Wheeler, W.  The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006, 192 pp., $24.95  ISBN 1905007302

 

Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture is a finely-written, broadly-interdisciplinary exploration of human social relations as natural and, naturally semiotic. It is part of a small but growing number of studies offering a refreshingly intelligent, inspiring, and uncommonly sane solution to the problem of thinking in dichotomies -- the natural and the artificial, the body and the mind, the individual and society -- arguably one of the greatest intellectual stumbling blocks.  Given the great importance of its message, The Whole Creature should have found itself among a great number of books recognizing and expounding the significance of advances made recently in the study of emergence as both a philosophical and scientific concept.  Most significantly, these new findings allow us to re-conceive the hard problem of selfhood, avoiding the disadvantages of constructivism and of reductionism. But books with like theses, books that present new evidence from contemporary sciences rather than simply rehearsing the very long (and by many accounts, failed) traditions of organicism or holism, are markedly few, and one wonders, since cultural theorists stand poised for the next new wave, Why isn't biosemiotics more widely recognized? The question becomes even more compelling when we realize that much of what Wheeler advocates promises to bridge the arts and sciences, an accomplishment, were it possible, might be as welcomed (for readers of Configurations) as peace in the Middle East.

Reasons, relevant and otherwise, may abound for the relative slowness with which critics (of all kinds) have adopted this new perspective, but most probable is the case that, as a critique of post-structuralism, an emergentist's thesis may be mistaken as a retreat to humanism or, worse, a desertion to reductionism, into the arms of the likes Joseph Carroll and Brian Boyd, whose "Literary Darwinism," sometimes also known as "Biopoetics" bears an unfortunate similarity, in name only, to Wheeler's area of focus, Biosemiotics. Wheeler proclaims herself to be neither enemy nor friend of post-structuralism or reductionism. She understands the success of developing a new theory of self depends on assimilating contradictory views instead of exacerbating hostilities. One may say, without paradox, that hers is a strong argument for a constructivism grounded in nature. Through the triadic semiotics of C. S. Pierce, Wheeler describes the possibility of a multi-vocal self that is also integral and unified.

            The difficulty of Peircean thought, his profligate generation of "ugly" and awkward terms, is often noted, but such difficulties should not intimidate a generation that cut its teeth on deconstruction. It is curious, then, that Peirce, esteemed by more than a few noted post-structuralists, should remain relatively misunderstood and underused. Although post-structuralists have praised the processual nature of Peirce's semiosis as an improvement over Saussure's focus on the static structure of the signified-signifier, what they either missed or declined to adopt is Peirce's metaphysical realism. According to Peirce, reality is gradually (and imperfectly) revealed in the semiotic process. His triadic semiotics includes a "sign," which is comparable to Saussure's signifier and an "interpretant," which is comparable to the signified, though it is usually itself a sign in the interpreter's mind (or, in Peirce's later writings, in a very generalized conception of mind, an important consideration for biosemiotics). The most innovative part of Peirce's triadic semiotics is the inclusion of "object," which is fully part of the semiotic process. Peirce extended signs beyond those that are conceptual, so as to include "indices," which are contiguous with the object they represent. Indices are in reaction to or opposition with an object and indicate the feeling of otherness, which simultaneously indicates the self to which it is opposed.  This enables partial access to "brute" reality through signs. While interpretation is fallible, it is constrained by the semiotic object. For Peirce, "objective reality" is whatever we sense as external to ourselves, whatever resists our will. In Saussure's semiotic, in contrast, the conception of meaning derives from structure and the systematic relations between and among signs and not by referring to material things. In this view wherein language refers to itself rather than to objects, language constructs our notions of reality.  By including the object in the semiotic process, Peirce connects the semiotic web at much needed anchor points to the material world.  For Pierce, as Wheeler reminds us, the world is perfused with signs.  Semoisis is not an exclusively human process; it is at work in organic nature generally speaking. More specifically, self-organizing processes and the evolutionary process are semioitic, according to biosemioticians.

As a "whole" creature, a human individual is primarily a social creature, embedded, interconnected with everything else in the system, and this is comparable to "post-human" conceptions of selfhood, though Wheeler diverges from this view in her Peircean metaphysical realism.  According to Wheeler, the first person view is not to be maligned as an illusion.  Rather, subjective experience is a fact of biological, social, and semiotic organization. Wheeler depends heavily upon the complexity sciences, which are congenial to Peirce's semiotics and give support to the assertion that emergent objects, such as selves, are more than mere epiphenomena. 

The Whole Creature must be praised for these insights. The only legitimate way to speak of a self as coherent -- and not merely as an effect of language nor as an atomistic, uncaused self as in the humanist tradition -- is to speak of it in terms of an emergent phenomenon. However, I must note, even as one fully invested in the field, emergentists have yet to offer conclusive arguments for ontological, as opposed to epistemological emergence. Nobel-prize winner Robert Laughlin, whom Wheeler invokes for support, has written a celebratory monograph, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, the style of which is not unlike Wheeler's own, that is, enthusiastic, encyclopedic, an enjoyable read. Laughlin maintains that the "Age of Emergence" has begun in science. While the science of emergence has been revived with breakthroughs in nonlinear dynamics research, there is no agreed-upon formalism for describing the supposed radical novelty in complex systems (Goldstein), and a precise definition of "complexity" has yet to be adopted by everyone in the field (Feldman and Crutchfield). Such criticisms come from within the community of complexity scientists and are not negative as such, rather they form basis for most research programs. This is not to say that Laughlin and Wheeler's optimism is misplaced, for very promising work is being done in, for example, physics and evolutionary theory, where semiotic analyses of nature are being used (Ay, Flack and Kakauer; Deacon, Cashman and Sherman).

Such is the base on which Wheeler builds her argument for socialist politics, suggesting that the complexity sciences compel us to believe that societies are complex nonlinear evolving holisms, giving credence to Marx's description of social organizations. But hers is a tempered socialism, valuing the sense of propriety, power and investment in the material world that control of your environment brings. She would thus be critical of the forms of capitalism that tend to prevent most people from owning property. Certainly, attempts to eliminate imbalances, which are natural and inevitable outcomes of all self-organizing processes, would be more effective if one understood social organizations as complex systems.

Wheeler rightly contends that it is the role of governments (not scientists) to suggest "intervening in complex totalities in strategic ways so as to ensure the health, creativity, and adaptability … of all." She furthermore writes, "in order to make effective interventions in complex biological systems such as ecologies and human societies, we need to have a good theory, consistent with complexity science's general observations about the characteristics of complex systems." Wheeler is careful not to say that the complexity sciences offer a theory for intervention.  What she does say is a theory should be constructed based on the observations of complexity science.  I commend her caution here since there is in fact no such thing as "complexity theory" or "chaos theory" -- at least not in Popper's sense -- no way to falsifying the claims being made by the workers in this field. And as yet, complexity scientists cannot make predictions about the behavior of complex systems, and so they can't offer any theories as to how one might manipulate them predictably. However, according to one notable complexity worker, James Crutchfield, soon enough it will be possible to make predictions about the categories of complex objects that are more likely than others (specific prediction remaining impossible), and he recommends that some measure be taken now to include marginalized people, such as artists, writers, and philosophers, in discussions about what kinds of intervention might be desirable (personal communication).

capitalism can be highly creative, but it can often be more faddish than truly adaptive, and it currently tends to favor investment over work. Moreover, even though capitalist systems are self-organized, she points out that their boundaries are drawn to closely -- in the minds of those with the most control -- excluding the wider context of employees' relationships, family and community, health, and, indeed, to the environment itself. Wheeler believes capitalism will transform itself in time, but only if it is subjected to constant intellectual and environmental pressures. A number of American businesses have already responded, since they have an interest in understanding how organizations work and getting them to run more efficiently. One of the things frequently recommended by those applying complexity science research to management is greater interactivity among all workers: employee, management, and CEOs. Also advocated is employee-ownership, which confers what Wheeler, after leading biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer, calls "semiotic freedom."

If there is anything we have learned from complexity science (or more correctly from cybernetics, one of its predecessors) is that centralized control does not work to effectively manipulate a complex system.  Although socialism is often associated with ineffective and inefficient bureaucracy, there are many varieties of socialism, and Wheeler envisions a government and a society that generously distributes the power of decision throughout its structure.

But to say that this book simply advocates the creation of self-organized societies, businesses and governments would be to miss an important fact. Any society, good or bad, is a self-organized system.  Not all self-organized systems are necessarily good. What they are are robust, stable, resistant to change, even when they are irrational. While (what we call) social progress may require democratic socialism or self-organization (i.e, a system in which every individual has an equal chance to be heard and to speak and to effect and be effected), it might also require the occasional intervention of a benevolent despot, who might overwhelm self-organizing trends, bringing something new (which may be initially viewed as perverse).

To conclude, Wheeler's book is a jubilant celebration of some important key ideas for the humanities. Fully immersed in her subject, her style is like her thesis, fluid, far-ranging, flowering and musical. She writes well on a subject she feels deeply about. I have but one criticism against her hopes for society with full semiotic freedom: if everyone interacted equally freely and frequently, too much homogeneity would set it, and our social system would become too resistant to change, too self-affirming. One of the things we understand from the complexity sciences is that imbalance is sometimes healthy. Marginalization and extreme stress can actually encourage favorable adaptations. This is something Thomas Pynchon brings to our awareness in Crying of Lot 49, when he implies that only the disenfranchised have the power to overcome the awful homogeneity in which Oedipa is trapped. It may be that a society needs marginalized people to occasionally disrupt the system and to further evolution.  Fortunately, hardship and isolation will be with us forever because self-organization is constantly creating imbalances--and creating writers like Wheeler, who partly because of their relative isolation, are capable of having original ideas.

 

Ay, Nihat., Jessica Flack and David C. Krakauer. "Robustness and Complexity Co-constructed in Multi-modal Signaling Networks." Special Edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society. London. B, (in press).

 

Deacon, Terrance, Tyonne Cashman and Jeremy Sherman. "Disembodiment: Absence as the Root of Intentionality" Working paper, 16 Dec. 2006. <http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/info.pdf>.

 

Feldman, David and James P. Crutchfield. "Measures of Statistical Complexity: Why?" Physics Letters A 238 (1998): 244-252.

 

Goldstein, Jeffrey. "Emergence radical novelty, and the philosophy of mathematics." Nonlinear Dynamics in the Life and Social Sciences. Eds. W. Sulis and I. Trofimova. NATO Science Series. 320. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2001, 133-152.

 

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

 

Laughlin, Robert. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

 Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D.