Expecting the Earth

Life|Culture|Biosemiotics

Wendy Wheeler (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

288 Seiten

2016
Lawrence & Wishart Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-910448-67-0 (ISBN)

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The age of gene-centrism and mechanism is slowly passing. In its place, the biological sciences increasingly recognise that life isn't simply a genetically determined programme but is centrally a matter of information and communication systems nested in larger communicative systems. The latter include both internal and external, and natural and cultural, environments. But 'information' is an under-unanalysed term in relation to living systems. Accordingly, a new interdiscipline, biosemiotics, has grown up to study the ontology of sign relations in biological, aesthetic and technological ecologies. From the Greek bios for life and semeion for sign, biosemiotics is the study of these intertwined natural and cultural sign systems of the living. Expecting the Earth draws on the semiotic philosophy of the American scientist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, the semiotic ethology of Jakob von Uexkull's Umwelt Theory, Gregory Bateson's cybernetic ecology of mind, Jesper Hoffmeyer's development of biosemiotics, and briefly upon philosophical precursors such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Gilbert Simondon, as well as the growth of ecological developmental biology more widely.
In this book, Wendy Wheeler formulates a history and theory of biosemiotic and proto-biosemiotic thinking in order to open up new possibilities of contemporary social, philosophical, aesthetic and technological engagement. This is essential reading for those interested in these groundbreaking new developments, and is relevant to the environmental humanities, social ecology and the life sciences more generally.

Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University and is currently a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London and in the School of Art, Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia where she is the London member of the Art, Ecology, Globalisation and the Interpretation of Science research group.

Introduction: The Turning1. Biosemiotics: Towards an Ecological Ontology of Sign Relations2. The Wrecked Vessel and Earth Repudiation: Gnosticism, Nominalism and the Semiotic Scaffolding of Modern Scientific Consciousness3. The Lightest Burden: The Aesthetic Abductions of Biosemiotics4. A Feeling for Life: Natural and Cultural Ecologies and the Orders of Discourse5. A Connoisseur of Magical Coincidences: Chance, Creativity and Poiesis from a Biosemiotic Perspective6. Expecting the Earth: A New Animism, the Technological Object and Gilbert Simondon

Erscheinungsdatum	18.07.2016
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
	Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Theorie / Studium
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-910448-67-2 / 1910448672
ISBN-13	978-1-910448-67-0 / 9781910448670
Zustand	Neuware