How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn

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How Forests Think - Eduardo Kohn

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come to be interpreted by a subsequent sign in a semiotic chain that extends into the possible future.

      The startled monkey’s jump to a higher perch is a part of this living semiotic chain. It is what Peirce called an “interpretant,” a new sign that interprets the way in which a prior sign relates to its object.11 Interpretants can be further specified through an ongoing process of sign production and interpretation that increasingly captures something about the world and increasingly orients an interpreting self toward this aboutness. Semiosis is the name for this living sign process through which one thought gives rise to another, which in turn gives rise to another, and so on, into the potential future.12 It captures the way in which living signs are not just in the here and now but also in the realm of the possible.

      Although semiosis is something more than mechanical efficiency, thinking is not just confined to some separate realm of ideas.13 A sign has an effect, and this, precisely, is what an interpretant is. It is the “proper significate effect that the sign produces” (CP 5.475). The monkey’s jump, sparked by her reaction to a crashing palm, amounts to an interpretant of a prior sign of danger. It makes visible an energetic component that is characteristic of all sign processes, even those that might seem purely “mental.”14 Although semiosis is something more than energetics and materiality, all sign processes eventually “do things” in the world, and this is an important part of what makes them alive.15

      Signs don’t come from the mind. Rather, it is the other way around. What we call mind, or self, is a product of semiosis. That “somebody,” human or nonhuman, who takes the crashing palm to be significant is a “self that is just coming into life in the flow of time” (CP 5.421) by virtue of the ways in which she comes to be a locus—however ephemeral—for the “interpretance” of this sign and many others like it. In fact, Peirce coined the cumbersome term interpretant to avoid the “homunculus fallacy” (see Deacon 2012: 48) of seeing a self as a sort of black box (a little person inside us, a homunculus) who would be the interpreter of those signs but not herself the product of those signs. Selves, human or nonhuman, simple or complex, are outcomes of semiosis as well as the starting points for new sign interpretation whose outcome will be a future self. They are waypoints in a semiotic process.

      These selves, “just coming into life,” are not shut off from the world; the semiosis occurring “inside” the mind is not intrinsically different from that which occurs among minds. That palm crashing down in the forest illustrates this living worldly semiosis as it is embedded in an ecology of disparate emerging selves. Hilario’s iconic simulation of a falling palm charts a possible future that then becomes realized in a palm that he actually fells. Its crash, in turn, is interpreted by another being whose life will change thanks to the way she takes this as a sign of something upon which she must act. What emerges is a highly mediated but nevertheless unbroken chain that jumps from the realm of human speech to that of human bodies and their actions, and from these to events-in-the-world such as a tree crashing down that these realized embodied intentions actualize, and from here to the equally physical reaction that the semiotic interpretation of this event provokes in another kind of primate high up in a tree. The crashing palm and the human who felled it came to affect the monkey, notwithstanding their physical separation from her. Signs have worldly effects even though they are not reducible to physical cause-and-effect.

      Such tropical trans-species attempts at communication reveal the living worldly nature of semiosis. All semiosis (and by extension thought) takes place in minds-in-the-world. To highlight this characteristic of semiosis this is how Peirce described the thought practices of Antoine Lavoisier, the eighteenth-century French aristocrat and founder of the modern field of chemistry:

      Lavoisier’s method was . . . to dream that some long and complicated chemical process would have a certain effect, to put it into practice with dull patience, after its inevitable failure, to dream that with some modification it would have another result, and to end by publishing the last dream as a fact: his way was to carry his mind into his laboratory, and literally to make of his alembics and cucurbits instruments of thought, giving a new conception of reasoning as something which was to be done with one’s eyes open, in manipulating real things instead of words and fancies. (CP 5.363)

      Where would we locate Lavoisier’s thoughts and dreams? Where, if not in this emerging world of blown glass cucurbits and alembics and the mixtures contained in their carefully delimited spaces of absence and possibility, is his mind, and future self, coming in to being?

      ABSENCES

      Lavoisier’s blown glass flasks point to another important element of semiosis. Like these curiously shaped receptacles, signs surely have an important materiality: they possess sensuous qualities; they are instantiated with respect to the bodies that produce and are produced by them; and they can make a difference in the worlds that they are about. And yet, like the space delimited by the walls of the flask, signs are also in important ways immaterial. A glass flask is as much about what it is as it is about what it is not; it is as much about the vessel blown into form by the glassmaker—and all the material qualities and technological, political, and socioeconomic histories that made that act of creation possible—as it is about the specific geometry of absence that it comes to delimit. Certain kinds of reactions can take place in that flask because of all the others that are excluded from it.

      This kind of absence is central to the semiosis that sustains and instantiates life and mind. It is apparent in what played out in the forest that afternoon as we were out hunting monkeys. Now that that young woolly monkey had moved to a more exposed perch Lucio tried to shoot at it with his muzzle-loading black powder shotgun. But when he pulled the trigger the hammer simply clicked down on the firing cap. Lucio quickly replaced the defective cap and reloaded—this time packing the barrel with an extra dose of lead shot. When the monkey climbed to an even more exposed position, Hilario encouraged his son to fire again: “Hurry, now really!” Wary of the precarious nature of his firearm, however, Lucio first uttered, “teeeye.”

      FIGURE 4. A muzzle-loading shotgun (illapa). Photo by author.

      Teeeye, like tsupu, ta ta, and pu oh, is an image in sound. It is iconic of a gun successfully firing and hitting its target. The mouth that pronounces it is like a flask that assumes the various shapes of a firing gun. First the tongue taps on the palette to produce the stopped consonant the way a hammer strikes a firing cap. Then the mouth opens ever wider as it pronounces the expanding elongated vowel, the way lead shot, propelled by the explosion of powder ignited by the cap, sprays out of the barrel (figure 4).

      Moments later Lucio pulled the trigger. And this time, with a deafening teeeye, the gun fired.

      Teeeye is, at many levels, a product of what it is not. The shape of the mouth effectively eliminates all the many other sounds that could have been made as breath is voiced. What is left is a sound that “fits” the object it represents thanks to the many sounds that are absent. The object that is not physically present constitutes a second absence. Finally, teeeye involves another absence in the sense that it is a representation of a future brought into the present in the hopes that this not-yet will affect the present. Lucio hopes his gun will successfully fire teeeye when he pulls the trigger. He imported this simulation into the present from the possible world that he hopes will come to be. This future-possible, which orients Lucio toward taking all the steps needed to make this future possible, is also a constitutive absence. What teeeye is—its significate effect, in short, its meaning—is dependent on all these things that it is not.

      All signs, and not just those we might call magical, traffic in the future in the way that teeeye does. They are calls to act in the present through an absent but re-presented future that, by virtue of this call, can then come to affect the present; “Hurry, now really,” as Hilario implored his son moments before he fired his gun, involves a prediction that

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