Since beginning my PhD program in communication, I have become increasingly interested in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Biosemiotics. The website for the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies can be found here. Scholars in the nascent interdiscipline publish in journals ranging from biology to philosophy to linguistics. What they share in common is a willingness to consider the communicative/signing possibilities of all living systems. That is, communication and meaning-making are not seen as the province of humans (or near-humans) alone. Cells communicate through exchange of chemicals that cause fundamental changes when they breach semi-permeable membranes. Ecosystems communicate through any myriad of living processes - communication that is interpretable from both within and without the systems. Animals communicate and make meaning of those communications in ways that cannot be reduced to Cartesian mechanics, nor to a reductionist physicalism.
As someone who is interested in the possibility of dethroning humans from the top of a communication hierarchy, instead inviting us to see ourselves as but part of an interconnected web of communication that embraces all existence, I welcome the vision that I have seen in biosemiotics. I think there is real promise in this emerging field to address the fundamental anthropocentrism that is a part of our current understanding of rhetoric, meaning-making, and politics. It is for that reason that I will be bringing some insights from biosemiotics into my semester project, examining how the animal voices were or were not heard in the fight over Prop B here in Missouri.
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