Introducing semiotic economy
Morten Tønnessen
Abstract submitted for the special theme
session Consumption as Signification (chaired by Kristian
Bankov), part of The 31st Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of
Finland, June 9–10
Associate professor at Department of Health
Studies, University of Stavanger
Researcher in the grant Dynamical Zoosemiotics
and Animal Representations (Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu)
The ten steps to a semiotics of being detailed
in Tønnessen 2010 (and said to be “pertinent to various sub-fields at the
conjunction of semiotics of nature […] and semiotics of culture […]”) conclude
with the following four points:
7) An imperative task in our contemporary world
of faltering biological diversity is that of Umwelt mapping, i.e. a mapping of
ontological niches.
8) The ecological crisis is an ontological crisis with
historical roots in humankind’s domestication of animals and plants, which can
be taken as archetypical for our attempted planet-scale taming of the wild.
9) The process of globalization is expressed by
correlated trends ofdepletion of semiotic diversity and semiotic
diversification.
10) Semiotic economy is a
field which task it is to map the human ontological niche insofar as its
semiotic relations are of an economic nature.
The ontological niche of point
7 was first introduced in Tønnessen 2003: 288 as “the set of contrapuntal
relations that [a being] takes part in at a given point of natural history”.
The notion is one of several profitable specifications of Uexküll’s Umwelt
concept. In plain language, the ontological niche represents what a being does
in fact do (relate to), rather than the interpretative challenges it encounters
in its semiotic niche (Hoffmeyer). Semiotic economy, then, traces the actual
behavior of the human species in Umwelt (i.e., ecological) terms, via a mapping
of the impact that human behavior has directly and indirectly as manifested in
the Umwelten of humans and notably of other living beings. This prospective
field of study – involving a more qualitative approach to economics (and a more
phenomenological approach, in a wide, Uexküllian sense) – is thus fitted for
empirical studies. From this theoretical vantage point, (human) consumption can
be conceived of in terms of signification not only from a human point of view
but also from an animal point of view.
References
Tønnessen, Morten 2003. Umwelt ethics. Sign Systems Studies, 31.1: 281-299.
— 2010. Steps
to a semiotics of being. Biosemiotics 3.3: 375-392.
