Abstract: "Animals craving for meaning in the Anthropocene – a perspective on the global semiocide"

This abstract was submitted to the organizer of the May 29-30 Oslo workshop "The Rhetoric of Human-Animal Relations" on February 1st.

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Animals craving for meaning in the Anthropocene – a perspective on the global semiocide

Biosemiotics is nominally linked to rhetoric through biorhetorics as developed by zoosemiotician Stephen Pain. More importantly, all biosemioticians concede that all animals are sign users, meaning utilizers. ‘Semiosis’ is the action of signs, and ‘biosemiosis’ the action of signs in living systems, two examples of such semiosis being animal communication and perception. Many, if not all, signs are subject to interpretation by some animal (or person). In the context of biosemiotics, there is no doubt that animals are proper subjects actively engaged in semiosis.

As interpreters, animals wild and tame are destined to interpret, and respond to, the constant stream of semiosis produced by human civilization. In the Anthropocene, the era in which humankind has acted en masse as a force of geological magnitude, the currents of human semiosis are increasingly shaping the landscapes. The human species is the first global species (a species with a global range) to emerge for millions of years, and its worldwide civilization is creating breeding grounds for a number of yet other global species. Enter the modern schism in nature between the favored and the unfavored. Various forms of ‘induced semiosis’ (Sharov) can in terms of human ecology be considered as constituting a further effectory layer in humankind’s control system qua global species.

When animal lives are subjugated to human purposes, their biosemiosis is tentatively adapted to our human semiosis. The Estonian palaeontologist Ivar Puura has introduced the word semiotsiid (semiocide) to signify “a situation where someone´s malevolence or negligence brings along destruction of signs and stories, which are meaningful to someone else, whose identity is thus violated”. If the Anthropocene is the Age of Man, then in a biosemiotic perspective it is also the era of an emerging global semiocide.