Universe of the Mind:. Semiotic Theory of Culture. Yuri M. Lotman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.288 pp. $45.00 (cloth)

Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture

ion from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter, such as in metaphysics, whereas the prefix holo(from Greek: holos = whole) is more appropriate because it is used in English to denote whole, entire, and entirety. Third, the term hologenome parallels the accepted term holobiont. What is the relationship between the hologenome concept and the classical phenomenon of symbiosis? The term symbiosis was first coined by Anton de Bary (1879) in the nineteenth century as ‘‘the living together of different species.’’ His broad definition is still generally accepted. The symbiotic system is usually constructed from a large partner termed the host and smaller partners called symbionts. This arbitrary division by dimension between host and symbiont may not fit all systems because size can be measured by cell number or by genome size, and in the case of many symbioses the microorganisms both outnumber their host and contain more genetic information. In spite of these limitations, the definition of host and symbiont based on size continues to be widely used, although it would be more appropriate to consider both the host and symbionts as constituents of the holobiont. Among the symbionts one finds endosymbionts and exosymbionts, referring to microrganisms living inside or outside host cells, respectively. Symbioses can also take many forms; most of them are defined as different levels of mutualism, when both the host and the symbiont benefit from the interaction. When the symbiont benefits and the host suffers damage, symbiosis is termed parasitism (or pathogenesis). Commensalism is accepted to be a close association of two or more dissimilar organisms where the association is advantageous to one and does not affect the other(s). These types of symbioses may change under different circumstances, for example, parasitic microorganisms can become beneficial under different circumstances (Taylor et al. 2005). The hologenome concept presents a novel way of looking at symbiosis. Until recently most of the important research on symbiosis has been carried out with a small number of model systems involving a host and a single primary symbiont, e.g., aphids and their endosymbiotic bacterium Buchnera sp (Wilson et al. 2010), the squid light organ and Vibrio fischeri (Nyholm and McFall-Ngai 2004), hard corals and their photosynthetic microalga of the genus Symbiodinium (Buddemeier et al. 2004), and legumes (Fabaceae) and nitrogen-fixing rhizobia (Ott et al. 2009). 4

The Hologenome Concept Human Animal and Plant Microbiota 2013th Edition

Practicing Philosophy, Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life

This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today's unstable culture-nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for ecological phenomena. The arguments in this Element are developed in three steps that take inspiration from both humanities and biological sciences: 1) Showing the diversity, reach and effects of sign-mediated relations in the natural environment from the level of a single individual up the functioning of the ecosystem. 2) Demonstrating numerous ways in which prelinguistic semiotic relations are part of culture and identifying detrimental environmental effects that self-contained and purely symbol-based sign systems, texts and discourses bring along. 3) Demonstrating how ecosemiotic analysis centred on models and modelling can effectively map relations between texts and the natural environment, or the lack thereof, and how this methodology can be used artistically to initiate environmentally friendly cultural forms and practices.

Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies

Ce livre est un hommage a Yves Benot, historien et militant de l’anticolonialisme, disparu dans les premiers jours de 2005. Il est compose de textes selectionnes et presentes par Roland Desne et Marcel Dorigny, tires d’une œuvre considerable. Avec un tres grand esprit de rigueur, Yves Benot s’est consacre tant a la decolonisation de l’Afrique noire, qu’aux fondements intellectuels de l’anticolonialisme et l’antiesclavagisme au siecle des Lumieres, notamment a travers l’apport de Diderot a l’H...

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Les Lumières, l’esclavage, la colonisation

The notion of semiosphere is certainly one of Lotman’s most discussed ideas. In this essay, we propose to investigate its ecological and biological dimensions, tracing them back to Vernadsky’s concept of biosphere and to Lotman’s environmental vision of art articulated in his early work, The Structure of the Artistic Text. Our investigation reveals how the biosemiotic undercurrents in Lotmanian thought enable the emergence of a cyclical, homeostatic model of culture that counterbalances a Modernist vision of art as a force working for unquestioned linear progress.

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The Semiosphere, Between Informational Modernity and Ecological Postmodernity

This article proposes a biosemiotic reading of William S. Burroughs’ The Wild Boys – A Book of the Dead (1971), showing how literature, by cutting up narrative structures and syntactical units, can fight the language virus’ configuring of human vitality, just like bacteria uses CRISPR-Cas9 to cut-up the DNA code-chains of threatening viruses. We will see that, supported by the shared biosemiosic nature of literary texts and biological forms, this parallel extends beyond the metaphorical to reinsert literature within the realm of living processes.

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William S. Burroughs and The Wild Boys Against the Language Virus: A Biosemiotic Guerilla

Summary This article explores the relations among three forms of representations (artistic, mental, and neural) and immersion, considered as an altered state of consciousness, in the context of literary reading. We first define immersive reading as an intensification of our embodied experience of literary representation, in accordance to neuropsychological studies about embodied cognition. We further consider the style of interpretation demanded by such immersive reading and its ethical and ecological underpinnings.

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Representation and Immersion. The Embodied Meaning of Literature

From the visual to the articulatory, from the rhythmical to the affective, and from the somesthetic to the spiritual, Stephen Dedalus’ poetic maturing in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man invites us to travel the paths leading from body to mind and from mind to body. How does Joyce’s writing formulate such an invitation? And how does the reader’s neurophysiological, imitative body respond to it? It is through a neuroaesthetic conception of reading as an embodied performance relying on empathic resonance and sensorimotor simulation that I propose to explore how the Joycean text reconfigures the reader’s sensorimotor experience.

Joycean Text/Empathic Reader: A Modest Contribution to Literary Neuroaesthetics

Human sign production and exchange is shaped by biological factors, such as our mutualistic relationship with food plants. This chapter investigates the relation between the semiotic acceleration typical of Modernity, the development of industrial-colonial capitalism, and sugarcane cultivation by European planters, resulting in the growing importance of sugar in the Western diet, with its impact on global health and the environment. How did sugarcane cultivation contribute to the modern intensification of production and consumption? Should we consider plants that associate with humans as shapers of our semiosis? And how do the arts, and more specifically literature, function within this complex biosemiotic system? In this chapter, I speculate on the interrelations between the life of signs and the life of plants, in the context of the colonial, industrial and neurophysiological history of sugar, using Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) as an example of the pharmacological role literature and the arts can play in the context of ecological and world health crises.

Pierre-Louis Patoine

Papers

The Semiosphere, Between Informational Modernity and Ecological Postmodernity

William S. Burroughs and The Wild Boys Against the Language Virus: A Biosemiotic Guerilla

Representation and Immersion. The Embodied Meaning of Literature

Joycean Text/Empathic Reader: A Modest Contribution to Literary Neuroaesthetics

How Sugarcane Accelerated Semiosis During Industrial Modernity, and How We Can Slow Down with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory