Biosemiotics (2010) 3:257261

DOI 10.1007/s12304-010-9073-1
O R I G I N A L PA P E R

Introduction to the Special Issue Semiotics of Perception

Being in the World of the LivingSemiotic Perspectives
Kati Lindstrm & Morten Tnnessen

Received: 24 April 2009 / Accepted: 12 March 2010 /

Published online: 20 April 2010
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This special issue on the semiotics of perception originates from two
workshops arranged in Tartu, Estonia, in February 2009. We are located at the
junction of nature and culture, and of semiotics and phenomenology. Can they be
reconciled? More particularly, can subfields such as biosemiotics and ecophenomenology be mutually enriching? The authors of the current special issue believe that
they can. Semiotic study of life and the living can emerge as properly informed only
if it is capable of incorporating observations made in natural science, philosophy and
cultural studies. The semiotic study of nature entails an experiential turn in the study
of life processes. Perception isor should beat the heart of the life sciences.
Keywords Animal mind . Landscape . Perception . Semiotics and phenomenology .
Uexkllian phenomenology . Umwelt
Much of the pathos of the life sciences and public discourse concerning animals and
humans focuses on global environmental issues and possible solutions to them.
Although many scholarly initiatives have in the last years called for a deeper
understanding of cultural factors underlying the environmental issues, the discourse
at large remains a pragmatic and technical one, leaving little room for philosophical
consideration of culture, humans and their cohabitant forms of life. It is at the same
time clear that since todays problems emerged along with humanitys culturally
conditioned attitudes toward other life forms and our living environment, it is only
through a thorough consideration of these topics that we can possibly start moving
toward a (semio)ethical and consequently less destructive way of living in the world.
K. Lindstrm (*) : M. Tnnessen
Department of Semiotics, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu,
Tiigi 78, Tartu 50410, Estonia
e-mail: kati.lindstrom@ut.ee
M. Tnnessen
e-mail: mortentoennessen@gmail.com

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The present volume addresses topics of humanly being in the world of the living
with particular emphasis on our environment, called landscape, and the animal
minds of animals and men alikeall from the vantage points of semiotics and
phenomenology.
At times nature is a mirror of culture, held up before us so as to show us a world
of our own making. In many a case, for instance, animal behaviour is a reflection of
our culturally conditioned approach to the animals in question. In such cases our
interaction with animal species is bound to be misrepresented if we mistakenly
assume that the animals current behaviour is its only possible behaviour. What we
can observe at any given time is often but a note in the behavioural repertoire of a
species. Wolves are a case at hand. They are known to have preyed on vulnerable
humans (dominantly children) in times of extreme ecological conditions (low prey
availability) and special societal conditions (poverty, unobserved child labour), such
as in early modern Europe, and in some cases in modern Indiabut would never
under more normal ecological conditions so much as approach a human being.
Those who saw the devil in wolves, in other words, saw little more than a reflection
of their own (culturally and ecologically determined) approach to the brute animals.
John Deely has elaborated on semiotics role as a signpost of the new age in
human thinkingan age that turns its back to solipsistic self-centredness and the
Cartesian opposition of subjects and objects (Deely 2001). Bringing to the
foreground the notion of relation (between the sign-object-interpretant, between
the perceiver and the perceived, between objective and subjective realities etc.),
semiotic thinking restores subjectivity not as an internalist conception, nor as an
externalist conception, but rather as a relational conception. Acknowledging that
human beings are constantly engaged in a multitude of inter-actions with other living
organisms, it endows the latter once again with the independent subjectivity and
respect that Cartesian philosophy had refused them. Through multifarious concepts
discussed also in the present volumesuch as Umwelt, Innenwelt, semiotic niche
etc.the biosemiotic perspective has done more than practically any other field in
todays academia to bring animals and other life forms back into the position of
independent agency rather than numbers in a preset formula.
While Uexklls notions of Umwelt and Innenwelt (von Uexkll 1909, 1921) deal
with the way in which animals (humans included) carry out their activities in the
world of perception, phenomenology has traditionally dealt with the topic of being in
the world from a purely human perspective. Emphasizing the bodily experience, the
elementary role of the senses and the relations spontanously formed between any
one subject and its surrounding as it is perceived at a pre-linguistic level,
phenomenology retrieves to the most primeaval and basic mode of beingthe
animalistic roots of human experience.
Apart from the animal mind, landscape is a key word for this special issue, as it
was for the original workshops. A semiotic usage of the term is far from being
established. So far, landscape has been a topic of only a few treatises of semiotics,
and they deal mostly with the symbolic or linguistic aspect of the landscape, lacking
encompassiveness in the consideration of landscapes as well as of semiotics. Some
mention of landscapes has been made in the context of urban semiotics and
ecosemiotics, but landscape semiotics as such can hardly be considered an
established field of study.

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In order to clarify the diverse terminology, we can say that the physical
environment is everything that is outside of us, either animate or non-animatethe
landforms, buildings etc. (things in John Deelys sense of a distinction between
signs, objects and things). An Umwelt is an at times species-specific life-world, the
physical environment configured to be perceived and comprehended by a specimen
of a certain life form, and as such it is a potentiality. It unites the meaningful
processes of each organism, all the while being a synchronic totality of them. The
Umwelt represents what can be experienced by any specimen of a certain life form,
rather than what has been experienced by it through its actual life history. It can be
modelled individually as well as for a collective. Landscape, in contrast, is neither
simply the physical reality nor the construct of a particular life form. Landscape as it
is defined in human geography these days is a holistic term, which seeks to unite
both the material and visible environment and the immaterial and invisible mental
structure concerning a certain physical environment. Like the Umwelt, it exists on
the individual level as well as on group levels. What is important here is that it is not
perceivableinstead, it is perceived. A landscape, therefore, is always historically
conditioned by ones previous interactions with the physical environment as well as
ones previous interactions with other living organisms in the landscape. It is not a
potentialityinstead it is constantly maintained by cultural, social and individual
processes in its physical as well as mental aspects. The past is always involved in a
landscape. Being at the same time perceived and culturally mediated, it forms an
interface between the animal understanding and the specifically human forms of
understanding in us. It is, at the same time, the stage for encounters between humans
and other life forms and the perceptual crossroad where grand environmental issues
are born, originating from these miniscule details.
With two exceptions, all papers in the present volume were developed from
presentations at the two workshops The Ecology of Perception: Landscapes in
Culture and Nature (Feb. 67, 2009)1 and Animal Minds (Feb. 910, 2009)2,
both arranged in Tartu, Estonia. The exceptions are the contribution of Renata
Sukand and Raivo Kalle, who were scheduled for a presentation but had to cancel,
and that of Ane Faugstad Aar, who attended one of the workshops. The Tartu
workshops on the semiotics/phenomenology of perception, as they were advertised,
in which phenomenology [met] semiotics (where culture meets nature)was
followed by a public lecture by David Abram, entitled Language and the Ecology
of Sensory Experience. The original occasion of the events was ecophenomenologist David Abrams first visit to Estonia and its biosemiotic
community. Abram had first been invited a year or so earlier, to Whats Wrong
with Nature? An interdisciplinary seminar investigating human perceptions of nature

1
Organized as part of the research project The Cultural heritage of Environmental Spaces: A
Comparative Analysis Between Estonia and Norway (EEA-ETF Grant EMP 54) in cooperation with
Neolithisation and Modernisation: Landscape History on the East Asian Inland Seas (Research Institute
for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan).
2
Organized by the research project Dynamical Zoosemiotics and Animal Representations (ETF/ESF
7790); sponsored by Estonian Green Party MP Toomas Trapido. Editing (Tnnessen) and language editing
of this volume has been supported by the same grant (editing by Tnnessen also by EEA-ETF Grant EMP
54).

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K. Lindstrm, M. Tnnessen

and environmental change (January 2526, 2008), arranged by Institute of

Philosophy and Semiotics in cooperation with the Jakob von Uexkll Centre.
Though Uexkll was not any more of a phenomenologist than he was a
semiotician in a proper scholarly sense of either of the two words, he nevertheless
gave rise not only to a theory of biosemiotic meaning (cf. von Uexkll 1956 [1934/
1940], 1982) but furthermore to what we can call an Uexkllian phenomenology; the
basic contribution of which is the theoretically modeled perspective of each and
every living being. For biosemioticians, as Jesper Hoffmeyer (2004: 89) writes, there
is nothing mysterious about the phenomenal world, for it is deeply embedded in
bodily semiotics.
Around 50 people took part in the events at some point, with presenters and
participants representing Estonia, Belgium, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands/
Finland, Norway, the UK and the US. For some it represented a first encounter with
biosemiotics, for others with landscape semiotics, phenomenology, ethology or deep
ecology. Arne Nss (19132009), the founder of deep ecologywith which Abram
is aligned, with his depth ecology; and for which also Kalevi Kull, Morten
Tnnessen and Wendy Wheeler have shown interestcoincidentally died a few
weeks before the workshops. An Estonian translation of excerpts from Abrams The
Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
(Abram 1997), published in the environmental magazine Roheline Vrav not long
after the workshops, was dedicated to his memory.
In various discussion formats, predominantly at a quite general theoretical level,
all these individuals (because such they were)philosophers and semioticians and
more, professors and students, scholars and whole creatures alikeinquired into a
stream of questions pertaining to the fundamental nature of nature as well as of that
branch of it which we call culture. There were practically no fixed dogmasnone,
that is, except those of the discussants own choosing. Presentations, as well, took
various forms in different genres and with radically different styles; notably Deelys
prophetic voice and Abrams essayistic nature writing performed with much
animation.
And so we discussedin plenum, in groups, during lunches and at late
encounters, for five days and moretemporality and territoriality, the land of
man and the land of romance, the human condition (or semiotic condition, as it
were), the animal condition in itself and in the context of a human identity
our animal nature (as well as, as Kalevi Kull would have it, our vegetative
nature); how it feels to fly, and to be endowed with a body; why birds sing, the
role of anticipation, imagination, creativity, improvisation; how many senses
there are, our receptivity to specific places and to other animals, place-specific
ecologies and cultures and perceptions and languages, the sense modalities,
synaesthesia and the complexity of sensation and of perception, the concepts of
the wild and of the authentic, relations of dependency and the nature of
animate reality, the phenomena of distributed intelligence and the outright
silliness of certain contemporary practices, the life histories of all that crawls on
or in the earth or flies in the unseen or swims or floats in the fluid medium of
this planet Earth which Abram insists we live in rather than on... We discussed
how we can become better animals, we examined the concept of Umwelt and
scrutinized the traditional taxonomies of life; the threshold of semiosis, and of

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cultureall the while asking ourselves which words and expressions were viable
and which would have to be constructed, re-interpreted, recovered or done away
with. Our mother was portrayed as the original, first landscape. The land was
tentatively (re-?)introduced as home. And at least for a moment, it was.

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