhabits ‘postmodernism’. By ‘postmodernism’ is not meant the apparent set of broad social, political and cultural co-ordinates, commentary on which created an academic publishing phenomenon in the early 1990s. Rather, it is a way of seeing after the modern, in which the glottocentrist and Cartesian co-ordinates of philosophy and social thought have been overtaken by a semiotic consciousness prefigured in the teachings of the scholastic philosophers (Deely 1994, 2001, 2005b). In effect, semioethics can come to the fore in an era of acute awareness of signs, an awareness which, indeed, faces its major threat not in a refusal to see the working of signs but in a failure to recognize semiosis in anything other than human signs. Lastly, and as a direct consequence of the above, semioethics needs to develop within the framework of the relation of the academy to the community. Like semioethics in general, this might at first seem to have vanguardist overtones in that it assumes a degree of will in such initiatives as making semiotics relevant to students. However, that would be to base the academy/community relation on a fairly instrumental view of what happens in higher education pedagogy. The decline of respect for authority in Western institutions identified in so-called ‘postmodernism’ (as opposed to the era after the modern delineated by Deely) with reference to the decline of grand narratives, affords an opportunity to redraw relations in higher education. While it has ushered in a litigious, customer mentality, the decline in respect for authority has also dragged some academics from their ivory towers, forced dialogue and encouraged the application of ideas to life as it is lived (cf. Haeffner 2005). The demands of relevance to bios, it would seem, present an opportunity to re-introduce zoē, thus making the conflation of the two for the purposes of the state an object of concern for the human good life in its relation to the whole of the semiosphere. In short, and in a self-consciously modest fashion, semioethics is dialogically compelled into a preliminary awareness-raising role. Undoubtedly, it would be a futile enterprise to try to persuade human groups to give up their pursuit of the core values associated with the good life. A voluntarist semioethics would precisely fall into this trap. It would run the risk of re-enacting a nature/culture division in which the human somehow has to be ‘drawn back to’ nature, leaving some of the scant comforts that ‘culture’ has afforded. The project of semioethics, as has been seen, is not like this. As Sebeok repeatedly pointed out, the idea of a split between nature and culture is absurd, simply because the former is merely a small compartment of the latter. Instead, semioethics has an analogon in the ‘wooded meadow’ discussed by Kull et al (2003); that is, a place where biodiversity is preserved rather than threatened by human activity. Unlike the wilderness (where cultivation and human management are almost wholly absent) or the countryside (where nature is ‘artificially’ protected by humans), the Estonian wooded meadow is, to a small extent, managed, but includes mainly local (i.e. non-introduced) species (Kull et al 2003: 77). Management, vanguardism, voluntarism and will must occupy very minor roles in semioethics, then. In the past they have proved part of the problem, rather than the solution, in the relation of humans to the rest of the semiosphere. Put another way, and, for the present purpose, inverting Gramsci, semioethics requires a replacement of the overvaluation of the optimism of the will with a more penetrative pessimism of the intellect. Another name for this is theoretical anti-humanism. Endnotes 1 Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 2001. 2 Richard M. Rorty ed., The Linguistic turn: Essays in Philosophical Method with Two Retrospective Essays, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967. 3 Barry Allen, ‘Turning back the linguistic turn in the theory of knowledge’, Thesis Eleven, 89, 1 (2007) 622 4 Thomas A. Sebeok, ‘Galen in medical semiotics’ in Global Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001.. 5 See, for example, Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London, Paladin, 1973 and Pierre Guiraud, Semiology, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. 6 In a retrospective on Mythologies published in 1971, Barthes rejected the book’s approached to ideology critique as obvious and outdated and, possibly influenced by the diversity witnessed at the formation of the International Association for Semiotic Studies two years early, and with which he had been intimately involved, called, instead, for ‘mythoclasm’. See Roland Barthes, ‘Change the object itself’ in Image-MusicText, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, Glasgow. Fontana and Paul Cobley, ‘Barthes’ sign theory in Anglophone media and cultural studies’ in Augusto Ponzio et al eds., Con Roland Barthes alle sorgenti del senso, Rome, Meltemi, 2006; see, also, below. 7 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, London, Duckworth, (1983) pp. 65ff., 101ff. 8 ibid. pp. 67-70 References Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception trans. K. Attell, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Agamben, G. (1998) Homo sacer trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, L. (1977) For Marx trans. B. Brewster, London: New Left Books. Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970) Reading Capital trans. B. Brewster, London: New Left Books. Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil trans. P. Hallward, London: Verso. Baldwin, J. (2004) ‘Beyond bodies, culture and language: an introduction to Alain Badiou’ Subject Matters 1 (2): 1-20 Cobley, P. 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