Freedom, Repression and Constraints

Abstract

Semiosis has a tendency to grow, to lead to more semiosis. Yet, organisms often need to decelerate that growth, or repeat parts of it; this occurs through the appearance of invariants. As Peirce argues, it is the “essential function of a sign to render inefficient relations efficient – not to set them into action, but to establish a habit or general rule whereby they will act …” (8.332). Beyond invariance, an important issue in respect of the continuity of nature as it encompasses culture is that of the apparent impediment or blockage to straightforward development of a phenomenon. As will be seen in Chap. 8, the issue is occasionally overlooked in understandings of culture; invariably, though, there will be plenty of evidence to reveal that one or another cultural phenomenon has not had a smooth trajectory delivering it to its current stage of development. Instead, it will have been subject to overdetermination and uneven development. In Chap. 8, it will be shown that the descriptions of nature offered by biosemiotics need to be alive to overdetermination and unevenness, too. In the present chapter, the focus is on the conceptualisation of impediments to development, some of their consequences and how they are played out in relation to one aspect of culture in particular, the interface of the visual and the nonverbal more generally.

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Semiosis has a tendency to grow, to lead to more semiosis. Yet, organisms often need to decelerate that growth, or repeat parts of it; this occurs through the appearance of invariants. As Peirce argues, it is the “essential function of a sign to render inefficient relations efficient – not to set them into action, but to establish a habit or general rule whereby they will act …” (8.332). Beyond invariance, an important issue in respect of the continuity of nature as it encompasses culture is that of the apparent impediment or blockage to straightforward development of a phenomenon. As will be seen in Chap. 8, the issue is occasionally overlooked in understandings of culture; invariably, though, there will be plenty of evidence to reveal that one or another cultural phenomenon has not had a smooth trajectory delivering it to its current stage of development. Instead, it will have been subject to overdetermination and uneven development. In Chap. 8, it will be shown that the descriptions of nature offered by biosemiotics need to be alive to overdetermination and unevenness, too. In the present chapter, the focus is on the conceptualisation of impediments to development, some of their consequences and how they are played out in relation to one aspect of culture in particular, the interface of the visual and the nonverbal more generally.

It would be foolish to imagine that evolutionary biology is impervious to multiple causes, despite popular accounts reducing it to key phrases. In Chap. 3 of On the Origin of Species, Darwin writes of the “struggle for existence”, noting that variations, if they are in any way profitable to the individuals of a species “in their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life” (Darwin 1872: 49) will tend to preserve those individuals and be inherited by the offspring, giving them a better chance of surviving. This principle is called “natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection” (Darwin 1872: 69). In the following chapter of Origin, in which he gives an extended definition of ‘“natural selection’”, Darwin writes,

Let it also be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life; and consequently what infinitely varied diversities of structure might be of use to each being under changing conditions of life. Can it then be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should occur in the course of many successive generations? (Darwin 1872: 62–63)

Darwin is drawing attention, here, to factors of overdetermination. The key point is the complexity of relations in niches or enclaves of organisms and the “physical conditions of life”. Of course, this stress is evidence that Darwin gave due consideration to the manifold nature of the conditions in which organisms exist, in contrast to the popular conception of natural selection as an immutable law. Nevertheless, there is a privileging of the conception of “use” in this statement, enforcing an unquestioned elision from “use” to “survival”. Later, Darwin does try to mitigate that elision when he refers to the bee sting bringing the creature’s own death, to huge numbers of drones being slaughtered by their sterile sisters, the waste of pollen by fir trees and Ichneumonidae feeding within the living body of caterpillars. He concludes that “[t]he wonder indeed, is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been detected” (Darwin 1872: 415).

On the issue of “use”, these statements of Darwin remain mere qualifications. Famously, “use” has been challenged by Gould and Lewontin (1979) and Gould and Vrba (1982), in articles dedicated to unravelling the important distinction between current utility and historical genesis in evolution. More forceful for its deviation from the mainstream of evolutionary biology, however, is Hoffmeyer and Kull’s (2003: 269) thesis that “use”, in the sense in which it is envisaged in an “ecological niche”, is superseded by “use” in the “semiotic niche” where the organism may have more control because it is in a conjunction in which all latently relevant cues have to be correctly interpreted. In a niche an organism does not attend solely to food, comfort and reproduction; instead, it must attend to an array of signs that are associated with those desirable entities (as it will also have to consider the signs of undesirable or “neutral”, ignorable entities). Given the range of individual circumstances and signs that accrue, Hoffmeyer and Kull posit a Baldwinian perspective rather than a strictly Darwinian one since “organisms do not passively succumb to the severity of environmental judgment. Instead, they perceive, interpret, and act in the environment in ways that creatively and unpredictable change the whole setting for selection and evolution” (Hoffmeyer and Kull 2003: 269–270).

This not only extends the overdetermination that Darwin identified, but also unties the straitjacket constraining the complexity of niches in the Darwinian account. Still, overdetermination of niches has received only a partial theoretical framing. While Darwin binds survival with the principle of natural selection, Hoffmeyer and Kull free it through the agency which a semiotic environment facilitates. But, notwithstanding the latter’s institution of a more agentive organism, neither consider the quality of survival. Nor is there a theorising of the nature of, on the one hand, the partiality in accounts of natural selection (Gould, Lewontin and Vrba are in a position to develop this, but do not) and, on the other, circumstantial limits on agency. Put another way, they do not theorise how “unfavourable” conditions might contribute to survival of organisms conceived as possessing agency. It seems that Darwinism, has not theorized how some things come to fruition and some things are prevented from coming to fruition. To put it yet another way, there is no account of the mechanisms by which, out of two favourable outcomes for survival, one might be ‘repressed’. Nor is there a sense in which agency might precipitate one kind of survival rather than another. It is only recently, in fact, that biosemiotics has fine tuned such a theory.

Darwin had nothing to say on this issue, but another of the “great modern thinkers” whose work is, likewise, by no means unimpeachable, did. In his 1915 paper on repression, Freud states that an instinctual impulse may meet with resistances which seek to render it inoperative. If the impulse comes from an external location it can be countered by flight; but this alternative is not possible with an instinct, so the ultimate resistance, for humans at any rate, is condemnation based on judgment. The preliminary stage of this process of condemnation is repression, “something between flight and condemnation” (Freud 1984[1915]: 145). Yet, since satisfaction of an instinct is usually pleasurable, it is difficult to account for the internal stifling of an instinct or the transformation of it into unpleasure. Freud suggests that repression is therefore a matter of competing impulses in which the one that is repressed is, in fact, turned away or kept from consciousness (Freud 1984 [1915]: 147). Irrespective of whether one accepts the entire Freudian cartography of consciousness, his outlining of the terms of repression is nonetheless persuasive. Freud suggests that there is “primal repression”, a first phase in which the “psychical representation” of the instinct is denied. This is followed by “repression proper”, affecting mental derivatives of the repressed representative. Furthermore, the derivatives of the representative are said to each have their own vicissitudes. However, each case of repression is potentially subject to displacement and/or condensation. In the latter, the repressed idea is a receptacle for multiple causes beyond itself. In the former case, the repressed instinct is merely located to another idea or object—Freud gives the case of an animal phobia (the famous “Wolf Man”, in fact) where repressed feelings in respect of the patient’s father are worked out in relation to fear of wolves. Ultimately, Freud is no more able to say what the derivatives are and what determines specific repressions any more than Darwin is able to give a definitive account of “use”. Both have to concede that specific instances are invariably massively overdetermined.

What is clear, however, is that the act of repression, like anxiety, is semiotic in nature: it contains an “idea” and associations to that idea. The instinctual impulse—about which Freud is sketchy—cannot really be conceived without its semiotic accoutrements. This may be one reason why psychoanalysis, despite having relatively little impact on psychology, has had some contribution to make to socio-cultural thought, implicitly or explicitly. In semiotics, for example, a central—but largely implicit—concept in the work of Ponzio and Petrilli (Petrilli 2005; Petrilli and Ponzio 2005; Ponzio 1993, 2006a, b; Petrilli and Ponzio 1998; Petrilli 2014) is that capitalism, and latterly global communication, has constituted a sustained repression of dialogue, a force blocking the ultimate inescapable demand of the other. Typically, individualism has been the touchstone of this enterprise, but this has been accelerated in late capitalism through the promotion of monologic identity. In short: one set of impulses and associations advances while another is impeded.

Yet where some kind of repression is most evident in semiotic terms is in quotidian human interactions and their ontogenesis: the arena of psychology, perhaps, but, in place of the speculative sexual aetiology of psychoanalysis, semiotics offers a more reasoned evolutionary basis. Before considering impediments and blockages of development in nature at large, it is worth suggesting that the clearest example of a natural ‘repression’ with a major cultural consequence concerns nonverbal communication in human development. Although there has been little work carried out on this process, from the period when toddlers learn words, linking and elementary syntax there is a palpable repression of nonverbal communication. Indeed, this repression is institutionalised at this age by speech therapists and numerous “medical” tests to ensure that children are developing grammar. There has been opposition to, and struggle against, such linguistic imperialism—for example, by the deaf (Maher 1997). However, even this example leans towards a linguistic incarnation of communication while, in general, nonverbal communication in humans—gesture, proxemics, kinesics, music, visual communication of bodily changes—is viewed as a supplement to spoken language. It is this fact that makes Sebeok’s (1988) (re)formulation of primary modelling all the more startling: as discussed in Chap. 3 (above), human “language” is shown to consist of an innate modelling device (geared to cognitive differentiation) which has become exapted for speech communication but, in the 2 million year history of the species (from Homo habilis), seemed to have allowed communication during the species’ first 1.2 million years to take place via exclusively nonverbal means. Consider this matter, then, in relation to the ‘visual’ in culture – it offers an instructive case study in respect of the ‘repression’ or neglect of the nonverbal by cultural analysis and offers an opportunity to consider a new formulation of the process of ‘repression’ across nature.

As has been seen in preceding chapters semiotics is not only a discipline devoted to carrying out a micro-analysis of an artifact and then extrapolating from the findings some general observation about the artifact in question or the class of artifacts. From the early twentieth century onwards, including the spread of interest in Saussure’s Cours, the benefits of close reading started to be enjoyed across the human sciences and semiotics was at the forefront of that. Yet, after biosemiotics especially, semiotics in its more contemporary guise consists not so much of micro-analysis, but in the act of stepping back to enable a broader view of how signification is organized in terms of media, modes, genres and species-specific semiosis. One manifestation of this contemporary programme has been the semiotic impulse to investigate ‘the visual’, rather than just ‘visual artifacts’. Of course, something of the flavour of this has been offered outside of semiotics in respect to the impetus to identify ‘visual culture’ as a phenomenon characteristic of the contemporary social formation.

Developing in the 1990s, a number of commentators posited a pictorial, rather than ‘textual’, view of the world, where the ‘world-as-text’ was thought to be replaced by the ‘world-as-picture’. In those heady days of the publishing venture known as ‘postmodernism’, many promoting ‘picture theory’ did so because they were identifying the new epoch as one which was dominated by the image (for example, Mirzoeff 1999; Mitchell 1994, inter alia). Possibly in an attempt to make this emphasis on the visual seem new, it was married with the masochism of French theory, particularly Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), to promote a refreshed version of what Martin Jay (1993) has identified as the “denigration of vision”. Fredric Jameson’s book, Signatures of the Visible (1990: 1–2) is exemplary in this respect: “The visual”, he writes,

is essentially pornographic, which is to say it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer). Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.

This somewhat unequivocal assertion might come as a surprise to fans of A Chump at Oxford (1940) or Rashomon (1950), but it is a statement that is typical of the “ocularcentrism” that Jay sees in French thought and its epigones. Its masochism derives from the fact that it simultaneously delineates the walls of a prison from which there is no escape and nowhere to escape to—much like the narrative of the television series, The Prisoner (1967)—while longing for the outside world whose existence beyond its walls it has already denied. It matches the way Foucault’s thought is torn between the omnipotence of all-pervading discursive formations and the longing for an anarcho-libertarian domain that the concept of discourse decrees is a figment of the imagination (Eagleton 2003; Levin 1997). The shadow of the ‘Panopticon’ (Bentham 1995; Foucault 1977) is constantly cast over ‘visual culture’ as a reminder of the supposed prison of almost total, controlling surveillance that humans have lived under since the Enlightenment. The ‘visual’ is seen as an implacable technology, its avatars mere versions of Michael, the camera lens-obsessed murderer in Peeping Tom (1960).

Contrast the position of ‘visual culture’, post-structuralism and ocularcentrism with that of the veteran neonate researcher, Daniel Stern. Recalling the birth of his interest in the ontogenesis of human communication, he writes (1998: 4)

When I was two years old, I was hospitalized for many months for an operation that was complicated by an infection. In those days, antibiotics were not yet very effective and hospital stays could be quite lengthy. In addition, visiting for parents and family were fairly limited. At that age, I spoke only a few words and could understand very little of what was being said. But it was important for me to have a sense of what was happening. Like any child in that situation, I tuned into what people did, how they moved, what was happening on their faces and how they said what they said. In other words, I was paying attention to the music but not the lyrics, as these were beyond me. In short, I became a watcher and reader of the nonverbal. A lot depended on it.

Apart from the heart-rending nature of this account, in which the poor child is left to his own resources and proves most resourceful, modestly recalling later in respect of the nonverbal that “A lot depended on it”, the quote indicates the first repression of nonverbal communication under discussion. The school of denigration of vision and its fellow travellers equate the visual predominantly with photographs and electronic media, entertaining the occasional foray into painting and other art-related practices. What they neglect—preposterously—is that visual technologies are just one minuscule portion of the entire sensory channel of sighted creatures. Of course, visual technologies can be argued to be extremely important as a crucial political battleground, particularly if they can be proven to influence or shape the way humans see. Yet, to forget that understanding the visual requires stepping back to examine how it functions for all sighted species effectively amounts to a repression of nonverbal communication. What Stern depicts in this quote is a world dominated by nonverbal communication, one in which vision is essential to survival and, tellingly, vision does the job adequately but by no means omnipotently.

Necessarily, ‘visual culture’ and the ideas that go with it—which seem quite old-fashioned now, although they have not vanished—are set up here as a ‘straw man’. Nevertheless, they provide a contrast with a semiotics of vision, by which is not meant an apolitical, text-centred and self-centred hermeneutic, but an assessment of the role of vision in human semiosis. Thus, on the one side, there is a tradition and trajectory of thought in which discourse and the tyranny of vision is posited, along with an anarcho-libertarian hinterland which should not, according to that trajectory, exist. On the other side, there is a fast-developing trajectory in which vision is considered in terms of its embeddedness in an entire field available to the sensory channel of sight—a field which is highly diversified, features related forms and content and, through those widest of relations, offers the opportunity to determine how a species ‘sees’. That field is not characterized by well-honed machines in a functionalist apparition of complementarity and control. Instead, it is riven with the potential for miscommunication and apprehends reality in only a fragmented way. It is a far cry from panopticism.

The field of nonverbal communication has been sufficiently variegated to have garnered some attention; and in recent decades, despite the historically and institutionally determined dominance of linguistics and the study of verbal communication, that field has even managed to fashion a place for itself in the academy (see, for example, Hall and Knapp 2013). In the popular imagination, nonverbal communication occupies a prominent position through the unfortunately designated ‘body language’. The demotic understanding of ‘body language’, promoted since the 1970s in business manuals and popular guides (e.g. Fast 1970), is tacitly based on the notion that bodily communication among humans is highly codified and subject to a kind of ‘grammar’. Sebeok (2001a) shows that this assumption is mistaken and argues that, like terminology such as ‘the language of flowers’, ‘ape language’ and so forth, the phrase ‘body language’ is to be avoided. When semioticians refer to nonverbal communication they are acknowledging the trafficking of signs within an organism or between two or more organisms (Sebeok 2001a). In humans, bodily communication comprises a number of elements. The most commonly recognized is manual communication or gesture (Kendon 2004). Yet there is also ‘kinesics’ (Birdwhistell 1970), made up of bodily movement and posture. As well, there is ‘proxemics’ (Hall 1966), focused on the orientation, proximity and distance of bodies as a matter of communication. These key features of human nonverbal communication, combined with general communicative attributes in the field of vision, have given rise to a number of media forms. These include mixed forms, such as theatre, with its combination of speech, nonverbal communication (bodily, and in set design/lighting etc.) and verbal communication. Film, television and, especially opera and other media that also incorporate music are supremely mixed forms (Sebeok 2001a). Yet, when making such observations, it is easy to forget that nonverbal communication inheres in the visible—or, as the ocularcentrists forgot, the visible is inherent in nonverbal communication—with respect to these media. The mise-en-scene of a film such as Alien (1979), featuring the justly famous interiors created by H. R. Giger, arguably carries out a large proportion of the communication in that narrative. The set design of a television soap opera such as Eastenders (1985-) no doubt communicates, visually, much of the vaunted ‘realism’ of that particular televisual form.

Yet finding this kind of integrated discussion of media, nonverbality and the field of the visual is not easy. One has to return to the classic, largely forgotten, text by Ruesch and Kees: Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (1956). The authors set out their stall immediately, stating that

the theoretical and systematic study of communication has serious limitations, inasmuch as scientific thinking and reporting are dependent upon verbal and digital language systems whereas human interaction, in contrast, is much more related to nonverbal systems of codification. Although most people are familiar with the rules that govern verbal communication—logic, syntax and grammar—few are aware of the principles that apply to nonverbal communication (1956: n. p.)

As they argue, much of the history of nonverbal communication has not been geared to the same kind of striving for representation that is characteristic of verbal and digital systems. As far as the visual arts were concerned, literal representation was hardly on the agenda before the Renaissance. Well into the Enlightenment, it was photography that provided the possibility, for the first time, of disseminating information at length nonverbally. Clearly, for Ruesch and Kees, the development of scientific thought on the back of writing and then printing in the Enlightenment has served to place further emphasis on the verbal/digital incarnation of knowledge, such that scientific knowledge of human communication has remained depressingly scant (1956: 12). Even with the putative increase of nonverbal semiosis in large amounts, from the arrival of the still photograph through moving pictures through Web 3.0, the idea that “culture is becoming more visual” (e.g. Ibrus 2014) would probably cut no ice with Ruesch and Kees. The problem they identify is also connected to the way that disciplines and subject areas develop in the academy.

What is known as ‘the visual’ has had a strange, but not uncommon, institutional predestination. As Machin (2014: 5) notes,

where a new’ realm of investigation is ‘discovered’ it can then herald a new flurry of activity that can, to those outside looking in, appear rather arbitrary. New network leaders will emerge in this new pioneering area of research. New terminologies will appear to account for the very same things already documented decades before in a different field … In my own field of linguistics, the specialism of ‘multimodality’ has over the last decade seen linguists draw models from their own field to attempt to identify the building blocks of the visual: a visual grammar. But it soon became clear that these scholars were largely ploughing the same furrow as over a century of semiotics, yet still not asking very basic and important questions about the nature of visual signs that had long been standard fare in this long standing tradition.

Elkins (2003; also cited by Machin 2014: 5–6) in particular has been outspoken about the spurious limitations placed on his field, noting the fixation on a clique of theorists and a constrained set of interests that do not proceed far beyond websites, some aspects of television and still photography. Yet, the shortcomings of the ‘visual culture moment’ in the academy remain a straw man because, as Machin rightly argues, they are actually symptomatic of the way many fields develop in the nexus of universities, publishing and higher education policy. The more serious problem is that the growth of new knowledge is stymied by disciplinary protectionism and the wilful neglect of holism. Machin (2014: 6, 9) adds,

What really is the justification and use in analysing the visual apart from other modes of communication, from language, sound and materiality? Most of the communication we come across happens in different modes simultaneously … [I]n fact a wider view of visual communication is one which does not disconnect it from other modes of communication and is in fact the very study of human action and culture.

Effectively, what Machin calls for here is an approach and a field with the same disciplinary principles that Ruesch and Kees adumbrate in their classic work. One name for this would be ‘semiotics of vision’ or ‘visual semiotics’ or, at the very least, ‘semiotics’.

How would such a ‘visual semiotics’ proceed? Well, the name would only be illustrative because it would seek to restore the connection of the visual to other modes of communication. Arguably, the first step should be backwards, to facilitate the kind of wider, species-aware view that has been promoted by biosemiotics. Sebeok thought in precisely such broad strokes and outlined the channels for signs or the channels in which communication takes place:

(Sebeok 1991c: 27)

The ‘visual’ can be found in the optical channel, a physical manifestation of energy which is facilitated by light. The other channels (tactile, acoustic, etc.) are facilitated by other phenomena in the universe. A visual semiotics would not only apprehend the location of the optical channel and its relations; it would also be compelled to ask about the Umwelt that was being invoked in the study of vision, acknowledging that humans are not the only sighted creatures and that the commonalities between the vision of humans and non-human animals need to be considered along with the differences. Hence, Sebeok also indicates the sources of signs:

(Sebeok 1991c: 26)

The clear division here is, first, between organic substances and inorganic objects; then, second, between the speechless creatures and Homo sapiens. What unites the latter two, however, is that they communicate from organism to organism, but also within organisms. Visual semiotics, then, would be concerned with visual artifacts in an ecology of component/organism semiosis. Or, to pitch the matter in a more digestible prose, visual semiotics would look at how visual artifacts operate in association with the range of communication around them, as Machin proposes. This does not mean that the most fruitful work in ‘pictorial semiotics’ (Sonesson 1989) is to be abandoned; however, the pars pro toto fallacies of ‘visual culture’ and the like are to be regarded with suspicion.

Now, it is possible to return to the guiding issue of this chapter: that there is natural blockage, impediment or even repression in human development—in this case, in relation to nonverbal communication where it relies on the optical channel. What is under discussion here is a phylogenetic and ontogenetic matter. As observed in Chap. 3, above, and onwards, the human Umwelt can be understood as being derived from an innate ‘modelling’ device by which humans can differentiate the world. Humans use their sensorium in a comprehensive fashion, utilising, too, the zoosemiotic nonverbal and the anthroposemiotic verbal (Sebeok 1988). As has been seen in previous chapters, this means that there are sign systems (nonverbal communication) which, in terms of evolution, are antecedent to, and give rise to, externalised linguistic sign systems. Nonverbal communication is recognised by Sebeok as an adaptive communicational capacity possessed by all living beings. So, in the development of this modelling, something must be lost with the movement to one mode from another. In the theory of natural selection, it is clear that what gets lost are the species, or species members, who do not adapt fit features to the evolving environmental imperatives. Biosemiotics, on the other hand, has been critical of the ruthless mechanism of the theory of natural selection. Contra neo-Darwinism, it posits ‘semiotic freedom’ and elements of learning in evolution. For example, Hoffmeyer refers to experiments where scientists placed artificial sweeteners rather than glucose in the environment of a chemotactic bacteria cell. He writes (2010b: 164),

In such cases, it seems appropriate to say that the cell misinterprets the chemical signs of its environment. Such misinterpretations are dangerous, and natural selection will favor any solution that helps the organism to better interpret the situations it meets. Indeed, selection would be expected to favor the evolution of more sophisticated forms of “semiotic freedom” in the sense of an increased capacity for responding to a variety of signs through the formation of (locally) ‘meaningful’ interpretants. Semiotic freedom (or interpretance) allows a system to ‘read’ many sorts of ‘cues’ in the surroundings, and this would normally have beneficial effects on fitness. Thus, from the modest beginnings we saw in chemotactic bacteria the semiotic freedom of organic systems would have tended to increase, and although it has not been easy to prove that any systematic increase in complexity, as this concept has traditionally been defined, has in fact accompanied the evolutionary process, it is quite obvious that semiotic complexity or freedom has indeed attained higher levels in later stages, advanced species of birds and mammals in general being semiotically much more sophisticated than less advanced species.

This semiotic freedom characterizes the scaffolding process in evolution, where the organism ‘builds’ on its relation to the environment. Hoffmeyer’s further development of the concept, generalizing it to cover the network of semiotic interactions connecting an organism with its Umwelt, shows how it facilitates processes of perception and action. The piecing together of parts of scaffolding, as has been seen in Chap. 4, above, produces particular reproducible ‘meaning’ for an organism as it takes part in the functional cycle of receiving signs appropriate to the sensorium and producing/circulating sensorium-appropriate signs. As Hoffmeyer (2010b: 164) explains, the process of scaffolding, traversed by semiotic freedom, contains something akin to a ‘goal’:

Allowing for semiotic freedom in the organic world significantly changes the task of explaining emergent evolution, because semiotic freedom has a self-amplifying dynamic. Communicative patterns in assemblies of cells or individuals may often have first appeared as a simple result of the trial-and-error process of normal interaction, and may then endure for considerable periods of time. If such patterns are advantageous to the populations (cells or organisms), they may eventually become scaffolded by later mutational events. Through this ‘semi-Baldwinian’ mechanism, the evolutionary process will enter a formerly forbidden area of goal-directedness.

Thus, the semiotic freedom of organisms is responsible for its survival, for its evolution and contributes to changes in its environment.

Yet, such descriptions, in presenting a functional process, often run the risk of overlooking possible impediments or by-products of forward-looking mechanics. What about those occasions when one choice is made over another? Something has to be lost or left behind. Sometimes what is left behind is something that it is beneficial to lose, such as negative memories (Ritchie et al. 2015); sometimes leaving something behind has deleterious consequences. The matter has to be considered in biosemiotics because, apart from anything else, it is part of agentive action. Semiotic freedom necessarily involves choice of one course rather than another. In studying such freedom, there is often a need to investigate the choices that get rejected (and why), particularly as they may later become choices once more or there may be opportunities for the organism to revisit or relive the moment of choice. In the case of the phylogenetic development of communication, it is clear that the ‘choice’—exaptation—of linear speech for human communication was significant. By no means did it eclipse nonverbal communication; nor did it demote nonverbal communication to a subsidiary role in real terms; but it did ensure a bias towards the verbal and a disregard for the nonverbal that effectively banished such communication to a realm that is not conscious in the way that it was for earlier hominid ancestors.

A related fate can be seen with respect to ontogenetic repression of human nonverbality. In infancy, the child is almost solely reliant on nonverbal signs. Its Umwelt is attuned to verbal signs and such signs will certainly circulate there; but those same kinds of signs will not yet emanate from the child her/himself. For the infant, as Stern (above) suggests, a lot depends on nonverbal communication. Around 18 months, however, the child with an expected development rate will start to use speech and syntax in an elementary fashion. It is for this reason that children’s development is usually tested at that time: in Europe, this principally takes place through the public health system. The results of such tests may enable a decision to make an early intervention in those cases where the child is not developing as expected, indicating, through this symptom, auditory or cognitive problems. Such tests administered at 18 months in the UK are geared to literacy, grammar and syntax. The child’s powers of concentration are observed, while the main focus is on the child’s ability to understand words and, above all, link them in sentences. Yet, the following are not tested or observed: skills in drawing, gesturing, singing, sense of body space, rhythm, powers of mimicry, etc. The unpredictable nature of young children’s behavior and attention will mean that at least one of these skills will invariably manifest itself even in the controlled circumstances of the test. Yet, such skills are not the focus of the test or taken as indicative of cognitive potential.

That infant innate powers of nonverbal communication do not simply disappear from 18 months onwards is powerfully affirmed by the work of stage magicians. In sleight-of-hand, legerdemain and prestidigitazione, they pull off tricks that, by virtue of their seemingly occult mechanisms, amaze onlookers. Yet, such tricks are almost totally dominated by mastery on the part of the magician, and forgetting on the part of the audience, of ‘lost’ nonverbal arts. Lions can therefore be tamed by the re-learning of the niceties of proxemics. A coin can be surreptitiously pocketed at the moment a seemingly insignificant gesture distracts the onlooker. The magician can predict the answers of an audience member, simply by ‘muscle reading’ their kinesics. The audience could have developed all of these skills possessed by the magician; but, without the magician’s dedication and focus on the task, it would have taken a lifetime.

At a certain stage in phylogenesis, it is reasonable to assume, the field of human sight was more attuned to the nonverbal communication which took place in the human’s environment. With the advent of linear speech, humans became creatures unique in their possession of verbal and nonverbal modes. Machin’s lamentation, above, regarding the separation of modes for the purposes of academic study is therefore entirely apposite in this light. Fixation on the visual apparatus of some technologies alone is not only unhelpful, it is also impractical since so many ‘technologies of vision’ are already verbal-audio-visual. Furthermore, such fixation also represses the fact that the field of the visual is irrevocably embedded in the encompassing field of nonverbal communication in general (which also includes an ineffable number of transactions currently invisible to the human eye). Moreover, there is a predicament that subtends all of these matters: that is, the problem inherent in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic repression of nonverbal communication. That there has ever been an impetus to isolate the ‘visual’ and to treat it as a realm of (semi-)autonomous functioning—or, yet more problematic, dictated by linguistic principles rather than associated to them by dint of a common modelling ancestor—is symptomatic of a grave error. It is precisely that error which has given rise to the idea of ‘visual culture’ and the want of sobriety in the assertion that culture is becoming more visual.

Apart from its role in making communication more efficient in specific contexts and putatively contributing to the survival of the species, there is a further reason for the persistence of nonverbal communication in the face of its “superseding” by verbality. Aside from efficiency, nonverbality is frequently pleasurable. This is evident in that nonverbal communication plays such a prominent role in the performances of magicians, in music, in the feats of “intelligent” animals (e.g. Clever Hans), in the exercise of vision (Cobley 2011) and in rudimentary reasoning—abduction (Peirce 1929; Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1980). Each involves a confrontation with repression and each, at least momentarily, involves an unblocking of the human potential that has been left as residual by the choice of the path of verbality. To be sure, repression is not simply a matter of blocking pleasure for the sake of it; much repression allows human communion to take place and society to be feasible—this is the position of the later Freud, in fact, in works such as Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 1985[1930]), although his gloomy prognostications in this respect are not final. The matter at hand concerns repression of “bad”, unpleasurable things, as well as “good”, pleasurable ones. Some kind of repression has to be considered in biosemiotics because it is part of agentive action. Semiotic freedom necessarily involves choice of one course rather than another.

In biosemiotics it is important to consider whether this kind of repression operates at a level of semiotic freedom which has developed only in the human, or whether there is repression at the level of lower organisms. Certainly, the degree of semiotic freedom available to organisms is proportional to what is left over, courses that are not chosen, actions that do not come to fruition. Yet, the question remains regarding which organisms enact repression as described above. One clue might be offered by Peirce and one of Sebeok’s footnotes. Sebeok (2001b: 96) asks whether the one-way ethological implication among the three categories of “taming/training/domestication” might be analogous to the Peircean categories of Firstness/Secondness/Thirdness and whether these map onto Charles Morris’s programme for semiotics: syntactics/semantics/pragmatics. The suggestion in the present discussion—which turns out to be completely unoriginal—is that repression of instincts is required for animals to become domesticated. What is slightly more original is the idea that repression is somehow involved in Thirdness. Interpretants, as Thirdnesses, produce some new signs and not others; rhemes efface their origins in qualisigns; induction belies its abductional roots; the pragmatics of communication encourages some interpretations or perlocutions and not others. Thirdness, or the movement towards Thirdness, seems to harbour repression as an indigenous component. Yet, there is a need to be clear about what is an occlusion and what is a nesting. Indices, for example, are not really occluded; they are nested in symbols. Possibly, this is what is occurring with the nonverbal residues of communication in language.

There is a further big issue to consider in relation to biosemiotics and repression. This concerns the repression of “continuity” in the sense of the non-voluntary ethics described in Chap. 5, above. The process of parenting among animals involves “instinctual” protection of offspring exceeding, or on a par with, self-protection. The offspring exists, in this light, as an “other” but also as a pre-eminently valued extension of the self. When the bird leaves the nest or the carnivore’s offspring goes off to hunt for him/herself, or when the human reaches adolescence, there arises the necessity to repress the extensional relation of the offspring to the self (although the most aged of human parents attest that the repression is never fully effected). Phylogenetically, the human’s “consanguinity” with all organic life on earth seems to have undergone an analogous repression—necessary for carnivorous and herbivorous nourishment, perhaps, but, as domestic pets and horticulture attest, the repression is far from absolute. Ultimately, this point about recognizing continuity of the realms of life is one that Deely et al. (2005) seek to make, albeit clouded by a willed “ethical” programme (see Chap. 5, above). The general argument arises from the biosemiotic concept of semiotic freedom and moments when that freedom is constrained.

What semiosis often entails is not the efficiency of the strongest of coding which would lead to identical reproduction, as was discussed in Chap. 6, above. In fact, much of semiosis is concerned with local rather than global interpretations and can involve imperfect recognition, memory, categorization, mimicry, learning and communication. Far from proceeding with absolutely predictable results, seemingly mechanical processes betray their incomplete properties. Deacon (2012a: 104–7) gives the example of a computer that crashes because its current function is in a loop, engaged in an interminable machine process. The common response to this problem is for the user to turn the computer off and then on again. He notes (2012a: 104),

If interference from outside the system (i.e., outside the mechanistic idealization that has been assigned a given computational interpretation) is capable of changing the very ground of computation, then computation cannot be a property that is intrinsic to anything.

Thus, it can be concluded that computation is an idealization about cognition based on an idealization about physical processes. The extrinsic, simplifying constraints—switching on and off—with respect to the computer’s mechanical operations are determined in the context of operations that are prevented or otherwise not realized. As Deacon (2012a: 105) adds, “Paying attention to what is not occurring is the key to a way out of this conceptual prison”. What establishes these constraints? The obvious answer is “the human brain”; but, as Deacon observes, this merely “passes the explanatory buck”, only for it to get passed again to ‘evolution’ and ‘natural selection’. What needs to be accepted is that real world physics and chemistry do not simply act mechanically like a computer with the occasional bug but, in fact, the kind of noisiness and messiness implied by a bug characterises their operations as a whole. This kind of imprecision was also observed in the last chapter with reference to codes. In Deacon’s terms, the messiness is not just consonant with the second law of thermodynamics but is a matter of the ‘ententionality’ (incompleteness) with respect to which phenomena are organized for achievement of something that is not intrinsic to them.

The concept of constraints is of some considerable importance to Deacon’s account of ententionality in nature because, as he concludes (2012a: 538), “Mind didn’t exactly emerge from matter, but from constraints on matter”. Leaving that somewhat large issue aside, the concept of constraint has implications both for biosemiotics and culture. As Deacon suggests (2012a: 191–2), constraint “is a complementary concept to order, habit, and organization because it determines a similarity class by exclusion”. What is important here is that

the concept of constraint does not treat organization as though it is something added to a process or to an ensemble of elements. It is not something over and above these constituents and their relationships to one another. And yet it neither demotes organization to mere descriptive status nor does it confuse organization with the specifics of the components and their particular singular relationships to one another. Constraints are what is not there but could have been, irrespective of whether this is registered by any act of observation (2012a: 192).

As Peirce held for habits, regularity or organization—rather than any specific substrate—is most relevant in respect of causation. “The term constraint”, writes Deacon (2012a: 193), “thus denotes the property of being restricted or being less variable than possible, all other things being equal, and irrespective of why it is restricted”.

As examples of constraints, Deacon offers the way a fast flowing stream forms stable eddies round a rock and how a snowflake grows hexagonally symmetric but idiosyncratic branches. In growing, the branches of the snowflake “progressively restrict where new growth can take place.” (Deacon 2011); in this way, “Constraints reflect what is not there, and the more constrained something is, the more symmetric and regular it is” (2011). Already, this is a more nuanced picture of invariance than codes or even habits allow. It also seems to recast what has thus far been discussed in relation to repression. Rather than an ‘information theory’ version of ‘constraint’, what Deacon proposes is an invariant with a capacity for recreating its “capacity for self-creation”, where “self” is not that far away from Sebeok’s self (see Chap. 4, above) as “an intrinsic tendency to maintain a distinctive integrity against the ravages of increasing entropy as well as disturbances imposed by the surroundings” (Deacon 2011). Ultimately, Deacon posits dynamical reflexivity and constraint as characterising a teleodynamic system (2012a: 510). Yet the “constraint-preservation process” sheds light on the role of invariance in agency in general, for it is “the simplest exemplar of an intrinsically end-directed process, whose most fundamental end is maintenance of itself” (Deacon 2011). Constraints are not necessarily to be conflated with order, although the ideas are related; Deacon explains

As in the case of the messiness of a room, order is commonly defined relative to the expectations and aesthetics of an observer. In contrast, constraint can be objectively and unambiguously assessed. That said, order and constraint are intrinsically related concepts. Irrespective of specific observer preferences, something will tend to be assessed as being more orderly if it reflects more constraint. We tend to describe things as more ordered if they are more predictable, more symmetric, more correlated, and thus more redundant in some features. To the extent that constraint is reduced variety, there will be more redundancy in attributes. This is the case with respect to any change: when some process is more constrained in some finite variety of values of its parameters or in the number of dimensions in which it can vary, its configurations, states, and paths of change will more often be ‘near’ previous ones in the space of possibilities, even if there is never exact repetition (2012a: 195).

It is for this reason that Deacon suggests that the concept of constraint could supplant habit

Recasting the Realism/Nominalism debate in terms of dynamics and constraints eliminates the need to refer to both abstract generals, like organization, and simple particular objects or events lacking in organization. Both are simplifications due to our representation of things, not things in themselves. What exist are processes of change, constraints exhibited by those processes, and the statistical smoothing and the attractors (dynamical regularities that form due to self-organizing processes) that embody the options left by these constraints.

Or, as Deacon repeatedly states, the crucial issue concerns what is “not there”.

In light of the previous discussion of repression in respect of nonverbal semiosis of humans, there is, perhaps, a need to revise the estimation of the action in question. “Repression” seems to suggest the smothering of some entity that needs to be free. It is an intimation that there is some anarcho-libertarian hinterland that might be reached if repression were lifted. If this is found to be unsatisfactory, an alternative explanatory principle needs to be critical in avoiding a mere functionalist bearing before consideration of its implications for culture can be undertaken. The idea of constraint seems to fit that alternative bill. On the one hand, it does appear to explain only ‘successful’ processes:

And it is ultimately the production and propagation of constraints that make physical work possible. For example, containing the expanding gases in an internal combustion engine, and thus constraining expansion to occur in only one direction, allows this release of energy to be harnessed to do work on other systems, such as propelling the vehicle which contains the engine up a steep incline. So to argue that constraint is critical to causal explanation does not in any way advocate some mystical notion of causality (Deacon 2012a: 203).

Yet, on the other hand, to this statement is added a critical coda which accounts not just for what is there but the nature of the trade-off regarding what is lost: “We can restate this causal logic as follows: reduction of options for change in one process can lead to even greater reduction of options in another process that in some way depends on the first” (2012a: 203). As with the snowflake and the messy room, greater regularity has its costs.

There are, no doubt, many implications for culture arising from the way in which constraints generate redundancy. However, the next chapter will outline some of the consequences of not understanding the centrality of constraints to the culture compartment of nature. Culture is necessarily ententional and what is “not there” in culture may be the evolutionary point: culture’s ‘pointlessness’.