Chapter abstract: "The true value of “doing well” economically"

Below is my abstract, finished today, for a prospective book chapter to be written this Spring.

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Chapter title: The true value of “doing well” economically

Author: Morten Tønnessen

  

Abstract:

Recent efforts to go beyond GDP as a measure of economic performance raise important questions about the nature of the economy, including: What is the best measure of a sound, flourishing economy? And what is the purpose of “doing well” in economic terms? One possible measure of the soundness of the economy could be the extent to which it results in better lives for humans – a thought that has inspired measures such as the HDI, among others. In the bigger picture, a sound, flourishing economy should also be consistent with good, and perhaps optimal, lives for non-humans, and well-functioning ecosystems. On this measure, economics should not be an altogether anthropocentric enterprise. To go beyond anthropocentric notions of economic performance, a degree of integration between economics, philosophy (normative ethics and philosophical anthropology included) and biology is required. A merely economic outlook can easily lead to commodification of each and every organism and natural resource, thus neglecting the agency, interests and intrinsic value of animals and other non-humans. To truly “serve all”, economists should acknowledge that there are economic stakeholders beyond humans, in the sense that the living conditions of practically all non-humans on this planet are today affected by human economic activities. This would make economics more compatible with current outlooks in normative ethics with regard to the value of animals, biodiversity etc., and could be part of a radical reconceptualization of the nature of the economy where economic value is situated within value theory in a wider sense.

Abstract: "Introducing semiotic economy"

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.

Two papers accepted for presentation at Imatra Summer School

Last week I was notified that my two abstracts for the International Semiotics Institute's Summer School (2012 - June 8-12, Imatra, Finland) have been accepted by the organisers. These are (session for which they were submitted in parenthesis):

* "Existential universals: A bridge between biosemiotics and existential semiotics" ("Nordic Semiotic Paradigns - NASS 25 years: Where do Cognitive, Bio- and Existential Semiotics Meet?", chaired by Luis Emilio Bruni)

* "Introducing semiotic economy" (special theme session Consumption as Signification, chaired by Kristian Bankov)

I will publish these two abstracts here in Utopian Realism as separate posts.

Radio - comments on the vulnerability of our modern monetary economy

As announced yesterday, I appeared on NRK P1 Sørlandet, a public regional Norwegian radio channel, this morning, concerning a bank strike which eventually did not materialize. Nevertheless June 6th - yesterday - was a historical day, as Norwegians have never withdrawn as much cash as yesterday on one and the same day. My perspective on a possible bank strike was threefold:

a) how we have come to depend on our monetary economy, and in effect spread this dependence globally through our development/aid policy (because we regard cultures without monetary economy as uncivilized)
b) how people deal with such modern shocks, being creative when in need (though such flexibility is more achievable in many 'less developed' economies, which are, ironically, less vulnerable in this respect)
c) the ways in which a contemporary bank strike would hit society compared to earlier bank strikes (e.g. 1976), illustrating our increased dependence on monetary economy and technology in our modern economy of scale

I was introduced as philosopher with master (hovedfag) in philosophy and a PhD underway in semiotics.

Tartu: Alf Holmborg lecture, and more (semiotic economy)

Today I attended Alf Hornborg's lecture at the Department of semiotics in Tartu "Submitting to Objects: Fetishism, Dissociation, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism". Previously I have heard him present at an environmental history conference (the First World Congress of Environmental History, Copenhagen, 2009), but this time around I have also gotten to meet him in person (yesterday a group of us were out for dinner). I consider him, like Almo Farina, a fellow practioner of 'semiotic economy', and have suggested he checks out Farina's work.

I have a lot to learn from Alf Hornborg's work, and I am eager to read more by him from the crossroads ecosemiotics / ecological economics / world-systems theory. As became clear during today's lecture, however, I have some reservations with regard to how accurate his depiction of the global economy is (and how far we can get in understanding the current and future economy by basing our theorizing on models derived from 19th century examples).

New research interests at Academia.edu

I have registered 35 research interests in Academia.edu.

Four of these I had to create:
Anthropocene studies
Ecosemiotics
Semiotic economy
Zoosemiotics

Feel free to join me!

Proceedings of the world congress in semiotics 2007

At long last I have received the proceedings of the 9th congress of the IASS/AIS - Helsinki-Imatra, 11-17 June, 2007, "Communication: Understanding/Misunderstanding", edited by Eero Tarasti (associated editors: Paul Forsell and Richard Littlefield). And quite a work it is, in 3 volumes (Acta Semiotica Fennica XXXIV, International Semiotics Institute, Imatra/Semiotic Society of Finland, Helsinki 2009).

My text "Where I end and you begin: The threshold of the self and the intrinsic value of the phenomenal world" appears pp. 1798-1803 (vol. III). Here, for the first time in Earth history (in print), I offer "a critique of a critique", namely of semioethics: "While I agree with several of the foundational statements of a semioethics proper, i have some critical remarks as to its present manifestation." I have now been engaged with semioethics for 2 years plus, not least through this spring's first "semioethics interviews" with John Deely, the first of which will sooner-than-ever be published. The article also contains seeds to what I now call "semiotic economy".

In the article I refer to:
David Agler
Gregory Bateson
Donald Favareau
Arne Næss
Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio
David Rothenberg
and myself ("Umwelt ethics")

The name of my article appears in the Contents (vol. I, p. xx). I ("Tonnesen") is further referred to in the Thematic index (vol. III) under the keywords "biosemiotics" (p. 1971) - but not under "ethics", nor "politics", nor "semioethics".