Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective (Biosemiotics, 22) 3030671143, 9783030671143

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Biosemiotics 22

Yogi Hale Hendlin Jonathan Hope  Editors

Food and Medicine A Biosemiotic Perspective

Biosemiotics Volume 22

Series editors Kalevi Kull, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia Alexei Sharov, Lab Genetics, Rm 10C222, Ste 100, National Inst on Aging, Baltimore, MD, USA Claus Emmeche, Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Kobenhavn K, Denmark Donald F. Favareau, University Scholars Programme, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Aims and Scope of the Series Combining research approaches from biology, semiotics, philosophy and linguistics, the field of biosemiotics studies semiotic processes as they occur in and among living systems. This has important implications and applications for issues ranging from natural selection to animal behaviour and human psychology, leaving biosemiotics at the cutting edge of the research on the fundamentals of life. The Springer book series Biosemiotics draws together contributions from leading scholars in international biosemiotics, producing an unparalleled series that will appeal to all those interested in the origins and evolution of life, including molecular and evolutionary biologists, ecologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers and historians of science, linguists, semioticians and researchers in artificial life, information theory and communication technology. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7710

Yogi Hale Hendlin  •  Jonathan Hope Editors

Food and Medicine A Biosemiotic Perspective

Editors Yogi Hale Hendlin Erasmus School of Philosophy, Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative Erasmus University Rotterdam Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Jonathan Hope Département d’études littéraires Université du Québec à Montréal Montréal, QC, Canada

ISSN 1875-4651     ISSN 1875-466X (electronic) Biosemiotics ISBN 978-3-030-67114-3    ISBN 978-3-030-67115-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Introduction to the Volume ����������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Yogi Hale Hendlin and Jonathan Hope Part I Food  Biochemistry of Desire: The Biosemiotics of Advertising to Bacteria��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   15 Yogi Hale Hendlin  Food, Health and the Body: A Biosemiotic Approach to Contemporary Eating Habits ��������������������������������������������������������������������   43 Simona Stano  How Sugarcane Accelerated Semiosis During Industrial Modernity, and How We Can Slow Down with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory������������������������������������������������������������������   61 Pierre-Louis Patoine  Food, Care and the Sugar Maple Stand��������������������������������������������������������   81 Jonathan Hope  Restoring the Meaning of Food: Biosemiotic Remedies for the Nature/Culture Divide������������������������������������������������������������������������   97 Alina-Andreea Dragoescu Urlica  Free-Range Humans: Permaculture Farming as a Biosemiosic Model for Political Organization��������������������������������������������������������������������  115 V. N. Alexander Part II Medicine  Biosemiotics, Holistic Biology and Self-Actualization����������������������������������  141 Gary Goldberg

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Contents

 The Role of Biosemiosis and Dysfunctional Signaling Processes in Human Pathology����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 D. M. Nowlin  Omics and the Biosemiotic Interaction of Food with Body, Mind, and Health ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  183 Tomoko Obara, Yogi Hale Hendlin, and Hiroyuki Matsumoto

About the Editors

Yogi Hale Hendlin  (Ph.D.)  is an assistant professor in the Erasmus School of Philosophy and core faculty of the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative at Erasmus University Rotterdam, a research associate in the Environmental Health Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, and editor-in-chief of the journal Biosemiotics. Jonathan  Hope  (Ph.D.) is a professor in the Literary Studies Department at the Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada). His teaching and research focus on semiotics, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities.

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Introduction to the Volume Yogi Hale Hendlin

and Jonathan Hope

Abstract  The topics of food and medicine have been mobilized for ages by semioticians in order to conduct their studies of sign processes and sign relations. The objective of this book is to examine the manner in which contemporary biosemiotics can help us reconsider food and medicine. Some chapters present more theoretical considerations (on advertising, cravings, holobionts, consumerism, care, spirituality and politics), whereas others expose more practical or medical applications of those experiences. Keywords  Biosemiotics · Food Studies · Medicine · Human Biology · Ethnology · Semiotics · Medical Semiotics

Foods and medicines have long been central to the history of sign studies. Indeed, a semiotic awareness was key in the first attempts by Western physicians to formalize their art, and to this day, medical personnel still speak of medical semiology and medical semiotics. In a way, the birth of semiotics as a discipline, science, and body of knowledge, was realized within a medical paradigm. The reading of symptoms by health professionals is a quintessentially semiotic practice. Symptoms as signs point to other objects, deeper causes that cannot be seen directly but are inferred by correctly reading the clues. As Baer reminds us, “The art of healing, in Greek antiquity, was called techne semeiotike, a craft having to do with signs” (1988: 1). Being able to diagnose illness and restore health is the process of noticing and attending to signs. Sebeok (1978) calls medicine the oldest branch of the “semiotic tripod” which counts philosophy and linguistics as its other pillars. Or, as Staiano writes Y. H. Hendlin (*) Erasmus School of Philosophy, Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] J. Hope Département d’études littéraires, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_1

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“health and illness is founded on a tradition at least as ancient as semiotics” (1982: 319). In ancient Greek thought, Hippocrates is apocryphally attributed as saying: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Cardenas (2013) convincingly demonstrates that in Antiquity there was no category confusion between what is medicine and what is food (as has occurred with the proliferation of “superfoods” and other niche fashion lifestyle diets prevalent today). Yet already in the origins of formalized medicine in the West, the relation between food and medicine, as they both pertain to health and life, was key. Today nutritionists are routinely trained in medical schools, and doctors often prescribe dietary recommendations. The proliferation of the awareness of food and drug interactions for prescriptions in contemporary medicine, and how food affects the efficacy of pharmaceuticals, harkens back to a more ecological approach to medicine and the context of medical compounds (Sørensen 2002; Fernstrom and Fernstrom 2017; Bailey 2010; Schmidt and Dalhoff 2002). Nutrition and medicine as sciences gain their meaning and potency in relation to the constellation of other factors in the Umwelt or environment in which they occur, rather than as stand-alone substances invincible to impinging forces. In light of the recent attention to food-medicine interactions, and on the manner in which this paradigm fundamentally changes how both are viewed scientifically and popularly, taking a biosemiotic approach to food and medicine, food as medicine, and the nutritive properties of some medicinal treatments, is opportune. Organisms, using their pre-existing receptors, interpret the molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids we intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating sequences of semiotic transformations that fulfill vital functions for the organism and its constituent organisms at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. Modern human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has not yet caught up with human invention of supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body’s normal shut-off mechanisms. While this volume investigates the biosemiotics of food and medicine involving primarily human bodies, the topic of “food and medicine” is obviously relevant for all living organisms. Nutrition and health are general attributes of all living systems, and for this reason there are extensive fields of animal nutrition and health, veterinarians, plant biologies, mycologists, and other studies of organism health down to bacteria, archaea, and even the mysterious “fourth domain” of biology consisting of organisms that only stay alive in their native habitats and cannot be cultured by humans (National Research Council 2002; Witzany 2012: 61-­82; 217-­44). Ethological varieties of medicine are replete in mammals, including using alternative behaviors as well as ingesting compounds outside their normal alimentary regime to triage illnesses and treat pathogens. For example, Nigerian chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes vellerosus) swallow unchewed herbaceous leaves of Desmodium

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gangeticum to combat parasitic worms in the rainy season (high season for parasitic re-infections) to increase gut motility (Fowler et al. 2007). Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) have also been found to deploy the anti-inflammation agents of Dracaena cantleyi leaves by chewing them and then “rubbing a foamy mixture of saliva and leaf onto specific parts of the body” (Morrogh-Bernard et al. 2017, p. 1). Similar practices were also found to be used by the local indigenous population in the region, and the leaves of Dracaena themselves were found to inhibit inflammatory cytokine production. Selective plant material and soil ingestion as anti-parasite self-­ medication is a widespread medical intervention for many species, including invertebrates (Huffman 1997; Christe et al. 2003). Thus, the phenomenon of pica, which is the tendency for organisms including humans to eat non-foods for unconscious medicinal benefit during childhood, pregnancy or illness, is likely extended throughout all organisms. All organisms likely interact with substances that have drug-like properties for them to aid in confronting ailments or system imbalances. Pica as medication may be as widespread as metabolism in living organisms. Insofar as biosemiotics has been productively applied to the human animal, paying attention to how biological processes make different meanings depending on their environments pushes forward the explorations of food, culture and identity that shored the first semiological food studies in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, innovative ideas presented by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958, 1965), Roland Barthes (1961), Mary Douglas (1972), Pierre Bourdieu (1979) all adapted fundamental notions from structuralist linguistics to analyze non-linguistic phenomena of human culture. Weaving the cultural and biological semioses leads to an even clearer understanding of the consequences (deleterious or not) of technologized food and medicine. These consequences concern notably semiotic and evolutionary fitness. Unflinchingly taking in new concoctions and taking up new practices (the latest an anti-aging product, colon cleansing, etc.) may be semiotically fit from a cultural perspective, as it adheres to the prevailing norms and standards of a particular era; however this may render us less semiotically fit from a biological perspective, failing to give us requisite nutrition, causing cognitive and physical maladaptive side-effects, and leading to a dystopian future (Cross and Proctor 2014). Referring to the Discourse on Method, Steven Shapin writes: “Descartes claimed that medicine had the capacity to make ‘men in general wiser and more skillful’ since ‘the mind depends so much on the temperament and dispositions of the bodily organs’” (2010: 527). Thus the responsibility of medicine is not just health in the physiological sense, but semiotic fitness. Its goal is to help organisms make decisions in their environment so that they can sustain their bodies in a state that enables them to continue making good decisions. Just as Aristotle writes in the Ethics regarding how a finely tuned string is neither so tight that it snaps nor so loose that it produces a dull sound, so too the disposition of the body is held in health in the range between over- and under-stimulation. Considering the ever-evolving character of semiotics, especially the keen current popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines (fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge), it is relevant and timely that these issues be addressed together in a book-length study. That this appears in the Biosemiotics

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book series with Springer is even more felicitous as food and medicine are biological meaning-making processes par excellence. The chapters of this book are divided into two sections: the first built around the way advertising, cravings, consumerism, care, spirituality and politics structure our experiences of food and health, the second presents more practical, medical, applications of those experiences. YOGI HALE HENDLIN offers a novel, biosemiotic, interpretation on one of the most renowned exemplars of semiotic analysis: advertising. In “Rhétorique de l’image” (1964) Roland Barthes examined how a Panzani ad contained different messages, all leading to the “Italianity” of the represented foodstuffs (in this case, an overflowing net bag of fresh vegetables, pasta, sauce and parmesan). This text has become standard reading in most introductions to semiotics since. Barthes was absolutely correct in stating that ads control various messages in order to promote products and services, but all of the messages he analyzed were, narrowly, linguistic. However, advertisements have always operated on other-than-linguistic, human semiosic processes, notably by impressing themselves on bodies: vivid colors, catchy tunes, striking montage, create and disrupt patterns of expectation in our senses. Bridging neuromarketing and biosemiotics, Hendlin opens up our semiotic understanding of how ads work and influence behavior, by examining the signs that circulate through and within our bodies, particularly olfactory signs. The creation and planned dissemination of odor potions in shopping environments, such as the pumping of various food odors at Disneyland, or the nauseating popcorn odor in cinemas, hijacks our bodies in ways that beset the so-called rational judgment of individuals – or liberal myth thereof. To put it another way, the advertisements are not only directed at individual humans who willfully give in to or refrain from specific purchases. The ads are also directed toward, and manipulate the biochemical semiosic urges that are deployed in our bodies. Hendlin focuses on two broad categories of these urges that materialize as intelligent, situated organisms learn from and adapt to the environment, namely those of our sensory modalities and those of our microbiota. In both cases, the effect is the same, as the manipulation creates deleterious behavioral patterns that stack the odds against our free will. Our senses are manipulated against us. Readers may recall the Lay’s chips slogan “Betcha you can’t eat just one”; indeed our cravings for fat, salt and crispiness easily dominate our desires. The bacteria that thrive in us are also commanded and turned against us, having learnt dysfunctional, addiction-like behaviors, ultimately turning into pathogens leading their own course to the detriment of the host. This may sound like a theme from a dystopian tale of science/speculative fiction. However, as Hendlin suggests, this is one of the thoroughly biosemiotic consequences of late capitalism banking on our bodies’ predictable responses to signs. Issues relating to food advertising are also examined by SIMONA STANO whose paper focuses on organic food products. Stano’s take on advertisements is more in line with classical cultural analysis, such as those expounded by Barthes. Indeed, she points out that the discursive strategies promoting organic foods tend to focus on the idea that those foods are somehow purer, unaltered, original, more natural (a highly problematic term, freighted with cultural connotations) than genetically modified foods. Organic foods would be wilder, more rustic, ethnic and local

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than their transformed, non-organic counterparts. This simplistic distinction may be propitious to the emergence of food tribes; it might inspirit orthorexic eaters motivated by ethics and dietetics; and it definitely influences the health-related behaviors and habits of eaters, purchasers and producers of food. However, as Stano points out, the biosemiotic underpinnings of this distinction are ambiguous. Stano reminds us that choices pertaining to food consumption are intrinsically linked to health and have been since classical, Western, antiquity; this is the case in the writings of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen. Through intuitive questioning and methodological observations, bodies were discovered to be able transformers of foodstuffs, operating in ways analogous to the cultural practices of cooking or fermenting. Thus, bodies mend themselves and keep healthy by breaking down, converting and interpreting food. Ultimately, the science of food leads to the current paradigm of nutritionism, popularized and criticized by food writer Michael Pollan, according to which the value of a whole food is determined by its individual constituent parts (i.e. scientifically-identified nutrients). This decontextualization of nutrients has an adverse effect on food production, especially when it comes to distinguishing organic food from GMOs. Spraying DDT on fields is in no way concordant with the principles of organic farming. But consider vegetables that have been genetically modified to be insect-resistant, by transferring naturally-occurring scorpion toxins, a bioinsecticide, into their DNA; are they organic? They could be, or not, depending on the prevailing legislation. Part of the problem rests on what is considered to be natural (natural-occurring, natural modification, etc.); another, rests on the fact that the genetic modifications of interpreting, semiosic organisms, exist in nature – as phenotypic diversity abundantly makes clear. Stano’s paper is an invitation, then, to view critically what the GMO/non-GMO distinction stands for, and how it influences our food-related habits. Food related-habits, like all cultural phenomena, are subject to evolutionary, or at least transformative, processes. Food fads come and go. Yet these fads are not only cultural. They are also, as PIERRE-LOUIS PATOINE argues in his paper on sugar, biosemiotic. These effects, as Patoine studies them, are plural and varied, traversing the wider bio-semiosphere of our Terran habitat, including: the influence of sugar on the individual bodies of sugarcane workers and sugar eaters; the influence of sugarcane harvest on the environment (ethanol fuel in our motors is not zero-impact); and the influence of sugar-fueled semiosis on the social structures and productions of human collectivities. Patoine focuses on the way sugar may have contributed to the acceleration of human semiosis from the 1600s onwards, an acceleration that he finds represented in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the chocolate factory. Questioning the superiority of human-specific will and reason, Patoine invites readers to consider the sweetness of the sugarcane as a trait that entrenches a mutualistic relation between the plant and humans – analogous to pollination benefitting both the newly fertilized plant and the pollinator accessing life-sustaining nectar. The extent of sugarcane production today should lead us to wonder if the human/sugarcane relationship is not spiraling out of control, with sugarcane monocultures and sugar-fueled human semioses having disastrous consequences, too often justified in the name of reason.

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As Patoine makes clear, human consumption of sugar is caught up in a recursive, and addictive-like, behavioral loop: consumption of sugar leads to higher levels of production, which leads to more weariness, which lead to a higher demand for sugar, et cetera. Sugar provides a quick energy fix, one that cannot be sustainable in and of itself. The same could be said of coffee that wakes up so many Westerners and keeps them going through the day. Some 150 years ago Henry David Thoreau lamented the ab-use of mechanical aids his fellow Americans employed and consumed to stay attentional through their working lives; he would probably be appalled at the number of cafés popping up in the US. In both cases, sugar and coffee are short-term solutions and long-term problems that structure the increasingly vulnerable and volatile living conditions of late capitalism. Here, reflecting on the necessity of degrowth, Patoine finds a provoking ally in the fictional character of Willy Wonka. An industrialist, producer of all things sweet, Wonka appears nonetheless as an esthete who contests the typically Modern drive for acceleration – a phenomena which has concrete biosemiotic consequences. Continuing the topic of sugar: the biosemiotics of maple syrup may seem a slow subject, but in his contribution “Food, care and the sugar maple stand” JONATHAN HOPE elucidates the imbrication of human, tree, and protist interactions that work to make this valuable liquid sugar beloved around the world. In fact, maple syrup as a slow artisanal relationship rather than an instrumentally productive commodity is precisely what binds these trees with their human foresters biosemiotically. Hope inquires how forests can take care of their inhabitants and frequenters without care being reduced to fat profit from the destruction of forests. A twist on Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Hope contrasts a post-growth economy in which the trees themselves foster “the growth of the human interpretant,” with a vampiric one of “plantation” style juicing maple saplings for every drop they are worth, killing them in the process. Envisioning maple trees as more than just economic sources for tree water to be boiled and bottled as lucrative syrup, maple trees also can be understood as conducting a less immediately marketable if equally fulfilling need. Drawing upon María Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of soil health and resisting economic productivity as the only measure of value, Hope turns to Gregory Bateson’s semiotics of “information-­as-difference” to make sense of how different harvest practices can lead to different interpretations of flavor in the community of tasters, as well as to how different forms of relations with the trees can provide different depths of care for and by the foresters. As Hope sums up: “what we see is food, what we get is information (semiosis, mind).” His chapter reminds us of the complexities of the forester’s job to “read” their maple stands, and that the semiotic process of interpretation requires foresters to utilize all of their senses, histories, and traditions, in order to maximize the sweetness of their syrup but also the flavor of their culture. Concluding with an implicit argument drawn from the Japanese practice of forest-­ bathing (Shinrin-yoku), Hope’s biosemiotic exploration of maple trees sheds light on how careful conservation is a two-way street, requiring work, but also providing refuge.

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ALINA-ANDREEA DRAGOESCU URLICA continues in this line of thinking on care detailing how a biosemiotic awareness may have a healing effect on the nature-culture divide  – an infamous thrust of Western philosophy that has been especially conspicuous since the Modern era. At root, this divide is a relation, one of the many ways a cultural group can play out a connection with nature; that it turned out as a disjuncture is neither necessary, nor essential to humans and their other-than-human counterparts. In all cases, this relation plays out on various planes and it is particularly obvious in the manner food and alimentary habits are treated in different cultures. Following on the pioneering anthropological research of Claude Levi-Strauss, Dragoescu Urlica makes the point that food-related practices mirror and consolidate connections between culture and nature. Dragoescu Urlica invites readers to wonder on the way these symbiotic relations between nature, culture and food unfold in ways that engage mythological, sacred, or spiritual experiences. One of these more noticeable experiences dislocates an anthropocentric perspective on food (viz. food that we humans eat), and considers other-than-human perspectives, namely those situations where humans serve as fodder. In line with thinkers such as Val Plumwood, who examined her meeting with a saltwater crocodile, or more recently with Nastassja Martin, who detailed her encounter with a brown bear, Dragoescu Urlica considers eating as a holistic experience that reinforces the web-like character of nature and dislodges an irresponsible desire to sit atop all food chains. Jae Rhim Lee’s widely publicized design project, the Infinity Burial Suit, also comes to mind. The artist created a decompiculture burial suit laced with mushroom spores that help decompose flesh, break down the toxins in our bodies, and nurture the soil. In all of these examples, the transactions between predator and prey, or eater and eaten, entertain a spiritual disposition towards nature and human’s place in it – even as that human is exanimate. In these reflections on circularity of life and death, Dragoescu Urlica promotes a know-how of interconnectedness between humans and nature that does away with the anthropocentric “fantasies of greed”, expelling the old tropes of human dominance and control. By mitigating the centrality of human-only narratives, and a widespread irresponsible tendency to consume everything within one’s grasp, Dragoescu Urlica endorses the Gaia model of planetary living, a model that comes with its lot of stories and myths to build, share and disseminate. In her chapter “Free-range humans: Permaculture farming as a biosemiosic model for political organization,” VICTORIA N. ALEXANDER reflects on the role of permaculture farming for the land, the native and farmed animals, as well as the farmer, Alexander herself in this case. By taking semiotic freedom for the habitants of a given ecology as the measure of success, through her ecopoetics Alexander describes the elements of her own farm which make it permaculturally- and biosemiotically-­oriented. Included in setting a farm up so that the animals and plants more or less take care of themselves is a freeing up of time, so that management, control, and dependency on a single hub actor (the farmer) dissipates, giving not only more semiotic freedom and autonomy to each participating creature, but also more free time for the farmer, without the “time-saving” mechanical devices which furrow rows indiscriminately to the eddies and whorls of local

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micro-­ecologies. Combining political and ecosystems theory, Alexander links how distributed governance at all levels allows interests to more accurately be represented in a given socio-ecological milieu. The chapter then dives into the codebiology metaphors of transduction and adaptors in and between cells, to make the point that unlike algorithms, living organisms “take advantage of mistakes.” This helps explain then, how living systems cannot be harvested mechanically, because of the attention to context and particularity at every step precludes economically applying mass generalized procedures for harvest. The inability of algorithmic systems to respond to real ecologies justly illuminates Alexander’s discrimination between distributed and hierarchical networks. By pointing out the capture of distributed networks by hierarchical ones, that leave less ability for organisms to fend for themselves, Alexander then generalizes the biosemiotic point and applies it to farm and food policy. Transitioning from food (focused) to medical applications of biosemiotic principles and theory, the second part of the volume discusses issues ranging from the phenomenology of brain injury patients, a redescription of allergies as a function of errant defense of the immunological system, and the burgeoning field of exosomics. Brain injuries, events that make painfully clear the biosemiotic condition of living organisms, have entranced psychiatrists and philosophers for centuries. In his contribution “Biosemiotics, Holistic Biology and Self-Actualization,” brain injury doctor GARY GOLDBERG discusses from a biosemiotic perspective how patients with brain injuries reconstruct their identities post incident. Viewing mechanistic accounts of brain injuries and their recovery as necessary but not sufficient for the rehabilitation process which is at once personalized and extremely intimate, to view the subjectivity of patients as more than noise to the medically diagnosable signal requires a deep humility to accept the unique semiotic reconstruction that is at once biological, psychological, and cultural. Goldberg connects his 40 years of experience dealing with brain injury patients to Kurt Goldstein’s (2000) The Organism, which interprets symptoms of brain injury victims to be “an expression of the organism’s struggle with the defect in its attempt to adjust itself in spite of some interference by the defect.” This biosemiotically- and phenomenologically-oriented (human) organism view of disability Goldstein identifies as “reentrant self-­ reference” similar to Dewey’s (1896) reflex arc description of organism behavior. In addition to the current understanding and ascription to “evidence-based medicine,” as a physician Goldberg also makes a plea for the necessity of a “biosemiotically-­informed medicine” as an antidote to the overly objectified and mechanistic treatment of brain-injury victims. Echoing the proto-biosemiotic perspective of Barbara McClintock as documented in Evyln Fox Keller’s A Feeling for the Organism, Goldberg’s focus on reentrant self-reference, a bottom-up theory of subjectivity addends traditional medicine to consider this first-person science perspective. The resonances with Jakob von Uexküll’s functional circle (Funktionskreis) are strong; contra Hume’s “no-ought-from-is” dictum, the logic of organisms with meaning-making orientations (which is of course all life) utilizes reference and value to actualize oneself and in so doing, one’s Umwelt. This also dovetails, as Goldberg indicates, with Howard Pattee’s notion of “semantic closure,” which

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vis-­à-­vis Goldberg’s case study of brain injuries, would require taking into account the own directionality and subjective self-knowledge of patients themselves for optimally effective diagnosis and treatment. Any medical professional can confirm that the body uses signaling processes to maintain good health. Can poor health result if the wrong signal is sent? Can a signal be interpreted incorrectly causing a pathological response? Such compelling questions are taken up by DAWN NOWLIN in her chapter, “When food becomes a threat: The role of dysfunctional signaling processes in pathology.” Nowlin’s argument takes its departure from the fact that all biological processes tend to involve learning and adapting to circumstances. The literature is replete with evidence that the immune system learns. Likewise it is uncontroversial to say that the central nervous system learns and adapts to internal and external conditions. These systems learn to differentiate between stimuli and can adjust and refine their responses to bring about more positive results overall. As biosemioticians, we understand that learning is possible only through signs, which mediate between the internal observer (e.g., the cells or the organs that make up the learning system) and the external world or other parts of the body with which the system interacts. If we accept that biological processes learn, adapt and develop sustaining habits through intermediary signs, we must also accept that responses must be somewhat indeterminate: adapting systems must make generalizations, distinctions, comparisons and associations, tendencies which open the door to error. Therefore it is likely that, in certain circumstances, an adaptable system could very well develop habitual responses— like unhealthy addictions—that are counter-productive to the body as a whole. Bringing together this volume’s twin topics of food and medicine in a thoroughly original and productive way, Nowlin investigates how the body can, through a form of Pavlovian conditioning, learn to respond to some foods (as well as other stimuli in the environment), as if they were signs of a toxin, pain, or some other physical threat. She calls the phenomenon “errant defense,” recognizing that the body’s defense mechanisms seemed to have been called into action by a false alarm. She looks closely at the various definitions of “allergy,” “adverse food reaction,” “intolerance,” “sensitivity,” and “hypersensitivity” in the literature, showing that there is little consensus and much confusion about how these conditions differ from each other and what their underlying causes might be. Some conditions may involve the immune system, but others clearly do not. Nowlin makes the case that what many unexplained conditions may have in common is involvement from the central nervous system, which, she argues, is the most likely culprit behind the creation of dysfunctional signaling processes. The value of Nowlin’s contribution to this volume cannot be overstated as it furthers a very important research agenda for biosemiotics that may lead to better treatment of serious medical conditions. TOMOKO  OBARA, YOGI  HENDLIN and HIROYUKI  MATSUMOTO coauthor “Omics and the biosemiotic interaction of food with body, mind, health, and disease.” This chapter underlines the importance for biosemiotics of the discovery of exosomes, vesicles that are produced by cells and released into extracellular medium. Exosomes carry information (e.g., proteins, lipids, messenger RNA, microRNA, and in some cases double-stranded DNA) from the producing cells to

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be delivered to and interpreted by receiving cells. Thus exosomes seem to play an epigenetic role in intercellular signaling and this greatly changes our understanding of how cells function and may even explain some observed transgenerational diseases. The authors examine Type 2 Diabetes mellitus as their case study. Notably, exosomes mediate immune system responses and they have been shown to be useful as biomarkers, diagnostics, and therapeutics in the medical field. The authors seek to catalog types of existing exosomes according to the traditions of the omics sciences and urge biosemioticians to pay attention to the soon-to-develop field of “exosomics.” Sign studies have systematically called for and called on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work. Evaluating this research is therefore no simple task, as papers refer to a variety of fields and operate with diverse methodologies. Readers may appreciate this as they read the chapters of this book, and the various disciplines their references rely on. While some of the chapters are written by biosemioticians reflecting on these specific topics of food and medicine, others are written by scientists and practitioners keen to present and elicit biosemiotic analysis of the phenomena they encounter in the clinic and the laboratory. Through assembling authors from a variety of backgrounds, we hope to give a matrix ecology of impressions on the different strands and paths a biosemiotics of food and medicine can and could take, rather than a definitive account.

References Baer, E. (1988). Medical semiotics (Sources in semiotics VII). Lanham: University Press of America. Bailey, D. G. (2010). Fruit juice inhibition of uptake transport: A new type of food–drug interaction. British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 70(5), 645–655. Barthes, R. (1961). Pour une psychosociologie de l’alimentation contemporaine. Annales Économies, Sociétés, Civilisation, 16(5), 977–986. Bourdieu, P. (1979). L’habitus et l’espace des styles de vie. In La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit. Cardenas, D. (2013). Let not thy food be confused with thy medicine: The Hippocratic misquotation. e-SPEN Journal, 8(6), e260–e262. Christe, P., et al. (2003). Evidence for collective medication in ants: Collective medication in ants. Ecology Letters, 6(1), 19–22. Cross, G. S., & Proctor, R. N. (2014). Packaged pleasures: How technology and marketing revolutionized desire. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review. [Online], 3(4), 357–370. Douglas, M. (1972). Deciphering a meal. Daedalus, 101(1), 61–81. Fernstrom, M., & Fernstrom, J. (2017). Google-Books-ID: FmaCDwAAQBAJ. In Don’t eat this if You’re taking that: The hidden risks of mixing food and medicine. New  York: Simon and Schuster. Fowler, A., et al. (2007). Leaf-swallowing in Nigerian chimpanzees: Evidence for assumed self-­ medication. Primates. [Online], 48(1), 73–76. Goldstein, K. (2000). The organism. New York: Zone Books.

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Huffman, M.  A. (1997). Current evidence for self-medication in primates: A multidisciplinary perspective. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. [Online], 104(S25), 171–200. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1958). Postface aux chapitres III et IV.  In L’anthropologie structurale (pp. 93–110). Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1965). Le triangle culinaire. L’arc, 26, 19–29. Morrogh-Bernard, H. C., et al. (2017). Self-medication by orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus) using bioactive properties of Dracaena cantleyi. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 16653. National Research Council. (2002). Signs of life: A report based on the April 2000 workshop on life detection techniques. [Online]. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Schmidt, L. E., & Dalhoff, K. (2002). Food-drug interactions. Drugs. 62(10), 1481–1502. Sebeok, T. A. (1978). The sign & its masters. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sørensen, J.  M. (2002). Herb–drug, food–drug, nutrient–drug, and drug–drug interactions: Mechanisms involved and their medical implications. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. [Online], 8(3), 293–308. Staiano, K. V. (1982). Medical semiotics: Redefining an ancient craft. Semiotica, 38 (3–4). Witzany, G. (2012). Viruses: Essential agents of life. Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media.

Part I

Food

Biochemistry of Desire: The Biosemiotics of Advertising to Bacteria Yogi Hale Hendlin

Abstract  The identification of human agency with our desires often comes at the price of overlooking the entourage of agents that draw us to our moods, feelings, thoughts, and behavior. This essay attends to the interactions between our symbionts – mutualistic, commensal, and parasitic – that through their secretions, create microbiome ecologies prone to respond to certain inputs and repel others, investigating forms of non-symbolic advertising that directly hook into human biochemical receptors. Although commercial food advertising is normally considered a branch of cultural semiotics aimed at the human superorganism rather than at our endosemiotic constituents, I argue that biochemical stimuli, especially the alkaloids in scents, are sought by specific groupings of bacteria, fungi, amoebas, viruses, and other microorganisms, by extension becoming philic or phobic to the human host. The biosemiotic economy of desire and affect which advertising engages, precipitates use and ingestion of physical materials feeding and reconfirming the responses of certain microbiota, rather than playing on human sociological anxieties alone. In many ways such advertising responds to, creates, and maintains biochemical ecologies sought by our micro-inhabitants – often to our detriment. Keywords  Microbiome · Advertising · Agency · Biosemiotics · Supernormal Stimuli · Olfactory

Introduction We simultaneously love and hate the fact that we can be manipulated into doing things we otherwise would not have done had we thought about it rationally. The compulsion to eat a well-placed treat, or to splurge on a rich dinner both titillates

Y. H. Hendlin (*) Erasmus School of Philosophy, Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_2

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because of the intense if fleeting pleasure, and engages our sense of danger or shame creating a blushed sense of secrecy or transgression. The limits of human autonomy elicit both our most fierce defenses of denial – that every choice has been our own – and our most understanding admissions of being human, all-too-human animals subject to the myriad exigencies of the flesh. Yet, what does it mean to give in to temptation? Who is giving in to whom? Where lies the agency in such an equation? And what does it mean to be guided, though not ruled, by our instincts – the evolutionary triggers and reactions that have helped offload our neocortex’s burdens? Using cognitive ethology and human ethological frameworks, this essay explores the ways human beings act according to engineered environmental stimuli, especially related to food and food smells. I argue that the bacteria and other microbial co-agents dwelling in and with us, are in fact responsible, in a formal sense, for many of the decisions we make surrounding food consumption. Along with myriad cultural elements influencing our dietary decision-making, a host of biological mechanisms are also at play, based on biochemical signals, creating a biochemistry of desire. Shades of pleasure, exultation, suffering, shame, and stupor, combine promiscuously in our justifications for our actions; especially around food. This contribution assesses some of the ways in which contemporary advertising strategies aim to bypass rational processes to directly prime, influence, and exacerbate certain biochemical responses. Social mimicry is part of the puzzle of unravelling the determinants of human habits and behavior. Yet, where the social ends and the biological begins is itself a muddled and contested area, rather than a clean distinction. This chapter is limited as far as possible to the biochemical aspects, focusing on how the engineering of smells has become a major marketing tool. In the spirit of Michael Pollan’s (2002) Botany of Desire, which examines how human decisions to favor certain plants with widespread dissemination and cultivation comes about through plants’ biological incentivizing of humans with the promise of sweetness, beauty, inebriation, or control, I similarly approach the junk food and retail industry from a biosemiotic perspective. Pollan’s view of plants maneuvering humans adopts a model of reverse causation from typical anthropocentrism. Here, I also subordinate symbolic advertising and memes to their indexical and iconic forms of signaling, the reverse of Deacon’s (1997) reading of the Peircean framework. Contrary to Deacon, who views symbols as emergent in a strong sense from other sign types, the symbolic forms of advertising in the model constructed here  – restricted to immediacies such as taste and smell  – are weakly emergent: epiphenomena of communicative forms not primarily cultural but biological, with the symbols doing the work of more indexical and iconic motivations. This occurs, I claim, as a result of symbols fulfilling wills situated in specific ecologies of symbionts constructing ecological niches in other humans and hence in the larger environmental landscape. While untethered symbolic orders certainly tend to take on lives of their own (Bennett 2015), in recent decades the importance of symbols in westernized cultures has led to an underappreciation of the role of biological

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processes in generating the desires and drives for which symbols are employed as means, justifications, and proxies. Put differently, instead of interpreting the scheming of advertising – both its contents and desiderata – as the product of nefarious or opportunistic profit-­maximizing human individuals or corporations  (though of course this plays a role), I instead conjecture that advertising behaviors and habit formations counter-­indicated for the flourishing of human organisms is the product – at least partly – of a disrupted biotic ecology, both inside and outside of the human organisms in question. Dysbiosis in the larger endo- and exo-semiotic ecosystems (the biochemical Umwelt)1 precipitates the conditions affording (further) predatory/parasitic conspecific behavior amongst humans and their bacteria.

Engineering the Human Condition Concern over the human condition, the stock of our humanness, in part revolves around the question of how human practices and designs on controlling the bodies and behavior of other humans as well as our environments, changes our biology. What is at stake in this question of our humanity, in many ways is a biological-­ ecological question regarding the characteristics our species take. This framing already presupposes a certain biological homogeneity and a standardization of effects, however; and as Arendt (1958) pointed out in The Human Condition, our (political) environment is just as crucial as our biological ontology in determining the actions we take and how we regard ourselves and others. (Contemporary nomenclature would interpret this as the supervening forces of epigenetics against the once-thought determinism of genetics.) Identifying the plurality of human beings as key to understanding our most human activities of acting together in concert, “from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears” (Arendt 1958, p. 5), I am inspired by this charge to redistribute the agency of human activity into the biological world that composes us. Indeed, the shaping of human biology through the careful reading of signs, as in medicine, and in the patient attention to food combination and subjective physical experience in traditional food ways, gestures at our species’ intentional intervention in the universal experiences of all organisms seeking food for sustenance and negotiating the types and frequency of food and other stimuli to foster health. If artificial selection prescribes according to some predetermined measurement or

1  A subset of the organism’s Umwelt in Uexküllian terms, the biochemical Umwelt consists of the active and reactive chemical substances (including biochemicals) in a given organism’s environment. It excludes other organisms, elements, and non-reactive or unremarkable geological phenomena, but includes all chemicals for which the organism has receptors for, or to which it could be vulnerable (or exploit).

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desired outcome, natural selection proscribes the almost infinite evolutionary options, giving rise to constrained emergence (to paraphrase Myrdene Anderson (2018)). The difference between these two forms of selection, in keeping with Deacon’s (2013) thesis in Incomplete Nature, configures the core questions of a biosemiotics of food and medicine. Exemplifying the genetic distortions and narrowing of prescriptive selection which reduces genetic diversity and allows faulty recessive genes to be expressed, Haraway (2008) discusses in When Species Meet the overbreeding of dogs for specific breed characteristics. Inbreeding of dogs can lead to premature cancers, hip dysplasia (as in Great Pyrenees herd dogs), or epilepsy (in Australian Shepherds). Certainly these artificial selection-derived dysmorphias don’t only occur in dogs, tulips, or other organisms humans breed, but in anthropogenically-induced exposures humans experience as well. Human stubbornness to achieve a given genetic or behavioral outcome as the primary desideratum, often leads to ignoring actively or passively the unintended negative consequences of such a program. Eugenics has a long and odious history. From a biosemiotic perspective informed by ecological evolutionary developmental biology as evidenced in the emerging Extended Evolutionary Synthesis paradigm, however, genes, organisms, and environments constitute a continuum rather than siloed, separable phenomena. Thus, to discuss the intended consequences of ways of engineering shared Umwelten – as we must when we confront the unintentional artificial selection of advertising – we cannot help but touch on each of these dimensions, both within a specific species population and the interspecies interactions between their overlapping Umwelten. In the long-term, at least, the project of eugenics could be read as fundamentally mistaken; where our health and genes result more as a consequence of eutopias – favorable topographies or ecologies in which organisms create habitats – than wasted effort engineering (and policing) individual organisms. Instead of worrying about the salvation of individual gene destinies (which often creates other distortions beyond our knowledge), the science of public health (a crucial link between the biosemiotics of food and medicine) suggests that locating interventions in population health through shoring up social and environmental commons, is a much more effective tack than attempting to “improve” individuals who fall into contrived post hoc discriminatory categories which measure discriminatory social practices rather than ethnic or other grouped ontologies. Determining precisely the original or optimal compositions of bacteria and other symbionts that inhabit us, is a topic for another time. How this composition ebbs and flows, however, I contend is at least in part a function of external stimuli, including in the last century or so those biochemical priming agents directed by businesses to sell food products.

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Biochemical Versus Audiovisual Advertising Focusing on the applied biosemiotics of advertising and its effects on different levels of human biosemiosis is warranted both because of its ubiquity and its embeddedness. Online digital advertising alone reached 273  billion dollars globally in 2018 (Frederik and Martijn 2019), which overtook television ad revenue in 2016. Some recent critics have heralded the rise of internet and personalized targeted advertisements as “the end of free will” as big tech companies with their extension lines of wearable and eventually implantable, connective devices aim to hack our brain and nervous system (Harari 2016; Zuboff 2019). Such psychographically microtargeted claims on our attention would undoubtedly constitute a severe loss of semiotic freedom, including collective and individual agency. Yet, there is a more subtle, but equally effective method in which various forms of analog advertising hack not our brain but (primarily) our belly and its co-constitutive microbiota. Point-of-sale, billboard, and other visual ads, as well as olfactory, aural, and free sample forms offer a less symbolic yet more directly biological effect on the human superorganism (Table 1). Ads have always acted upon bodies, as well as minds. What distinguishes directly biological advertising, however, is the actual changes in the composition of air, or ingestion (in any form – food, drink, airborne volatile organic compounds (VOCs), dermal, etc.). In these cases, the traditional biosemiotic cascade of advertising from symbolic to indexical to iconic becomes shortened from indexical to iconic, or in some cases, precipitates a direct iconic form of semiosis for the body, endocrine system, and the bacteria and other microflora that live us. This chapter focuses on the latter forms of advertising, those that more directly hook into biochemical receptors with less mediation than symbolic forms. We can provisionally divide up signs into their identical or iconic aspect, the referential (denotative) or indexical aspect, and the representational (connotative) or symbolic aspect. Deacon (2012, p. 18) notes, “indexicality depends on immediate correlation and contiguity, and is transitive.” This transitivity of indexical signs Deacon explains as “a pointer pointing to another pointer pointing to some object,” which “effectively enables the first pointer to also point to that object” (2012, p. 21). That is, the chain of reference of indexical signs also allows the original mediated Table 1  Differences between visual and biochemical advertising Traditional interpretations of advertising Symbol: Status drives cognitive-emotional changes which create physiological changes which create cellular changes (“top down” cravings or aversions) Index: Selling with alluring or suggestive imagery (e.g., ear-worms/jingles) Icon: Enhanced images of food products themselves (often aided by indexical status referents or pleasure evocations)

Directly biological advertising Symbol: Not applicable

Index: Scent engineering (when evocative of a memory, situation, or place) Icon: Free samples for oral consumption; scent engineering (when directly representing the food item or alkaloid replacing the food item)

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sign to (in)directly point to the intended object. Medical symptoms pointing to the underlying disease are a classic example of this transitivity. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) inhaled can also index the stimulation of certain biochemically active stimuli that they mimic synthetically from the perspective of cell receptors, indicating the presence of a certain class of nutrients or threats in the environment. Thus, “advertising” through stimulating biochemical expectations of a certain type of receptor through precursors – signs of the thing which lead glands and organs to expect, say, a certain type of protein molecule, and thus releasing hormones gearing up for receiving the predicted stimulus through upregulating certain hormones or neurotransmitters – is a bait-and-switch activity with mimics which never quite fulfill the needs and assumptions of the awaiting receptors and cell metabolites, while bombarding an activated endocrine system with other foreign substances it is unprepared to deal with. The evolutionarily-keyed expectations of idiotypes and molecular receptors reinforce the goal-directedness of realist explanations of evolution (Levesque 2019). Nonetheless, biologists and theorists sometimes misinterpret this goal-directedness as fixity – that somehow a genetic program is spinning itself out irrespective of the ecology and web of relations in which the organism finds itself. Thus, I contend that stimuli – and especially supernormal stimuli, defined as concentrated anthropogenic stimuli which override native biological circuit breakers – can re-track (or hijack) the directedness of organisms’ goals. If organisms from the single-celled to humans and beyond simultaneously operate on many semiotic channels with interwoven processes (Hendlin 2016), most of which are largely deterministic and precious few which allow for agency and novel meaning making (in humans, see Barrett 2010; Kahneman 2013; McGilchrist 2009; Sapolsky 2017; Tinbergen 1951), then the quality and composition of lived environments is pivotal for determining the directedness of their teleologies and maximizing opportunities for agency. Since composite organisms’ endosemiotic processes are sometimes keyed to stimuli predicated on addictive short-termism – which short-circuits the interflow of other endosemiotic processes essential for the well-being of the host or superorganism they compose– then it is possible that the larger teleodynamics (reciprocal self-­ regulating tendencies vis-à-vis environmental feedback) of the constituent organisms will be transferred to fulfilling other acquired goals which may compete with, or foreclose sustainable mutualistic goals of overall organism health.

Artificial Selection Prescribes, Natural Selection Proscribes Deely (2009, p. 116) suspects that the “true measure of semiosis is the influence of the future upon the present in constantly reshaping the past.” In examining the active and passive elements of advertising on biosemiosis, I ask indirectly: How do memes interact with genes? Or, better: How do cells respond to symbolic stimuli? What are the processes through which our social cues are transcribed into and onto endosemiotic processes in our glands, cells, symbionts, and parasites? Instead of focusing

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exclusively on the symbolic elements of advertising, we can also investigate more immediate forms of advertising, and how the symbolic forms themselves are in many ways displacements (Ersätze) of indexical and iconic semiosis. Just as people and organisms rely on a portfolio of heuristics to simplify complex decision-­making, so too do bacteria, fungi, protists, amoebas, viruses, archaea, and other microbiota. In order to make use of proteins, RNA, or other means of sustenance and replication, these microorganisms rely on biochemical approximations. Operant conditioning to supernormal stimuli are methods that short-circuit the use of the original objects that the signs of these heuristics are evolutionarily habituated to select for. “Tones” as used technically in biosemiotics, such as search tones (or “images”) (Tønnessen 2018), resemble remarkably the “play system” and “seeking system” discussed in psychology in reference to the mammilian brain’s limbic system (Panksepp 2016). These drives in their historical states describe highly collaborative activity, working with others to find, achieve, or enjoy coordinated action. The primary emotional systems, according to neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp (2004), hold trans-species patterns of meaning and engagement. Panksepp claims that human emotions can best be understood through analyzing animal emotions. Probing the instinctual emotional types that emerge through subcortical brain activity, Panksepp grasps the importance of endogenous drug receptors, hormones, and how these are stimulated by activity and substances. Discovering the high degree to which emotional urges and needs are conserved evolutionarily across mammals including humans, Panksepp views the symbolic indexes of the neocortex as a tabula rasa onto which environmental stimuli processed in more basal primary emotional brain centers are mapped (Panksepp 2004; Sur et  al. 1988). Perhaps not ironically, Panksepp’s investigation into the pan-mammalian characteristics of the emotions based in the nervous system was initially spawned by an interest in psychopathology. The fact that search tones or seeking systems, amongst other tones and systems such as play, lust, or rage, can be mapped onto symbols and experiences quite mediated from their original evolutionary gearing or proximate cause, has not been lost on twentieth and twenty-first century marketeers. A large body of literature throws into question the liberal notion of personal sovereignty which claims that individuals in some strong way are responsible for their financial, political, health, and social decisions (e.g., Kahneman 2013; Thaler 2016). To be able to choose is often exaggerated as an autonomous, rather entangled action. And in many cases, the designation of choice is a post-hoc rationalization based on the alibi of self non-contradiction rather than a genuine commitment to the logic of past actions.

How Bacteria Create Desires Toxoplasma gondii, which humans can pick up from pet cats or from eating infected meat, is a parasite that controls humans in subtle, but noticeable (and documented) ways, likely contributing to hundreds of thousands of car accidents annually (Flegr

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2008; Flegr et al. 2002). Jaroslav Flegr and his colleagues found that humans with Toxoplasma gondii protozoa cysts embedded in their nerve and muscle tissue react more slowly to simple stimuli (Havlíček et al. 2001). Likewise our bacteria, viruses, amoebas, nematodes, and other endosymbionts in their parasitic forms can niche construct beyond their immediate semiosphere as a result of creating the environmental conditions conducive to their reproduction and thriving. Host manipulation occurs across the microsemiotic foodchain. Akin to a different form of rabies, “many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings” (McAuliffe 2012, p. 3). Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky further states, “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of” (McAuliffe 2012, p. 3). So, who’s really running the show here? Without having to resort to exo- and endo-bacterial determinism, we can relinquish a good deal of the baggage that comes from notions that humans are autochthonous, autonomous individuals. Everything about us is emergent, co-created, and porous, rather than a result of single authorship (including this essay). Nonhuman endosymbionts, especially parasites, have evolved varying adaptive mechanisms to control and manipulate host phenotypes, including human behavior (Flegr 2016). This enables them to expedite transmission from infected to noninfected hosts. Host manipulation as a genre of endosymbiont activity is ubiquitous in parasitism of mammals including humans, and can change host population dynamics and induce ecosystemic changes (Labaude et al. 2015).

Being Plural Advertising can then in important ways be seen as a symptom of host manipulation. Viewing compulsions semiotically  as symptoms  – from the Greek σύμ-πτωμα meaning “mishap,” “mischance,” a “falling in,” or “collapse” (Liddel and Scott 2019) – they are always pointing to the disease that is not directly seen or manifest. Symptoms represent a truncation in the semiotic circle, further indicating  to the object which is the disease itself. Staying with the symptoms is to be caught in a sort of strange loop, rarely permitting exit into the thing itself, the object to which the symptom refers (Hendlin 2018). Symptoms, in Baer’s Medical Semiotics, contain instances comparable to what C.S. Peirce has referred to as firstness, secondness, and thirdness, as well as what Baer calls “fourthness,” the “symptom as symbol” (Baer 1988, p.  132). Baer describes how Secondness is the dimension in which the symptom appears as irrational brute force, as outside or inside aggressor, as irresistible impulse or inexorable blind fate. Experiences of terminal illness or of obsessive ideas (Zwangsideen) are examples of this irrational dimension of the symptom. As Peirce describes, such a mode of secondness is “regardless of any third,” resulting in a truncated semiotic circle. (Baer 1988, p. 132)

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That staying stuck at secondness can result in a “truncated semiotic circle” means that the future-possibility open aspect of semiosis is disrupted, if not fractured. Baer views the current “broadening and pluralizing” of “the notion of symptom” as a mistaken fixation on secondness rather than understanding the full triadic context of the semiosis at hand (p.  132). Without the thirdness of otherness, symptoms are caught in a closed loop of prima facie assumed understanding and control, when illness’s uncanniness is precisely its unknown and uncontrollable dimensions. Fourthness or the symbolic experience of symptoms Baer (1988, p. 132–3) designates as the psychological, biomedical, and sociological aspects, of which medicine “remains deficient” as long as it concentrates on the biomedical aspects alone to the exclusion of the social dimensions of illness. Reflexively accounting for the social and psychological contexts of sickness is part of the cultural semiotics determinative of illness, including accounting for the “basic cultural assumptions from which it proceeds” (Baer 1988, p.  133; Kleinman 2003; Steele 2011; Watters 2010). Biosemiotically, medicine often fails to account for the variations and diversity present in living organisms living with and amongst other living organisms, including their varying health qualities, biochemical dispositions, diets, and countervailing endosemiotical biological protective factors, such as the strength of their microbiome (Bailey 2010; James-Todd et al. 2016; Komaroff 2017; Sørensen 2002). For Baer, western medicine over-ascribes importance to the biological (biomedical) aspect in the same gesture as it fails to take into account the context of biomolecular cross-system influences (i.e., from kidneys to bloodstream to behaviors creating different qualities of blood). This overcompensation for failing to account for the contextual influences must be recognized before adequate integration of these other factors of health and disease can contribute to our medical understandings. In medical terms, instead of recognizing the biopsychosocial model of disease, western medicine focuses on the bio part, but reductively instead of recognizing the ecological endosemiosis of different body system communications and cascades.  For example, the placebo effect plays no role in a purely biomedical model of disease. The gold standard of medical research, double-blind randomized controlled trials, are meant to control for and negate any possible placeboes. Yet, from a critical, biosemiotics and cultural semiotics of health approach, only by incorporating the psychological and sociological elements of health can the meaning of symptoms and their multiple underlying determinants be assessed and treated. Because of the need to reassess the gap between status quo medical practice and health outcomes, in recent years, due to the distortions resulting from excluding these elements of health in effective diagnosis and treatment, the placebo effect has made a comeback as a powerful contributing element to illness and health (Finniss et  al. 2010; Greenberg 2018; Kaptchuk et  al. 2010; Kaptchuk and Miller 2015; Miller and Kaptchuk 2008). In acknowledging the role placebos play in health and disease, these psychosocial aspects of symptoms can be wisely included in medicine rather than left as a wildcard working without guidance nor acknowledgment. Complementarily, the recent attention to how diet interacts with medications testifies to the biochemical interference patterns between food and medicine, rather than assuming that sufficient brute medicinal power alone can override unhealthy

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lifestyle choices (Bubnov et al. 2015; Davis et al. 2019; Dumit 2012; Kravchenko et al. 2015; Nicholson et al. 2012; Sørensen 2002). As personalized medicine has come online in the profession, it quizzically reveals our reliance upon commons, such as air, water, soil quality and micronutrients. Personalized medicine must also attend to how individual body ecologies rely on common environmental exposures and ingestion of foods, and how both of these interact with pharmacology. Environment, in the role of diet and other interactions, remains a pesky if ineluctable component to any treatment and health as it effects the efficacy of medicines.

The Flavor Industry Part of how our environment is formed in late capitalism has become largely determined by the exigencies of corporations. When the tobacco conglomerate RJ Reynolds bought the children’s sugary drink company Hawaiian Punch, their chief biochemist remarked that “many flavorants for tobacco [would] be useful in food, beverage and other products” promising “large financial returns” (Milton 1963; Nguyen et al. 2019). That flavorants could be generalized across products as diverse as tobacco and children’s beverages reveals the common addictive character across these additives. The addictiveness of additives has been underexplored in research, especially their propensities to biochemically upregulate glandular processes while baiting-and-switching the actual delivered (evolutionarily novel) biochemicals. Drugs of abuse are characterized as both generating adverse effects to self and/or society and creating loops of reinforcing use. When more use begets more use, creating a hedonic treadmill so tolerance to the drug requires increasingly intense dosage to get the high the drug produces, we are dealing with an addictive substance. Being in the colors and flavors business, as RJ Reynolds attested (Nguyen et  al. 2019), demonstrates how artificial additives come to substitute for naturally-­ occurring stimuli in the realm of desires. In the competitive marketplace for our taste buds, sugar, salt, and fat are the usual suspects. Due to the revolutions in agriculture, preserving, packaging, distribution, and advertising, along with the homogenization of tastes through mass media and national and then transnational commodity chains, “Foods that were once luxuries thus became seductively commonplace” (Cross and Proctor 2014, p. 2; see Patoine in this volume). Their ease to obtain and ubiquity in the commercial marketplace exposed humans and our endosemiotic organisms to a flood of chemicals and stimuli previously never available to them – they were not evolutionarily geared to handle these new stimuli, even if the original sources of the non-extract version of the stimuli in some cases were coded as desirable (like glucose). In their refined forms, these substances take on entirely different functions in their relationships to the body. Refined, extracted, intensified, optimized, a reverse alchemy of substances makes what was once salutary, malign.

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Taste and Democracy Kant distinguishes between taste as a private faculty and as a general one. The statement “I like strawberries” is different for Kant than “strawberries are sweet,” with the former designating a personal proclivity, and the latter a generalizable aesthetic judgment. Kant writes, taste is at bottom a faculty for the judging (Beurtheilungsvermögen) of the sensible rendering of moral ideas (by means of a certain analogy of the reflection on both), from which, as well as from the greater receptivity for the feeling resulting from the latter (which is called the moral feeling) that is to be grounded upon it, is derived that pleasure which taste declares to be valid for mankind in general, not merely for the private feeling of each. (Kant 2001, p. 230)

Jakob von Uexküll is well-known for his self-image of following in Kant’s footsteps (Deely 2004). Where Uexküll differs from Kant, however, is that instead of grounding organism behavior in transcendental concepts, Uexküll finds the biological organization of the organism’s structure (Bauplan) fundamentally indicative. One of the many problems with the well-meaning but misdirected advice of “following your instincts” or “follow your desires” in an age of supernormal stimuli, is that our instincts are increasingly managed and engineered to achieve not the best outcomes for our organism but for the profits of another organization which is not an organism at all, but a business corporation. Corporations generalize their behavior of soliciting and enrolling instinctual drives to fulfill their own organizational blueprints (Baupläne). Rather than a personalized predation or parasitization, which occurs in organic relationships, the stochastic manipulation of host physiology and semiotics to map onto corporate interests impersonally attempts to hook into generalized tendencies rather than attend to individual weaknesses and resiliencies. This generality simultaneously makes corporate parasitization both less effective as they are less individualized and more effective because of the large broadcast and scope. The biosemiotic consequences of this standardization of engagement and the normalization of individuals is a lack of specificity that wears down the nuances of sense receptivity found in individual organisms. In the generality of their appeal, they map symbols onto indexical references that allow them to bypass critical judgment and appeal directly to instinctual  biological processes, including different colonies of endosemiotic human bacteria, amoebas, nematodes, viruses, and other parasites. In Sheldon Wolin’s (2017) masterpiece Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Threat of Inverted Totalitarianism he observes how democratic action and sui generis collective decision-making has been replaced by a simulated and controlled version. He details how the blurring of the lines between where corporate power ends and state power begins upsets the role of government as enforcing fair play, and instead consists of tailoring the rules to predetermine appointed outcomes, rendering actual politics moot. To go a step further, what is being managed in our current democracies (and authoritarian governments as well), is not only

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a governmentality of political bodies, but biological ones as well. Biogovernmentality, however, goes beyond our behavior to our metabolism.

Scent Manipulation as Deceptive Semiosis Smell may be one of the most immediate sense faculties we possess as humans, in that the olfactory bulb goes directly to the brain with fewer opportunities for interceding neocortex filtration or judgment (Hendlin 2020). Olfaction is wired with less mediation than other inputs, and the biochemical reactions of smells which catalyze biochemical shifts under our conscious radar (like pheromones) have powerful effects on our behavior (Ackerman 1991). Our sense of smell is processed by the limbic system, which also is responsible for emotion and memory. Many working in the flavors and odors business acknowledge that they are intentionally bypassing rational faculties by appealing directly to human (or endosymbiont) instincts, while at the same time denying that they are catering to the potential preferences of parasites that could be undermining human agency. Alex Hiller, a marketing ethicist, for example, falls into this double-bind. Yes, changing smells is manipulative – this is the whole point. But it is mild, and I would argue that consumers realize and accept that in all artificial, and especially retail, environments, some mild form of manipulation does take place and it in no way constrains anyone's freedom, autonomy or well-being. (Quoted in White 2011)

The fallacies of this marketing ethicist are indicative of the profession; we should “accept” that in any commercial environment that our biology is being channeled, and yet such sense engineering is downplayed as “mild,” presumably because only the weak will be affected. Such responsibilization for responding to marketing also conveniently exculpates the corporation to manipulate as they please with impunity, placing any blame on the all-too-malleable consumer (Elias et al. 2018). Advertising to subterranean desires not present or at least not as active until or unless invoked through stimuli that indexes onto endosymbiont search images (or search tones, see Tønnessen 2018), calls into being prominences in the ecology of endosymbionts. The petrichor (the bouquet after fresh rain) of geosmin, the organic compound of earthy aroma and taste emitted as an metabolic by-product of particular classes of actinobacteria in soil, attunes human instincts and classes of our endosymbionts according to particular affordances and proclivities. The oily-salty smell of McDonald’s french fries, on the other hand, reaches down into our recesses and evokes very different qualities and invitations for action from a very different set of endosemiotic agents and instincts. In a Time magazine article titled “My nose made me buy it,” investigators track how artificial scents have become a major form of point-of-purchase advertising (Sifferlin 2013), short-circuiting the rational decision-making properties processing in symbolic visual advertisements. Going straight for our olfactory bulb could be seen as a cheap trick, bypassing rational judgments through the immediacy of iconic

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and indexical stimulation (Ackerman 1991; Synnott 1991). Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when managing consumer purchasing to maximize it started becoming high-budget science (Cross and Proctor 2014), consumer behavior became a calculus based on testing behavior-modifying stimuli and arrangements. Actual individual decision-making matters less for marketers than the stochastic behaviors responding to their stimuli inputs. While smell engineering can be based off of real smells like baking cinnamon and sugar, it is just as (if not more) often the result of artificially contrived odors. When smells dissimulate, advertising a certain representation while actually presenting a very different actual object, the phenomenological experience is often overwhelming in the technical sense (Barrett 2010; Cross and Proctor 2014). Disneyland’s “scent machines” pump out finely engineered aromas of frying oil, dough fried in fat, sugar, donuts, and beignets to evoke childhood pleasurable smells, intended to bypass rational faculties and advertise directly to more biochemically-­geared urges. These urges often have their origins in a complex evolutionary coupling, which before industrial times were advantageous. Fat, sugar, and salt, were all relatively rare worldwide in pre-industrial diets, and so biological lust for them was rewarded (Cross and Proctor 2014; Kessler 2010). But the mass production of these substances, combined with ultra-processing of foods, lead to the creation of supernormal stimuli, foods with intensities, quantities, and combinations of these substances never found in the wild (Barrett 2010). The chemical synthesis of analogs familiar to human-calibrated scents and tastes allows for food products to appear to our senses as if they possessed a certain substance (such as honey or animal fat) while delivering something else (like aspartame or palm oil). The chemical design of synthetic smell loses the subtlety of complex, musky aromas like real vanilla bean, but vanillin hits you and grabs you, and refuses to let go of your scent receptors. It accosts your nose with aromatic hooks, tethering you ineluctably to the source of the emanating thing. Thus, according to a biosemiotic analysis, the synthetic version of vanilla, vanillin (phenolic aldehyde), satiates certain taste receptors with a search tone for vanilla bean (Vanilla planifolia), without delivering the aphrodisiac and other salutary effects. Vanillin is comprised of a single molecule, 4-hydroxy-3-­ methoxybenzaldehyde, while vanilla bean extracts contain roughly 200 molecules (4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde being one of those). Currently “less than 5% of vanilla flavoring comes from natural sources; many people are so conditioned to the use of synthetic ‘vanilla’ [vanillin] flavor that they prefer it to the real thing” (Cotton 2008). This paradoxical reversal of preference for the intensely-optimized but narrow-spectrum ersatz for the real thing, is a function of heuristic replacement characteristic of supernormal stimuli (Hendlin 2018). Synthesized tastes and smells titillate certain gross search tones while neglecting more subtle ones, creating a molecular Stockholm syndrome. Overwhelmed with such concentrated stimuli, while lacking the complimentary diffusing alkaloids, remaps the tone of vanilla for that of vanillin, with the original losing the semiotic power its complexities provide (see Nowlin in this volume). Nuance in flavor and smell is traded for sheer bursts of excess; quantity substitutes for quality.

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As the nose is perhaps the sense organ most associated with instinct, it is no surprise that iconic and indexical advertising focuses heavily on smells. No business has made more ranging use of the manipulation of artificial smells than Disneyland. Part of the theme park’s identity is wrapped up in smells, to produce the desired psychology of the parkgoer. Disney makes use of a patented scent generator called a “smellitzer,” capable of producing a wide palette of smells and intensities, depending on their management needs (Wheeler 2014). While artificial smells are deployed to improve the experience Disney wishes to impart, the bottom line of smell diffusion technologies as they currently stand are to increase sales. Through the selective placement of smell vents which look like speakers, combined with circulation systems to fan the smells out to customers, Disney can effectively lure customers into its old-timey ice cream shops and restaurants. Fragrance specialists at ScentAir, the United States’ largest scent marketing and branding company, works with many major retail companies to develop scent maps of their stores. As the firm explains it: “Specific scents can be customized for specific departments, such as a baby powder smell for the child’s section or a coconut scent in swimwear (which is what Bloomingdale’s uses) and lilac in the lingerie department” (Sifferlin 2013). Their olfactory potions have an obvious purpose: to encourage customers to linger longer and return more often. Another example of smell engineering is the Hard Rock Café’s Orlando Hotel suffusing “ocean” smell in its lobby so “guests can imagine checking into a seaside resort,” despite the hotel’s hour drive from the coast (Sharrock 2013). ScentAir also engineered the hotel’s scent trajectories to entice people into the downstairs ice cream shop through emitting the patented “sugar cookie” scent at the top of the stairs with “waffle cone” greeting unsuspecting customers at the bottom (Sharrock 2013). The smell firm – perhaps with a conflict of interest in its reporting – reports the hotel’s ice cream shop sales increased 45% in the first six months after implementing this smell scheme (Sharrock 2013). Ironically, ScentAir also provides the smell blends “fresh air, breeze, and ‘Fresh Outdoors’” to artificial environments which devoid of the perfumes smell nothing of the sort (Sharrock 2013). ExxonMobil has also deployed ScentAir aroma technologies in their gas stations with coffee scent to promote  brewed coffee purchases at kiosks, also leading to purported increased sales (Ravn 2007). Because of the buzz of scent marketing in increasing sales, Advertising Age Magazine called it one of the Trends to Watch in 2007 (Ravn 2007). While the tradition of baking bread during an open house to drive up the home’s sale price is well known, the prevalence of scent marketing as a necessary element to actuate consumer behavior suggests its efficacy. Clearly, scent marketing companies have a vested interest in embellishing their reports of the efficacy of smell engineering on consumer behavior to collect more wholesale accounts. Nonetheless, as other forms of visual and aural advertising become oversaturated, scent advertising appears to be the next frontier. Fake scents transport us to other times and places. They allow virtual vacationing based on the alkaloid receptors in our olfactory bulb and the pleasure or pain they give the brain. But fake smells (and tastes, and visual, aural, and haptics stimuli) are also dangerous; they give us information as if we were in the middle of a place or

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situation, when in fact that is not the case at all. The simulation of sensation (Baudrillard 1994), some experts in the smell marketing industry believe, lead to increased exposure to artificial scents coupled disingenuously with decontextualized products, which could even lead to instigating the development of allergies in consumers (Ravn 2007; see Nowlin in this volume). As we increasingly live in “managed democracies” (Wolin 2017), the toxic side-effects of controlling humans and other organisms may pile up non-linearly, invisible at first and torrential when it is too late to stop the accumulated harms. Sometimes, attention to these harms comes in the forms of hunches by laypeople noticing incongruencies in their environment. The phenomenological experience of regular people can serve as an early warning and detection system for scientists (Oreskes 2019); canaries in the coal mine. The popular fast food restaurant Subway has found itself in the middle of a “bread smell” “conspiracy” (Roston 2011). For decades Subway employed a “dough conditioner” for its bread  – azodicarbonamide – that is illegal in the European Union for food use, but is used in some cases in the United States food industry, as it is has been approved as Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) by the Food and Drug Administration (although legally limited to a maximum of no more than 0.0045% of the total weight of the flour). Azodicarbonamide, however, is also used in yoga mats and shoe soles to increase elasticity (Landau 2014). This chemical happens to be the bread smell chemical Subway has been accused of pumping out their vents while baking the bread on premises to lure in customers. After a public outcry about the health dangers and the ick-factor of using elasticizers in food, however, Subway capitulated to replace the chemical (although Arby’s, McDonalds, and Starbucks continue to regularly use azodicarbonamide in their products) (Landau 2014). Despite its usefulness in the fast-food and bread industries, the World Health Organization has reported that azodicarbonamide could potentially induce asthma when inhaled by those working with the chemical (Cary et al. 1999). Of course, Subway is not the only venue to use such aromatically alluring practices – even if the artificiality and potential health harms of the chemical in question puts it in a distinct class. Other well-documented cases of smell manipulation involve the cinnamon roll franchise Cinnabon’s strategic placement of ovens near storefronts so smells exit, tempting passersby. Even when no actual baking is occurring, store operators routinely induce Cinnabon aromas through warming cinnamon and brown sugar on baking sheets to produce the same olfactory effect (Nassauer 2014). The baked-goods chain Panera has also switched night baking of bread to daytime hours, to maximize the pleasurable scents exuded from its stores (Nassauer 2014). Although the smell of caramelizing cinnamon and sugar maps more directly to our senses, giving a more felicitous perception of the sign-link the smell refers to than azodicarbonamide’s deceptive chemical semiosis, the aim and method of manipulating human purchasing and consumption behavior through smell remains. Scent marketing has become a multi-billion dollar business, a requisite expenditure for the most competitive retail and restaurant environments (Nassauer 2014; Ravn 2007). The New York supermarket chain Net Cost uses scent machines to fill its stores with artificial food smells such as milk chocolate and fresh-baked bread

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(Peterson 2014). But too much scent can be just as offensive, or ineffective, apparently, as not having the right scents in the right places. The cosmetics retail store Lush actively pumps away scents through an exhaust fan from its perfume-saturated store so as not to “overwhelm” customers in the store, giving the (false) impression that its highly scented products are not as overloaded with added scent as they actually are (Peterson 2014).

Responding (Reacting?) to Manipulation The idea of “controlling oneself” around stimuli, exerting “self-control” around manipulative stimuli and a society engineered for addiction, always puts the onus of responsibility on the individual, something that sociologists of medicine call “responsibilization” (Shamir 2008). Companies pretend to exonerate themselves by making the weak-willed person responsible for their bodily sensory responses to the stimuli they are inundated with. In music, the refrain or catchy part of a tune designed to create a desire to hear it again is called a “hook.” By creating aural patterns (e.g., ear-worms) that hook into the unconscious of the listener, and are “sticky,” easily remembered and sharable, pop songs are designed to create “hits;” popular tunes provide the expected optimized stimuli they have primed listeners for. Situational circles reproduce stimuli-response bypasses to conscious thought. This can work positively to increase reaction times when riding a bicycle, for example. But if one was raised in a milieu where processed foods and the engineered tastes and smells of refined foods competed with the simplicity of unassuming traditional or healthier foods, then despite the negative physiological reactions experienced shortly after eating processed food, the stupor they produce would be associated with positive memories. Any natural stopgaps that might exist to bar the frequent or post-satiety consumption of these foods could be overridden by positive associations with their toxic effects. After all, strong emotional bonds such as special nights out gorging on high fat, high sugar foods, such as birthday cakes and other celebratory associations relived and ritually reenacted in each iteration of consumption, rekindle hollowed out pleasant moods that once accompanied the original meal. In dysbiotic microbiotic ecosystems, exogenous bacteria and other pathogens  colonize and dominate endogenous microbiota. For example, the human “mouth is an unusual ecosystem in that the oral microbiome must be controlled,” through oral care practices such as brushing or flossing (Wade 2016, p. 67). Dental caries and periodontal diseases occur through bacterial activity, “but the primary risk factors are a sugar-rich diet for caries and host susceptibility and smoking for periodontitis. The oral microbiota is important for health because it prevents colonization by pathogens” (Wade 2016, p. 67). Thus, a healthy oral microbiological system, teeming with mutualistic bacteria prevents pathogenic incursion. But the opposite  – an oral microbiome dominated by pathogenic strains  – can lead to increased conversion of nitrate to nitrite which then converts to nitric oxide. This

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process can have deleterious effects for non-oral diseases as well, especially on the cardiovascular system through causing infections or aggravating chronic inflammation (Wade 2016). Here, as in other parts of the body, the relationship between endogenous and exogenous bacteria is a protective one. Yet, when the composition and ratio  of endogenous to exogenous bacteria changes through environment, diet, hormones, or other factors, the previous equilibrium in the biotic system punctures at a certain point, creating a new set of conditions and chemical excretions favorable to the new inhabitants, difficult to recalibrate. This new micro-ecological equilibrium tends to reinforce the stability of its own bacterial colonial mix (c.f. Gallopín 2002), even if it might be deleterious for the long-term health of the host organism. Following the work of Sapolsky (2017), I conjecture that because there is a continuum between our own meta-cognition as a superorganism, making decisions that have been called autonomous for the whole human body, and the more but never fully automatic biochemical reactions that occur at the micro- and hormonal-levels, much of the advertising humans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been exposed to are aimed at existing pathogenic constellations of bacteria through a semiotic cascade (symbol ➔ index ➔ icon) which uses the host to perform the pathogens’ bidding. By capturing the interpretation of signs through decontextualization which is a weakness of the (merely) symbolic order which late capitalism has leveraged, the transition from “physis to phantasia” which occurs in symbolic orders (Baer 1988, p. 303), has created an uncoupling of food and scent from health and the things they represent, which has allowed for the capture of these processes by pathogens.

Fasting as Counterpoint to Stimuli Barrage A number of different traditional practices involving fasting have again come into vogue recently. “Intermittent fasting” (abstaining from eating food for 16 or more hours per day) has apparently become a necessary counterweight to the excess and ever-availability of food  – especially sugary, salty, fatty food  – and research on intermittent fasting shows it to be effective in lowering blood pressure, insulin levels, and insulin sensitivity (Patterson and Sears 2017; Sutton et  al. 2018). The 24-hour drive-through and increasingly-used food delivery services, combined with ubiquitous enticing sensory markers, have prompted many stuck in the evolutionary dilemma of unlimited access to take special measures to abstain from the glut of opportunities to feast on previously rare or nonexistent substances. Intermittent fasting can be contextualized in a larger cultural escape from overstimulation, a purgative to the binge of all kinds the acceleration of life consumer economies have wrought (Wajcman 2015). Fasting then can be seen as a counterpoint to the current indulgent default. Jakob von Uexküll (2010) discusses contrapuntal relationships between organisms and their environments to demonstrate the ontological unity amongst organisms and habitats that form part of each other’s Umwelten. When organisms share

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overlapping Umwelten, like the orchid and wasp (Uexküll’s favored example), they literally make up each other, as their behaviors, actions, and perceptions are mutually colored. Different bodies’ ecologies become each other queerly (quer or diagonally), potentiating co-constitutive affordances. The rise of the popularity of fasting in its various forms can be reinterpreted not as a religious or ascetic practice, but instead as one following the saturation of exposure to unsafe food products. Just as the Catholic tradition of Lent is a collective religious practice, fasting and “detoxing” need not be only an individualistic practice, but new collective practices can also arise to meet this common protective need. Fasting need not be some sort of renaturalized bourgeois fantasy. In a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) world (Henrich et al. 2010), the bombardment of manufactured pleasures optimized for attracting attention and appealing to biological drives for certain substances coupled with the contrived social symbolism, has become almost an irresistible stimulus for many. By reacting through fasting, intermittent or not, the game of dieting or abstaining serves to legitimate and uphold the dominant stimulus barrage. What is at stake in the oscillations between biochemical overwhelm and the willpower-­expending fasts, detoxes, diets, and other abstemious behavior to counterbalance the excess, is how we can as a society best tune our exposures to different stimuli optimizing for cooperation and collective flourishing. As the enduring and sometimes tortured discussions regarding the ontology of species attests (Haraway 2008; Kitcher 1984; Lloyd and Gould 1993; Wilkins 2011), species are malleable and elusive – not just conceptually, but biologically. A species reflects the history of its environment, including the biotic and abiotic entities and events they meet and refract. Where one species begins and another ends is not always a clear designation, and species barriers can be surprisingly malleable (Sommer 2011). The stimuli that consumerism presents us with, is produced to maximize our consumption of certain foodstuffs and other disposable items, often at the detriment to our short- and long-term health, when taken to its logical extreme is a relationship of parasitism. While social Darwinism cynically interpreted such manipulations as a weeding process or naturally-condoned hierarchy, Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, holds a distinctly less competitive view of the processes of evolution than in Origin of the Species. There, he writes, “Those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring” (Darwin 1871, p. 111). This passage suggests that the oft-used natural fallacies of oppressors indeed have little grounding in nature and more often are projections of prevailing power structures. Instead, as Darwin observes, empathic, cooperative behavior, it turns out, enables the thriving of the greatest number, and because of the emergent forms of community and help that spontaneously organize when enough members of a community are flourishing, Darwin saw sympathy (according to Hume’s definition) as the mechanism of resonance enabling a deeper form of communication, and indeed communion, amongst conspecifics. Darwin’s hunch has since been named and researched with solid supporting evidence as group selection (Price 1995; Sober et al. 1999). While Darwin stressed that

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cooperation focused on strengthening group- rather than species-wide fitness, this often overlooked notion (in neoliberal social Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, at least) of group selection holds promise for bridging misunderstandings regarding individualistic competition, and the collective cooperation of survival. The idea of interspecies selection has been less researched up to now (but see Laland et  al. 2015; Roughgarden et al. 2018), yet will likely lead to interesting findings for biosemiotics across species, as species signal together with mutual benefit. As far as biosemiotics is committed to developing non-anthropocentric understandings of the communicative processes of nonhumans, it aims at estranging the notion that only humans have experiences, or as Nagel (1974) famously put it, “what-it-is-to-be-likeness.” The rub is that when biosemioticians speak of experience, which really is the currency of the discipline along with meaning, we are not talking about human experience, or human-esque experience, but rather the hardly imaginable experience of another species. Beyond the complications of sex, culture, or body varity in the human context, having fundamentally different semiotic systems – that is, different perception signs (Merkzeichen) and action signs (Wirkzeichen) as well as unexperienceable receiving and emitting receptors (Merkrezeptoren and Wirkrezeptoren) – defies our ability to think like a plant, or like a fungus, or prokaryote. One would have to conjure up Kafkaesque visions of metamorphosis to even dream of switching roles experientially (but not in terms of general interests) with such significantly different others. How can we think like a plant if a plant has no centralized nervous system, and it’s “brain” is distributed, across the thousands to millions of root sub-apices, where active neuronal-like activity is present (Baluška et  al. 2006)? Similarly, thinking like an octopus, which has its central brain and distributed neurons (up to 20% of total neurons) in its tentacles, challenges our imagination. And yet, acknowledging such radical difference while understanding the experience of such creatures as an indicator of an environmental relation rather than a constricted western modern notion of individuality, is the entrée into understanding other humans and the multiple levels of simultaneous (endo-)semiosis at work in their actions. Thure von Uexküll (1979, p. 13) reminds us that [T]he world surrounding a living being is not the physico-chemical world at large or the biosphere as a whole. Its organism cannot be defined in mechanical or psychological terms. 'Environment' and 'organism' can only be defined on the basis of their mutual relationships. Their relationships can be described in terms of a functional circle in which perception and operation complement and constantly redefine each other. (Translation from Baer 1988, 282)

Fasting too is quickly becoming the counterpoint to supernormal stimuli and invasive marketing. Artificial environments beget a Naturverlassenheit, or a nostalgia for nature. We have bizarrely made experiences of natural environments valuable due to their vanishing scarcity. The decontextualizing of smells and stimuli from their full spectrum of molecules and co-emergent symbionts spurs a return to simplicity and authenticity, a full first-person trust in each step of a much shorter commodity supply chain. Fasting has been forgotten in westernized cultures, frowned upon as some ascetic ideal in the Nietzschean sense. Viewed often as a false moral high ground from

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which to manipulate others, shaming them into joining along, abstaining from the onslaught of stimuli is even commonly regarded as heretical or irreligious to the church of capitalism. It’s the “do as I say but not as I do” of capitalism: Warren Buffett and others admonish us to save, but when we really do we are outcast from spendthrift social circles (which by now, are ubiquitous). Even for former alcoholics or people wishing to lose weight, in social situations proffering forbidden fruits we tend to conflate abstemious with sanctimonious behavior, shaming teetotalers of various sorts for our own shame at lacking a healthy level of reflectiveness about our own compulsions (Alexander 2010; Alter 2017; Keane 2002). Fasting creates space in between the metabolic processes of the cells we inhabit, and our reaction to the biochemical secretions of those cells. Fasting creates a sense of autonomy in the superorganism, because it stretches the stimulus-response effect of being driven by urges often resulting from dysbiosis. Like holding the breath between inhale and exhale, fasting creates a productive pandemonium in the body ecology, depriving addicts of their metabolic source material and conditioning, thus recalibrating the dominance of various vying bacterial groups. Fasting from advertising likewise recalibrates our senses. I recall a visit to Cuba many years ago the almost vertiginous experience of not seeing any billboards; no products advertised. After some time I focused my attention to other things, the birds, the sky, the surf; but it took some time, addicted as my search image for advertisements had become. Detoxifying from addictive search images  – search images that are not evolutionarily advantageous, but feed parasitic endosymbionts reinforcing a dysfunctional functional circle (Funktionskreis)  – often takes abstinence. It is no wonder that 70% of smokers still quit “cold turkey” (Chapman and MacKenzie 2010), even in an era with an ever-expanding array of nicotine products designed to entice smokers into believing that they can quit smoking cigarettes while continuing their nicotine addiction by other means (Hendlin et  al. 2017). Rather than the indulgent lie that we can have our cake and eat it too, sometimes the only way out of a vicious circle is to cut off the abusive semiosis at its source: by either removing oneself from one’s habitat (Umwelt) or eradicating the disease vector from one’s habitat in which one remains. Fasting helps create productive friction where certain habit pathways have been greased and others have been made sandpaper-like (Savičić and Savić 2013). When food choices which might undermine long-term human health are engineered in a society to become the most “convenient” and “easiest” options, and work schedules have precluded traditional culinary rituals with women being conscripted into the workforce without a reduction in the amount of total hours worked for a family (Nussbaum 2000), the outsourcing of sustenance has dealt a heavy blow to nutrition. Groopman (2019) describes this process of productive friction: The path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors… The central force for eliminating bad habits, according to Wendy Wood, is ‘friction.’ However businesses all around us try to reduce friction. A cashier taking an order at McDonald’s is scripted to ask, “Would you like fries with that?” This simple question encourages us to eat more fat and carbs. Binge-watching on Netflix or

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Hulu is facilitated by the way that the next episode starts automatically as the credits roll on the previous one.

Imposing barriers, even artificial ones such as fasts, digital detoxes, or other types of willful abstemious behavior, can upset the grooved habits developed by capitalist societies, which themselves may be the result of biological endo- and exo-semiotic dysbiosis. Summoning up deliberate behavioral friction against pathways that have been artificially smoothed by manipulative interests contra to the thriving and wellbeing of the host organism, is a useful heuristic that allows space and time to enlarge between set Pavlovian or other stimulus-response engineered priming. Of course, the other form of fasting, which doesn’t require such tremendous acts of willpower time and again for every individual is deliberately redesigning social spaces to encourage healthy behavior and create friction for unhealthy behavior (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). But this level of coordination, and solidarity, first presupposes an enlightened political engagement and education that can have some inkling of what holistic biosemiotic interventions might look like. While we can grant that there are plural and potentially incommensurable good ways to set up a society, more easy to agree on is that there are undeniable forms of dysbiosis aided and abetted through (infra)structural violence (Farmer 2004; Nixon 2011). Destroying native forests and waterways, emitting pollution through unnecessarily dirty forms of energy production, and car-centric cities and regions, all tend towards forms of dysbiosis and disrupt endosymbiont health. If we accept the biochemical deterministic aspects of human life, as much as the biosemiotic freedom and active meaning-making of all organisms, this confluence permits broadened ecological approaches of mind more in accordance to the current 5EA (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, ecological, and affective) cognitive science and Extended Evolutionary Synthesis paradigms of science and philosophy of mind as well as biology in the twenty-first century (Ahmed 2014; Bitbol 2002; Böll 2008; Laland et al. 2015; Noble 2008; Panksepp 2004; Pigliucci 2010), and intentionally designing our societies accordingly.

Conclusion As the founders of biosemiotics entrusted the discipline to “provide the human sciences with a context for reconceptualizing foundations” based in rather than ignoring biological factors (Anderson et  al. 1984, p.  8), we can see that many of the motivations for taking up the particular methods of deceptive social and biochemical mimicry that corporations commit in their advertising and promotional strategies, as well as the “hooks” of heightened addictiveness in design and composition of their products, have their origins in certain endo- and exo-ecological compositions of non-mutualistic symbionts. Bringing these cultural phenomena back into the realm of biosemiotics to honor the often overlooked biosemiotic components of

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these actions (the iconic and indexical semiosis not aimed at our linguistic or rational human selves, and perhaps not even aimed necessarily at our human cells or components), provides a different angle of understanding and hopefully eventually deconstructing these pervasive, undermining phenomena. Parasitism begets parasitism, both biologically and socially – insofar as the two can be distinguished. In the same vein as the field of public health focuses on the social determinants of health, biological processes likewise can be understood as including determinants without being determined. In other words, in accordance with one of the central tenets of biosemiotics, organisms – no matter how small or primeval – engage in heuristic processes, which allow them some elements of choice in decision-­ making. Rather than a matter of kind, autonomy and automaticity instead are matters of degree, highly contingent upon external factors and situations (Appiah 2006, 2007), delicate, relational, temporal, and contrapunctal. Instead of ignoring how (built) environments shape organisms, as thin descriptions of equality of opportunity might contrive, acknowledging the contrapunctal nature of humans and our environment might lead to biosemiotics playing a role in the regulation of advertisements and consultation on the self-restraint reducing qualities of certain types of engineered stimuli. Millennia ago, Aristotle defined the human species as the political animal. We seem to have long accepted that humans are uniquely social, but we have long viewed sociality as necessarily replacing or negating the biological determinants of our actions that come from us also being animal. If advertising is a sort of parasitism, then it is only possible because parasitized people thought up advertising to serve some sort of end that would enlarge the sphere of influence of those parasites. If they weren’t themselves parasitized, they would not wish to parasitize others. As biosemioticians, we must remain vigilant, however, that advertising is not just a parasitism of symbolosphere, but also of the semiosphere’s other components directly relating to biological processes with indexical and iconic signs. This bioethical metaphysics of parasitism is a claim that may one day be empirically feasible to test. In the meantime, attending to the shared agency of biota in creating similar endobiotic environments in other organisms to propagate their endosemiotic ends, should be seriously considered when discussing the role and modes of food and commodity advertising in contemporary society.

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Food, Health and the Body: A Biosemiotic Approach to Contemporary Eating Habits Simona Stano

Abstract  A number of food myths have increasingly captured the media agenda in recent years, reinforcing, but also distorting, the link between nutrition and health. Narratives and paradigms establishing connections between particular elements in the composition of food and even specific techniques used to produce it, on the one hand, and bodily health, on the other hand, have emerged and spread, influencing people’s perceptions of edibility and consumption behaviours. This paper explores such issues by making reference to existing literature in the field and analysing relevant examples of media discourses on health-related eating habits, with specific regard to the opposition between technologically modified food and organic products. Within this framework, specific attention is devoted to the conception of eating as an “embodied experience” and the understanding of the bodily dimension itself. Keywords  Nutrition · Health · Body · GMOs · Organic food · Nature

 ood, Health, and Medicine: From Antiquity F to Contemporary Societies Eating healthy food is not a novel concern: activity in the kitchen has always been very important from a medical perspective, especially in those times when physicians had few other options to treat their patients (Laudan (2004 [2000]). Since classical antiquity, in fact, various authors have emphasised the continuum between food and medicine: according to the Hippocratic corpus (Places in Man, 45), for instance, food (σιτίον, sition) can be used to cause changes in the state of the body This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 795025. It reflects only the author’s view and the European Research Executive Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. S. Stano (*) Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin (UNITO), Turin, Italy © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_3

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in addition to, or also instead of, drugs (φάρμακα, phármaka). Similarly, Aristotle (Problemata 1.42, 864b) distinguished food from drugs because the former can be digested (“cooked”) by the body, while the latter cannot, but also suggested that large quantities of food can act as drugs, since the body is not able to “overcome” them.1 Drawing on Hippocrates’ observations on bodily fluids, then, Galen’s theory of humoralism also highlighted the potential of food in maintaining and restoring health, introducing a medical conception of nutrition that, through Islamic literature and its subsequent re-consideration by the twelfth-century European scholars, formed the basis of a host of popular manuals and common sayings that kept circulating until the seventeenth century (cf. Laudan (2004 [2000]), 2015). From a biosemiotic point of view, such theories are very interesting, as they suppose a process of “interpretation” of food substances by the bodies that process them. Within these frameworks, in fact, not only does our body ingest food, but it also “elaborates” upon it, fragmenting foodstuffs into smaller units (i.e. from the bites it initially takes to the basic elements obtained through digestion) and interacting with such units in different ways depending on a series of material, as well as symbolic, contextual factors, in an interconnected web of signs triggering specific actions and reactions. Without the ability of the body to interpret food (as a source of energy, a means of recovery, a threat, etc.) and correspondingly transform it, in other words, neither nutrition nor its links to medicine would exist. By the middle of 1600, a new paradigm emerged: following in Paracelsus’s footsteps, a number of northern European scholars began to question the structure of classical medicine and the humoral theory, introducing a new classification of elements and a different conception of digesting processes. However, the idea of a dependence of health on food still remained fundamental, also leading to the condemnation of previously largely consumed products, such as sugar, due to their negative effects on the human body. Cooking thus progressively took the shape of a sort of “chemical science”, consisting in “analyzing, digesting, and extracting the quintessence of foods, drawing out the light and nourishing juices, mingling and blending them together” (Marin 1758: xxii–xxiii; Engl. trans. in Wheaton 1983: 197). Such an understanding was further enhanced in the 18th and 19th centuries by modern theories on the role of calories, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals in the biochemical processes of digestion; and it became predominant in recent times, with the rise of the so-called “paradigm of nutritionism” (cf. Scrinis 2008, 2012, 2013), which conceives food mainly in terms of its components and establishes reductionist connections2 between particular nutrients and bodily health.

1  For a detailed description of the Aristotelian reflection on food as medicine and its controversies, see Totelin 2014. 2  “Nutrition scientists, dieticians, and public health authorities—the nutrition industry, for short— have implicitly or explicitly encouraged us to think about foods in terms of their nutrient composition, to make the connection between particular nutrients and bodily health, and to construct “nutritionally balanced” diets on this basis. … I refer to this nutritionally reductive approach to food as the ideology or paradigm of nutritionism. This focus on nutrients has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body” (Scrinis 2008: 39).

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Subdividing food into its components to highlight their (beneficial or harmful) effects on health has thus progressively become a common strategy in dietetics, as well as in several dietary discourses circulating within the mass and new media3— not without misunderstandings and misrepresentations. In 1999, for instance, Heinz released an advertisement showing a bottle of ketchup with the headline “Lycopene may help reduce the risk of prostate and cervical cancer*”, using an asterisk to refer to a review article on the health benefits of the carotenoid hydrocarbon which gives tomatoes their red colour, and thus associating the product with cancer prevention. In addition to the lack of scientific substantiation of the reported claim (see Nestle 2013: 336), the evident problem with this message concerns precisely the isolation of a specific nutrient, which is de-contextualised and given meaning independently from the other components of the food it is part of: Ketchup contains processed tomatoes, sugars, and salt (in that order) and could hardly be considered a health food, not least because it typically is used as a garnish for hamburgers and fried potatoes. The advertisement singled out one component of ketchup, lycopene (a plant pigment naturally present in tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables), and it clearly associated ketchup with cancer prevention by including a prominent endorsement from the Cancer Research Foundation of America. (Ibid.: 334)

From a biosemiotic point of view, then, the above-mentioned process of interpretation of food by the body disappears, or at least becomes extremely weak: substances no longer seem suitable to be used by the body at different times and in different circumstances in different ways. On the contrary, they are thought to have a pre-­determined and a-contextual effect on the body, either such an effect is positive (as in the case of lycopene) or negative (as for all the nutrients that should be carefully avoided). Despite these issues, such a communicative strategy proved very effective, and the brand reported a 4% increase in market share as a result of the ad. What is more, since the agro-food industrialization increased the disintermediation of supply chains, making food processing opaque, and biotechnology allowed creating and modifying products for specific use, growing attention has been paid to the practices of production of food and their effects on health. Let us consider, for instance, the large debate concerning genetically modified food, palm oil, the use of antibiotics in livestock or chemical pesticides in agriculture, and a series of other cases where the attention has, in fact, shifted from food itself to a series of contextual elements characterising it. Guido Nicolosi (2006/2007; 2007) referred to such dynamics by introducing the idea of an “orthorexic society”: drawing on Steven Bratman’s definition of “orthorexia nervosa” (see in particular Bratman 1997 and Bratman and Knight 2001) as a psycho-cultural syndrome consisting in a state of hyper-attention paid to eating healthy food, he described contemporary societies’ “obsession” with food “perfection”, as related not only to dietetics (e.g. healthy food), but also to other aspects such as aesthetics (e.g. food design) and ethics

3  For a detailed analysis of the strategies used in health and fitness magazines, for instance, see Stano 2014 and 2018.

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(e.g. critical consumption): “there is not only the fear of physical contamination (virus, GMO, etc.) at play, but also the fear of a loss of a symbolic-identity purity … or ethical-ideological” (Nicolosi 2006/2007: 49). Such a phenomenon is strictly related to the so-called regime of “gastromania” (Marrone 2014) established by the mass and especially new media, in which the discursive dimension of food (i.e. pictures, reviews, audiovisual representations, etc.) has become even more important than food itself: not only do we eat food, but also and above all we talk about it, we describe it, we comment on it, we share its pictures on various social networks, etc., thus investing it with multiple meanings and values that in turn mediate our experience of it. Within this context, an increasing number of “food myths”4 (such as the “carcinogenic meat”, the “evil glutamate”, the risks associated with refined sugar and flours, or the benefits of organic and “natural” foods, just to mention a few) have progressively emerged, reinforcing, but also distorting, the link between food and medicine, pharmacology and dietetics. There is no doubt, in fact, that eating is intrinsically and inevitably related to the human body, since it is characterised by the interaction among the physiological dimension of nutrition, the cultural aspects of signification and communication, and the social structures of production, distribution and consumption (cf. Sebeok 2001). However, such myths have resulted in an unprecedented and often uncontrolled amplification, as well as in a distortion, of the relation between food and the bodily dimension. Drawing on these considerations, this paper intends to analyse the link between nutrition, health and medicine from a biosemiotic perspective, dealing with food as an “embodied experience” (cf. Lupton 1996; Violi 2008, 2009) and therefore emphasising a conception of the body as a text that marks at the same time the origin and the limit of signification and interpretation processes (cf. Stano 2019b). To this purpose, the following paragraphs will deal with relevant examples of media discourses on health-related eating habits, with specific regard to the opposition between biotechnologically modified food, on the one hand, and organic food, on the other hand.

 ood and Health in Contemporary Societies: The Case F of Genetically Modified Foods as Opposed to Organic Products Within the framework of present day’s societal orthorexia, it is particularly interesting to focus on the widespread resistance to biotechnologies applied to food in public opinion. Although an increasing number of scientists have agreed on the

4  The term myth is here used in its common understanding in contemporary cultures; for a discussion on this, see in particular Barthes 1957, Niola 2012, and Ortoleva 2019; a general overview, with a specific focus on present day’s “food myths” can be found in Stano 2019a.

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safety of GM foods (see in particular European Commission 2010; Winter and Gallegos 2006; Nicolia et al. 2013; WHO 2014), in fact, most people still perceive them as a major threat for health. By contrast, the organic market is flourishing5 precisely for the opposite reason. While certainly linked to material factors, such trends cannot be fully understood without making reference to the socio-cultural dimension and the biosemiotic processes underlying it. Nicolosi (2006), for instance, suggests to interpret them in light of Claude Fischler’s idea of “gastro-anomy”, that is, the fact that the agro-food industrialization has eroded the socio-cultural constraints6 that regulated the gastronomic universe, thus allowing for more autonomy and freedom in food choices, but at the same time creating insecurity: Le régime alimentaire devient l’objet d’une décision individuelle. Jusque-là, le choix s’imposait comme de lui-même, dicté qu’il était par les ressources, par le groupe, la tradition, les rituels et les représentations; voici qu’il revient en boomerang pour peser désormais comme une charge sur l’individu qui, à la lettre, a maintenant l’embarras du choix. … Le nouveau mangeur-consommateur … ne sait plus comment reconnaître le comestible du noncomestible, de sorte qu’il finit par ne plus guère se reconnaître lui-même [The food regime has become the object of an individual decision. Once the choice was self-evident, as it was dictated by resources, groups, traditions, rituals and representations; now it comes back as a boomerang to weigh as a burden on the individual, who is literally spoiled for choice. … The new consumer-eater … does no longer know how to recognise what is edible and what is inedible, and so ends up hardly recognising him/herself]. (Fischler 1979: 205–206; our translation)

In Nicolosi’s view, such insecurity explains the neophobic attitude of contemporary eaters, who can no longer rely on the Cultural Order (cf. Mary Douglas 1966) to discriminate what is edible from what is not, and so have become more reluctant to try novel foods and unfamiliar techniques. Although interesting, such an explanation is very general, and does not describe adequately the peculiarities of present day’s so-called “orthorexic” concerns about food safety, nor does it provide a comprehensive explanation of how the link between food and health has changed in contemporary societies. Moreover, as remarked by Marion Nestle, “questions of safety cannot be addressed without dealing with issues of regulation, oversight, trust, and control—politics” (2010: 172). From a semiotic point of view, such as the one adopted in this paper, this means focusing primarily on the discursive strategies intervening in the definition of such issues and the effects of meaning arising from them. This is precisely the aim of the following paragraphs, where we will highlight the arbitrariness of the definitions of genetically modified foods and organic products, then analysing the main isotopies resulting from the discursive dimension associated with them and their biosemiotic implications.

5  For recent statistics, refer in particular to Willer and Lernoud 2017 (European data), Canada Organic Trade Association 2017 (Canadian data), and Organic Trade Association 2018 (US data). 6  I.e. culinary grammars, syntagmatic successions and paradigmatic structures, traditional and religious prescriptions and taboos, table manners and rites, etc.

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GM Food: The “Denial” of Nature “Transgenic” or “genetically modified” (GM) foods (also referred to under the broader category of “genetically modified organisms” to which they pertain7) are among the major concerns of contemporary eaters: logos indicating their absence have been increasingly incorporated to labels and packaging, and both consumer associations and governmental bodies have promoted a number of communication campaigns on the risks associated with their consumption. But what are exactly GMOs? The World Health Organization defines them as organisms (i.e. plants, animals or microorganisms) in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination. The technology is often called ‘modern biotechnology’ or ‘gene technology’, sometimes also ‘recombinant DNA technology’ or ‘genetic engineering’. It allows selected individual genes to be transferred from one organism into another, also between nonrelated species. (WHO 2014, our emphasis)8

Although largely shared and adopted by a number of institutional entities, such a description is problematic: not only does it refer to a classification system based on the techniques of production of the considered organisms rather than on their final characteristics (Bressanini and Mautino 2015: 119–124), but it relies on manifestly arbitrary and not at all clear criteria for defining the “naturalness” of such techniques. According to the European legislation, for instance, some practices, such as the recombination of nucleic acids, cell fusion, or the injection of external heritable material into one organism, are considered forms of genetic modification, while others, such as the so-called mutagenesis or some methods of cell fusion not involving nucleic acids recombination, are not. This gives origin to a series of borderline cases, such as that of the Creso wheat cultivar produced by hybridising the Mexican CIMMYT line with the Cp8144 mutant, in turn obtained by treating Cappelli wheat with combined neutron and gamma-ray irradiation, which in fact involves a genetic modification and yet is not recognized as a GMO (for further details, see Ibid.); or the other thousands of plants that, although resulting from chemical or radiation mutations, do not fall into the class of “un-natural” techniques identified by the above-mentioned definition. In fact, similar modifications are inherent to natural evolution: as James Shapiro (1992, 1997) notes, evolutionary variability occurs frequently in the realm of cell biology, sometimes also with extensive genome reorganisation within one or a few cell generations. A process of “natural genetic engineering” therefore exists, and recalls a fundamental idea in biosemiotics: “living cells are agents capable of

 “Foods produced from or using GM organisms are often referred to as GM foods” (WHO 2014).  Such a definition is echoed, with slight variations, by various institutions, such as the European Directive 2001/18/CE (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32001 L0018), the American National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard (2018, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/12/21/2018-27283/national-bioengineered-food-disclosurestandard), the NON-GMO Project (https://www.nongmoproject.org), etc. 7 8

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inventing new ways of living”9 (Sharov et al. 2016: 2, our emphasis) as a result of a continuous process of re-interpretation of hereditary signs alongside other signs originating either in the environment or in the organism itself. In this sense, rather than a series of accidental modifications, cell evolution should be seen as a complex biological process of active self-modification (Shapiro 2016). So, even though evolution is riddled with genetic modifications, GMOs pose a crucial problem, since they make an external element (human action) interfere with the “cell agency” (cf. Giorgi and Bruni 2016), thus affecting the above-mentioned process of re-­ interpretation: the implantation of foreign genetic material into a host cell results in such cell expressing those foreign genes, both physically and semiotically. In this sense, the genetic modification of food is problematic as it alters that combination of “life, semiosis, and agency [that] make[s] up one conceptual complex which, once realized in the wild, constitutes the basis of ongoing sophistication during evolution” (Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2016: 11). On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that technology is an unavoidable element of the contemporary world, and so participates in such dynamics even when natural evolution occurs, as it is part of the context where it takes place and which influences the processes of interpretation of cells. What is more, food production is dotted with techniques (such as radiation or hybridisation) that have an impact on genetic codes, and hence on cells’ agency and interpretation processes, but are not recognised as genetic modifications by institutional agencies. Finally, as James Shapiro (2016) effectively shows, externally driven genetic engineering may also occur without any human intervention, via viruses and bacteria. Definitely, the separation between natural evolution and genetic modification caused by external factors is transient and not at all easy to determine and assess. This explains why, at a global scale, the classification and legislation regulating products obtained through biotechnological techniques vary considerably. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity (2000), for instance, replaced the reference to GMOs by the more general concept of Living Modified Organisms (LMOs), using such a denomination to identify those organisms that have been modified and therefore potentially differ from their original counterpart and environment in ecological terms, regardless of the techniques used to obtain such modifications. National specificities, then, make legislation on GM organisms and food even more varied and complex, as exemplified by the differences among Canada (where any novel food is subjected to the same processes of analysis and approval regardless of the techniques that led to its production), the United States (where the law HR 933 [2013] prevents federal judges from introducing any ban on the sale of GMOs), and the so-called “precautionary principle” adopted by the European Union (cf. Directive 2001/18/EC, Regulations 1829 and 1830/2003/EC and Recommendation 556/2003, which is aimed at minimizing the potential adverse effects deriving from biotechnology.

9  Jesper Hoffmeyer (2014) described such dynamics by attributing a certain degree of “semiotic freedom” to cells.

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To conclude, therefore, the universe of genetically modified foods is highly variegated, and administered by prescriptions and proscriptions based on arbitrary codes that evidently vary depending not merely on material factors, but also and above all on socio-cultural representations and values. Yet the above-mentioned definition makes reference to a sort of universally acknowledged “state of nature”— which, as such, is thought to be rather related to “objectively” verifiable parameters. The same applies to the perception of the link between GMOs and health. Research (see, for instance, Wunderlich and Gatto 2015; Bray and Ankeny 2017) has shown that consumers worldwide display limited understanding, as well as misconceptions, of genetically modified food products, probably because they mainly receive information from the media, Internet, and other news sources that tend to be less reliable than scientific experts. The case of food allergies, which are generally listed among the main side effects of GMOs, is emblematic in this sense. Despite a policy preventing any protein that has been shown or even suspected to cause an allergic reaction to be introduced into GMO crops, and the international principles of food safety (FAO/WHO) requiring the structure of any introduced protein to be compared to all known allergens before releasing any GM food onto the market, consumers are still particularly concerned about the potential of GMOs to cause allergenic responses. This strongly opposes most scientists’ view (see, for instance, Herman et al. 2003; Singh and Bhalla 2008; Xu 2015), who rather support that, with appropriate oversight, not only do transgenic foods not cause more allergic responses than conventional breeding, but they might even enable us to remove common allergens (such as gluten) in our food. In any case, it should be remembered that allergenicity is not an intrinsic, fully predictable property of a given food, but rather “a biological activity requiring an interaction with the immune system in predisposed individuals” (EFSA Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms 2010: 11). Focusing exclusively on the properties of food, independently from its context of consumption and its interaction with the body consuming it, definitely, cannot provide an adequate understanding of such dynamics.

Organic Food: The “Praise” of Nature First introduced by Lord Northbourne in Look to the Land (1940), the idea of “organic” farming has progressively developed and spread in contemporary societies, where it has become not only a common presence in supermarkets and restaurants, but also a crucial issue in national and international legislations. Demand for organic products is primarily driven by concerns for personal health and the environment—even though the scientific and medical literature still lacks adequate evidence to support claims that they are either healthier or safer than conventionally produced food (see Kumpulainen 2001; Magkos et  al. 2003; Williamson 2007; Harvard Medical School 2015; Brantsaeter et al. 2017). Moreover, many of the so-­ called “organic foods” marketed in stores actually have been treated with pesticides, herbicides and fungicides that are not really different from conventionally grown foods.

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Despite the large number of definitions provided by governmental bodies, consumer associations and other entities,10 the key concept identifying such a form of production of food (and hence the products deriving from it) remains constant, as the Organic Manifesto clearly states: “as the chemical paradigm is about controlling nature, the organic paradigm is about respecting nature”11 (Rodale 2010, our emphasis). However, it is not always clear what such a “nature” is: sometimes defined as an “ecological balance” (SARE and the EU Commission), sometimes rather described in differential terms as “anything that is non-synthetic” (FAO and WHO), the term gets back to emphasise the arbitrariness of the definition it is part of, pointing out the same issues encountered when dealing with GM foods. In this case too, in fact, there are various exceptions proving the existence of the rule: while certain synthetic inputs determined to be essential and consistent with organic farming philosophy (such as insect pheromones) are allowed by organic legislations, some “natural” inputs (such as arsenic) are banned, as they are considered harmful to human health or the environment (cf. FAO 2012). Moreover, there is a large debate concerning the standards and the criteria underlying the certification of organic food, as well as the risks that may derive from its incorrect management, before or after harvest, both in terms of food safety (i.e. product contamination and in food-borne illnesses) and environmental problems (i.e. excessive erosion) (for further details, see in particular Katz and Weaver 2003; Van Loo et al. 2012; Hardy et al. 2013). However, as Harvey, Zakhour and Gould (2016) note, there is still no sufficient data to assess risk of outbreaks due to organic foods compared with non-organic, so-called “conventional” foods. Again, therefore, the purely material dimension12 does not seem to suffice to adequately describe what is being marketed as the “organic paradigm”, which appears in fact strictly related to collective representations and socio-cultural values, that is to say, to a series of discursive strategies originating particular images of nature and conferring specific meanings on them. The following paragraph will describe the main aspects related to such strategies, in a comparative perspective relating them to those that emerge from the analysis of the communication of genetically modified foods.  Consider, for instance, the definitions provided by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (Codex Alimentarius Commission 1999, http:// www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq1/en/), International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM 2004, https://www.ifoam.bio/en/organic-landmarks/definition-organic-agriculture), the EU Council Regulation (EC) No 834/2007 (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32007R0834&from=EN), the EU Commission (https://ec.europa.eu/ info/food-farming-fisheries/farming/organic-farming/organics-glance_en), the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (https://www.sare.org/Learning-Center/Bulletins/ Transitioning-to-Organic-Production/Text-Version/What-is-Organic-Farming) and the Italian association Sistema di Informazione Nazionale sull’Agricoltura Biologica (SINAB, http://www. sinab.it/content/cosè-bio) 11  It is interesting, in this respect, to consider the role played by animals and plants themselves in controlling weeds and insects in organic farming, as noted by Victoria N.  Alexander in this same volume. 12  Which is certainly important, as it regulates the processes of organic farming. 10

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 rganic vs Genetically Modified Food and the Communication O of Nature As highlighted by Ilaria Ventura (2012), one of the most remarkable features of the discursive dimension associated with “organic” food is that it generally emphasises those characteristics that products do not possess, as well as those processes that have not been implemented during their creation. Such a strategy seems to respond to the very contemporary—although well rooted in antiquity (Ricca 2012)—trend to celebrate “Nature” (in the singular form and with a capital letter) as a differential term, that is to say, according to a logic of denial—and consequent dysphorization—of anything that is artificial, industrial or somehow manipulated (cf. Marrone 2011, 2012; Stano 2018). More specifically, various aspects of the communication13 related to organic food suggests four main characterisations of such a Nature: (i) a wild, uncontaminated and imperfect Nature, which finds expression primarily in broken edges and forms, dark colours, chalky surfaces, transparencies revealing the presence of imperfections, or at least some missed improvements, in the product, etc., in opposition to industrial and technological refinement; (ii) a rustic Nature, which also functions as a guarantor of authenticity and integrity, but finds expression in figures referring to the rural tradition and evoking the memory of a supposed idyllic pre-industrial and still non-globalized society (cf. Stano 2015, 2017); (iii) an ethnic Nature, built on the figure of the “good savage”, that is to say, the “non-civilized”—and therefore not yet corrupt—man; (iv) a local Nature, which also contrasts the negative effects of globalization and homologation, but in the “here” of terroir (understood as the natural environment of a territory, in conjunction with the people and traditions that characterise it). Whether any of these aspects prevails or they are combined together, Nature often appears as a differential term (i.e. the denial of Culture). The “Organic. Naturally Different” campaign launched in 2011 by the Organic Centre Wales (OCW) emblematically depicted this. In one advertisement, an altered orange tells an organic one “Just had a bit of a spray. I don’t look too orange, do I?”, and the latter replies “Wouldn’t know, love, I’m organic. I’m not so into that”. In another ad, a plum that “had some work done” is told by another, organic plum “I’m a nice handful already love, I’m organic”. The list goes on, with a number of organic vegetables, fruits, etc. rejecting any process of alteration, and thus being acclaimed as “naturally different” by the tagline. Furthermore, this kind of communication suggests an inchoative14 characterisation of Nature, which is how things are  Ventura (2012) mainly focuses on packaging, but her observations can be extended to other forms of communication and further developed as shown in this chapter. 14  The reference is here to the theory of aspectuality (cf. Greimas and Courtés 1979; Leone 2017). 13

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“originally”—with such an origin being either a “here” crystallized in an idyllic past to be preserved or rather a still uncontaminated “elsewhere” to safeguarded. In any case, the emphasis is put precisely on the agency of “natural organisms” themselves, refusing any possible intervention from the outside—and disregarding that, in fact, almost all the foods we consume have been modified under thousands of years of human (and animal) intervention and domestication. By contrast, most representations of GM products insert them in a terminative aspectuality, connoting them as the end of a process of transformation and even subversion of the natural order. Thus the mechanisms of manipulation of food, which are concealed as much as possible or at least disguised under the aesthetics of a faraway tradition in the discursive dimension associated with organic products, become predominant, finding expression through figurative elements such as the human hands (carefully protected by lactic gloves as in any hazardous operation or experiment) and injections, which are in fact very recurrent. Oranges-kiwis, apples-­ watermelons, banana peels revealing salamis inside them and other visual paradoxes, then, evidently mark the dysphoric characterisation of such a process: if the lack of processes of alteration in organic products suggests a veridictory intent15 (i.e., making such products appear as they are, cf. Greimas 1966), transgenic foods rather oscillate between secret (they do not seem what they are) and lie (they are not what they seem). Building on the distinction introduced by Jean-Marie Floch (1990)16 between the representational and the constructive function of language, it is in fact possible to associate the organic market with a referential strategy based on a disengaged (cf. Greimas and Courtés 1979) and informative style, often using quantitative data, graphs and nutritional tables to suggest that consumers are told the “truth” about products. In contrast, communication on GM foods seems to oscillate between an oblique strategy based on paradoxes, hyperbole and forms of irony aimed at highlighting the dangers related to their consumption, and a mythical strategy inserting food into new narratives and investing it with symbolic meanings. The recurrent figure of “Frankenfoods” is emblematic in this sense: pieces of fruits sutured together evidently recall Mary Shelley’s famous novel, thus evoking the dysphoric myth of a science that dares to go beyond the limits of humanity and is therefore destined to succumb to its own creations. Such an idea is in fact very common in the debate on genetically modified foods. In 1998, for instance, Prince Charles  It is interesting, in this respect, to recall what stated by Fischler (1979): “Une nouvelle esthétique culinaire se répand. Son credo est de rétablir la « vérité des produits »: le cuisinier, désormais, sera un maïeuticien de la nourriture, celui qui, socratiquement, fera accoucher les mets de leur vérité naturelle; il rompra ainsi avec le « chef » ancienne manière, grand prêtre de l’accommodement, sorcier de l’artefact, qui assurait le triomphe de la Culture sur la Nature” [A new culinary aesthetics is spreading. Its creed is to restore the “truth of products”: the cook is becoming a “maieutician” of food, namely the one who, socratically, pulls the natural truth out of dishes; thus he breaks up with the old idea of the “chef”, the high priest of the compromise, the wizard of culinary artefacts, who ensured the triumph of Culture on Nature] (1979: 207; our translation and emphasis). 16  This model, developed by Floch to describe advertising, can also be applied to other codes, as several scholars have shown (see in particular Marrone 2007; Ventura 2007; Mangano 2008). 15

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reproached food biotechnology of “tak[ing] mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone”, warning his readers about the “the long-term consequences for human health and the wider environment of releasing plants bred in this way” (Windsor 1998); and in 2000 Pope John Paul II declared that using genetically modified organisms to increase production was “contrary to God’s will”, also advising farmers that when they “forget this basic principle and become tyrants of the earth rather than its custodians … sooner or later the earth rebels” (see Lyman 2000).17 To conclude, in most contemporary foodspheres, to be considered healthy, food products must in a certain sense deny their own “culturalness”, realizing a process that, drawing on Lotman’s work (see in particular 1974, 1984, 1993), Pierluigi Cervelli (2012) has effectively described as an “incursion” of the extra-semiotic chaos of Nature (here positively connoted) into the semiotically ordered universe of Culture (here dysphorized due to its presumptuous ambition to dominate Nature). This also leads to interesting observations on the link between food and medicine, and a series of related aspects, which will be discussed in the next paragraph.

Food, Health… and the Body As we discussed in the first paragraph, the link between food and health has always played a crucial role in human societies: because of their properties, various food substances have historically been used to prevent and cure body alterations. What has changed is the understanding of the relation between the body and food, and so the specific uses that have been made of the latter to cause effects on the former. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, cooking represented the basic metaphor for the systems that sustained all life, with the sun “cooking” seeds into plants and plants into fruits and grains, and then humans “cooking” such substances into edible dishes, and their internal organs finally “cooking” the ingested food to produce energy and vital substances (such as blood and the other humors of the Galenic theory), excreting wastes and returning them to the soil, where the cosmic culinary cycle began again (cf. Laudan 2004 [2000]: 13). This, as we have seen, allowed for a separation into easily digestible foods, which were preferred in healthy diets, and hardly digestible substances (or quantities of substances), which had to be avoided as much as possible—but could also be used as drugs, if well administered, as the Aristotelian model suggests. After 1650, the metaphor of cooking was replaced by that of fermentation, which was associated with putrefaction, distillation and the interaction of acids and salts. Although always starting with seeds and ending with the release of waste, the cosmic culinary cycle of that era therefore involved diverse processes and a different approach to food itself: “the cosmos was still a kitchen but was now equipped with brewers’ vats, and the human body held miniature copies of that equipment” (Ibid.:

17

 For further details on the theological and secular debate on biotechnology, cf. Nestle 2010.

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15). As a consequence, a preference emerged for food products that fermented readily (such as oysters, anchovies, green vegetables, mushrooms and fruits) and so did not need complicated preparation in the kitchen to be pre-digested; this brought about evident changes in the healthy diet of that time. Such a change also contributed to shed light on the chemical composition of food, initiating a process that, as we highlighted, culminated in the excesses of nutritionism. Here is where an evident break becomes manifest: the focus on nutrients denounced by Scrinis “has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body” (2008: 39). In the paradigm of nutritionism, in fact, the body seems to lose the ability it previously had to transform, in one way or another, the substances it ingests; such substances, on the contrary, acquire the capability of affecting the body, even irreparably, according to a reductionist and deterministic logic. The bodily dimension, in other words, is no longer conceived as a series of processes or practices, but rather as a permeable but nonetheless closed entity, namely a sort of echo chamber where the effects of nutrients resound and expand, with no possibility of reaction. As a result, “free-from” eating habits have become the norm, making of diets the “new totems of contemporary food tribes” (Niola 2015, our translation). Such tribes tend to emphasise the “poisonous” character of the conception of food as a phármakon. This way, not only is nutrition de-­ contextualized from the social and cultural dimension that conferred particular values and meanings on it, establishing the gastro-anomic regime criticised by Fischler, but food is itself fragmented into partitive units unrelated to each other and forced into a reductionist model. In fact, while there may be some basis to discriminate against certain substances, biosemiotics reminds us that things organise themselves in systems, whose functioning mechanisms cannot be explained (or adequately altered) by focusing on their single elements, requiring instead to carefully consider the relations among such elements. Although, as we analysed above, a “differential” logic also characterises contemporary eaters’ concerns for “natural” food, a substantial difference is noticeable: the healthy Nature promoted by organic farming and threatened by transgenic foods ensures not only the respect of physiological, but also of socio-cultural and environmental balances. Eating choices thus go well beyond a few merely material and un-contextualised aspects of food, re-embracing the socio-cultural dimension associated with nutrition. This re-inserts food into those processes that Fischler (1988) described under the so-called “principle of incorporation”: not only does it provide the very substance of the human body and the energy it consumes, but in addition people believe or fear, according to particular processes of magical thinking, that food acts either on the state of their organism or on their essence and identity by “analogical contamination, integration or impregnation” (279). Furthermore, from a biosemiotic point of view, it is essential to note that such choices are not “rational”, resting on embodied reactions. As stated by Hoffmeyer (2008), “consciousness about bodily states, feelings … may be conceived as a fundamental carrier wave running through our entire psychological life, always ready to absorb and carry forward the stream of interpretations and reinterpretations that occurs in body and

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brain” (181). In this sense, taste itself can be interpreted as a “secondary emotion” (cf. Damasio 1994), that is to say, a bodily “interpretant” that is continually repatterned reflecting the psychological reality that the eater finds him/herself in, entering into further semiotic loops of “feeling based experiences” (Hoffmeyer 2008: 181) in an uninterrupted chain, that remains mainly unconscious to him/her. Hoffmeyer refers precisely to food, and especially to the advertising industry, to illustrate an example of this: The stream of delicacies presented in commercials are certainly not intended for the appeal to reason, in fact, reason would be much too risky to depend on. If, however, our endocrine response is successfully stimulated, we become unconscious and more or less helpless victims to the consumptive suggestions of the ads. (Ibid.: 182)

If nutritionism concealed such processes under a merely nutritional logic, the concerns of contemporary orthorexic eaters re-affirm their importance, combining dietetics and ethics, and thus re-discovering in the body that link between individual dimension and socio-cultural values, food material and meaning-making processes. On the other hand, there has been a marked change in the concern for healthy eating, making it evidently different from the ancient understanding of the relation between food and medicine. In the cosmic culinary conception that was common prior to 1650, the body “cooked” the food it ingested, thus realizing the essential “passage from Nature to Culture” celebrated by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964). In the following system, a more “natural” transformation18 was performed; yet, as we highlighted, the body still played an active role of “interpretation” of food substances. By contrast, the so-called orthorexic concerns about the naturalness of food, exactly as the paradigm of nutritionism, seem to conceive the body as passive, that is to say, incapable of counteracting the “contamination” of food. It is, in fact, only by avoiding ingestion that one is thought to be able to resist such a contamination or contagion. This reductionist perspective leads to its extremes the “bon à penser bon à manger” (“good to think, good to eat”) described by LéviStrauss (1962), as well as those aphorisms that, from Brillat-Savarin (1825) to Feuerbach (1862), remind us that “we are what we eat”—and now, above all, what we risk being (i.e. “dummies”19 without a body, at least if by the latter we mean what biosemiotics teaches us) if we eat the wrong (i.e. artificial, modified, “unnatural”) food. By doing so, it overlooks a fundamental fact about food and nutrition: “the infinitely metonymical question on the subject of ‘one must eat well’ must be nourishing not only … for a ‘self,’ which given its limits, would thus eat

 The reference is, again, to Lévi-Strauss’ theory, according to which cooking presumes a system that is located within a triangular semantic field, whose three vertexes correspond to the categories of raw, cooked, and rotten. The raw represents the unmarked pole, while the other two vertexes are strongly marked, although by opposition: the cooked is a cultural transformation of the raw, though the rotten is its natural modification. For further details, see Lévi-Strauss 1964, 1965. 19  The term “dummies” is here used to make reference to the lack of agency characterizing the body in the analysed texts. In this sense, it is also very interesting to consider the advertisement supporting organic food by Madeline Jimenez (https://madelinegrand.com/campaign-ads/food-ad-3/), which insists precisely on the deterministic relationship between eating “artificial” food and having an “artificial” body. 18

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badly, it must be shared … One never eats entirely on one’s own: this constitutes the rule underlying the statement, ‘One must eat well’” (Derrida 1991: 115). Nutrition, in other terms, is necessarily a contextual act and, as such, cannot be conceived as depending solely on material substances. If, on the macro-level, it relies on the sociocultural environment in which one eats and shares his/her experience with others, on the micro-­level, the analysed cases prove that the body itself can be seen as the environment—or better the Umwelt (Uexküll 2010 [1934, 1940]), to recall a well-known and fundamental concept in biosemiotics—within which food is not simply ingested, but more properly “incorporated”, that is to say, interpreted (as a set of chemical substances, but also of meanings and values) and consequently processed.

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

Abstract  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. Keywords  Biosemiotics · Sugar and capitalism · Colonialism · Acceleration · Industrial modernity · Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

(Bio)semiosis does not escape history. At every biological scale, the production and circulation of signs is impacted by circumstances, by context. As semiotic agents, DNA strands and viruses, cells and micro-organisms, plants and animals, are caught up in the flows of information constituted by, and constitutive of, our world’s history. Human semiosis is part and parcel of that history. And literature, the weaving of signs into stories and song, is an integral part of human semiosis. As a literary scholar, I’m interested in the ways

P.-L. Patoine (*) Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_4

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in which literature – as a field of practice – emerges from the biosphere, and participates, in return, in its shaping. We can examine this recursive interaction at various scales: from the small scale relation between text and body, to the larger scale transactions across cultural groups, species and their environment, spanning centuries and continents. This large scale approach, to which the following argument belongs, implies that literature is part of a bubble (Sloterdijk 2011) of meaning covering Earth, which Vernadsky and Teillard de Chardin in the 1920s called the noosphere (for them, an advanced stage in the geophysical evolution of the planet, and an extension of the biosphere), and that Yuri Lotman (1984) theorized as the semiosphere (conceived as the linguistic-cultural environment inhabited by a human group). My present pursuit of tracing large scale interactions between the semio- and the biosphere, between literature and ecosystem, is thus close to what Derek Woods defines as a “Vernadskian reading method,” which “approaches texts as if they are part of an Earth-scale entity [the noos- or semiosphere] coupled to the biosphere” (2017, 203). Embracing this broad perspective, this chapter delineates a historical and conceptual framework to better understand the relations between European literature and culture under Modernity (1600 onward), the constitution of industrial capitalism, and sugar (especially as extracted from sugarcane). We will explore the ways by which sugar (among other factors) may have intensified the speed of human semiosis during the Modern era, culminating in “the Great Acceleration” that followed the Second World War, an “unprecedented spike in human impact on the Earth system” and a period marked both by “its overwhelming quantity of reading material” (Woods 2017, 202) and by the mounting importance of sweetened foods in our diet. Such relation between sugar and semiosic acceleration (both experienced as increasingly toxic) seems to generate forms of anxiety (or, more to the point: of nausea and disgust resulting from sugar and information overdose) that artists have addressed. An early example is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl 1964), which has engaged our sugary industrial lives so pertinently that it has become part of our contemporary mythos, not only as a children’s novel, but also through its two cinematographic adaptations (by Mel Stuart in 1971, and Tim Burton in 2005) and a number of derived musicals, video games, animated films and radio plays (and a ride in an English theme park). At the end of this chapter, I will consider Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a corrective to the logics of industrial-­ capitalistic acceleration, and a (modest) remedy to its nefarious consequences: our current global pandemic of chronic metabolic disease such as Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and heart disease (Lustig 2013), but also: species extinction and climate change (Steffen et al. 2011), and solastalgia (Albrecht 2005). Following Glenn McLaren’s (2015) attempt at understanding the obesity crisis from a unifying biosemiotic framework, my goal here is to approach the large scale interaction between sugar and semiosis by integrating the study of narrative with that of food and physiology, history, industry and ecology. This goal is not so different from Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiological project, which he famously defined as the study of “the life of signs within social life” (1966 [1916], 16). Only in our case, “social life” includes animal, vegetal and cellular communities, plus the

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artifacts and technical systems that extend their biological faculties. The complex anthill is as much part of the “life of signs within social life” as the city of San Francisco, and so is cellular signaling and so is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: they are all part of this planet’s interrelated biosemiotic history. Note that by “biosemiotic history,” I do not imply any predetermined global teleology or destiny, but a successive realization of what Don Favareau has called the “relevant next” (2015), following Stuart Kauffman’s notion of the “adjacent possible.” Developed in the context of evolutionary biology to explain the biosphere’s molecular diversification during these last 4.8 billion years, Kauffman’s “adjacent possible” originally designated the set of non-existent organic molecular species that “can be synthesized from the actual molecular species in a single reaction step from substrates in the actual” (2000, p.  142). Favareau’s “relevant next” is a Peircean/Uexküllian re-­ reading of Kauffman’s notion that specifies how living systems do not move randomly into the “adjacent possible,” but according to the biosemiotic relations they establish with their meaningful surroundings. As an aspect of a living system, human semiosis evolves in the manifold, unforeseeable domain of the relevant next, and not following some straigthforward, individually or socially defined path toward Progress. In that sense, the history of semiosis I evoke here follows Saussure’s affirmation that: “the distinguishing characteristic of the sign […] is that in some way it always eludes the individual or social will” (1966, 17). One of the reasons why the sign escapes human will is that it is always relational. In the case we will be discussing, the relation is between European civilization and sugarcane, an emergent, mutualistic rapport in which the plant has used its potential sweetness to seduce humans into propagating it around the globe, while giving them the metabolic energy to do it. Such mutualism is typical of animal-vegetal relations. Humans propagating sugarcane are thus not so different from, let us say, nectar-feeding bats and the nectar-­ producing plants that feeds them, studied by Detlev H. Kelm and his colleagues. These biologists have investigated why the Glossophaga soricina bats avoid the pathological side-effects (glucotoxicity) of their extreme sugar consumption, concluding that their exceptional metabolism would “have enhanced their efficiency as plant pollinators, because active individuals are likely to pollinate more plants and transport pollen over longer distances. From the plants’ perspective, the energetic costs of producing sugar-rich nectar would be repaid through enhanced cross-­ pollination” (Kelm et al. 2011). Could we say that sugarcane has similarly benefitted from our enhanced agricultural efficiency during industrial Modernity, while feeding the semiosic acceleration in the arts, sciences and industry that made Modernity possible, a mutualistic process that “elude[d] the individual [and] social will”? We will now explore this question through a brief history of sugar production and consumption, before turning to sugar’s contribution (as biopolitical tool) to our “culture of novelty” and productivity. The latter is a potentially toxic culture (in terms of ecology and global health) opposed by Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with which we will conclude our reflections.

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A Short History of Sugar According to J.  H. Galloway’s historical geography of the sugarcane industry (2005), sugarcane cultivation begins in northern India, during the Vedic period (1500 to 500 BC), before spreading to Southern China and to Persia and Mesopotamia (600 BC), then to the Mediterranean basin during the Middle Ages, and to Madeira and the Canary Islands through fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish colonization. It is from the Canary Islands that Colombus will bring sugarcane to Hispaniola (Haiti), on his second voyage in 1493. An early version of the plantation model is then established, and production begins with enslaved Africans and indigenous people. The Spanish and Portuguese sugar industry then develops in the Caribbean and in Brazil. Around 1650, England colonizes the Barbados, conquers Jamaica, and starts producing its own sugar. By then, European and English nobility and wealthy classes have already become sugar eaters. Sugar appears in their medicine, displays of rank, and literary imagery. For example, as anthropologist Sydney Mintz notes in his remarkable Sweetness and Power, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599), the clown Touchstone teases Audrey, telling her: “honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar” (1985, 155). During the eighteenth century, the infamous triangular trade solidifies, as African slaves are shipped to American colonies to work the plantations, producing raw materials such as sugar, coffee, and tobacco, to be consumed in Europe, while “the products made by Britons–cloth, tools, torture instruments–are consumed by slaves who are themselves consumed in the creation of wealth” (Mintz 43). By no later than 1800, sugar has become a necessity in the diet of every English person–even though it is still costly and rare–; by 1900, after the end of slavery and the subsequent reduction of sugarcane cultivation in favor of the more northern sugar beet, sugar supplies nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet (Mintz 5–6). We can visualize this dramatic growth in sugar consumption on the following graph (Fig. 1), taken from the work of nutritionist Richard J. Johnson and his team (2007): Of course this augmentation in production and consumption did not happen only because people liked sweet food, but because it benefitted a group of dominant individuals. According to Mintz, after the mid-seventeenth century: […] the owners of the immense fortunes created by the labor of millions of slaves stolen from Africa, on millions of acres of the New World stolen from the Indians–wealth in the form of commodities like sugar, molasses, and rum to be sold to Africans, Indians, colonials and the British working classes alike–had become even more solidly attached to the centers of power in English society at large. (157)

As we will see, the fact that the very first sugarcane plantations–plantations that will serve as models for later factories–are worked by slaves who are constrained into adopting inhuman rhythms of production will orient the destiny of industrial Modernity. The sugar industrialists evoked by Mintz, “owners of immense fortunes” and “attached to the centers of power,” will defend such an orientation, and overcome the criticism of thinkers who, already in the eighteenth century, are taking a stand against slavery. In the 1774 edition of L’Histoire des deux Indes (a collective work directed by the abbey Raynal and published in three versions, it recounts the

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Fig. 1  Sugar intake per capita in the United Kingdom from 1700 to 1978 and in the United States from 1975 to 2000 is compared with obesity rates in the United States in non-Hispanic white men aged 60–69 years. Values for 1880–1910 are based on studies conducted in male Civil War veterans aged 50–59 years. (Johnson et al. 2007)

history of European commerce and colonization in Asia and America), the man of letters Jean-Joseph Pechméja writes: “Anyone justifying such an odious system [slavery] deserves, from the philosopher, the deepest contempt and from the negro a stab with a poniard” (quoted in Halpern 2006, my translation). In the same volume, Deleyre, the author of the chapters on the “discovery” of America and on the Guarani Indians, criticizes the European cult of work and industry, questioning the notion of private property and the “right to be wealthy.” Finally, as Halpern reminds us, for Montesquieu and Voltaire, colonization and slavery were contrary to reason and to human justice, but were also at the origin of material progress, which would be necessary to the progress of reason. Montesquieu and Voltaire were right: the progress of “reason” (a historically situated, Eurocentric form of rationality and a certain style of semiosis) is indeed historically linked to material “progress,” which includes dietary changes made in favor of sweet industrial goods. This progress, achieved through slavery and colonial exploitation, was justified by “the right to be wealthy” and the cult of work and industry denounced by Deleyre. This constitutive violence of “reason,” a central concern for contemporary decolonial studies (see Quijano 2007), underpinned the emergence of the Modern consciousness in relation to sugarcane plantations and the new rhythms these plantations gave to human lives.

Sugar and the Acceleration of Production Before its mechanization, the production of sugar from sugarcane was labor intensive. It demanded the development and refinement not only of agricultural and food processing techniques, but also of administrative procedures, especially for the management of “human resources” (if we can use this term in the context of slave labor). In that sense, as early as the seventeenth century, the sugar plantations were laboratories in which the behavioral, bodily discipline typical of industrial Modernity was experimented. As Mintz writes:

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It is the perishability of sugarcane, the fact that it must be processed quickly after cutting, and through many steps, that pushed the planters toward a factory-like management of work in terms of task division and scheduling, but also in terms of discipline. Europe’s encounter with sugarcane thus facilitated its transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, a transition that changed the temporality of work, and more generally, of human life. Indeed, time is of the essence throughout sugar production, and during harvest men and women worked continuously in the fields and mills. This intense rhythm characterized the proto-industrial model developed on the plantations, a model later implemented in European factories as they spread during the eighteenth and (especially) nineteenth centuries. In these factories, the “machine temporality” inflicted on workers echoes the one imposed to slaves on the sugar plantations. Ironically, sugar produced in the colonies would become a major source of energy for the European factory workers (in the form of molasses, mostly), allowing them to comply with the intensified rhythms imposed by factory owners in their attempt to remain competitive. Today, the work rhythm forced on slaves at the very beginning of modern industrial capitalism appears to have become an inherent feature of this system, which dreams of imposing uninterrupted activity to all workers and consumers, as Jonathan Crary argues in 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). In a striking backlash, white collar executives and managers are now falling victim to these inhuman rhythms, as they present the highest preeminence of burn-out of all socio-­ professional categories in the “developed” world (Chabot 2013). As Chabot notes (125–126), this burn-out epidemic parallels the state of our planet under industrial capitalism, as natural–and especially fossil–ressources are rapidly burned out. We could add that “burn-out” also applies to our global health condition, characterized by heightened sugar intake, that source of quick energy that burns brightly and spectacularly, before the sluggish insulin drop. This small scale “sugar rush and sugar crash” is also structurally reminiscent of the larger scale “rush and crash” or “boom and bust” dynamic that has characterized capitalism since its inception, as the analysis of the seventeenth century Tulipmania by Garber (2000) suggests (but we could also think of the early twentieth century gold rush and financial crash, or the “dot-­ com bubble and bust” of the 1990s and early 2000s). The increasingly global conditions of ecological degradation, burn-out, diabetes and obesity result, in part, from industrial capitalism, which tends, as we have just seen, to homogenize human lives in terms of temporality (the accelerating rhythms of production and consumption), but also of space and habitat, as when the colonial sugarcane plantations created quasi-uniform landscapes across the Caribbean, Brazilian and Latin American territories. Poets and writers from these regions have

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reflected upon such uniformization. For example, and as Paul B.  Dixon (2015, 181–183) notes, the long narrative poem by the Brazilian author João Cabral, “Morte e vida severina” (1955), expresses the impossibility of escaping the repeating stories and landscape of the sugar plantations, and its uniform ways of life, also described by Cuban essayist Benítez Rojo in La Isla que se Repite (1989). The homogenization of human life in terms of temporality, habitat and culture, thus appears to be an effect of modern capitalism and, as we will now argue, of the circular logic of industrial production.

Sugar and the Acceleration of Consumption In nineteenth century England, sugar took a growing place in the diet of workers. Agriculture became more and more industrialized, and masses flocked to the cities where they lacked the space and time to grow and cook their own food. The human species thus began a nutritional transformation, shifting from a primarily rural, starch consuming animal surviving on maize, rice, beans, barley, wheat, etc. (since the Neolithic revolution, around 10,000–8000 BC, see Larsen 1995, 186) to one that is urban, and feeds on meat and refined grains, sugars and oils (Cordain et al. 2005). To better picture this transition, let us note that in America at the turn of the nineteenth century, agriculture still occupied 68% of the population, a percentage that dropped to 14% in 1950, and to only 2% in 2012 (Piketty 2013, 152). With no more space or time to garden locally, nineteenth century European and American factory workers had to purchase most of their food, now produced and traded on a global scale. Promoted by food producers from the colonies, products such as sugar, tea and coffee entered the everyday diet, being for example sold in factory canteens, where they became associated with “quick energy” and the ability to work more efficiently. As more meals were eaten outside the home, and with many wives now working in factories, practices such as domestic bread-baking declined. The meal schedules and preparation time was constrained by the industry’s productive rhythms and, for example, sweetened preserves and industrial bread replaced porridge. Sugar became a near-universal accompaniment of hot beverages and industrial wheat products. Thus, simple carbohydrates progressively replaced the complex ones that dominated the preceding starch-based diets (Mintz, 130). As we can surmise, industrialists benefited twice from this system as, on the one hand, factory workers could work harder and longer hours for them, and on the other, the workers had to buy most of the daily necessities from these very industrialists, including food and sugar. Indeed, as Mintz explains, in the mid-nineteenth century, with the liberalization of trade: Cheaper sugar came at a time when its increased consumption was guaranteed not by the sugar habit itself, but by the factory world and machine rhythms which were the background for its use. It was not just that labor worked harder in order to get more; those who paid its wages profited both from labor’s higher productivity and from its heightened use of store-purchased commodities. (166)

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This recursive configuration opened the way to the growth of the internal (national) market and to the possibility of accelerating the cycles of production and consumption within it. As a result from this circular logic, around 1850 the biggest sucrose consumers became the poor, whereas before 1750 they had been the rich (Mintz, 148). By transforming a former luxury into a daily commodity, supposedly through the individual effort of the worker, this reversal contributed to the feeling that (colonial) capitalism could raise the living conditions of everyone (in the metropolises). This feeling, this political affect, justified the promotion of a uniform capitalistic socio-economical model centered on growth, in which growing production has to be matched by growing consumption, in an ever-accelerating cycle. This acceleration, which accompanies industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is associated with an emerging culture of “novelty in consumption” (Mintz, 174). In contrast with earlier periods, these were centuries during which new products were (as they are still today) constantly introduced and made desirable or even necessary. Sweetened foods were an important part of these novelties, and participated in habituating us to daily innovation in the goods we consume. This habit of novelty is a central feature of Modernity, and permeates its “life of signs within social life.”

Innovation and Acceleration In the cultural domain, the beginning of Modernity is marked by a shift from a traditional (recycling) perspective to an innovative (productive) one. In France, this shift is associated with the seventeenth century “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” during which authors Boileau and Racine defended the imitation of classical artistic models, while the modern Charles Perreault advocated the creation of new artistic and literary forms. Four centuries later, it seems that the Moderns have succeeded, on the whole, in replacing the cult of the classics by a cult of innovation that has come to dominate the arts. This is especially true from the mid-nineteenth century onward, with, for example, impressionism superseding academic painting, fauvism going beyond symbolism, geometrical abstraction supplanting cubism, pop art replacing abstract expressionism... Albeit an oversimplification, such a list illustrates the innovative logic that has animated artistic fields during the modern era, a logic which feeds into productive and consumptive acceleration in other domains. Of course succeding trends and fashions do not originate with Modernity. Just take the poulaines (medieval long-pointed shoes): all the rage in Europe in the late fourteenth century, they passed out of fashion before making a come back in the mid-­ fifteenth century, then disappeared for good (Grew 2001, 117). What appears with industrialization is the speed and profusion of cultural novelty, and a clearer domination of the progressissivist paradigm in which innovation is valued above imitation of the Ancients. Habituation to artistic novelty can be seen as qualitative change that has accompanied a drastic quantitative change within our cultural ecosystem. The following

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Fig. 2  Number of new book titles published per year per million inhabitants in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, for the period 1500–2010 (Roser 2019)

graph (Fig. 2) shows the augmentation in the number of books published per year per million inhabitants in the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany, from 1518 to 2009: Despite important disparities, this upward curve is reminiscent of that of sugar consumption, examined above. The relative correlation between these two curves does not constitute, in itself, the proof of an actual interaction between sugarcane cultivation and book publishing in the modern era, but it does reflect a case of what Hoffmeyer (2007) has called “semiotic causation,” which “[brings] about effects through interpretation […], as when, for example, bacterial movements are caused through a process of interpretation based on the historically defined needs of a sensitive system” (152). In this case, the “historically defined needs” are those of modern capitalism: seeking economical activity and the creation of wealth (through colonial exploitation), desiring artistic and scientific progress, Modernity interprets the sugar cane, developping new behavior at the contact of its sweetness, of its commercial and nutritional potential. In this case, a desired future state (economical growth and cultural progress) appears to have caused the parallel development of sugarcane cultivation and consumption, and book publishing (a case of what we could also call, with Terrence Deacon, “absence-based causality,” 2011, 12). These two curves, however, are but two aspects of the modern intensification of human activity, culminating in the Great Acceleration we observe after 1950. Indeed, the statistics used by Steffen, Grivenald, Crutze and McNeill in their

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conceptual and historical perspectives on the Anthropocene show similar curves applying to most anthropogenic ecological changes during Modernity (Fig. 3). Derek Woods also notes the similarity between the statistics of book publishing and the ecosystemic dimensions of human activity. Comparing data taken from Google Books and Early English Books Online, and from annual reports of the librarian of the American Congress, where the book and print collections went from about one hundred thousand items in 1866, to one million in 1900, fifteen million in 1966, and thirty-eight million in 2014, Woods observes that “the planetary number of books grew by more than two orders of magnitude between the early Industrial Revolution and the present,” which translates into a graph of literary output that displays “a similar shape to those that chart human energy use and the rate of anthropogenic species extinction” (2017, 205). The quantitative and qualitative intensification of human activity corresponds to a period of growth and innovation, in which our socio-economical system has thrived on the speedy extraction, transformation and throwing away of natural resources. This intensified rhythm can also be observed in the literary sphere, as we shifted, starting in the early modern period, from what Roger Chartier (1995, 17) named “intensive reading”–the reading and re-reading of a few canonical texts–to “extensive reading,” which consist of reading a greater variety of texts, fewer times. In a sense, with sugar-fueled industrial Modernity, we pass from a culture where signs (here, texts) are recycled and re-used on a longer period, to one where they are produced in larger quantities, consumed for a relatively shorter period, and discarded. The augmentation in sugar consumption and the densification of the human semiosphere not only happened during the same period, but are equally enmeshed in the cycles of global capitalism and the market economy, obeying the same principles of accelerative novelty and growth. We will now see that the large-scale intensification of human activity, caused in part by our mutualistic relationship with sugarcane, can also be observed on the individual, physiological scale.

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Biopower and the Neurophysiology of Glucose The concordance between the speeding up of semiotic production and the modern history of sugar does not only concern large scale social dynamics, but can also be linked with human glucose metabolism. Indeed, the “quick energy” associated with sugar intake, which allowed factory workers to adjust to machine rhythms, equally sustains cognitive work. In humans, the brain accounts for approximately 2% of the body weight, but it consumes around 20% of glucose-derived energy (Mergenthaler et al. 2013), making it the prime consumer of glucose amongst our organs. Glucose metabolism provides the energy for the biosynthesis of neurotransmitters, and sustains neuronal computation and information processing. On the individual physiological level, the very existence of human semiosis thus depends on sugar, while the style taken by semiotic processes, on the broader cultural level, has historically been shaped by the sugar industry–which, as we have seen, participated in defining Modern “rationality” and ideology through “material progress.” Another important way through which sugar shaped human semiosis is through its association with three other colonial imports: tea, coffee and chocolate. These three products have in common their bitterness, which the English and Europeans mitigated with sugar, but they also share another important trait in regard to our metabolism. They belong to a specific category of drug food: stimulants. Contrarily to other drugs, such as psychedelics or alcohol, stimulants accord well with the rhythms of industrial production, so it is not surprising that, during Modernity, tea and coffee have competed with alcoholic drinks under the pressure of morality and temperance. This story of temperance serving biopolitical views on public health begins in the seventeenth century. As Sydney Mintz recounts, it is during this period that stimulating tea progressively (and partially) replaces mollifying beer in European courts. Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese bride of Charles II, who reigned from 1649 to 1685, was: […] England’s first tea-drinking queen. It is to her credit that she was able to substitute her favorite temperance drink as the fashionable beverage of the court in place of the ales, wines, and spirits with which the English ladies, as well as gentlemen “habitually heated or stupefied their brains morning, noon and night.” (110)

The chemical composition of the tropical, vegetal substances that entered the European market during the colonial era, and their effect on our metabolism, participated in changing the behavioral and cognitive norms prevalent during Modernity, as stimulants began to replace, or complement, depressants such as alcohol. These psychoactive plants and their associate, sugarcane, also played a role in the modern economical competition between European nations. Indeed, the replacement of beer and wine by tea and coffee contributed to turn the population into a machine for production, to use Foucault’s formulation in The Mesh of Power (1976). Foucault explains how, during the eighteenth century, we observe a transition from monarchical power, which was essentially prohibitive and legal, to modern bourgeois regulatory techniques such as discipline (practiced in school, factories, and the army; we can also consider temperance as a disciplinary technique), which is

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not only prohibitive but coercive and stimulating, oriented toward the enhancement of productivity, including semiotic productivity. As this type of power is not only legal but also biological and anatomical–disciplining bodies to augment economic and demographic growth–Foucault calls it biopower. It is in the context of this emerging biopower that sweetened stimulants and sweetened foods became prominent in our diet. Of course, we know today that excessive glucose consumption can lead to memory and cognitive deficiencies, to quicker aging of cells and higher risk of developing diabetes. One of the numerous studies suggesting a link between degraded cognitive abilities and sugar consumption was carried out by Amy Reichelt and her team (2015), who exposed adolescent rats to a 10% sucrose solution for specific time periods each day and tested their ability to identify changes in the spatial relations between objects of their environment, and their use of contextual information to resolve cognitive conflicts (through a rodent analogue of a Stroop task, with lights and sounds associated with levers delivering reward pellets). Although rats are usually able to use contextual information, those exposed to sucrose failed to do so when the levers’ configuration diverged from training. Interestingly, the rats’ responses were done at the same speed as that of the control group, suggesting that their inability was not linked to increased impulsivity. The researchers hypothesize that a similar deficit might be observed in humans. Another study, led by Wuxiang Xie, used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), following 5189 people over 10  years, to better understand the possible links between glycemia (blood sugar level) and cognitive decline. The observations suggest “a linear correlation between circulating HbA1c [glycated hemoglobin] levels and cognitive decline, regardless of diabetic status” (Zheng et al. 2018, 847). As these studies multiply, sugar (especially as it pervades processed food) has come to be seen as a toxic substance. Just like our natural environments are burned out by frenetic extraction and exploitation, our health and bodies are degraded by the intensified rhythms of industrial production and consumption, including that of sugar. As we have seen with the historical augmentation in book publishing, human semiosis is also caught up in this acceleration. Today, we suffer from information overdose, or infowhelm, as signs and signals surround and overwhelm us. Writers and producers of content are expected to live up to quantified measures of productivity (the daily blog post, the yearly book). If a change in our diet can potentially modulate the individual impact of glucotoxicity, can another semiotic regime remedy infowhelm? Can literature sharpen the awareness of our accelerated lives, and teach us how to resist the toxic gluttony of consumer society? Fully answering such questions is out of the scope of this chapter, but we will begin to investigate them through a discussion of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), which can be considered as participating in the constitution of a postmodern, postindustrial consciousness.

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 harlie and the Chocolate Factory, a Remedy C for Sugar-Fueled Acceleration? If Charlie and the Chocolate Factory imprinted our collective imagination, giving shape to the semiosphere we inhabit, it might well be because it addresses so pointedly our industrial, sugary lives, attempting to remedy some of their noxious aspects. Roald Dahl’s children’s novel narrates how young Charlie Bucket, the only child of a starving proletarian family (four grandparents sharing a bed, Charlie and his parents sleeping on mattresses on the floor) wins one of the five golden tickets granting him an exceptional guided tour of Willy Wonka’s mysterious neighboring chocolate factory, during which all four other winning children will be punished for their bad behavior, while virtuous Charlie enjoys the visit and is chosen to become Wonka’s heir. The novel opens with a description of the Bucket’s living conditions, in which factory work is directly related to eating possibilities. Indeed, Mr. Bucket, the sole wage-earner of the family is a “cap-screwer” in a toothpaste factory, and so “the only meals they could afford were bread and margarine for breakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbage for lunch, and cabbage soup for supper” (5). Little Charlie Bucket, however, longs for more fulfilling food, and especially for chocolate, which he cannot afford. His desire, one of the main motors of the narrative, appears both as mimetic desire (“he would see other children taking creamy candy bars out of their pockets and munching them,” 6) and as a response to commercial and industrial spectacle: “Charlie could see great slabs of chocolate piled up high in the shop windows” (6), “within sight of the house in which Charlie lived, there was an ENORMOUS CHOCOLATE FACTORY!” (7). We find here the recursive dynamic which characterized the transition to the industrial diet, evoked above: Charlie’s desire is both created and potentially satiated by the factory, and is thus caught in a closed loop. In this way, the food industry creates its own world, a world of specific needs and satisfactions forming the modern human Umwelt. Charlie’s world is furthermore characterized by a form of alienation, historically shared by both the European proletariat and the workforce employed in the colonies: in this industrial world, local production does not equate local access, a situation described from Charlie’s point-of-view as “the most torturing thing you could imagine” (7). Indeed, Wonka’s factory does not cater especially to the local market, as its sends its confections to the “four corners of the earth” (10). To this problem of access, is added a form of delocalization and invisibilization of production, as factory workers are the Oompa-Lompas, an exotic people supposedly saved by Wonka from their difficult living conditions, and now dwelling continuously in the factory, whose doors never open and is entirely cut from the local community. Although my object is not to articulate a decolonial critique of Dahl’s novel, let us note that chapter sixteen, “The Oompa-Lompas,” is a textbook expression of the colonial imaginary prevalent in large parts of twentieth century Western culture. In three pages, this chapter manages to condense so much problematic imagery (“So I shipped them all over here […] They all speak English now.

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They love dancing and music,” 71) that it borders on the caricature. In any case, it certainly makes visible the articulation of coloniality and industrial Modernity in which Charlie’s desire for chocolate is enmeshed. To a certain extent, resisting such desire equates resisting an exploitative system, and Charlie is presented from the start as a champion of restraint and resistance: Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket get to taste a bit of chocolate […] for the next few days, he would allow himself only to look at it, but never to touch it. Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble […] And in this way, Charlie would make his ten-cent bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month. (6)

Charlie’s power of moderation might be due to poverty, but will nonetheless be one of the virtues that distinguish the boy from the four other children allowed to visit Wonka’s factory, firmly establishing him as the hero of the story. This virtue is one of slowness and durability (“last him for more than a month”) and of appreciation in spite of scarcity, an appreciation for smallness (emphasized by the use of italics for tiny, repeated thrice). Charlie’s slow eating extracts chocolate from the rhythm of rapid, gluttonous consumption on which the market economy thrives, and brings it toward an aesthetic, sensuous pleasure that is situated outside the sphere of utility (eating a tiny nibble won’t sustain you). As we will see, the same can be said of Wonka’s wondrous factory: its fantastic features reduce what should be the epitome of industrial capitalism to an object of pure beauty, a flower, an amusement ride. Charlie’s restraint contrasts with the behavior of the other four ticket winners, successively trapped by their defining flaw–gluttony, caprice, love of TV or of chewing gum. Here again, Dahl’s tale reflects the conditions of modern capitalism, in which the illusion of freely chosen individual desires and identity participates in the creation of insatiable subjects, geared toward intense work and consumption. Compared to the desiring will of these children, and even though he himself desires chocolate, Charlie appears as a hero of self-mastery and non-action, able to restrict his energy intake and expenditure. When his family is starving after the father loses his job, Charlie makes “little changes here and there in some of the things that he did, so as to save his strength. […] Everything he did now, he did slowly and carefully, to prevent exhaustion” (40). Constrained by circumstances, Charlie develops virtues that allow him to resist the toxic gluttony and acceleration promoted by modern capitalism and the food industry, and faces scarcity with a certain dignity. Similarly, during the guided tour of the factory, Charlie “wins” by doing nothing, that is, by not disobeying Wonka’s warnings under the influence of greed and appetite, like the four other children do. These impatient children are slaves to appetites that need quick gratification, as we can see with the first victim of the factory, Augustus Gloop who, encountering the chocolate river, kneels on its edge, and scoops “hot melted chocolate into his mouth as fast as he could” (72, my emphasis). Such frenzy appears as the typical response to Willy Wonka’s culinary and commercial innovations. For example, as a result of his “Golden Tickets” promotion, “the whole country, indeed, the whole world, seemed suddenly to be caught up in a mad candy-buying spree, everybody searching frantically for those precious

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remaining tickets” (23). This irrational desire accelerates the rhythm of consumption, but also of semiosis: it pushes an inventor to create a machine that would detect the presence of a Golden Ticket without opening the wrapper of a candy bar (23); it triggers a media surge around every new winner, each time with “cameras clicking and flashbulbs flashing, and people pushing and jostling” (30). Even the speech of Grandpa Joe, who shares Charlie’s fascination for Wonka’s factory, speeds up when he learns that Charlie is to visit the factory the next day: “You must start making preparations at once! Wash your face, comb your hair, scrub your hands, brush your teeth, blow your nose, cut your nails, polish your shoes, iron your shirt […]” (51) The frenetic enumeration conveys the old man’s excitation, here intrinsically linked with the attraction of sugar, candies and chocolate (and the mystery of their industrial fabrication). This attraction is exercised by Willy Wonka, who at first appears as a classic entrepreneur, a genius inventor developing novelties and protecting his industrial secrets, generating high levels of excitation in the public and participating in the accelerative dynamics of modern capitalism. Such view, shared among the population, is however a misinterpretation, as his work is actually motivated by the pure pleasures of invention, imagination and beauty. The fact that Wonka’s factory is first and foremost a place of wonder and sensuous pleasure appears clearly with the first room visited, which contains a “lovely valley” and the great chocolate river. This pastoral scene (“Graceful trees and bushes were growing along the riverbanks– weeping willows and alders and tall clumps of rhododendrons with their pink and red and mauve blossoms,” 64) is enhanced by the awe felt for the scale of the factory’s industrial processes, with Wonka boasting that “[t]here’s enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well! Isn’t it terrific?” (64). The effect on the visitors is radical: “[t]hey were staggered. They were dumbfounded. They were bewildered and dazzled. They were completely bowled over by the hugeness of the whole thing.” (65–66). Hugeness, here, is a sensory quality that opens toward the sublime, the visitors being entranced by a spectacle of pure wonder that transcends its mercantilist aspect. Even Wonka’s boast that he can fill every bathtub with chocolate leads us out of the world of utility and commerce (selling, buying and eating chocolate) and into a world of pure Bataillean expenditure (bathing and swimming in chocolate). Moreover, this spectacle is the occasion for the text to function on an aesthetic level, allowing the reader to enjoy the pleasure of words and linguistic form, often found in Dahl in repetition and paradigmatic variation (“[t]hey were staggered. They were dumbfounded. They were bewildered and dazzled”). Indeed, for the reader, visiting Wonka’s factory is often a poetic experience, for example when the visitors’ boat rushes down the chocolate river, and the parents collectively exclaim: “He’s balmy! He’s nutty! He’s screwy! He’s batty! He’s dippy! He’s dotty! He’s daffy! […]” (85) Here, we are invited to savor a series of synonymical modulations, and to enjoy a collection of words just like a child might enjoy collecting stones or stamps. A similar aesthetic joy can be produced by the songs sung by the Oompa-Lompas after each of the bad children’s demise. These moments, when wordplay dominates the text, are unnecessary, in terms of narrative; they slow down our progress through the story, and

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temporarily frustrate our epistemic gluttony (the desire to know as quickly as possible where the story is going) in favor of aesthetic degustation. Such aesthetic disposition might disrupt the behavioral and cognitive norms necessary to capitalistic growth and acceleration. Another aspect of the novel’s poetical contestation of utilitarianism and acceleration can be found in its condemnation of the bad children’s inability to appreciate Wonka’s wordplays, his ludic and aesthetic use of language. During their boat ride on the chocolate river, the guests read signs on a series of doors, for example: “STORE-ROOM NUMBER 77–ALL THE BEANS, CACAO BEANS, COFFEE BEANS, JELLY BEANS, AND HAS BEANS.” Which prompts the following protest and reprimand: ‘Has beans?’ cried Violet Beauregarde. ‘You’re one yourself!’ said Mr. Wonka. ‘There’s no time for arguing!’ (86–87)

Another child, Mike Teavee, expresses doubts about the inclusion of “hair cream” in the list of confectionerary creams. In a sense, the bad children’s inability to accept wordplay and fantasy is part of what makes them consumerist, utilitarian slaves, as their world is limited to instrumental speech serving their voracious desires. Easy televisual entertainment–which could be considered the cultural equivalent of industrial food, and has frequently been associated to it, as in the pinnacle of modern living: the TV dinner–is also denigrated in the novel, for its literal “dumbing down of minds.” Indeed, the chant sung by the Oompas-Lompas after Mike Teavee is miniaturized as a result of his obsession with television (137–141), denounces what is, at the time of the book’s publication (1964), a new media, and celebrates the power of book reading to stimulate and expand imagination. Here again, Wonka and his workers explicitly position themselves against the habit of easy gratification that is part of the recursive, productivist and consumerist cycles that have fed the Great Acceleration. His emphasis on the poetical and the fantastical is not the only quality that marks Wonka’s difference with the world of novelty that he seems to partake in. Indeed, the conclusion of the novel shows the industrialist deviating from the norm of economic growth: through his Golden Tickets promotion, Wonka actually seeks an heir, not to expand his empire, but to “keep it going,” someone who will be able to maintain his wondrous and whimsical factory (151). Transmission and tradition are thus preferred over growth and innovation, and it is in this perspective that the restrained and respectful Charlie will be chosen as Williy Wonka’s champion. Indeed, he is the only child who escapes the glutonous logics of capitalism, appreciating in a purely aesthetic ways the wonders of the factory. This exceptionality appears in his trajectory across the narrative, which actually follows a direction opposed to that of the bad children. Indeed, when Charlie finds his Golden Ticket, it is the result of a real need to feed: starving and having found a dollar bill, he buys chocolate to eat “rich and solid food” (43). But in the end, this authentic material need is transcended when he inherits Wonka’s factory, a temple dedicated to beauty, wonder and joy, to art and imagination. The other children follow a reverse path. They initially live in a world of capitalistic simulation, a world of imaginary desires

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and artificial “wonder and joy,” symbolized by their insatiable desire of sugary treats (this world is a negative version of Wonka’s artificial/artistic domain). Their desire for consummer goods (fed by capitalist spectacle) prevent them from establishing an aesthetic relation to the factory, and duped by their greed, they are finally punished by the experience of the “real” in all its abjectness: for example, Veronica Salt and her bourgeois parents will be thrown in the garbage bins, and exit the factory covered in disgusting refuse. This quasi-oxymoronic structure (Charlie goes from the “negative real” to a “positive imaginary,” the bad children go from a “negative imaginary” to the “negative real”) reveals the simulacra that made accelerative capitalism possible, as false desires can never be satiated and are ever renewed, leading to the recursive growth of production and consumption.

The Biosemiotic Constitution of Modern Consciousness Our analysis of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory suggests that sugar, and the sugary treat, not only influences the speed and modalities of modern semiosis; it has become a sign of Modernity itself, just like the snack analyzed by semiotician Roland Barthes in 1961. Barthes shows how the discourse of modern dietetics tends to link food to work and activity, associating it with the energy to adapt to the modern world. Discussing the opposition between the quick snack and the lengthy business lunch, he writes: [A]n energy-rich and light food is experienced as the very sign (and not only as the auxiliary) of one’s participation to modern life: the snack does not only respond to new needs, it gives to this need a certain dramatic expression, construing those who embrace it into modern men, into managers detaining power and control over the extreme speed of modern life. (985, my translation)

Sugar is also both a sign of, and an auxiliary to the “extreme speed of modern life,” a crucial cog in the infinitely layered semiotic process that is industrial, colonial capitalism. Let us conclude our reflections by having a closer look at this sign, following Peirce’s definition of semiosis as “an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant” (1931, CP 5.484), the latter being, according to our philosopher’s “provisional assumption,” “a sufficiently close analogue of a modification of consciousness” (1931, CP 5.485). How did sugarcane, as a semiotic agent, participate in the constitution of modern consciousness, and in the concomitant speeding up of human semiosis? Following Peirce’s triadic model of semiosis, we could say that the quality of sweetness, a potentiality of sugarcane, is interpreted by Modernity as a sign for marketable products, leading to a new habit: the indsutrial production and consumption of sweet food, which in turns (as a source of quick energy) become a sign for labor power, leading to the habitual consumption of sugar (and its accompanying stimulants like coffee) as a way of working faster. In this configuration, sugar can then morph into

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a new sign: a sign of profit for the capitalist and of fleeting consolation for the worker, co-dependent interpretations, each opening toward their associated habits. These spiraling semiosic processes, based on the coupling of the sugarcane’s sweetness and difficulty in processing, and of human physiology and culture, have been central to the intensification of human activity, and to the modern densification of the semiosphere. Human semiosis has been shaped by its encounters with sugarcane, with its specific rewards (sweetness, quick energy) and demands in terms of exploitation (intense rhythm of industrial processing). If, from the early sugarcane plantation to contemporary office work and frenetic consumption, we have become habituated to machine rhythms, and are able to adjust to these rhythms through sugar-rich, time-­ saving eating habits, it seems that literature can offer us a way of developing slower ways of thinking, of feeling and of being in language that escape the utilitarian rationale of modern capitalism. By reshaping the semiosphere through aesthetic practice, we can redefine the way we inhabit the biosphere, and relate to other life-­ forms. We have built a mutualistic relation with sugarcane, changing our habits (nutritional, cognitive, behavioral, semiotic habits) and, in return, through these habits, we have modified our planetary environment, and the context of all semiosis on Earth. Humans and other life-forms are thus united in a single society, a single biosemiotic history. The direction this history will take is of course difficult to foresee. Will sugar–which, in the guise of ethanol and biofuel, is now feeding our machines as well as our bodies–continue to accelerate the densification of the semiosphere, and the degradation of the biosphere? Or will literary, artistic and scientific counter-reactions resist the noxious aspects of “the modern way of life”– with its industrial, fast-paced, sugar-rich eating–to reorient us toward slow food and more sustainable habits?

References Albrecht, G. (2005). Solastalgia. A new concept in health and identity. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 3, 41–55. Barthes, R. (1961). Pour une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation contemporaine. Annales  – Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 16(5), 977–986. Benitez-Rojo, A. (1989). La Isla que se Repite: El Caribe y la Perspectiva Posmoderna. Hanover: Ediciones Del Norte. Cabral de Melo Noto, J. (1955). Morte e Vida Severina. São Paulo: TUCA. Chabot, P. (2013). Global burn-out. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Chartier, R. (1995). Forms and meanings: Texts, performances, and audiences from codex to computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cordain, L., Eaton, S. B., Sebastian, A., Mann, N., Lindeberg, S., Watkins, B. A., et al. (2005). Origins and evolution of the Western diet: Health implications for the 21st century. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 81(2), 341–354. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn.81.2.341. Crary, J. (2013). 24/7, Terminal capitalism and the ends of sleep. New York: Verso Books. Dahl, R. (2013 [1964]). Charlie and the chocolate factory (Q.  Blake, Illustr.). New  York: Puffin Books.

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de Saussure, F. (1966 [1916]). Course in general linguistics (W.  Baskin, Trans.). New  York: McGraw-Hill. Deacon, T.  W. (2011). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New  York: W. W. Norton & Co. Dixon, P. B. (2015). Of Cane, the Caribbean and João Cabral de Melo Neto. Caribbean Studies, 43(1), 175–188. Favareau, D. F. (2015). Creation of the relevant next: How living systems capture the power of the adjacent possible through sign use. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 119, 588–601. Foucault, M. (2012, September 12 [1976]). The Mesh of Power (C.  Chitty, Trans.). Viewpoint Magazine. https://www.viewpointmag.com. Accessed 24 Feb 2016. Galloway, J. H. (2005). The sugarcane industry: An historical geography from its origins to 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garber, P. M. (2000). Famous first bubbles – The fundamentals of early manias. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Grew, F. (2001). Shoes and pattens. Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer. Halpern, J.  C. (2006). Les Lumières, l’esclavage, la colonisation. Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 345, 185–188. Hoffmeyer, J. (2007). Semiotic scaffolding of living systems. In M. Barbieri (Ed.), Introduction to biosemiotics: The new biological synthesis (pp. 149–166). Haarlem: Springer. Johnson, R. J., Segal, M. S., Sautin, Y., Nakagawa, T., et al. (2007). Potential role of sugar (fructose) in the epidemic of hypertension, obesity and the metabolic syndrome, diabetes, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 86, 899–906. Kauffman, S. A. (2000). Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelm, D. H., Simon, R., Kuhlow, D., Voigt, C. C., & Ristow, M. (2011). High activity enables life on a high-sugar diet: Blood glucose regulation in nectar-feeding bats. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 278(1724), 3490–3496. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.0465. Larsen, C. S. (1995). Biological changes in human populations with agriculture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 185–213. Lotman, Y. M. (2005 [1984]). On the semiosphere (W. Clark, Trans.). Sign System Studies, 33(1), 205–229. Lustig, R. H. (2013). Fructose: It’s ‘alcohol without the buzz’. Advances in Nutrition, 4, 226–235. McLaren, G. (2015). The obesity crisis and semiotic corruption: Toward a unifying biosemiotic understanding of obesity. Cosmos and History, 11(1), 181–220. Mergenthaler, P., Lindauer, U., Dienel, G. A., & Meisel, A. (2013). Sugar for the brain: The role of glucose in physiological and pathological brain function. Trends in Neuroscience, 36(10), 587–597. Mintz, S.  W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New  York: Viking-Penguin. Peirce, C.  S. (1931). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piketty, T. (2013). Le capital au XXIe siècle. Paris: Seuil. Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178. Reichelt, A. C., Killcross, S., Hambly, L. D., Morris, M. J., & Westbrook, R. F. (2015). Impact of adolescent sucrose access on cognitive control, recognition memory, and parvalbumin immunoreactivity. Learning & Memory, 22(4), 215–224. Roser, M. (2019). Books. OurWorldInData.org. Visualization from the data compiled by Fink-­ Jensen, J. (2015). Book titles per capita. http://hdl.handle.net/10622/AOQMAZ. Accessed 28 Nov 2019. Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Bubble. Spheres Volume 1: Microspherology. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/ MIT Press.

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Steffen, W., Grivenald, J., Crutze, P., & McNeill, J. (2011). The anthropocene: Conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369, 842–867. Woods, D. (2017). Accelerated reading. Fossil fuels, infowhelm, and archival life. In T. Menely & J. O. Taylor (Eds.), Anthropocene reading. Literary history in geologic times. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Zheng, F., Yan, L., Yang, Z., Zhong, B., & Xie, W. (2018). HbA1C, diabetes and cognitive decline: The English longitudinal study of ageing. Diabetologia, 61(4), 839–848.

Food, Care and the Sugar Maple Stand Jonathan Hope

Abstract  The sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is one of the most emblematic plants and symbols of Canada. It is especially important in the province of Québec that produces approximately three quarters of the world’s prized maple syrup. Articulating ways of questioning from biosemiotics and the ecological humanities, I will reflect on the manner in which feeding and caring play out in the concrete, situated practice that is maple sugaring. Doing so, I will address three points: the expression of semiosis in forests, husbandry in the maple stand and the production of syrup, and finally caring relationships involving humans and trees. Maple sugaring thus appears replete with (bio)semiosis, mind networks that grow through and among bodies. Keywords  Sugar maple (Acer saccharum) · Food · Care · Other-than-human minds · Biosemiotics · Ecological humanities

* Diatoms are unicellular heterokont algae, that form one of the most diverse groups of protists on Earth. Through carbon fixation, they produce breathable oxygen; through photosynthesis, they generate basic lipids that lay the foundations for planetary food webs. Diatoms come in a stunning array of shapes, most of which are either bilaterally symmetrical or radially symmetrical. Their cellular wall, called a frustule, is made up of almost pure silicon dioxide (SiO2), a rare biomineralization event among eukaryotes. In other, more poetical, terms: “Diatoms are algae that live in houses made of glass. They are the only organism on the planet with cell walls composed of transparent opaline silica.” (Diatoms of North America website) Still very much alive and thriving, the fossil record indicates that these organisms date back at least to the lower Cretaceous epoch (145–100 mya) – and possibly earlier. There exist many deposits of diatomaceous earth, or diatomite, composed of J. Hope (*) Département d’études littéraires, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_5

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residual silica from the dead organisms. Some of these sedimentary deposits in North America, especially those formed during the Neogene period (23–2.6 mya), are commercially mined in order to extract a very fine, chalk-like powder. This powder has multiple uses: in abrasives and paints, as a dehydrating insecticide, as an absorbent, as insulation material. Today, diatomite is mostly used as a filtering agent for a variety of foods including, specifically, maple syrup. By using diatomite filters, producers end up with a more crystalline, sediment-free syrup. Diatomite is promoted as a relatively inert product. However, couldn’t the diatomite filter alter flavors in the maple syrup (or, for that matter, in any other food)? And couldn’t the diatomite filter bring about changes in the (proven or claimed) health benefits of the foods that have been processed? These questions have concrete semiotic consequences, especially for professional tasters and nutritionists. I will briefly touch upon them in the following pages, but I will do so by focusing on other relational webs. Indeed, I indulge in maple syrup thanks, in part, to countless critters that lived and died millions of years ago. I feed from their skeletal remains. So, bringing together ways of questioning from biosemiotics and the ecological humanities, I ask: what other quasi-minds, in Peircean parlance, are involved in maple syrup? Or as Haraway might say: who else, in the sugar bush, in the sugar shack, matters?

Sylvan Semiosis In his introduction to Mind and nature (1979), Gregory Bateson reflects on the itinerary, that he later qualifies as one of “experimental writing” (68), that resulted in his book. He writes: I was laying down very elementary ideas about epistemology […] that is, about how we can know anything. In the pronoun we, I of course included the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the Senate of the United States. And in the anything which these creatures variously know, I included ‘how to grow into a five-way symmetry,’ ‘how to survive a forest fire,’ ‘how to grow and still stay the same shape,’ ‘how to learn,’ ‘how to write a constitution,’ ‘how to invent and drive a car,’ ‘how to count to seven,’ and so on. Marvelous creatures with almost miraculous knowledges and skills. (4)

Offering a definition of identity or being (“we”) that is large enough to include other-than-humans, and of knowledge (mind, intelligence) that is explicitly pragmatic (“how to…”), are two clear signs of Bateson’s biosemiotic inclinations (for more on these, see Hoffmeyer ed. 2008). Bateson does not consider, in a simplified manner, that all logical-mental types are equivalent; he will speak of a hierarchy of types that rests on the descriptive and classificatory abilities of different organisms. Nonetheless mind is found throughout nature, in/with/and/because of the organisms that inhabit the world. I will not go over all the “basic presuppositions which all minds must share” (27) that Bateson lists out in his first chapter. One of them, however, really warrants attention:

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translation, or transduction (though Bateson does not use these precise terms). For minds to happen, information (as difference) is required. This information exists, only if it is recognized as such, namely as a meaningful, organized pattern. Bateson specifies: “To be meaningful – even to be recognized as a pattern – every regularity must meet with complementary regularities, perhaps skills, and these skills are as evanescent as the patterns themselves. They, too, are written on sand or the surface of waters.” (46) The key here is the idea that knowledge is borne out of the translation of a message from one code into another, the synchronization, the meeting of complementary regularities. When I relate to meaningful objects, for example by looking at them, pointing at them, naming them, I negotiate or operate equivalencies with at least three codes: visual, kinesthetic, linguistic. This operation is analogous to the activity that consists in translating an utterance from one language to another – though this second example is but a special case of translation and not its general model. As Bateson points out, this matching of complimentary regularities and skills, the mind’s capacities of feeling differences and combining sources, relies on and expresses the “coevolution” (46) of codes.1 Bateson’s contributions to semiotics stand out in his introductory remarks and his reference to the redwood forest – to which he returns later in his chapter “Criteria of mental process”. In this chapter, “the cornerstone of the whole book” (91), Bateson lays out a structured account of mental processes as informational processes in living systems. Bateson’s six criteria of mental processes are (92): 1 . Mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components; 2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference; 3. Mental process requires collateral energy; 4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination; 5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions) of events which proceeded them; 6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena. The key to Bateson’s conception of mind lies on the premise that “mental function is immanent in the interaction of differentiated ‘parts’.” (93) This entails that individual, indivisible entities are mindless; a requisite to mind is the interactive relationship between parts that are either spatially distinct (A and B), or temporally distinct (A and A1). To be complete, this relationship must activate “some third component which we may call the receiver. What the receiver (e.g., a sensory end organ) responds to is a difference or a change.” (94–6) In other words, sensory systems and the adjoining mental systems in all creatures “only operate with events, which we call changes” (97).

1  We could distinguish at this point translation at the level of codes and translation at the level of signs. Both function by operating equivalencies, however the first is rigid and follows predetermined and strict rules, whereas the second operates by virtue of creative analogies between the different elements composing signs.

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Admittedly, difference is an awkward thing, one that resists straightforward identification. Bateson says this in “Form, substance, and difference”, where he states that “difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept” (1970, 457–458). It is also in this paper, in his discussion on difference, that Bateson famously defines information: “what we mean by information – the elementary unit of information – is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy” (1970, 459). Applied to the sugar shack, this definition of information-as-difference could be used to figure out what is at stake when a taster tries to distinguish good quality maple syrup from off-flavor, buddy syrup. To answer this question, one could point to a variety of clues. The distinctive taste of buddy syrup is usually caused by a late or over-extended period of harvesting, at which point sulphur-containing amino acids appear in the sap. Though buddy sap has a unique spectroscopic signature, the unpalatable compounds are barely distinguishable to the naked eye (or nose) in the sap itself. However they become easily detectable in the finished syrup: the product is substantially less sweet than good quality syrup, and its flavor recalls fish, bitter medicine, decomposing vegetable matter, raw chocolate, overcooked or rotten eggs, raw meat, etc. This stands in stark contrast to the various flavours of good quality syrup: vanilla, toffee, cream, hazelnuts, orange peels, conifers, toast, etc. What I’ve done here is described distinctive traits of buddy syrup (for more on this, see various documents in the “knowledge transfer” section of the Acer website, see references). But the difference itself, as that which happens in the blink of an eye to a person consuming the syrup, remains elusive. Things clear up however if we consider this differential situation in terms of embodied and mindful relations, and rely on Peirce’s ground-breaking concept of the interpretant, the learnt responses to cues in the environment that coalesce, in this particular case, as flavors. As a psycho-­ linguistic agent and a semio-cultural interpreter, I may very well respond to the flavours by saying “delicious!”, “gross!”, or “doesn’t this remind you of last year’s first batch?” A biosemiotic perspective would remind us though that the flavours are already identity-building responses and interpretations. “Ugh, rotten eggs” is the translation in linguistic terms of a sign relation that holds between (1) a sulphur compound, (2) taste buds and olfactory sensory neurons, and (3) an on-going experience in tasting in a collective (and specifically discursive) setting. For Bateson, mental, or more precisely informational, semiosic, processes are coded – they are translated into other forms according to rules. Attacked plants warn their neighbors of threats in the vicinity by releasing volatile organic compounds through their leaves. I express my love to somebody by using specific words and exhibiting specific behaviors (most of which are heavily coded). As semioticians well know, the volatile organic compounds, the words, the behavior are employed to mean something else than what they literally are, at face value. In this sense, when minds are involved, you may very well get what you see, but you always get something different, something more. It is in this discussion on codes, that Bateson returns to the forest. Bateson writes, I quote him at length:

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In some highly diffuse systems, it is not easy, perhaps not possible, to recognize either sense organs or pathways along which information travels. Ecosystems such as a seashore or a redwood forest are undoubtedly self-corrective. […] But it is not easy to point to any part of the system which is the sense organ gathering information and influencing corrective action. I think that such systems are quantitative and gradual and that quantities whose differences are the informational indicators are at the same time quantities of needed supplies (food, energy, water, sunlight, and so on). A great deal of research has been done on the energy pathways (e.g., food chains and water supplies) in such systems. But I do not know of any specific study that looks at these supplies as carrying immanent information. It would be nice to know whether these are analogic systems in which difference between events in one round of the circuit and events in the next round […] becomes the crucial factor in the self-corrective process. (112)

Bateson’s epistemological account of the redwood forest could be explained by his acquaintance and proximity to it. Yet nothing should prevent us from adapting Bateson’s example to instance other natural environments, including maple stands. The point is that natural environments present rich and complex webs of semiosis that very likely overlap or harness other relations (“energy pathways”). In this sense, food or alimentary habits can facilitate information flows. Nutritional pathways of living systems, can also be semiosic pathways: what we see is food, but we also get information (semiosis, mind). This idea that food has a signifying function could be explained by corelating alimentary and behavioral changes. For example, the effects of glucose on the neurons and cognitive functions in humans are not only chemical, but they underscore the interpretative processes involved in food consumption. These effects are acutely felt in a sugar rush or sugar crash – and these can happen pretty frequently at the sugar shack… After chugging a full mug of réduit (boiled water that hasn’t yet reached the 66° Brix of proper maple syrup), or on the contrary if my glucose levels have fallen below a level that I’ve gotten used to, I, or my ways of relating to the world, change: thus my cravings for sugar, which signals low blood sugar, can bring on lightheadedness, palpitations, sleep problems, and mood swings, all of which have effects on my cognitive capacities. The same could be said of caffeine, nicotine, cannabinoids or any other substance whose consumption alters my disposition towards the world. This could even be extended to fertilising soils, the human practice of tinkering with the alimentary habits of other-than-humans. Indeed, talking about food does not only refer to what humans eat (and how they prepare their meals, who they eat with, what goes on inside their bodies as they digest food products, etc.); it should also take into account the way humans feed others. By adding nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (the most popular ingredients in fertilisers) to the soils of their sugar maple stands, producers alter and try to enhance the plant’s developmental capacities, such as the production of stems, flowers, roots, chlorophyll, or adenosine triphosphate. Again, this tinkering does not play out only on a chemical level, but also on a semiotic one in that it affects the tree’s growth, their world- and corelated self-forming interpretative capacities. In other words, the chemical processes are not an end to themselves, and in any case, they don’t just happen out of the blue. They are a means deployed by an organism in order to keep itself alive, and they are processes which organisms respond to. And it is because

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the trees recognize and adapt themselves to differences (differences which make differences) that the redwood forest, but also the maple stand, is mindful  – like you and I.2

Land Husbandry and the Production of Maple Syrup The forester and environmental philosopher, Aldo Leopold, is a central figure in the history of American nature conservation and in the discussion of forest care. Leopold’s preferred vision of conservationism relies on a thorough consolidation of systems, one which resonates with the overlapping and intersecting problems in the sugar shack. In his collection of essays written between 1932–1946, For the health of the land (1999), Leopold combines data-driven science with bio-eco-centered ethics, to provide an overview of some key ideas, such as land stewardship, sustainable agriculture, and restauration and management of wildlife. Leopold’s ideas cannot be taken for granted, because, as news headlines make devastatingly clear on a daily basis, the state of biological, ecological and the more general environmental systems are in dire straits.3 For Leopold, the application of conservation ethics to land consists in using a wide array of methods. It also requires developing, in Leopold’s words, a “reorganized system of land-use in which not only soil conservation and agriculture, but also forestry, game, fish, fur, flood control, scenery, songbirds, and any other 2  Two points in closing this section. One of the first and most quoted scientific papers arguing in favor of plant communication through chemical signaling appeared a few decades ago in Science, “Rapid changes in tree leaf chemistry induced by damage. Evidence for communication between plants” (Baldwin and Schultz 1983). The controlled experiment consisted in damaging the leaves of trees and measuring the levels of phenolic and tannic compounds (anti-nutrients that deter herbivores and phytophagous insects) in neighboring trees; the authors report a significant increase of these compounds, and conclude that the trees communicate via airborne biochemical signals. Interestingly, these experiments were conducted on poplars (Populus X euroamericana) and… sugar maples. The mindfulness of maples is a time-tested topic – the joys of serendipity! Second point: a thorough biosemiotic analysis of forests would require that I go over research done by so many others, particularly the work of Suzanne Simard (2018) on communication in plants, and Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) forest epistemology (that explicitly builds on Bateson’s ideas). I would even address the bestselling book The hidden life of trees by Peter Wohlleben (2015). However Bateson’s arguments are, for now, sufficiently convincing as they lay solid epistemic foundations for other-than-human semiotics. 3  A second reason why Leopold’s ideas on wildlife require critical assessment is that he makes certain ideological assumptions that are, for better or for worse, at odds with contemporary science and environmentally informed thinking. The idea of landownership that Leopold champions has its limits and biases; nation-states harness, organize and exploit other-than-humans in ways that Leopold does not address; sex and gender differences have environmental implications that Leopold seems oblivious to. I fully acknowledge these shortcomings and potential areas of dispute. Nonetheless, Leopold was keenly aware of the teeming networks of life in wildlands, the interrelatedness of species and systems, and the roles that humans could, should play within these networks. These are the issues that catch my attention.

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pertinent interest[s are] to be duly integrated” (49). Here, Leopold reminds his readers that in organizing land they must consider radically different entities (soils and songbirds) and heterogeneous scalar parameters (agro-economics of floods and the aesthetics of scenery). In more contemporary terms, forests are complex systems and should be considered as such. Case in point, in their application of complex systems science to forestry, Filotas et  al. (2014) take into account phenotypic and genetic differences in various stands of trees, and the multitude of “vertical, horizontal and temporal dimensions of stand composition and structure” (4), such as soil quality, soil layers, biodiversity, age variations of trees, anthropogenic disturbances, etc. The exploited sugar maple grove, an agroforest, has added layers of complexity: tapping (in effect scarifying the trees), brush- and log cutting, acidification and premature exhaustion of soils, etc. And the stand is also a playground, a hunting ground (for humans and other animals), a place to wander and to rest. When we consider what the sugar maple grove is about, all “interests” (49) or “values” (47) as Leopold calls them, should be taken into account “so that they collectively comprise a harmonious balanced system of land-use” (47). Admittedly, this last quote referring to a “harmonious balance”, is freighted. But it reflects or expresses Leopold’s concerns with land health, namely “the capacity for self-renewal in the biota” (219). Leopold writes: What is the nature of the process by which men destroy land? […] Most thinkers have pictured a process of gradual exhaustion. [… B]ut there is something else that needs to be said. It seems to me that many land resources, when they are used, get out of order and disappear or deteriorate before anyone has a chance to exhaust them. (162)

According to Leopold, there is a point where use becomes unregulated and turns into misuse, abuse. As Leopold speaks of the “sickening” (164) of resources, he actuates a definition of health that refers not to a fixed, quantitative ideal, but to a constructed, pragmatic, qualitative state, leaving room for ethical and moral judgments – in fact inviting them. As a result, Leopold writes that conservation consists in “keeping the resource in working order, as well as preventing overuse. […] Conservation, therefore, is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence or caution” (164). Conservation is, in every sense of the word, work – and this work requires the development of skills. Comparing the abilities to build, fix and use machines (such as tractors or radios) with those of care for the land, Leopold exalts the “necessity for skill, for a lively and vital curiosity about the workings of the biological engine” (165) and “the mechanisms of nature” (165). Running a sugar shack requires that producers learn how the biological engine of the trees works, or more precisely, that they understand the behaviour of the trees (though to be fair, scientists still don’t quite understand how maple water flows through trees). Basically, maple syrup is a human food product, derived from a plant’s food doubled as anti-freeze – multi-tiered “energy pathways”, as Bateson might have called them. During the summer, the tree photosynthesizes sugar, part of which is stored as starch in its roots, a reserve that the tree will use

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to kick-start its growth the following spring. In late winter or early spring, temperatures oscillate between above-freezing during daytime, and below freezing during nighttime; as temperatures fall below zero, the gases in the fibers of the tree contract and as temperatures increase, the gases expand. This contraction and expansion pushes the water around the tree. Raw sap moves mostly upwards from the roots through the sapwood; elaborate sap (raw sap enriched by the products of photosynthesis in the leaves), moves mostly downwards in the cambium. Harvesting maple water consists in tapping the trees, i.e. making fresh and controlled wounds that reach into the sapwood and inserting a spile through which the water will flow. Basically, water moves through the vascular tissues of the tree because of a pressure difference (higher within the tree) contained by the hermetic outer bark, between roots and budding leaves. If the tree’s bark and cambium are cut, water will run out.4 But understanding how maple groves function also requires that the sugarmaker learns, or becomes familiar with, what Leopold calls the “language” (171) of wildlife – though “semiosis” would be a more precise appellation. This language could refer to many types of sign relations. For instance, it could refer to the way a forester learns how to read the stand, just like a doctor learns how to read symptoms: by spotting diseases such armillaria root rot (Armillaria mellea), nectria cankers (Neonectria galligena), or tar spots (Rhytisma americanum), or by gauging weather patterns in order to guess what would be the best moment to tap the trees at the beginning of the sugaring season. But it should also refer to the pre-, or paralinguistic biosemiosic mind processes in the forest: the network of signals keeping animals, insects, mushrooms and plants in touch with one another. In other words, learning the language of trees depends on one’s readiness to admit that meaningful things happen to/in them. Traditionally maple water would be harvested by tapping mature trees. The water would drip into pails hooked onto the spiles and the producers would go from tree to tree collecting it. Nowadays the spiles are usually connected to tubing that winds from tree to tree down to the sugar shack. This technique is doubly advantageous for producers: it facilitates water transport and, by keeping the same atmospheric pressure within the tree and the tube network, it insures a vacuum conducive to the flowing of the maple water. In some cases the pipes are fitted onto pump extractors that increase the negative atmospheric pressure on the trees. A revolutionary technique in maple syrup production, referred to as the “plantation method” – patented by Tim Perkins and Abby van Den Berg of the University of Vermont – consists in actually lopping off the crown of saplings – the younger trees

4  Analogies are important: at this point the tree is not like a hose, with water moving up and down, leaking through the tap; rather it is more like a sponge being squeezed around in all directions. On this particular question of analogies, a biosemiotician would point out that Leopold’s use of the terms “engine” and “mechanism” to describe living systems is pernicious. What makes living systems living is that they are precisely not like cars or radios: they are not aggregates of parts that must be assembled (by who?) in a certain order for them to work. Rather, they are alive because they self-correct, adapt, form communities, interpret signs within and without.

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Table 1  Average yield of various harvesting methods a Method Bucket Tubing (normal vacuum of 20 in.-Hg) Tubing fitted onto a pump extractor (high vacuum of 25–28 in.-Hg) Plantation method

Yield (pounds of syrup/tap) .75–1.5 lb of syrup/tap 2–4 lbs of syrup/tap 3–6 lbs of syrup/tap 500–1000% estimated increase compared to conventional methods (Perkins and van Den Berg 2015, 5)

The bucket, normal vacuum and high vacuum figures are approximations commonly quoted by producers; they were confirmed to the author in an email correspondences by Martin Pelletier, forest engineer at the Acer research centre, and Guillaume Provost, inventory coordinator for the Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec (PPAQ) organization. Yield depends on many factors, such as seasonal variations, regional differences, altitude and orientation of the stand (north- or south-facing), size and age of the trees, etc. Also key, is the installation of taps and tubes as any leaks in the system will entail a loss in the vacuum; one could be equipped with a cutting-­ edge pump extractor, but it is just about worthless if the system is springing leaks. As for the plantation method, it is in its early experimental stages. Though preliminary yield figures are impressive, they have been established by the patent holders and can only be refined through more experiments and applications of this method

a

being easily replaceable and more sensitive to temperature changes than mature trees – and fitting a vacuumed collector onto the tree. In this case the water is basically sucked out from the tree as if it were a straw. What we witness here is the development and progressive implementation of technological innovations whose explicit goals are to stabilize, but mostly increase, the yield of maple water (Table 1). As technoscience progresses, trees produce more water than they would, had they been left to themselves. The last method I refer to, the plantation method, heralds a future where maple water would become a cash crop, a future where maple syrup would be produced en masse, effectively and efficiently. The maple syrup industry has undergone important technological shifts in the past, this could be just another step. By comparison, the harnessing and transformation of so many other food stuffs (corn, wheat, coffee, cocoa, palm oil, salmon, beef, etc.), and most naturally-derived products (cotton, gold, hydropower, etc.) have been subjected to intense technological and economic overhauls. Coffee harvesters do not randomly wander in subtropical forests looking for beans; panning for gold may still have an attractive aura for those who yearn for a mythological 19th gold-rush, but its results are rather marginal compared to mega mining projects of the twenty-first century. Why should maple syrup remain an exclusive, so-called “wild” product of the terroir? In her commentary on the plantation method, Laura Sorkin writes: In a natural forest, which varies in maple density, an average 60 to 100 taps per acre will yield 40 to 50 gallons of syrup. According to the researchers’ calculations, an acre of what is now called “the plantation method” could sustain 5,800 saplings with taps yielding 400 gallons of syrup per acre. If the method is realized, producing maple syrup on a commercial

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For a maple producer whose objective is to stabilise and increase the yield of syrup, the technique is promising: saplings grow rapidly and can be easily replaced, they could be planted in rows making water collection that much easier, sugar maple plantations could be envisaged in other areas of the world, far beyond their current and limited native range in the northeastern temperate forests of North America. Under these conditions, with syrup production increasing five- to tenfold, maple syrup products could be a lot cheaper and more widely available. This could be good news, and not only for producers. Following a general backlash against refined white sugar extracted from the sugar beet (Beta vulgaris) and the sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), artificial sweeteners, and high fructose corn syrup (which has been linked to non-alcoholic cirrhosis, Jensen et al. 2018), maple syrup has been hailed as a healthier alternative. To be sure, maple syrup is metabolized in the same manner as refined sugars, but it continues to gain popularity due to certain health benefits, including a low glycemic index, high rates of antioxidant polyphenols, and the fact that it is essentially composed of sucrose with no pure fructose. The reasons for the backlash against refined sugar are not limited to impacts on the health of individual consumers, but also take into account the ugly socio-cultural and environmental history of sugar cane plantations (Dockès 2009) (Stuart 2013). In this respect, the maple syrup industry, a defining element of Québécois national heritage, benefits from a strong popular feeling and a pristine image, one that is carefully manicured by different pressure groups (producers, retailers, restaurateurs, a provincial federation etc.) The recent 160 million dollar acquisition of L.B.  Maple Treat, a key player in the production and transformation of maple products, by the sugar giant Lantic Incorporated, should be interpreted in this light: as a reaction to popular enthusiasm for maple products and a response to changing consumer demands.6 The plantation method of harvesting maple water is still at an experimental level. In the event that this method imposes itself as the main way to harvest water, it will, however, come with its share of problems (Sorkin, previously quoted, raises some of these issues). Harvesting maple water has always meant wounding the trees, but this technique properly kills them after a few seasons. In addition, if this method is mainly promoted as one that increases yield, its most obvious outcome is to increase

5  This last sentence presents an interesting, perhaps unintentional, polysemy. “Redundant” means both obsolete or unnecessary, and laid off or jobless. Thus, talking about a “redundant forest” is an admission that in ordinary times the forest (among other living systems) is integrated in cycles of production and labour. The illusions of capitalism rest in part on the uncompensated and unrecognized work of nature. 6  For more on the health aspects of maple sugar products, see the dedicated website on maple sugar research hosted by the organisation of Quebec maple syrup producers, https://maplescience.ca. For more on the biosemiotics of sugar consumption, see Pierre-Louis Patoine’s chapter in this volume.

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consumption. In a time when degrowth is imposing itself as a communal project that is scientifically and ethically responsible and viable (Demaria et  al. 2013), more infrastructures, more economic activity, more sugar in the bodies, can hardly be justified. The intensive plantation method confronts producers and consumers, once again, to the contradictions that arise when the objectives, desires, anxieties and logic of human-only technologies and economies are confronted to a wider biosemiotics/ecosemiotic concerns.

Caring with Maple Trees In “The land-health concept and conservation”, one of his last essays (included in the aforementioned collection), Leopold qualifies himself as a “land-doctor” (220). As Leopold most likely knew, doctors’ dealings with patients mobilize different types of knowledge (semioses), including the knowledge of causes (etiology), the identification of signs in patients (diagnosis), the estimation of outcomes (prognosis), and the determination of courses of action (treatment). Patients are system-­ making amalgamations of stories and it is in this way that “doctor” Leopold envisages four requisite conditions to land-health: recognizing the integrity of land, gently caring for it, transcending sole economic interests, controlling human interventions (and also, more tendentiously, controlling human population). At this point, Leopold acknowledges that his arguments rely not only on the hard facts of science, but also on the supple arguments of ideology. He writes: These then are my personal guesses as to the conditions requisite for land-health. Some of them step beyond ‘science’ in the narrow sense, because everything really important steps beyond it. I do not claim that my guesses are objective. They are admittedly wishful. Objectivity is possible only in matters too small to be important, or in matters too large to do anything about. (226)

Here Leopold is not confessing the failure of science. Rather he is highlighting the crucial fact that land, health – or for that matter any object of study, any interrogation, any definition – expresses and enforces the values and judgements of those involved. Thus, when I walk into the maple stand and intervene in it, I walk into a forest of multi-scalar sign relations that intermingle with those that are said to be distinctly human and cultural. Such a cluster of relations is dealt with at length by María Puig de la Bellacasa in her recent essay Matters of care (2017). Her last chapter “Soil times. The pace of ecological care” is of particular interest as she echoes, without explicitly referring to, Leopold’s ideas on land-health. Soil makes up the outermost and extremely thin layer on the Earth’s crust, the pedosphere. It is composed of organic matter, minerals, liquids, and is instrumental in supporting life on Earth. But as Bellacasa points out, soil is also what we humans make of it, the value we find, or are ready to find in it: “[w]hat soil is thought to be affects the ways in which it is cared for, and vice versa, modes of care have effects in what soils become.” (170) This thinking and

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caring requires a specific ecological temporality or “pace” (169) that, Bellacasa states, is incompatible with the progressivist and productivist ideals of industrial agriculture. Soil is not only the ground on which humans tread or that support human activities. And it is definitely not “dirt” (169). It is a community with which humans live, of which humans are part. If communities are, by definition, groups of people or others who share common characteristics, they are also composed of individual members and subgroups that express differences. One of these differences, that was for the longest time in classical Western philosophy cast and conceptualized as a universal, is time. Bellacasa rearticulates the concept of time with an other-than-­ human perspective that dislocates the illusions of anthropocentricism. Bellacasa writes: Soil ecologists have long been aware of cycles of interdependent growth and decay in the living soil that articulate multiple temporalities. But the temporal immersion of TAPO [thoughtful and protracted observation] is specifically oriented to rethinking human ecological practice in its material obligations with ethical and affective dimensions. TAPO requires making time for the times of the soil and, I argue, can be read as a form of cultivating ‘care time’. (201)

By insisting on the plurality of timescales that interconnect in soil (the time of decay, the time of insects and other critters, the time of fertilisers, the time of cultivation, the time of erosion, etc.), Bellacasa questions the authority of industrial agriculture. A blunt example: we needn’t set our watches to the balance sheets of pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies, and forcibly synchronize other-than-­ humans with the accounting periods of profit-driven juggernauts. The temporality of technoscience in this era of terminal capitalism, is but one of many, and it expresses the limits of its objectives, its desires, its anxieties, its logic.7 Bellacasa’s point is that a logic and ethics of care, drawing from feminist philosophy, questions the technoscientific imperatives and promises of terminal capitalism. These include the idea that soils must be repetitively fertilised and “put back to work” (186), and the idea that all past and present-day problems can be solved simply by added progress, what Bellacasa calls “technoscientific futurity” (172). More importantly, this logic of care can also provoke us to cast a new politics of soil that recognizes, defends and celebrates the pedosphere as a “living multi-species world” (172). Bellacasa writes: engaging with different ways of experiencing time could have additional significance for the way that we look at the temporality of science and technology. […] [C]ontemporary approaches to soil care disrupt [the technoscientific] vision of innovation. […] Here, a feminist politics of care in technoscience […] appears particularly relevant. It […] offers an

7  Bellacasa exemplifies the deceptions of agro-capitalism with the dust bowl phenomenon that ravaged the continental United States in the 1930s, and the controversial heritage of the Green revolution, that took place notably in Brazil, India and Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. So many other examples could be pointed to. As I write this, at the end of the summer in 2019, fires rage in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, an effect widely attributed to soaring deforestation rates and the hunger for land by mining, logging and agro-food companies (Lappé 2019).

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inquiry into different modes of ‘making time’ by focusing on experiences, in this case of soil care, obscured or marginalized as ‘unproductive’ in the dominant futuristic drive. (177)

The politics of soil and agriculture contemplated by Bellacasa, integrates human and other-than-human temporal scales. Stitching other-than-humans extensions onto our selves may blur the limits of individuals and species; but it also has the effect of putting forward, what Bellacasa calls “alternative affective ecologies” (195) of biosemiosic and anthroposemiosic relations. Care is not equivalent to what would habitually be referred to as “medicine”, the study and treatment of remedies and illnesses. But medicine would have very little meaning without care. People seek the help of health professionals (for themselves, their children, their parents, their pets, etc.) because they hope and expect that these professionals will cultivate a caring disposition towards them, one which unfolds on many levels of semiosis. While the sick may require medication and surgery, viz. technical interventions on their bodies, first and foremost, and more immediately (apart from obvious examples in trauma centers and emergency rooms), they require a person to person interaction. And this interaction unfolds not only in linguistic utterances (“how is your pain compared to yesterday?”), but also in bodily communication that articulated language is often unable to match (Long 2019). The empathic so-called “body language” with which a health professional can greet a distressed patient is already part of the treatment. A smile will not kill malignant cancer cells in the same way ionizing radiation does, namely by breaking apart molecules in their DNA and misleading the cells attempts at interpreting the gene sequence. But if the smile soothes the patient by reducing his or her anxiety (something that can be attested by measuring biomarkers) the health professional’s engagement towards his or her patient considered as a whole person, is caring (for more on the biosemiotic perspective of patients as people, see Gary Goldberg, this volume). A biosemiotic perspective on care thus entails that humans are not the sole purveyors and benefactors of care (and especially not the human reduced to an abstract psycho-linguistic cultural set of capacities). Humans can take care of each other, of other animals, of plants and natural environments; and inversely environments, plants and animals take care of themselves, and sometimes, take care of humans. The Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) is a germane example. Forest bathing has become something of a fad in the past few years: the relatively aimless activity of just going out in the woods is repackaged as alternative health care by self-help gurus marketing meditation. Nonetheless, since its introduction by the Japanese Forest Agency in 1982, Shinrin-yoku has received considerable attention in preventive medicine, backed by evidence-based research, for its therapeutic qualities against stress and anxiety. Drawing from their own experiments, in the forest and in the laboratory, and reviewing other field studies, Tsunetsugu et  al. (2010) report that Shinrin-yoku has positive effects on the well-being of test subjects. These (pragmatic) effects are evaluated through surveys and also by measuring physiological parameters in levels of hemoglobin and glucose in the blood, salivary cortisol

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concentration, overall heart rates, and activity of natural killer cells – all positively affected (to a certain degree) by Shinrin-yoku. It is worth mentioning that the overall positive biases behind Shinrin-yoku are not accounted for by the authors: telling subjects that they will go for a walk in a botanical garden or in busy street downtown can easily consolidate positive or negative, culturally determined predispositions. But if this practice makes a difference in the lives of test subjects, attempting to determine if that difference is exclusively cultural or physiological is pointless. In fact, in their review of experiments on olfactory stimulations, an important aspect of Shinrin-yoku, the authors note that exposure to Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica), “most familiar to the Japanese population” (30) and Hiba (Thujopsis dolabrata), “a commonly used species in Japan that possesses a characteristic smell” (31), generally have positive effects on test subjects. What is a stake here are the semiotic bases of aromatherapy, that should not be discarded on the grounds that they leverage relative cultural elements. Quite the contrary. This makes clear that odours serve as signals for something pleasurable – signals because the odours trigger responses not through necessity, but through on-going and adaptive, physiological and linguistic learning experiences. Just like Bateson’s arguments on mind go well beyond the giant redwood forests of the American southwest, the beneficial aspects of Shinrin-yoku should not be limited to Japanese forest environments. Indeed, in their conclusion, Tsunetsugu et al. state that in order to establish Shinrin-yoku “[a] desirable step would be to increase the variety of types of forest settings appropriate for [it].” (35). It seems reasonable to suggest that the mindful maple stands in temperate forests of eastern North America could also take care of humans.8 This is not just a metaphor, one that could be illustrated, for example, by agentive, Ent-like trees cradling human bodies. Rather if Shinrin-yoku has various positive effects (such as increasing the activity of natural killer cells and reducing psychological stress), then this experience of a semiosic forest could be seen as one that is conducive to the growth of the human interpretant.

8  In fact, I am not convinced that the benefits of Shinrin-yoku are limited to forest settings, but could encompass the uniquely diverse sensorial realities of all environments, such as seasides, grasslands, frozen deserts, etc. And while there may be something specific about natural environments, the distinction between culture and nature, as envisaged by Tsunetsugu et al., is extremely problematic. The authors oppose, with no explanations, natural elements such as wood, the sound of running water and images of trees, to artificial ones like metal, the sound of a dental turbine, and “displeasure-evoking images” (30) Without delving into the problems implied by this overly simplistic distinction, it is only fair to point out that city experiences can be sensorially soothing for some people: coming back home after a long holiday and rediscovering familiar colors, odors, sounds in one’s home and neighborhood can have appeasing physiological effects. This is hinted at by the authors themselves who suggest that future practices of Shinrin-yoku could be “individually tailored” (35) or at least recognize the reality of “physiological subgroups” (35). One person/ subgroup might relate to (i.e. find meaningful) something that another person/subgroup might be oblivious to; this is basically the whole point of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltforschung.

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Concluding Remarks I proposed to dig into the network of relations that riddle the sugar maple stand. But the more we dig into networks, the more they seem unfathomable. So many relations interlace in a can of maple syrup: the well-drained, rich and silty loams in which the trees thrive; the neighboring and sometimes competing tree species, like the American elm (Ulmus americana) and the North American beech (Fagus grandifolia); the critters that live in the groves and sometimes decimate them, including the notorious Asian long-horned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis); the various tools and equipment used in maple syrup production; all the way to the traditional plaid flannel shirt and the midnight chatting around boiling pans. Sign relations are played out in each of these layers, converging through and between bodies. Maple sugar producers intervene on the forests and tinker with their semioses, harnessing, participating with the “energy pathways” as Bateson called them, of food and care. Eating and caring have always been marked by commensality. Maple sugaring shows once more that this togetherness extends far beyond the limits of the human. Acknowledgments  This paper would never have seen the light of day without experience in a sugar shack. Warm thanks to the Durand family from the city of Québec, and especially Pierre Durand, for inviting me so often to take part in their sugaring seasons, something that enabled me to learn the complexity, intelligence and joy involved in this practice. I would also like to thank Martin Pelletier, forest engineer and head of the technology transfer section of Acer. Centre de recherche, de développement, et de transfert technologique acéricole for so generously providing information on sugaring techniques and the behaviour of maple trees. Finally, I wish to thank Guillaume Provost of Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec, for also confirming production estimates of different harvesting techniques.

References Acer. Centre de recherche, de développement, et de transfert technologique acéricole. http://www. centreacer.qc.ca Accessed 8 June 2019. Baldwin, I., & Schultz, J. (1983). Rapid changes in tree leaf chemistry induced by damage. Evidence for communication between plants. Science, 221, 277–279. Bateson, G. (1970/2000). Form, substance, and difference. In Steps to an ecology of the mind (pp. 454–471). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and nature. A necessary unity. New York: E.P. Dutton. Demaria, F., Schneider, F., Sekulova, F., & Martinez-Alier, J. (2013). What is degrowth? From an activist slogan to a social movement. Environmental values, 22, 191–215. Diatoms of North America. https://diatoms.org. Accessed 7 July 2019. Dockès, P. (2009). Le néocapitalisme, le sucre et l’éthanol. In Le sucre et les larmes. Bref essai d’histoire et de mondialisation (pp. 215–269). Paris: Descartes & Cie. Filotas, E., Parrott, L., Burton, P. J., Chazdon, R. L., David Coates, K., Coll, L., Haeussler, S., Martin, K., Nocentini, S., Puettmann, K., Puitz, F. E., Simard, S. W., & Messier, C. (2014). Viewing forests through the lens of complex systems science. Ecosphere, 5(1), 1–23. Goldberg, G. (2020). Biosemiotics, holistic biology and self-actualization. In Y.  H. Hendlin & J. Hope (Eds.), Food and medicine: A biosemiotic perspective. Cham: Springer.

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Hoffmeyer, J. (Ed.). (2008). A legacy for living systems. Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics. Dordrecht: Springer. Jensen, T., Abdelmalek, M.  F., Sullivan, S., Nadeau, K.  J., Green, M., Roncal, C., Nakagawa, T., Kuwabara, M., Sato, Y., Kang, D. H., Tolan, D. R., Sanchez-Lozada, L. G., Rosen, H. R., Lanaspa, M. A., Diehl, A. M., & Johnson, R. J. (2018). Fructose and sugar. A major mediator of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Journal of Hepatology, 68(5), 1063–1075. Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think. Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lappé, A. (2019). Follow the money to the Amazon. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ideas/archive/2019/09/follow-­money-­amazon/597319/ Accessed 11 Oct 2019. Leopold, A. (1999). For the health of the land. Previously unpublished essays and other writings. Washington, DC: Island Press. Long, T. (2019). Pain as sign and symptom. A semiotic analysis of nursing clinical practice and research. Recherches Sémiotiques – Semiotic Inquiry, 38–39(3, 1–2), 171–182. Patoine, P. L. (2020). Slowing the pace of industrial modernity’s sugar-fuelled semiosis with Willy Wonka. In Y.  H. Hendlin & J.  Hope (Eds.), Food and medicine: A biosemiotic perspective. Cham: Springer. Perkins, T., & van Den Berg, A. (2015). United States patent application publication No: US 2015/0040472A1. https://patents.justia.com/patent/20150040472 and https://patentimages. storage.googleapis.com/f8/54/4d/3f03c9c3d4af44/US20150040472A1.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2019. Producteurs et productrices aécricoles du Québec (Quebec maple syrup producers. Maple research program). https://maplescience.ca. Accessed 8 June 2019. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care. Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Simard, S. W. (2018). Mycorrhizal networks facilitate tree communication, learning and memory. In F. Baluska, M. Gagliano, & G. Witzany (Eds.), Memory and learning in plants (pp. 191–213). Dordrecht: Springer. Sorkin, L. (2014). Maple syrup revolution. A new discovery could change the business forever. Modern Farmer, January issue. https://modernfarmer.com/2014/01/maple-­syrup-­revolution/. Accessed 11 June 2019. Stuart, A. (2013). Sugar in the blood. A family’s story of slavery and empire. London: Penguin. Tsunetsugu, Y., Park, B. J., & Miyazaki, Y. (2010). Trends in research related to “Shinrin-yoku” (taking in the forest atmosphere, or forest bathing) in Japan. Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 15, 27–37. Wohlleben, P. (2015/2016). The hidden life of trees. What they feel, how they communicate. Discoveries from a secret world (J. Billinghurst, Trans.). Vancouver: Greystone Books, David Suzuki Institute.

Restoring the Meaning of Food: Biosemiotic Remedies for the Nature/ Culture Divide Alina-Andreea Dragoescu Urlica

Abstract  This chapter explores the convergence between food studies and new developments in semiotic awareness known as biosemiotics. In alliance with ecological theory, biosemiotics draws on the sign theory proposed by C.  S. Peirce, which reveals how meaning is not to be reduced to the structure of an object and a corresponding sign, but also takes into account a representative association of the former two elements. Contemporary interdisciplinary studies consistently and consequentially confirm some more “primitive” intuitions on how nature works in triadic structural patterns. This analysis dismantles narratives of nature seen as an endless resource or a nurturing parent, as well as certain meanings assigned to food in relation to the nature/culture dichotomy embedded in myths that have shaped Western imagination. Therefore, this semiotic “analysis”  – which is literally “a breaking up” – reappraises such polarized disjunctions in order to reunite them and to reposition (human) nature and culture as communicating vessels running into one another in the manner of autocatalytic processes which sustain all forms of life. Having this aim in mind, methodological insights are taken correlatively from ecolinguistics, biosemiotics, and cultural anthropology, in order to find the hermeneutic traces our cultures have left in diverse mythologies and inherited systems of thought. Keywords  Biosemiotics · Food · Nature-culture · Co-construction of meaning · Symbiogenesis

Introduction – Taking an Ecological Stance The highly complex modalities in which human communities have treated food symbolically have diversified along the lines of evolving cultures, carrying ontological and epistemological implications. By extension, national cuisine becomes a language through which a society may express its ecological stances, based on A.-A. Dragoescu Urlica (*) USAMVB “Regele Mihai I al Romaniei”, Timisoara, Romania © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_6

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configurations which gradually turn into traditions. These, in turn, afford for the interpretation of food-related concepts as instantiations of deeper ontological meanings and food itself as a means of symbolic self-definition. Consequently, food becomes the locus of dietary prescriptions/proscriptions and ideological constructs which transform it into the object of semiotic interpretation as a marker of personal or group identity. This chapter examines the implications of becoming what we consume (or what consumes us), in terms of conceptualizations of dietary choices in keeping with certain life philosophies. In other words, a community’s preferred practices of food production and consumption, as well as, implicitly, its members’ prevalent attitudes towards nature, are underwritten by deeply symbolic and cultural meanings. That is why food is often perceived as an identity marker, according to the logic of identity in the dictum “you are what you eat”. However, this symbolic self-definition comes under suspicion in current global society, given the denatured, homogenizing, and artificially-enhancing food practices pervasive across modern lifestyles. Recently, food styles have repositioned food in contexts further apart from nature than ever before, which are becoming pragmatically relevant to this diachronic analysis. As an effect, the commodification of food has been conducive to the current objectification of nature and the co-extensive denaturation of our cultures. Thus, we ponder the far-reaching consequences of food production, but also our approaches to the need for sustenance which have begun to tax the environment. The discussion highlights emerging trends calling for a return to “natural” and more holistic ways of living and eating, which are underlain by ethical and ecological stances. One conclusion is that our behavior and natural needs must be harmonized with sustainable practices in the absence of which severe loss of information (biodiversity) and other unintended consequences threatening to take us on the path of (self-)destruction. Acknowledging our symbiotic relationships with other living beings and our interdependence within the web of life hinges on recuperating a lost awareness of our place in the order of things and cultivating respectful attitudes towards food and nature. In the tradition of ecological thinking, which envisages relatedness within the web of life, a special place is devoted to the dimension of “the sacred”. In Bateson’s project of reconciling mind and nature, the sacred becomes articulated as “the pattern which connects” (Bateson and Bateson 1987). According to Eicher-Catt (2008: 258), by casting the sacred in a new light, Bateson hypothesizes that sacrality is embedded within nature as much as it emerges in culture. Also, by understanding communicative processes and interactions between organisms, we have a better chance of finding more accurate answers to the question posed by understanding the sacred, which is expressed in “the communicative fabric of the living world” (Bateson and Bateson 1987: 140–150). Therefore, the analysis of symbolic meanings underlying ethical stances mainly builds on a particular conceptual framework from the point of view of ecolinguistics and eco/biosemiotics. Kull (1998: 346) discusses several key concepts in ecosemiotics, highlighting the semiotic aspects of the human-nature relationship, as well as the place of nature across cultures, which are generally underpinned by semiotic mechanisms. This

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perspective highlights the place of culture within nature, not beyond/above/outside it. Despite Kull’s recognition of biosemiotics as distinct from ecosemiotics – in that the latter extends semiotic analysis from the threshold of life to inquiries into the larger meanings of nature, as well as relationships between nature and culture, Hoffmeyer (1996) already includes culture, along with both internal and external nature, in the triangular description of biosemiotics in general. According to Hoffmeyer’s (1996) distinction between genealogical and ecological semiosis, vertical or horizontal semiotic axes of communication would also correspond to the diachronic or synchronic dimensions of biosemiotics. However, notwithstanding that ecosemiotics would then stand for the more synchronic aspect of this continuum, Kull (1998: 351) takes a larger view by also including the “history of culture-nature relationships, as the development of nature(s) in culture(s)”. Thus, whereas the lenses of biosemiotics proper reflect the relationship between internal and external nature, it is within the “environmental sphere” that the relation between external nature and culture are deployed, according to this description. Ecosemiotics, which Hoffmeyer (1996: 96) designates as the “environmental sphere”, deals with an extended meaning of environment going beyond nature while drawing on it, as nature/culture are embedded within one another. Through the unfolding of these relationships within nature-culture, alongside other kinds of subjects, we all “participate in the evolutionary incorporation of the present in the future” (Hoffmeyer, 1996: 51). Every living being is “busy incorporating experiences”, which lead, via assimilation, to higher semiotic complexity of the whole network (1996: 13). In this interpretation of the environment, which is coextensive with nature-culture, human society is basically understood beyond disunity, as part of ecological systems “through metabolism and energy consumption” (Kull 1998: 362). On the other hand, through the permanent transformation and interpretation of nature, these semiotic processes are traced in correlation to food as both sign and signal, as well as the cultivation and assimilation of nutritious/fictitious additions to the “raw” realities of nature.

From Bacterial Culture to Cultivating Nature This chapter makes a case that fundamental (“raw”) aspects of living, essentially based on eating or (avoiding) being eaten, can be considered breeding grounds for the formation of habitual, ritualistic, and later symbolic and cultural developments which have led to the formation of culture or, more accurately, cultures, in an endless diversity of forms. In cultural memory, food ways or “diets”, according to the etymological root of the Latin diaeta, meaning prescribed way of life, may be interpreted as directions radiating from nature towards culture. Thus, habits of obtaining food and dietary ideologies, as well as ensuing ecologies (or lack thereof) have gradually evolved into cultures which we are obliged to inhabit. These pieces of communal and commensal life fall together in a larger puzzle which we are “making together”, while “becoming-with” other species, according to Haraway’s (2016:

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58) theory of “sympoiesis”, which best encapsulates being alive at all levels of relational interpretation. This idea builds on that of symbiogenesis (Margulis 1991), which has largely been established as a law of life formation through interactions and associations. From this perspective, organisms are essentially colonies of bacteria with which they have established mutualistic interdependence or symbiosis (Margulis in Haraway 2016: 60). Thus, at the heart of the matter is one amoeba eating a bacterium and not digesting it, which probably became an acquired genome instead. Taken both metaphorically and literally, that which emerges where there are two in relation to one another may be construed as “culture”. Progressing along lines of phylogenetic cultures, we have ended up in an industrial environment where we are currently evolving in “symbiogenetic tissues of naturecultures, in story and in fact” (Haraway 2003: 17). To envision the broader significations of this story that humans, animals, and plants have constructed together, we appeal to Haraway’s (2003: 32) notion of “companion species”. It serves the purpose of drawing relational pathways between species and tells a story of co-constitutive complexity, co-evolution and significant otherness. In bringing together more of the threads nature/culture has woven with our and other species’ assistance, we might be able to discern the story of coevolution in our “virtual realities” from a holistic emergence perspective (Deacon 1997: 21). One of the basic principles of ecosystems within the entwined dimensions of “nature-­ culture” is the acquisition of genomes from each another by way of ingesting food or through other types of interactions. Symbiotic inter-active and “response-able” relations in dynamic complex systems operate in embedded processes in which “all of the players are symbionts to each other, in diverse kinds of relationalities”, even though symbiosis should not necessarily be understood as “mutually beneficial” in all cases (Haraway 2016: 60). Looking at microbial cultures which co-inhabit the same spaces with us (within our bodies), most of these are beneficial and contribute to our nutrition, development, and genetics by changing gene expression, thus triggering consequences upon the process of evolution of life on large scales (Selosse 2017). This is how the evolution of cultural food production and eating practices has generated particular configurations of civilizations based on the preeminence of symbioses between animal/plant/human beings and the microbiota. Apart from balanced cases of alliance with our symbionts and symmetric relationships enabling a vision of harmony in nature, there is also a large variety of predator-prey and host-parasite interactions that are correlated to disease in the human/plant/animal body or to inflicting violence upon one another. In this type of asymmetric interactions, one of the agents involved not only feeds on the other, but often depends entirely on doing so for preserving the continuity of its own life. The trophic chain was thus perceived as a hierarchy of power and, for the longest time (human) representations of these chains placed humans on top as we established ourselves to be the ultimate predators in nature. We have reached a stage in Western culture, following the emergence of postmodernism, where we have begun questioning our own modes of being, behaving, and eating (whether food rites or mere “table manners”), in short – doing what we have termed “culture”. Starting perhaps

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from a primal bacterial culture which re-organized their environment, we ended up engaging in the act of preparing the earth for crops, which becomes a truly cultural act. The same word derived from the Latin cultura “cultivating, agriculture” figuratively also means “care, honoring,”,1 which intersects with the religious dimension and the correlated meanings of giving food offerings to the gods and sharing food with the spirits of nature. Despite the plenitude of nourishment available to the primordial ancestors, there is already a dietary interdiction imposed on them: in the land of plenty, humans must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This may perhaps be interpreted as the primeval interdiction of separating the archetypal binary opposites – in genuine deconstructive manner avant-la-lettre. However, Adam’s misuse of freedom entailed the consequences of fall from grace and the evolution of civilization with all its hardships and insufficiencies, which is about to utterly transform “the Garden” into a barren wasteland. Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1996: 6) suggest that history might take a different course in pointing that events depend on a first action which has been taken and everything else “subsequently occurs within that order”. We may connect this idea to the principle of emergence of living systems, implicating that we create our world, in part, by making choices, starting with the very basic act of eating. This view calls into question reductionist or deterministic philosophies which explain evolution by necessity, according to genetic or environmental dictates alone. From the holistic standpoint which begins to emerge across numerous disciplines, the environment is not seen as a set of things to be used, a storehouse of resource-commodities, but rather it consists of a net of interdependencies (Worster 1994: 35; 354). Based on these given resources, each community of life constructs together very different cultural meanings.

From Cultivating Nature to Cultivating Meaning As all life forms, we depend on the earth and its resources to provide us with vital nutrients in what becomes a never-ending self-sustaining cycle of life. This phylogeny has been arranged according to the tree of life metaphor, more recently replaced by the web analogy, which highlights the interconnectedness between all species. Ecolinguistic and biosemiotic approaches (Stibbe 2015; Bogusławska-Tafelska and Haładewicz-Grzelak 2019) rely on these new ways of understanding nature, including all living beings. The paradigmatic emergent behaviour of ecosystems engenders the evolution of diversity, as a result of interactions and intersections at various angles, building on previous emergent manifestations. The interplay between competition and cooperation have both been conducive to the narrowing down of restricted “niches” where each species feeds on specific resources, according to the

1   Online Etymology Dictionary. [online] search?q=culture. [Accessed 10 Aug. 2019].

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“affordances” (Gibson 1986: 127) available in the context of particular environments. Animal and plant behaviors are also substantially the result of interactions building on highly specific histories of other interactions. Accordingly, but on another level of semiosis, the choices we have made along particular lines of cultural evolution have been conducive to certain outcomes in very specific contexts building upon one another, generating constraints as we become more complex (Deacon 1997: 113–116). At the most basic level, even our perceptions start generating outcomes nested in one another, spiraling up or down in evolutionary trends towards higher order or more destructive processes. Our understanding of the living world now depends on being able to make the perceptive leap from the local mechanisms of functioning to an overall organismic paradigm that becomes known as the holistic paradigm (cf. Bogusławska-Tafelska 2019). By the same token, our various understandings of “nature” – whether functionalist or pragmatic, cognitive-scientific or metaphysical – are articulated on our initial points of departure, which go along very different lines of assumptions and form the basis for constructing radically different worldviews (Markoš 2009: 8). Alexander’s (2009) discussion of “the radically new”, which may arise whenever “a new directionality might be discovered, via arbitrary constraints” opens up a space of possibility for thinking of evolution of culture(s) in biosemiotic terms. As with neuronal complexity, such “dynamics generate patterns whose succession is determined either by directional tendencies that have evolved or by accidental contiguities and similarities between different attractor basins” (Alexander 2009: 96). Just as a certain habit of thought is conceived of as “an attractor basin”, symbolic function may be seen in analogous terms to myth formation and ultimately to the evolving formation of a culture in a certain arbitrary (yet constrained) direction. A symbolic ordering of the world is established from the dawn of time among people interacting with various environments, attending to the basic necessities of life – e.g., different hunting/fishing/farming techniques, corresponding diets, etc. – resulting in very dynamic cultural variation and a symbolic structuration of societies. In the absence of representation, as Deacon (1997) argues, we would be cut off from the world of understanding or meaning making and we would not have access to essential emergent properties such as meanings or beliefs which are generated through symbols. However, as we have crossed the “symbolic threshold”, we have become a “symbolic species” with a tendency to interpret and assign meaning to the objects and events we perceive (Deacon 1997: 79). The meaning of symbols in the context of this biosemiotic reading is to be understood in reference to Peirce’s triadic model of the icon, index and symbol, where symbols are “legisigns whose objects are assigned by rules of interpretation” (Short 2007: 220). According to Peirce, a symbol is “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object” (Peirce 1998: 292). A sign may be an icon (likeness to the object), an index (pointing at, directing attention to the object), or a symbol, depending on the type of relation it has to the object, which is “the ‘ground’ of its significance” (Short 2007: 214).

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Based on these dynamics, in the symbolic structuration of societies such as tribal Amazonians, imposed constraints such as limiting work/hunting/gathering hours may be considered a cultural principle, as this may “constitute a determining factor for explaining what is customarily called the homeostasis of productive forces in archaic societies” (Descola 1994: 295). Nonetheless, cultural imperatives in primitive societies like the Amazonian Achuar, for instance, are formed “largely independent of material constraints” (Descola 1994: 285) in symbolic negotiations and transactions with others and with nature. For instance, the under-exploitation of resources in indigenous ecology is a cultural norm which is predicated on social specifications consistent with a symbolic ordering rather than on ecological limits (Descola 1994: 313). These considerations support one of the tenets of this section regarding the importance of the way the story is told, the way we assume a “language stance” with respect to various aspects of the world. Cowley’s (2011) “language stance” and “wording” concepts, as well as Maturana’s (1978) “languaging” are helpful in making this point. These concepts play on the interactivity that living beings engage in within an extensive web of interrelated aspects. In Cowley’s (2011: 1–2) distributed view, language implies coordination, as meanings are managed by individuals together, by integrating perception, feeling, action, and finally “wordings”. Far from being a faculty which stems from independent brains or minds, language is seen as “a mode of coaction” which functions in social relations thereby creating what Cowley (2011: 3) calls symbol grounding. However, it should be highlighted that the biosemiotic stance cannot be reduced to mere constructivism, as signs draw on the environment and the use of signs further helps create the environment in co-action. Thus, sense making builds on “a history of engaging with each other” which depends on the environment, as well as on “languaging” together (Cowley 2011: 8). In this line of thought, “ecologically extended” (Steffensen 2009) and coordinated communities based on a culture of intentional learning and sharing can access the deepest potential resources available to work with. Awareness of the kind of culture we are constructing can help us maximize benefits for all forms of life and to restrict destructive patterns which tend to separate us from nature and to engender de-naturalized cultures. The very dichotomy nature-culture points to the fatal disunity operated by (Western) imagination. One of the polarized items is no longer preferred in opposition to the other one and the split is overcome by their alliance. At this level of culture, the manner, for instance, in which we procure food and how we feed ourselves becomes a “diet”, i.e. a lifestyle which shapes the form our particular culture will take. Such ideas which become prevalent, continuously shaping who we become on the long term as we further acquire and transmit these histories of collective coordination within the cultures we co-construct. If we take food as a marker of identity and briefly consider the dietetic trends prevalent in the Western world today, one can only wonder what the consequences of choosing “junk” food will be in relation to creating a “junk” culture. As Curtin (1992: 4) argues, food structures “what counts as a person”, while food metaphors (such as “junk” or “fast” food) point to aspects we choose to cultivate within our culture, which tend to create “regimes of truth” finally becoming actual modes of reality.

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Cultural aspects are furthermore completed by adding another layer to the word culture in the figurative sense – that of “cultivation through education, systematic improvement and refinement of the mind” and, finally, the related sense of “collective customs and achievements of a people, a particular form of collective intellectual development” which had appeared by 1867.2 In this sense, culture may be defined in terms of acquisition, languaging and communication or it may well be established around more basic practices of eating, finding, sharing, and manipulating food in primeval times, which have, by way of repetition, turned into rituals and finally acquired symbolic status. The essential rites of passage – baptism, marriage, death – are commonly associated with food rituals which carry symbolic meaning, in all cultures, starting with the oldest ones dating back several millennia. In the case of symbol interpretation, cultural theorists, historians of religions, or anthropologists can never be certain of having interpreted artifacts or “traces” according to their actual meaning at the time it was created and used. In Derrida’s use of the “trace” metaphor, any sign contains not only a presence, but also an absence. Mythology, metaphysics, and the whole “history of the West is the history of these metaphors and metonymies” taken as presence, when in fact there is absence (Derrida 1978: 279). However, these become the lessons we learn and teach others, including some “presences”, as well as some absences which are sometimes forgotten. In the structuralist approach to mythology, terms are seen as lacking meaning without their binary opposites, as they are embedded in structural relationships within culture. In the systematic decoding proposed by Lévi-Strauss, binary oppositions are not only opposed to one another, but also resolved through a mediating term in what forms a triadic relation (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 224). Myths may be deciphered according to a consistent systematics where some elements opposing each other are reconciled through elements which mediate between them. Akin to language systems, myth units cannot be understood in isolation, but only as parts of a structured system of relations between them. The Lévi-Straussian analysis of cooking and eating practices revolve around binary oppositions such as the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, etc. across a wide range of South American tribal myths. These polarities are employed to draw parallels between primitive and modern cultures, evidencing that the savage mind is as sophisticated as our own, with merely different sets of values, codes or constraints. In Lévi-Strauss’s “culinary triangle” (1997: 27), the cooked is a cultural modification of the raw, whereas the rotted is a natural transformation. Along the lines of these polarized conceptual schemas, the semantic opposition between nature and culture is enhanced by the realization that nothing can be merely cooked; food is cooked in a certain manner and it reflects choice, transformation, cultural processing. Thus, food is culturally structured or “constructed” (Meigs 1997: 96). In defiance of structuralist attempts at organizing language, poststructuralists seek to decompose all symbolic structures. Among these, language is no longer

2   Etymology Dictionary. [online] Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=diet. [Accessed 10 Aug. 2019].

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considered a system of clear-cut correspondences between signified and signifier, which leads to an inherent undermining of all texts and binary oppositions. However, this approach will be overcome through Peircean semiotics, as the triadic relation between the object, the interpretant, and the representamen may be contrasted to dyadic or binary approaches. Thus, from the perspective of semiotic ecology, “our own dualistic view of the universe should not be projected as an ontological paradigm onto the many cultures where it does not apply (Descola 1996: 93). For these reasons, the nature-culture dichotomy is inadequate in describing interactions of more or less “primitive” societies with their particular worlds. Perhaps there is an inconsistency between the minimization of the nature-culture dualism, on the one hand, and the overestimation of the mind, on the other, which is taken as a “filtering device decoding sets of contrasts already present in nature” (Descola 1996: 84). In Descola’s view, the nature-culture distinction operates as the central Straussian tool which aims at the systematization of contrastive myth aspects into a semantic matrix of a universally meaningful discourse across cultures. Most of the myths collected from Native American societies upon which Lévi-Strauss built his mythological theory do not distinguish nature from culture, so we may not be certain of our own way of interpreting binary oppositions.

Levels of Meaning from Nature to Culture Dominant tides of Western culture and religion have rooted human dignity and self-­ worth in the separation from nature and the distinctness from other animals. Among other distinct traits, we are singled out, ironically, as “the only ones to eat with cutlery – a sure sign of civilization” (De Waal 2001: 3). Culture should not be perceived as antithetical to nature, but as an “environment that we create ourselves”. Despite being indeed “an extremely powerful modifier”, nature and culture cannot be separated as they are in a relation of circularity where each one produces the other. De Waal makes a critique of behaviorism and structuralism for viewing animals as interchangeable and for the reductionist culture/nature dualism. However, there is probably an agreement with the Lévi-Straussian argument stressing the excesses which are bound to sweep our human cultures constructed in disjunction from nature: “For is it not the myth of the exclusive dignity of human nature, which subjected nature itself to a first mutilation, one from which other mutilations were inevitably to ensue?” (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 41). We may speak of an “animal culture”, as long as culture is generically considered “a way of life shared by the members of one group […] derived from exposure to and learning from others” (De Waal 2001: 31). Along this line of thought, it is argued that we become cultural by learning from peers, much like other animals, which lays more emphasis on personal responsibility for behavior choice within the group. Also, such modes of thinking posit animals no longer as prey, but as members of our extended family who have dignity and deserve respect. Thereby, currently expanding animal studies and research on animal phenomenology of

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perception makes a loop closing back on “primitive” modes of interpreting relationships within the world of living systems. These systems are not exploitative because they commonly place humans in the same order of nature along with all the other beings which are seen as interdependent in the cosmic food web (Århem 1996: 185). For instance, the Makuna of the Colombian Amazon have traditionally considered animals as “persons” endowed with knowledge and ethics, which they accordingly treated as equals (Århem 1996). In an utterly poststructuralist semiotic system well ahead its time, these cultures devised a relativistic mode of interpretation of animal beings, depending on who/why is considering them: “When animals roam in the forest or swim in the rivers they appear as fish and game, but as they enter their houses they discard their animal guises, don their feather crowns and ritual ornaments, and turn into “people” (Århem 1996: 190). According to their nature (i.e. their environmental niche and resources available to them), each community of animals has developed its own “culture” and the customs which enable us to deem each of them a distinct class of beings. Furthermore, this enables us to understand more deeply “the continuity between nature and society, and ultimately the essential unity of all life” (Århem 1996: 200), which is encapsulated in the concept of the “humanness” of all beings, beyond apparent differentiation. From the same perspective, human predation represents an exchange of goods within nature, while killing for food is construed as “a generative act through which death is harnessed for the renewal of life”, thus stressing the implication of becoming “parties to a moral pact governing relations within human society as well as the grander society of all beings.” (Århem 1996: 200). Descola (1994) further reflects on the cultural patterns of the Achuar people, whose lifestyles are predicated on the transactions they establish with all the sentient natural beings from which they obtain food. Whether they employ force, threats or by means of social niceties, their interactions with animals and plants amount to a kind of social etiquette. Achuar conceptions regarding sociality establish rules for hunting and gardening which are far more spiritual in nature than our technicalities for finding food in modern cultures. On the contrary, their incantations appeal to species leaders, as they deploy their personal relationships with game. The transactions between hunters and game or between women’s gardening and plants depend on mastering the correct skills for interacting with the supernatural domain (Descola 1994: 93). Descola’s symbolic exegesis displays a deeper understanding of these knowledge systems, which are essential in indigenous ecology for the establishment of complex transactions around food. For the Makuna, predation is conceptualized as “exchange” with other species and killing for food is seen as a “generative act through which death is harnessed for the renewal of life” (Århem 1996: 200). In the primeval world of meaning, species are seen as interrelated within the natural web and animals accede to the category of “humanness”. Across Amazonian indigenous communities, plants and animals are construed as persons able to exchange messages among themselves and other species, including humans, on an equal footing. By conceptualizing the idea of social culture without separating humans from animals and plants, common cosmologies highlight the continuity

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between nature and society and ultimately the essential unity of all life. Therefore, in Amazonian eco-cosmology, humankind does not reign over other life forms which could inadvertently legitimize human exploitation of nature. Instead, there is a broader awareness of the interdependence of all nature, including human beings, from which ensues our responsibility towards the whole. The most highly valued aim of these communities is “to maintain and reproduce the interconnected totality of beings which constitute the living world” (Århem 1996: 200–201). In Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of mythical nature, humans are part of the whole and each species becomes a mediator in an endless triad of meaning. Lévi-Strauss hypothesizes that herbivorous animals act as mediators, as they are plant eaters akin to gatherers, but also animal food for carnivorous species at the same time. This relation may be considered a case of mediation or a double process of opposition as well as correlation, where each term generates the other one (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 224). Similarly, there are analogous situations on the linguistic level, for instance corn smut, caused by the Ustilago maydis fungus, mediates between wild and cultivated plants, garments mediate between “nature” and “culture”, etc.; such rapports of mediation are illuminative with regards to understandings of Native mythology, helping us make sense why, for example, the Game-Mother is associated with corn smut, underwriting universal human structures (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 225). Following such traces, by acquiring knowledge on myths, we become acquainted with deep structures of meaning which universally underpin the human “story”. Myths often reflect the continuity between subjective experience and the properties of the cosmos, thus illustrating the continuity of humanity with the rest of nature (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 240). Very common in the mythical dimension, humans and nature are so closely connected that primitive societies experiencing this state as a golden age and disconnection from nature as personal loss. The fact that the community of nature includes human beings and all structures they depend on correlates with the respect for nature proposed by Lévi-Strauss which has prompted “primitive” societies to avoid accumulative or exploitative tendencies.

Animism as Distributed Intelligence As cultural researchers, ethnologists, ecologists, botanists, and others are looking into indigenous cultures, we find there is more to learn from shamanism and animist worldviews. The idea of a kind of intelligence active throughout nature at the core of many “primitive” worldviews is now gaining support within the scientific community, as more scientists evidence the intuitions of indigenous communities that all forms of life are interrelated. Shamanic systems of knowledge highlight that nature undergoes perpetual transformation and science has now confirmed intuitions of co-evolution across the web of life. That is why predation, as mediated by shamans, is interpreted as a revitalizing exchange with nature. As predators, however, humans share a responsibility towards other species as we are related to them. Moreover, all life is imbued with intelligence, evolution is guided by an intelligent

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resource from within, the evolutionary process and nature as a whole displays a higher form of intelligence (Narby 2005: 107–108). As Narby points out, these cultural systems might become substantial resources of knowledge showing us – the younger species – how to learn from nature and to control our predatory instincts. Movement has been considered a criterion of intelligence among animals or at the very least, a criterion for classification and taxonomic practices in the animal and plant world. Plants display restricted movement requirements, as they absorb nutrition from resources available all around – sunlight and earth minerals. Animals (the animate), on the other hand, are organisms which move in order to find food (Narby 2005: 57). By devising ways to feed themselves, they developed nervous systems highly efficient in surviving over their competitors. The sooner information travels through an evolving nervous system, the better animals manage to avoid being eaten. Consequently, brains have been selected so as to catch prey and to escape predators, as “a race between animal predators and animal prey” (Narby 2005: 58). Although this process has contributed to the development of brains, being a brainless organism can hardly be equated with lacking intelligence. Narby illustrates this case by making reference to animals lacking brains, such as the water sponge which simply filters its food through its airy body, while the hydra extends its retractable tentacles to catch small crustaceans. How they detect prey with great precision despite having no brains remains the subject of biosemiotic research and intelligence correlates with other somato-sensory aspects besides those restrictedly associated to the brain (Cowley 2011: 11). On the other hand, plants are scarcely as inactive as they might seem merely because they have developed other abilities than movement in order to avoid predation. Instead, they have opted for a plethora of chemical strategies and substances – such as insecticides, pesticides, etc. – to prevent being eaten. However, considering them in terms of our own thinking and seeing as we operate in a different, more rapid manner than plants, our semiotic interpretations of plant life have downplayed their value, having generated “animal prejudices against vegetables” (Narby 2005: 58). The implications of using a biosemiotic framework to dismantle such biased semiotic systems might be rather unsettling for those who choose vegetarian diets based on ethical principles respecting (only) animal forms of life. Biosemiotic research into sign use and communication in plants amply corroborates this hypothesis (Kull 2000; Baluška et al. 2006).

 ecoming Means Assimilating Nature B and Co-constructing Culture All beings evolve and grow old while living in a permanent process of becoming. To become implies to understand inasmuch as survival in nature implies becoming aware of the proper “signs” which become intelligible as food in the perception of animals, which are able to decode signs such as representations/traces of other animals. The semiotic animal reaches a degree where, “by studying signs, [it] comes to

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realize that the whole of experience, from its origins in sense to its farthest theoretical reaches, consists of sign-relations presenting and maintaining what they signify” (Deely 2009: 13). In his Trilogy of Philosophy, Deely (2009) traces Western culture along two conceptual phylogenies: the “way of ideas” and “the way of signs”, the former Cartesian model being proposed by the cult(ure) of modernity and the latter re-emerging in contemporary semiotics. The latter one considers meaning more fluidly, as interactive processes. The evolving meanings of signs depend on the interactions between living organisms adapted to their environment and to each other. Thus, with the extension of meaning making (semiosis) to the entire world of the living, it becomes obvious how the approaches of ecosemiotics and biosemiotics (Barbieri 2003; Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991: 117) begin to retrieve semantic processes at all levels – starting with the genetic code to the more complex level of Nature as a semiotic entity (Gaia). In the space of culture, living beings also engage in the co-construction of one other and their entire sociocultural environment as they look for and provide sustenance for their families. Being co-constructors of our own worlds, we begin to understand the deep responsibilities we have in conducting relationships with one another and the rest of nature, as autopoietic systems have the ability to generate themselves. An extension of the autopoiesis concept to a larger system is put forth in the theory of “Gaia” as a living system, where life becomes the coherent catalyzer of all that belongs to nature (Lovelock 1975/1990; Maturana and Varela 1980; Margulis, 1998). The idea of feedback loops refers to the maintenance of a state of coherence or equilibrium which can be applied on every level, starting from an organism’s homeostasis to food chains operating in feedback loop systems across nature (Markoš et al. 2009: 139–140). In Worster’s (1994: 379) view, Gaia is one of the strongest metaphors emerging in the current “Age of Ecology” and it is currently rewritten in relation to autopoiesis in “the wider discourse of self-referential systems” (Clarke 2012: 58–59). Construing the Earth as functioning analogously to a living organism implies intrinsic value and encourages a greater reverence for life. On the other hand, from a Neo-Darwinian standpoint, Gaia theory is replaced by game theory or the selfish gene metaphor. Thus, selfish individuals only aim at the survival of their genetic lineage, which is seen as the basis for any interaction, all subsumable to “games played in ecosystems” (Markoš et al. 2009: 141). In an ecosystemic framework, establishing connections and interrelations is a matter of building kin, which occurs at the level of sympoiesis rather than autopoietic systems (Haraway 2016: 61). In sympoietic systems, information and control are distributed and produced collectively as species are related to each other (Dempster in Haraway 2016: 61). Analogously, in symbiotic relations, language can be used with meaning and it has a transformative power through collective, co-­ creative work. From this perspective, it matters what stories are told. For instance, in Haraway’s story of companion species, these become different as a result of living together, eating together, or simply by symbiosis. The concepts of “companion species” and “acquiring genomes” which characterize symbiotic relationships (Margulis and Sagan 2002) enable us to become more aware of our dependence on other species.

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The deep implications of acquiring include not only genomic acquisition, but also the assimilation of new meanings; by extension, “acquiring tastes” is also a matter of learning and adaptation to a cultural environment. The history of life is one of evolution, building on acquired traits and skills, which can therefore be studied as a narrative, applicable to the approach of hermeneutics and the humanities (Markoš et al. 2009: 15; 32). The “stories we live by” (Stibbe 2015), discourses and strings of meanings we construct culturally, have an extensive impact on our relation to the world around us, including the other species and nature as a whole. It may be argued that by making specific choices such as changing what and how we eat, we have the potential to alter the type of destructive relationships between our species and the natural world that we have created (Jacobs 2017). We must face the effects of the industrial or “green” revolutions that have brought about an exploitative mode of production while enlarging the split between nature and culture. The cultural adjustment proposed by Haraway (2008: 93) highlights the hope of coevolving less destructively and more respectfully with “significant others”. We are significant to each other, as companion species that co-evolve and teach each other how to communicate, despite inhabiting diverse corporealities (Haraway 2008: 164). The ethical regard she proposes articulates on the recuperated understanding that “every species is a multispecies crowd”, a complex-distributed system which functions in continuously interactive modalities and webbed processes. By engaging in storytelling that nurtures the living, Haraway encourages “learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” (2016: 2). The concept of “response-ability” makes reference to becoming aware of the ways of nature, which include both nurturance and death, “remembering who lives and who dies” in the “naturalcultural history”, while living up to the etymological meaning of the word “companion” from the Latin cum panis, “with bread”, “at table together” (Haraway 2016: 28–29). Thus, we may begin to effectively change our stories by focusing on daily activities like “breaking bread together”, by learning and teaching how to make responsible choices about the food we eat, by being more conscious about those forms of life who are both “absent” and “present” on our tables. The stories humans tell each other and especially stories told to children or students must begin to include responsibility and awareness to the world we co-inhabit. Overexploiting the limited subsistence potential of nature and the conceptual failure to grasp the interdependence between parts forming a dynamic whole has led to a rapidly expanding tragedy of the commons which reflects the loss of our sense of responsibility towards nature. Faced with this predicament, we must relearn from the “primitives” to view the world as interconnected in a systemic whole to which our food-based practices and stories must restore coherence.

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Conclusion A final point unveils the fact that prevalent fantasies of greed have devastating consequences not only from an ecological perspective, but also generate destabilizing effects on personal and social levels. From an eco-semiotic standpoint, the decreased respect for food goes hand in hand with the deterioration of respect for nature and life. From a more holistic perspective, these phenomena entail the loss of respect for oneself and the gradual degeneration of human (nature). In as far as a living being is a center of action based on free will and choice, relinquishing the possibility of choosing one’s food and delegating it to the industrial system of production may be deemed the ultimate renunciation to the perennial sense of personhood. These processes which have taken over our responsibilities of free choice have also led to the de-naturalization of food, which is becoming more synthetic and radically altered from the natural state. An important effect of our newly re-discovered freedom of choice becomes apparent in currently evolving trends featuring organic or raw food which are bringing us closer to nature. We must learn to live together in more cooperative ways of eating and being. We may thus surmount deleterious relationships of ignorance or indifference with our food, which undermine our own cultures, as well as microbial cultures that we depend on. Learning to live with nature and understanding its relevance in the cultures we are building directly impacts our lives for which we must take responsibility.

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Free-Range Humans: Permaculture Farming as a Biosemiosic Model for Political Organization V. N. Alexander

Abstract  Modern agricultural approaches attempt to substitute biological self-­ reinforcing networks, which naturally sustain healthy food economies, with technology that seeks to control nature — not work with it. Artificial solutions (caging, pesticides, genetic engineering) tend to address symptoms of problems that the artificial approach has itself created. The great error of modern agriculture is the assumption that Nature is not intelligent. In fact, we can learn much from natural smart technologies that far out-perform recently invented artificial “smart” technologies. These lessons can also be applied to other political and economic systems, allowing self-organization to foster creativity and intelligence in the populace at large. Keywords  Semiotic scaffolding · Henry George · Permaculture · Biosemiotics and politics · Monetary theory · Heterarchies

Introduction When co-editor of this volume, Jonathan Hope, invited me to think about food from a biosemiotic perspective and to take part in a panel on the topic for the 2018 Biosemiotics gathering in Berkeley, I hesitated. I’m a farmer so I have a deep and complex relationship with the food I eat. In addition to vegetables and fruits, I raise chickens and sheep for food. There’s no sugar-coating it; I am red in tooth and claw. I have eaten many a coq au vin and mutton curry whom I had known by name. I often wonder if I am more or less ethical than the coyotes I fence out of my pasture. What is my primary role, predator or provider? I am no ordinary omnivore insofar as I have greater semiotic capacity than my fellows. I can reflect on my actions. V. N. Alexander (*) Dactyl Foundation, New York, USA Fulbright Program, US State Dept. of Education and Cultural Affairs, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_7

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To be sure, deciding upon an ethical way of treating and living with our Earthmates is not easy. To consider eating meat as a moral issue smacks of religiosity, supposing that there is a static or divine sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Ethics, in contrast, is associated with secular government, business, or medicine where the definitions of right and wrong, good and bad are arrived at through convention, agreement and use. The former is idealistic; the latter is pragmatic in C.S. Peirce’s sense. I see myself, at worst, as just another predator in the ecosystem. I would not advocate veganism or vegetarianism for the coyotes, foxes, coy-wolves, bobcats, bears, hawks, snakes, or other carnivores and omnivores that live around my farm in the Harlem Valley of New York state. Each play a role in maintaining the ecosystem. From my participation within this system, my ethical maxims emerge, for example: don’t eat more than you need to; don’t waste lives. As a biosemiotician I am not so interested in ethics as I am in another, related issue. In this chapter, I argue that what makes a course of action or system of organization intelligent is the degree to which semiotic freedom is fostered. All natural complex systems which support life are intelligent in this sense. Permaculture farming methods, which I use, more or less, tend to mimic a natural complex ecosystem. Industrial farming practices aren’t intelligent insofar as they use a strictly top-down control approach. My research interests have long focused on identifying and describing the behaviors of mindless distributed systems that allow intelligent behavior to emerge from the network of interactions. Even so, mind emerges from mindless neurons. I argue that intelligence can only emerge from a distributed system in which the interacting individuals enjoy freedoms that are enabled by constraints. The extent to which the individuals—be they cells, organs, or organisms—making up a system have the ability to interpret and even misinterpret the world around them—and not just react mechanistically—determines whether or not the system as a whole can behave intelligently, that is, intentionally, adaptively and creatively. (The precise biosemiosic definition of “interpret” will be explored in detail throughout this chapter.) Ethical and intelligent farming practices are those that allow the individuals in the domesticated ecosystem to fend for themselves a bit and require the farmer to provide material enclosures and other enabling constraints that help the animals help themselves and, in doing so, help others. Industrial farming treats animals like cogs in a machine. The consequences of their behaviors are kept at a minimum. Mainly the will of the animals is replaced by the power of fossil-­ fuel machines that do the work that early farmers would have relied on other animals—and plants—to do. Using permaculture farming as an illustration of an intelligent system, I will pull out abstractions and general definitions in order to use them to judge how and under what circumstance a society, economy or government can be considered an intelligent system. This is not to say that biosemiotics-inspired governance could create a utopia or that there is no injustice or suffering in nature or on a permaculture farm. As Death so infamously remarked once, “Et in Arcadia Ego.” All ecosystems digest semiotic beings.

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KING CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius? HAMLET: At supper. KING CLAUDIUS: At supper where? HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes but to one table. That’s the end. W. Shakespeare (Hamlet 4.3.19–28)

Hamlet notes the human being’s (rather inglorious) position within a material recycling process. The amazing “piece of work” that is Man is not just an eater of food but is eaten, and the Great Chain of Being joins itself into a loop. (If I—eater of vegetables, roosters and rams—were at my death to be recycled in my own compost pile, that would be poetic justice.) Hamlet’s remark alludes to Martin Luther’s condemnation at the “Diet of Worms,” (a 1521 meeting in the city of Worms), a phrase in which Germans may recognize no humor, but which cannot fail to make English speakers giggle. The lines suggest that the person on which the Polonius character was based was part of the Reformation, an attempt to reduce the hierarchical control of church over the individual, giving people more freedom and responsibilities. We may suppose Shakespeare thought of the maggots that will recycle the body of Polonius the Reformer because of the pun, a willful misinterpretation. In this quote we find the main themes of this chapter: puns, power, control, cyclical reciprocity, freedom, and freewill, all of which I will explore through a theory of sign action.

 n Intelligent System Is Held Together A with Semiotic Scaffolding Libraries and genes and governments and digestive systems are all, indeed, the products and producers of semiotic scaffolding. D. Favareau (2015: 243).

Networks of interactions exist in natural ecosystems; one organism depends on the by-products of another, which depends on others, until all life, watery brine and mineral crust are interconnected in a massively complex adaptive system displaying what Bruce Clarke (2019), the 2018–2019 U.S. Library of Congress Astrobiology Chair, calls a kind of “planetary cognition.” The relationships between and among organisms and their environments can be described as semiotic because they are formed when the individuals respond to signals, which they subjectively recognize, in ways that aid in their survival or ability to adapt. After eons of such intentional actions, everything hinges on everything else. And because the relationships are interpretive, not set in stone, they are robust and can continue, even when some expected relationships fail. Interactions often help create and maintain material structures: shelters, pathways, and physical divides. Think of the consequences of a beaver dam or a migratory route of geese. Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008b) calls these inherited innovations—habits, tools, instincts, structures, and culture—that both help create and are created by each other, semiotic scaffolding. Many non-human animals can be said to have their own culture which is passed on to succeeding generations and becomes part of the immaterial and material

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structure of an ecosystem. On my farm, generations of crows have dined at the compost pile near the barn; the territorial crows, in turn, protect my chickens from hawks, who are pushed to the perimeter near the vegetable garden where they seemed to have switched mainly to a rabbit and vole diet. These rodents migrate to the farm from the surrounding swamp and woods to try to enjoy the richer table of my garden but, in doing so, they lose the security of the cover of their natural habitat, which makes them easier prey for the raptors. A pair of red-tail hawks raise their young in my teenage son’s lately unused treehouse perched high on one-treed hill, and while my garden functions as bait for the hawk prey, the garden is practically rodent-free, saving bushels of food from damage. Meanwhile in the pasture, the free-range chickens, unmolested by the hawks, follow sheep around because they scare up insects as they graze. Sheep are skittish and jump at the sight of a slinking animal and the chickens are warned by their movement. Foxes, who prefer an easy meal of wild berries, snakes, mice and squirrels, only seldom invade the farm, taking on one of our valiant roosters while the hens fly to the trees. The chickens sound the ground predator alarm (a squawking ruckus that I’ve learned to distinguish from the very similar daily “I just laid an egg” announcement and also from the “sky predator” alarm, which is answered by the crows, not me). Our dog is rallied or I come out yelling and waving my arms to chase the fox off the rooster. A good rooster is essential; he breaks up hen fights and when he finds a juicy grub, he calls out with a specific “juicy food” signal and gives it to a hen who is always “eating for two.” I lose a good rooster every year, but I can afford to keep extras because forage abounds, mainly from the seeding grasses, the feral raspberry bushes along the boundary and five mulberry trees dotting the pasture, whose ancestors were probably cultivated by first homesteaders in the 1750s precisely for this purpose. There’s so much wild forage, in fact, that a blind hen in our flock, pecking randomly and feeling around, has managed to thrive—her continued survival shows that natural selection has been neutralized by resource abundance and her network of protectors. This hen, Sydney, invented a completely original call to communicate with humans. When she wanders off and gets lost (which happens often) we sing out, “Sydney?” and she replies with her signature four-part musical phrase, and we play marco-polo until we are reunited. When invasive Japanese beetles were turning our grapevine leaves into lace, Sydney discovered that if she struck the trellis with enough force, the tasty beetles got knocked loose and rained down. The other chickens have since learned her trick. Everywhere I look on my little five-acre farm, there are relationships across time and space and species which, though built upon instinct, are largely adapted through learned experience and have evolved into our distinct farm culture. This culture is intelligent insofar as it is self-reinforcing and increases the overall productive capacity of the farm as a whole. My stories illustrate that animals are capable of tool use, planning, cooperation, and altruism. They are creative and smart because I give them room to be responsible for their own survival. I just provide a minimal amount of protection and social security, a safe barn to sleep in and food in the winter. Each hen pays me back for my trouble with one protein-packed egg every single day and the sheep provide wool, take care of the landscaping and help make the soil rich for

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the vegetables. There is more than enough food for my family of three to eat fresh produce all summer and preserved foods throughout the winter. The permaculture way allows me to spend about as much time farming as a retired suburbanite spends taking care of ornamental gardens and house pets. I let the ecosystem work with me as much as possible because together we’re smarter than I am alone. All natural ecosystems integrate and constrain individuals such that they retain autonomy, and we can even go so far as to say it is the constraints themselves that engender autonomy (see Cobley 2016). When you hear the term “systemization” you may think of a loss of freedom of the system’s subjected parts. In popular culture, farm animals, office workers, factory workers, soldiers, or students are sometimes figured as cogs in a great machine, meat for the grinder, or bricks in the wall. But, of course, a human is a social animal and can’t exist for long without society, and with society comes constraints. Healthy human social organization needs governing laws—algorithms that are meant to eliminate personal biases and treat everyone equally. But these laws should not crush individuals under the weight of bureaucracy. Laws should help citizens help themselves. Unfortunately, it seems no matter what kind of social-political structure we adopt—democracy, communism, socialism, free-market capitalism, anarchy— power tends to concentrate over time and to monopolize the wealth that is created by the semiotic scaffolding, that is, by the community interactions, the networks, the shared conventions, the public infrastructure, sovereign currency, laws and other enabling constraints. To name a half-dozen examples of how community wealth is pilfered: (1) much of the value of a plot of land in a city is not inherent in the land itself, nor anything that the landowner has done to it, but in its proximity to a community of people and public infrastructure; (2) the value of a social media site is found mainly in the content provided by the user community; (3) the value of a platform like Uber is found mostly in the labor and capital investments of the drivers, not in the platform software owned by the corporation; (4) much of the value of a business that requires a specific type of licensing may inhere in the limited access to the license not the business activity itself; (5) the ability of a business to capture a market through merger and acquisition may depend more on access to cheap loans than to the superiority of the business, and (6) an invention may be more a product of an evolving knowledge base than of the insight of those who hold the patent. In each of these cases a small group of people have gained control over what should be public infrastructure or a marketplace, in which the free exchange of ideas, goods and services should be enabled for all, without inequitable benefit to the providers of one specific kind of service. All have right to the fruits of their labor and capital risk, and all have right of access to a fair share of natural resources and semiotic scaffolding. A widespread distribution of power is what ferments intelligence. While the algorithms on a permaculture farm—the habits that the individuals have collectively developed—are always adapting and canalizing with positive and negative feedback and selection, similarly the algorithms of a democratic state are constantly being revised with each new law or legal precedent. But not everyone is involved in the legislative process and there is a perfectly natural tendency for those rewriting the

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laws to write them in their favor. If there is not sufficient input from diverse groups of people who have mutually beneficial relationships, the state will inevitably become less and less intelligent and less self-sustaining over time. We might do to develop permaculture governance.

I ntelligent Agency Emerges from the Constraints (Lawful Use of Signs) That Enable Freedom (Misinterpreting Signs) Some theoretical background is needed to make my argument about how intelligence emerges clear. Semiosis is co-extensive with life. According to the biosemiotic perspective, sign-use emerged long before chickens and even before other organisms with simple brainstems. As Hoffmeyer notes, sign-use emerged with the very first single-cell primitive life forms that were able to respond to and/or transform differences in the environment (e.g. a glucose gradient or degrees of light and dark) in ways that indirectly contributed to self-preservation (2008a: 31–38). These simple life forms would be powered by multiple interrelated autocatalytic chemical reactions, through which stuff could be metabolized or broken down and reconstructed into cytoplasm in a series of somewhat flexible steps. We may say these goalward steps stand for the goal. Signs, in essence, are a means to an end, an end that will autocatalytically recreate the conditions that will enable semiosis to continue. Within the cell, a tiny ecosystem unto itself, the cycle goes on, producing sign-reading intelligence even though there is no brain involved. At each level of organization, semiotic scaffolding appears through the interpretation of signs. Marcella Faria (2018) has described how single biological cells in a body can alter chemical signals and receptors as conditions change, and disperse signals into the surrounding fluid medium to create virtual networks with other cells through synapses, empty spaces, very much like neurons do. These virtual communication assemblies exhibit coordinated wave behavior and can act as a single entity. Faria argues that this smart behavior between and among simple cells is an example of the necessary adhesion mechanisms that made multicellularity possible. These fluid and adaptable semiotic relationships tie different cells together, and change and evolve over time. Why are such enabling constraints necessary for intelligent behavior to emerge? When any group of independently acting individuals are kept in close proximity, their behaviors may tend to regularize; the result is what looks like intentionally coordinated behavior (see Alexander 2011: 41–46; Alexander and Grimes 2017: 346–349). Imagine a starling murmuration in which there appear to be different centers of organization emerging and dissipating as the flock seems to act as a single intentional entity. Such behavior visually illustrates the effects of semiotic scaffolding; the organization does not come from top-down control but from flexible individual interactions. Complex system scientists have attempted to decipher the algorithms of bird flocking, but the computer simulation models of murmurations

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that have been produced are too symmetrical (see Reynolds 1987). While the self-­ organization of lifeless material, like bits or crystals, tends to be somewhat symmetrical, organismic self-organization tends to be more amorphous. This is due, I argue, to the fact that when organisms interact with each other, they tend to interpret the signs of their fellows. A semiotic habit is flexible, whereas an inanimate algorithm is not. What is interpretation? Are not organismic interactions based ultimately on chemistry and physics? Isn’t each starling and every chicken like Sydney just driven to react to physical matter in ways that are predetermined by the laws of physics and chemistry? Is there a black box where some magic happens and the individual escapes the bounds of determinism and performs a creative act that is truly self-generated? Marcello Barbieri (2003) has introduced a concept for understanding the nuts and bolts that go into the formation of semiotic scaffolding, the virtual networks that tie things and individuals together, producing what he calls “biological codes.” He explains that codes develop when two material entities from two separate worlds are joined by adaptors. Imagine, for example, a cell, its receptor, and a protein molecule; or a truck, a hitch, and a trailer; or wasp DNA, a bacterium/virus, and butterfly DNA.1 If adaptors can come in all different kinds of shapes and/or can hook up with other adaptors, one thing could potentially make an unlimited number of arbitrary connections with any other thing through adaptors. It’s the arbitrariness of the pairing, stresses Barbieri, that makes the relationship an encrypted code. If some adaptors are selected over others because they happen to join two things that are better together, evolution can occur and a new biologic code can lead to a new semiotic habit, that is, a new self-reinforcing effect. Barbieri further notes that whatever is used to interface with something else may be considered a tool, an artifact of biological processes. Tools are part of the emergent semiotic scaffolding created by interactions within constraints. Food is translated into useful stuff for our bodies by means of Barbieri’s third-party adaptors. A whole series of chemical transformations involving adaptors is often necessary to get food into a form we can finally work with. The chemicals that aid in digestion are tools that a body has evolved. The effects of the arbitrary relations are not predetermined by chemistry or physics because the relationship is arbitrary. This is why we may say that the emergence of these processes is truly creative. Although Barbieri might not agree with me, I further argue that when two intelligent systems (e.g. two cells) transduce through an adaptor (e.g. a signaling molecule), the adaptor functions as a sign, to both parties, of the benefit of the connection. To put it another way, the adaptor is a means to an end. It doesn’t matter that the two systems are not consciously pursuing that particular goal. It only matters that the beneficial effect occurs and is self-reinforcing. In the course of negotiating with an environment, a cell or organism faces the blooming buzzing confusion with its

1  Genetic material from one species can be transferred to another through bacteria and/or viruses acting as vectors

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evolved receptor tools, and sometimes a familiar match is made, and sometimes, although rarely, a match is made with a deceptively familiar coupler. This might lead to nothing; this might lead to something negative, but it might also connect the organism to a new benefit that the organism didn’t even know it was looking for. In this way, a new theory or useful habit is discovered by making a logical leap through the wormhole of analogy. In Peircean terms this is called this the logic of abduction. Cells have evolved receptors that match with specific kinds of proteins; organs have evolved specific procedures for processing a variety of biochemicals that, in turn, transduce other chemicals; animals have instincts that get triggered by appropriate cues; humans have schema that they compare to the world. All organisms have evolved semiotic infrastructure and semiotic conventions that they use to make sense out of the world. What they have not evolved an interactive tool for, they cannot use, they cannot perceive, they cannot process. Therefore, we must ask, how do they ever learn anything new? To be able to learn new things is true intelligence. To understand how living systems learn new things, we first need to describe how they know the things they’ve already learned. The signaling molecule, receptor, relay molecules and cellular response shown in Fig. 1 make up the semiotic scaffolding, shaped by natural selection, which channels the semiotic habit that results in an effect that is self-sustaining for the body. Semiotic infrastructure allows mediated contact with the world; organisms know things through their tools, and, more

Fig. 1  Sign-Reading using Evolved Infrastructure: Semiosis

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specifically, through the reinforcing effects that are produced when they interact with the world through their tools. A semiotic habit is a series of mediated steps, a series of sign-interpretations and code-transductions, one thing leading to another, then another until finally an effect is produced that helps recreate the conditions that allow that kind of semiotic habit to recur. An autocatalytic chemical reaction is a nice physical picture of such a process. There may be a number of steps on the way to the final reinforcing effect. Each link between two transductions may be seen to involve one of Barbieri’s third-party adaptors. In biological systems the number of steps is often quite large and complicated. As with many purposeful actions, it matters less what actual steps are taken, as long as the objective is satisfied. There may be a number of means to any end. Likewise with a semiotic habit, the steps may be somewhat arbitrary. My favorite way to illustrate this is to compare a biological process to a Rube Goldberg machine—a long, overly complicated procedure for carrying out a simple task, that involves a number of physical processes (one thing hitting another, knocking over something, triggering something else…). Each step in a Rube Goldberg machine is there—it exists in the way it does—because it represents, to the designer, the ultimate effect that he is after. Each step is a sign of the goal. The individual steps in a Rube Goldberg machine are somewhat arbitrary. Apples used to knock things over can replace oranges. A high heel shoe use to flick a switch can replace a hammer. Because this is so, biological Rube Goldberg machines can generalize (Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances is relevant here). They can substitute some of their sign-tools for others that are similar enough that they work for their purposes. But generalizing is not discovering anything new. It’s a process of reducing differences to sameness. Now let’s think about how a living system learns something new. In Fig. 2, a foreign and different molecule, which happens to be similarly shaped to the signaling molecule, enters the extracellular fluid. Although the receptor has been evolved by natural selection to only respond to the first signaling molecule—the correct one—due to the similarity in shape, the receptor can mistakenly respond to this look-a-like molecule. If this misinterpreted response activates a different set of relay molecules or triggers a different cellular response that happens to be self-sustaining for the body in a new way, then this new look-a-like can become a new signal and form a new semiotic habit. It is such misinterpretation of chance look-a-like signs (icons)—biological puns, in a way, like Hamlet’s pun—that allows living organisms to perform actions that are not predictable by means of traditional methods. The laws of physics and chemistry conform to statistical probabilities. The relative similarity of one thing to another is a quality, not a quantity, and it is difficult to measure or categorize precisely. As I’ve argue elsewhere (Alexander 2013), these fortuitous qualities of signs are the “effective factors,” noted by complex systems scientists, that make the evolution of self-organizing systems inherently unpredictable. An interpretation in a biological system may depend on different semiotic habits being triggered by the same sign, depending on context, or an interpretation may depend on different signs all triggering only one semiotic habit. There are a number

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Fig. 2  Sign-Misreading using Evolved Infrastructure: Poesis

of many-to-one and one-to-many signaling pathways in the body that are differentially triggered depending upon what the signs mean (how they function) in different contexts. A misinterpretation is different. It occurs when a new sign enters and repurposes existing semiotic scaffolding (as in Fig. 2). If the misinterpretation is lucky for the organism, it becomes a new habit and the misinterpretation (a poetic act) is subsumed and becomes an interpretation (a semiotic act) once habituated or fixed by selection. As Percy Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry (1840), declares, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” Misinterpretation is a process whereby something entirely novel comes into being. This is one of the reasons why organisms are so different from machines, even artificially “intelligent” machines. A machine that enacts procedures in a strictly defined way with no hope of learning from its mistakes, or, more to the point, no hope of innovating through its mistakes, is not intelligent. Recall how blind Sydney, searching for grapes, bumped into the trellis and knocked beetles down. Had she done this previously and knocked grapes down? Did she pluck up her first beetle expecting a grape? Was she just groping her way blindly or was she seeking with her other organs of perception? Most likely she was looking for food using tools that had worked for her before, but the new result was a great innovation. Biological systems do not just allow mistakes to happen so that the animal can learn not to do that again—that’s how AI learns (see Alexander 2019)—living systems take advantage of mistakes. No non-cyborg

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machine is designed to learn the way that Sydney did. A machine designer would decompose, define and categorize each step toward the goal, assign percentages and values, and create a machine that would reject the beetle as not a grape. The only way an organism has to respond to something foreign and new is to mistake it for something it does know, assimilate it into itself and allow it to change itself. Because Sydney is expected to fend for herself a bit, she was out there trying and she discovered a new way to get easy food; and when the other chickens adopted her method, a plague of insects was prevented from destroying the grape harvest. In an intelligent system, the self-interested actions of every individual tend to mutually benefit the others—it’s not that they are especially generous or communists or anything like that; it’s not that the universe is divinely benign; it’s just that ecosystems tend to evolve this way because those that are helped as a side-effect of another’s actions tend to thrive. In a self-organizing ecosystem where true intelligence emerges from the interactions of all agents in their environments, there is no ultimate top-down control, no unitary mind that makes all the decisions and comes up with all the plans. Instead actions flow to the lowest energy state and tend to find an intersection where good things will happen—for one or the other of the members. An intelligent environment is—to use Peirce’s analogy in “Design and Chance,” (1992: 220)—like a casino where the odds have been skewed so that it is easier for players to win. As Favareau (2015) explains, sign readings reinforce each other providing directionality towards and away from other sign relations in the network, through the dynamic emergence and canalization of semiotic pathway biases and constraints. [This] … enables new scaffoldings and new pathways within and between scaffoldings to arise, increasing semiosic capacity exponentially (emphasis in original 239).

 isoemiosic Permaculture Negotiates Between Heterarchies B and Hierarchies, Diversity and Specialization, Niche-Building and Global Intercourse Gen X bore witness as the pyramid structure of a feudal hierarchy somehow or other impressed its shape again on society, even though that type of political organization had long been banished by Enlightenment era framers of the democratic state. New “private-public partnerships” have help create a powerful ruling class that exerts control over the populace whose actions in voting booths, in the courts, and at the check-out counters are increasingly rendered ineffectual. The dominance today of online platforms has exacerbated the problem of centralization. It started with food, naturally. Small farmers were the first to lose their autonomy. In 1910 there were some eight and a half million farms in the United States. Today there are a little more than two million, although the number of acres farmed has not changed much. The sharpest drop occurred between 1950 and 1970 when machines replaced human labor and farms began to specialize in monocrops (see Ganzel 2007).

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I can’t imagine how a reasonably low-cost machine could harvest what I grow in my vegetable garden. A green bean, pea, jalapeño, chard, collard, asparagus, zucchini, yellow squash, or okra plant replenishes its yield every week or so. It would be inefficient to uproot the plants and put them into a mechanical sorter to separate fruit from leaves. Carrot and beet seeds planted on the same day do not germinate or grow at the same rate, and I harvest carrots and beets every week beginning in June and the last are not ready until November. I stagger cabbage plantings, and after I cut firm heads in late July, the younger heads can begin to grow into the empty spaces. I do succession planting in some of the beds; winter spinach grows where the spring pea plants were. Because we grow about thirty different kinds of vegetables and fruits that are ready at different times, we harvest non-stop from the first appearance of early spring’s nettle and asparagus to last of early winter’s arugula and kale finally succumbs to a prolonged hard freeze. If I were to specialize in a single crop, I would need migrant labor for a few weeks or a month to bring in the bulk of the harvest, and my role would be more like that of a landowning Lady than a farmer. Indeed the hoarding of land that we see with industrialized farming has many features in common with feudalism. In the 1990s the decentralized Internet promised hope and change and escape from the resurgence of concentrated power, the neo-feudalism of the corporate-­ state. The Internet promised to dissolve economic borders. Massively interconnected horizontal communication would replace hierarchies. Middlemen would fall away, leaving producers to connect directly to consumers. Trade would be free and fair. Agency would be distributed along the many googles of nodes in the network. But fast forward thirty or so years and we find the Internet, and the neoliberal globalism that rode into town with it on a white-washed horse, has instead intensified the centralization of power with a billionaire class presiding over a heavily mortgaged populace whose assets are, for the most part, under water.

Was It the Tool Itself or the Way We Used It? Initially, the Internet started to foster the self-organization of different self-­sustaining niches, from which and into which, envoys and messengers from other niches regularly traveled. If not for the certain manipulation of certain algorithms this situation might have evolved cyber intelligence as in any science-fiction novel, but it didn’t. Those groups deemed too-outside the norm earned the derogatory label “filter bubble” and are now quarantined by search algorithms in Internet back alleys where they don’t get checked and they can’t evolve. All Internet users are now invited to enter the World Wide Web through a door marked Google, after which they are herded into one of just a few technological-industrial complexes, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Springer, Apple, Facebook and Twitter, where serfdom, censorship and the invasion of privacy are not illegal. The Internet no longer has enough enclosures or enabling constraints created by different groups, independent niches partially isolated from global effects. The control of the Internet was effectively seized by

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one small group people—with low-interest central bank loans and majority control of the finite resources, land, minerals, energy—and another small group of people in control of the communication, laws, and public infrastructure. Together the ventriloquist and their dummies homogenized the heck out of cyberspace by broadcasting mind-numbing infotainment. As these two groups of concentrated power come to more or less perfectly overlap, intelligent society disintegrates, and eventually you and I, like beef and dairy cattle, may be shown to our stalls where the troughs have been filled with fossil-fuel grown corn, which our bodies, not unlike those of ruminants, have not evolved to digest very well. Today there are few independent or isolated groups of scholars, artists, musicians, artisans, experts, professionals, or farmers. This kills the kind of local reciprocity, mutually beneficial relationships—such as I have on my farm— which lead to enabling constraints and semiotic freedom. Without enclosures and enabling constraints, the innovative effects of local interpretations tend to dissipate. Web-like power-distributing semiotic scaffolding doesn’t form, and instead all the power gets siphoned up. With a traditional hierarchical structure (Fig. 3), it is more or less transparent who is wielding the power. A decentralized network (Fig. 4) may appear to distribute the power, but it can become dominated by a few people who have control of money, technology or laws and then a decentralized network can easily develop a hierarchical structure that is hidden from participants (Fig. 5). A garden requires a fence to keep rodents out. Flocks of sheep and chickens need to be fenced in to keep them from wandering off and to keep predators out. But a permaculture farm’s borders are still somewhat porous, like the membrane of any living cell. The domesticated animals share the rewards and responsibilities of maintaining the farm ecosystem with the wild ecosystem creatures that surround it. Relative isolation (not total isolation, a closed system will die) is how diversity is created and maintained. Signals can’t travel across systems that have different constraints. The signals we invented on my farm might be meaningless to animals on the farm down the road. Maintaining separate niches or groups keeps the world from becoming too homogeneous. If members of a group depart from the regular constraints (usually by reinterpreting them), they will either make the group more diverse, adaptable and robust, or break off and form a separate group with a different dynamic. Separate interacting niches both keep one another alive (by supplying by-products and wastes) and constrain each others’ growth (by consuming the Fig. 3 Top-down hierarchy

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Fig. 4  Distributed network

Fig. 5 Distributed network with hidden hierarchy

excess, thinning the herd). Wendy Wheeler (2019) stresses how important a biosemiotic perspective is in valuing political diversity: While a convergence of interests and aims is necessary for the cohesion of social organisations, the political implications of the danger of collective error in too much agreement, and absence of dialogic exploration, should also be obvious. The reproduction of the same, and the failure to countenance disagreement, or multifarious difference, is clearly perilous because deathly. This fact is seen vividly in totalitarian societies which produce death symbolically and actually on vast scales (p. 195).

The separate sustainable ecosystems, groups of people and other animals, that create their own rules of engagement for each other by their interactions are called heterarchies that resemble a dynamical interplay between Figs. 4 and 5. These heterarchies do not themselves form hierarchical pyramids where those at the top benefit off those on the bottom. Instead they form clouds of reciprocal interaction that evolve centers of shifting organization and change like murmurations. A permaculture farm tries to be as self-sustaining as possible, nearly a closed-­ loop system, while also interacting in permacultural ways with the surrounding

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culture and economy. On our farm, we mainly grow food just for ourselves and give a few gifts to neighbors at our karma farm stand when we have more than we can use. But we also run a cottage industry selling wool. We chose Navajo-Churro sheep, the oldest breed in the United States, a hardy, efficient eater, almost a wildtype, which are known to have good strong textile wool as well as sweet meat, even as the animals mature. We have about six sheep at the beginning of winter; then the flock expands to twelve to sixteen, which is about right for our five acres during grass-­growing seasons, and then the flock contracts again in the fall as young males are slaughtered or sold to wealthy home owners to replace their motorized landscapers (this is a trend in our community that we helped start), and extra ewes are sold to breeders who want this valuable heirloom variety. Small farms struggle with the slaughtering process. Knowing how to dispatch a lamb as quickly and as painlessly as possible and divide up the carcass correctly is a valuable skill. In the old days, an itinerant butcher might come to a small farm with a mobile unit. But that practice is now illegal (thanks to Big Ag-friendly regulations), which forces all animals to be shipped under terrifying conditions to industrial slaughter houses where they are killed without regard for their feelings. We address the dilemma by bartering with newly immigrated Muslim neighbors who are experienced in humane slaughter, which happens to be the method prescribed by their religion for preparing for holy feast days. This interaction with a group unlike ourselves helps us both. Most varieties of sheep are either specifically bred for wool or for meat, but not both. Commercial meat farms throw out the wool after the ewes are shorn each spring. We take the garbage wool from neighboring farms and process it for use as building insulation (my husband is an “ecological” builder). Since our primary resource is waste to whomever is providing it, we are imitating economical Nature. She has also designed wool, a smart technology, to be a natural humidity regulator and well as a superior insulator, even when damp, and the springy design of the individual fibers makes the insulation expand in the walls over time to fill every empty space instead of shrinking and sinking like fiberglass, recycled blue jean cotton or cellulose insulation. After shearing, the dirty “skirt” or edge of the fleece is cut off and thrown in the compost and it helps build soil that retains moisture. Then the fleeces are stretched out on racks left out in the rain and the sun and occasionally turned for few weeks before washing. Then they are “picked” apart by a hand-powered machine (which looks like a cross between a rocking baby cradle and a bed of nails) by my son and myself while we do his homeschool curriculum, listening to books or watching documentaries. (I use permaculture methods for homeschooling too, teaching my son how to teach himself.) I’m rigging up a system with a windmill so that we can harness wind energy to run the machine. This will allow us to can vegetables while we do school work instead. The point that I’m making here, providing so much Melvillean detail, is not to teach you how to manage a wool business, should you ever need to, but to illustrate how semiotic scaffolding creates an efficient self-­ sustaining cottage industry that is interdependent on the wastes and by-products of other self-sustaining entities.

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 hy We Can’t Have Nice Things: Parasites and Monopolizers W of Finite Resources and Semiotic Scaffolding The invention of symbolic barter, paper or electronic currency, enables specialization and trade. This remarkably useful tool is part of human semiotic scaffolding and can create super-ecosystems that interact with all the others without taking away their local autonomy, if it’s used right. Belief in currency operates quite literally on a, if not a free-lunch principle, at least on a stone soup principle. As long as people believe in the value of symbolic money and act on this belief, it functions as a means of exchange and triggers the creation of wealth. In a permaculture society, currency would function differently than it does in an industrialized society. Let’s imagine long ago a pioneer community got together and decided to create fiat money to pay some of their members to build good roads from their village to neighboring villages and to construct a public market square with stalls and a good roof, for everyone to use to sell their goods. The road workers and carpenters were paid this fiat money for their services, and later they were able to exchange this money with other villagers for goods and services. This money started to cycle throughout the entire village, creating jobs out of people’s needs and creating greater overall wealth. Some villagers bought tools or had barns constructed and became more productive farmers. Soon everybody had more produce to bring to market. Soon more people moved into the village to fulfill different specialized needs, an apothecary, a seamstress, or a blacksmith. Neighboring villages mimicked the first. The different villages began to specialize in local beers or textiles or preserves and traded with each other. Next the first community decided to create more fiat currency to build a school, dig a town well and make public privies. The modern equivalent of the public square/market place is the Internet; using fiat currency, the state could directly fund the development of public platform sites, search engines and bulletin boards, and then allow them to be democratically regulated by the people who use them. As the somewhat eccentric economist Bill Still (Still and Carmark 1996) and the less eccentric but still quite radical economists Stephen Zarlenga (2002) of the American Monetary Institute and Ellen Brown (2012) of the Public Banking Institute have argued, a government need not borrow or tax to have money to spend. Creating money out of thin air and turning it into public infrastructure instantly creates wealth for everyone and backs the currency with material assets. Small fees can be charged for use of the infrastructure to control inflation, which will be slight unless fiat money is created and dispensed in exchange for nothing, as with a Universal Basic Income, or is created to destroy infrastructure, as in war. Taxing of the top percent of wealth would only be necessary to control inflation, not to generate revenue. This is how the semiotic scaffolding of currency functions in an ideal permaculture farming village. Fiat currency can accelerate the formation of more semiotic scaffolding. It’s like pumping energy into a system. Assuming that a community collectively owns its finite natural resources like forest and stone (that is, they aren’t hoarded by some

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Lord), the only thing needed to start building public infrastructure for everybody is the guarantee that those few doing the construction work get paid. One of the reasons why we probably don’t have so many community barn raising-like projects in modern society is that not everyone in the community who stands to benefit from the infrastructure works as hard on the project as everyone else. Permaculture farming operates on the premise that those doing the work, be they chickens, sheep, crows, hawks, or farmers, are more or less immediately rewarded for their efforts. Today a state treasury could act like the permaculture village council and simply create the money needed to build the public infrastructure that would allow people to begin fending for themselves better. Similar monetary reforms were introduced to the U.S.112th Congress by Representative Kucinich as part of the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, HR 2990. The bill, unfortunately, did not attract a large number of sponsors. American economist Henry George makes a distinction in Progress and Poverty (1879) regarding the means of production that his contemporary Karl Marx did not; George was more permaculturally minded. He recognized the difference between owning and controlling the material tools that an individual might build or buy and owning and controlling finite natural resources—that are given/created by Nature (land, water, minerals, forests)—and semiotic scaffolding—that is created by community interactions. George argued the individual might own a tool—like the machinery in a textile factory—and benefit off the added productive value the tool creates for those using it. For example, weavers might chose to work in a textile factory using the machinery if they can produce more rugs there and make more money. But George, drawing upon the trend of discussion in his day, further argued that an individual should not own and control more of the finite natural resources than he/she can personally work. To do so is to hoard resources and prevent others from using them. In addition, an individual does not have a right to unfairly benefit off the value created by the interactions of a community. To illustrate both forms of unjust ownership, let’s imagine the successful textile factory owner takes his profit and buys up land in an industrial area but doesn’t build another factory and doesn’t use the land for anything else, not even farming; he keeps it out of use and creates land scarcity in the town. In this way, he can make more money speculating on land than he can running a textile factory. The added value of land that is in the middle of an industrial zone is created by the existence of other industry and transportation infrastructure in the area, which the owner of that land did not himself create. In Progress and Poverty, George argues that land monopoly is the cause of poverty even as technological progress provides the means for everyone to be more productive. George suggests taxing finite resources such as land only, not labor or interest income, would allow the individual to keep the fruits of labor and the capital investor to keep the added productive value of the tools provided. To go against this is to go against a force of nature, according to George, which we see in the constant battle between laborers who use tools and capital investors who provide tools. Instead of speculating on land or on stocks to make money, the profitable textile factory owner could lend his extra money out to some else to build a business. In this way he would be adding to the productive capacity of his community. George’s

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single land tax remedy is designed to prevent hoarding and make land available to more people. George’s remedy assumes that the natural resources and community infrastructure belong to everyone equally, present and future. George recognized the negative effects of taxing the income from productive labor and productive investment at a high rate and taxing the income from hoarding resources, speculating on land or stocks, and monopolizing community infrastructure at a low rate. In a permaculture system, a productive worker like Sydney or a productive capital investor like a wool-picker provider would not be taxed at all. The highest tax would be on those who, for example, own second and third vacation homes in the center of my hamlet valley as an investment, and who keep their two or three acres of manicured lawn out of productive use, driving up the price of land and housing in the hamlet, and even preventing local wildlife from using the land. (They are venerable job creators, however, for the guys that mow their lawns every week.) The “taxes” that the members of a permaculture farm pay are just their wastes, their by-products, their Malthusian excesses, and the side-effects of their efforts to survive. I’m not forgetting that animals also pay the ultimate price of lost years when they are preyed upon. In the wild, many fowl, for example, only live about three to four years which keeps the wild population stable. Nature is more profligate than permaculture farmers are. We maintain the fowl population size on our farm by eating our chickens’ eggs and extending the lifespans of individual chickens. (One of our hens celebrated her eighth birthday this summer.) We maintain the size of our herd by selling the ewes and eating the rams. The sheep we keep grow into old age. We don’t reduce our herd to a number below that which the farm can sustain. That would throw the whole operation out of balance. In a permaculture state, only taxing excess would be permitted; to tax those existing at the level of subsistence is parasitism. The fact that the state taxes the labor of people earning minimum, low, or even medium wage is grossly unethical. The fact that the state taxes the little bit of land people require for shelter or a garden is grossly unethical. As farm governor, my job is to provide the infrastructure that guarantees my community is kept free, productive, healthy and secure. As a governor, like a doctor, my first directive must be “do no harm.”

Gas Burns the Semiosic and Poetic Ties The principle behind modern agriculture is simple: Break down nature’s own semiotic scaffoldings by the intelligent application of oil. It’s oil all the way through: It takes oil to extract the metals and produce the tractors, it takes oil to drive the tractors, it takes enormous amounts of oil to produce the fertilizer and spread it on the fields. It takes oil to harvest the big fields and eventually to dry the harvested product. J. Hoffmeyer (2018).

I am not a trained expert in permaculture farming; I simply adopted methods that are easy. On our farm, we always multi-task and every solution ought to fix two or three problems without creating any new ones. The most essential rule of permaculture

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farming is try not to work too hard. Meanwhile, my retired neighbor, spends several hours every weekend early spring through late fall mowing his single-species three-­ acre lawn, giving it a precision Scottish plaid pattern. He fertilizes it, spreads weedkiller. In the 1800s, his house was built close to the curb on a narrow plot designed to accommodate a backyard kitchen garden, hens and a maybe a family goat or cow. In our hamlet, wizened elders still remember when more than a few houses on any block had a dairy cow, even the merchant and professional worker families who did not consider themselves “farmers.” Their gardens and animals functioned as their economic safety net. Refrigerated long-distance shipping ended the need for kitchen gardens, and gas-powered lawn equipment changed the habits of the successive residents of my neighbor’s house. I doubt that much time or effort has been saved in this exchange. My neighbor spends a lot of time on his lawn. Perhaps he doesn’t like the Turing pattern that my sheep graze out or the many varieties of grass, clover, trefoil, creeping Charlie, and dandelion, which he considers weeds, that thrive and bloom in our pasture and feed the bees. In the fall, he uses a gas-powered leaf blower to collect his leaves and then he burns them. My sheep stand under the sugar maples and eat the sweet leaves as they fall. I let the wind blow the rest up against the fence and into the low areas, then I rake them up and pile them in the potato and cabbage beds. I rarely have to weed these beds because I use so much mulch. Out of my raking, I get twice my volume in potato-filled sacks every year and ten gallons of sautéed cabbage or sauerkraut. The soil in the potato patch is so rich and loose— made up granule castings from earthworms that get as big as young garter snakes— that you can just slip your bare hand six inches under and pull a big golden Yukon or a handful of purple Peruvians. My neighbor doesn’t get any food out of his efforts. On paper, the fossil-fuel powered farm appears to produce more food with less human labor, and it probably does, but industrial agriculture tends to produce more processed carbohydrates (grains that are easily harvested at once), and less nutritionally dense foods like leafy and root vegetables, a tendency which more or less defeats the purpose of food. And many of the laborers are not readily visible, those who subsidize the fossil-fuel industry, the soldiers who fight in wars for oil, the miners digging for steel for the machines, the marketers and bankers involved in the procurement of expensive machinery, and the millions of other laborers involved in managing the politics of industry. Into Their Labours, John Berger’s 1991 intergenerational historical novel, about a farming community in France, traces the displacement of traditional farmers into farm-industry-derived jobs. Most of the characters in Berger’s novel wind up less well-off than their ancestors. The family member who earns the greatest financial reward in the end is a tiny old lady living high in the mountains who forages for herbs and mushrooms and then trades with local restaurants. The problem with the kinds of networks that industrial farming creates is that they are not immediately reciprocal; interactions are spread out over a larger number of specialized workers. This greater complexity would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that some profit and tax is extracted from each task of each worker and filtered up to a small group of people occupying privileged positions in the network.

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Fig. 6  Captured network

The industrial network isn’t so much a decentralized web as it is an octopus with tentacles in everything (Fig. 6). Animals in cages aren’t able to fend for themselves. People who aren’t allowed to fend for themselves are not being enabled to give back to their communities. This doesn’t just degrade the life of the individual but the whole system in which they exist. In 2013, Roy Walmsley reported that the United States had almost a quarter of the world’s prison population, even though the U.S. had only about 5% of the world’s population. The private prison industry absorbs the tax-revenue that could go to purchasing materials to build affordable housing and farms for poor communities, so that non-violent convicts could be sentenced to community service building that infrastructure to help eliminate poverty, which is the main fertilizer of crime. Every solution should fix at least two problems and not create any new ones. Even convicts should be free-range, fending for themselves while co-creating and co-­ sustaining their communities.

Conclusions Permaculture could be the (albeit unattainable) ideal for agricultural, economic, political and social systems. What I’ve learned on my farm through the lens of biosemiotics has helped me come up with some general principles for healthy creative systems: Every self-organizing system begins with constraints, an enclosure, or limited communication network, a niche, a farm, a flock, institutions, language, conventions, constitutions, basic laws, semi-porous national or regional boundaries. Within these constraints, the individuals do not need a law governing every exchange or action, because this is to make them into automatons and prevents them from coming up with new and different solutions. The regularizing effect of the constraints, which they all have in common, may be sufficient to provide reliable, rule-governed behavior, that is somewhat predictable and yet open to novelty.

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Maintaining separate niches or groups with limited interaction fosters diversity. Too much global communication makes everything homogeneous. Government could use fiat money to create enabling constraints like supply lines and communication lines, education and health centers, but not run them. The professionals and people interacting within these constraints should have semiotic freedom to help create and maintain the institutional constraints. Individuals must pursue their own purposes, be somewhat responsible for their own survival, because in this way they are in a position to create their own good luck and contribute to the building of semiotic scaffolding. Ideally niche-to-niche interaction should be limited such that each benefits off each others’ by-products, excess, or waste. Ideally all waste should be recycled (if it can’t be recycled or composted, you probably shouldn’t be using it) and taxes should be levied only on excess wealth, if at all. We could all stand to eat more vegetables and less meat.

The idea of permaculture governance seems to echo many a notion of reform that has been introduced again and again throughout human history. I began with a mention of Martin Luther (1483–1546), who questioned the authority of the Catholic Church and who advocated for the individual’s right to interpret scripture. Above I mentioned as well Percy Shelley (1792–1822), Romantic poet (and a vegetarian)— whose father-in-law, William Godwin (1756–1836), was perhaps the first true direct democracy advocate, whose mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was perhaps the first women’s rights2 advocate. Percy penned The Necessity of Atheism in 1811, urging the use of reason guided by feeling instead of depending upon authoritative morality. Shelly advocates for peaceful revolution and civil disobedience in The Masque of Anarchy (1832), in which he powerfully reminds us, “[We] are many—they are few.” Shelley would later influence the great civil rights leaders and pacifists, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) and Martin Luther King (1929–1968). As I close here, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) also comes to mind. Emerson thought the divine was not a Being but was distributed throughout nature, and he preached the self-reliance that became identified with New England mind-­ set and which I echo here. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) inspired by Emerson3 wrote Beyond Good and Evil (1887) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), showing how conceptions about morality actually emerge from the interactions of society. We may say that every attempt to get away from a hierarchically organized system is a biosemiotic move insofar as it recognizes intelligence as a distributed system in which the individual creates society and is created by it through semiotic

2  Wollstonecraft argued that women, as the primary educators of children, should themselves be well-educated. She attempted to change the culture to improve the state of existence for women and, in consequence, for all people (see Wollstonecraft 1792). 3  Nietzsche praises Emerson extensively in his journals and letters (see Stack 1993).

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interactions. We can note that the sentiment, “Government of the People, by the People, for the People,” attributed to Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) echoes Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) observations in Critique of Judgement (1790), that in an organism: every part not only exists by means of the other parts, but is thought as existing for the sake of the others and the whole—that is as an (organic) instrument….also its parts are all organs reciprocally producing one another…. Only a product of such a kind can be called a natural purpose, and this because it is an organized and self-organizing being. (p. 220)

One wonders why similar revolutionary impulses have to reinvent themselves every several generations. Perhaps it the clash between holistic/organicist thinking and scientific reductionism that has kept reforms from fulfilling their goals and creating self-organizing societies. If this is so, then we may lay the blame on Rene Descartes (1596–1650) who convinced the Western world that mind and matter, the spiritual and material, were subject to two incommensurable fields of inquiry (see Favareau 2010: 1–77), driving science toward mechanistic views, which has lent false legitimacy to mechanistic approaches to agriculture and to governance. Fortunately now, with the introduction of information concepts into biology, such as “signal” and “code,” the separation between the two cultures may be bridged. Perhaps now the biosemiosic permaculture revolution can finally go forward.

References Alexander, V. (2019). AI, stereotyping on steroids and Alan Turing’s biological turn. In A. Sudmann (Ed.), Democratization of artificial intelligence: Net politics in the era of learning algorithms (pp. 43–54). Bielefeld: Transcript. Alexander, V. (2013). Creativity: Self-referential mistaking, not negating. Biosemiotics, 6(2), 253–272. Alexander, V. (2011). The biologist’s mistress: Rethinking self-organization in art, literature. In And nature. Litchfield Park: Emergent Publications. Alexander, V. N., & Grimes, V. (2017). Fluid biosemiotic mechanisms underlie subconscious habits. Biosemiotics, 10(3), 337–353. Barbieri, M. (2003). The organic codes: An introduction to semantic biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, J. (1991). Into their labours. New York: Pantheon. Brown, E. (2012). Web of debt: The shocking truth about our money system and how we can break free. Baton Rouge: Third Millennium Press. Clarke, B. (2019). What does it mean to think like a living planet? Planetary cognition lab. Accessed 13 Nov 2019 from https://www.gaian.systems Cobley, P. (2016). Cultural implications of biosemiotics. Dordrecht: Springer. Faria, M. (2018). Aggregating, polarizing, networking: The evolution of cell adhesion codes. Biosystems, 164(Feb), 60–67. Favareau, D. (2010). Essential readings in biosemiotics. Dordrecht: Springer. Favareau, D. (2015). Symbols are grounded not in things, but in scaffolded relations and their semiotic constraints (or how the referential generality of symbol scaffolding grows minds). Biosemiotics, 8(2), 235–255.

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Ganzel, B. (2007). Shrinking farm numbers. Wessels Living History Farm. Lincoln, NE: Ganzel Group. Accessed 13 Nov 2019 from https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_11.html George, H. (1879). Progress and poverty: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth. New York: Doubleday. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008a). Biosemiotics: An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008b). Semiotic scaffolding of living systems. In M. Barbieri (Ed.), Introduction to biosemiotics (pp. 149–166). Dordrecht: Springer. Hoffmeyer, J. (2018) On the semiotics of modern farming. Personal correspondence. 4 September 2018. Kant, I. (1790). Critique of judgement. Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1951. Peirce, C. (1992). In N. Houser & C. Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings (p. 1). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Reynolds, C. (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. In M. Stone (Ed.), SIGGRAPH ‘87: Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques (pp. 25–34). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. Shelley, P. (1840). A defence of poetry. In M. Shelley (Ed.), Essays, letters from abroad, translations and fragments (Vol. London). Edward Moxom. Written in 1821. Shelley, P. (1832). Masque of anarchy: A poem. London: Edward Moxon. Written in 1819. Stack, G. (1993). Nietzsche and Emerson: An elective affinity. Athens: Ohio University Press. Still, W., & Carmrack, P. (1996). The money masters: How banks create the world’s money. Rolling Bay, WA. Accessed 13 Nov 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBk5XV1ExoQ& feature=youtu.be&t=22 Walmsley, R. (2013). World prison population list (10th edition). International Centre for Prison Studies. Accessed 13 Nov 2019 from https://prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/ downloads/wppl_10.pdf Wheeler, W. (2019). Culture, politics and biology from a biosemiotic perspective. Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry, 39(1–2), 183–203. Wollstonecraft, M. A. (1792). A vindication of the rights of woman: With strictures on political and moral subjects. Boston: Peter Edes. Zarlenga, S. (2002). The lost science of money: The mythology of money, the story of power. Valatie: American Monetary Institute.

Part II

Medicine

Biosemiotics, Holistic Biology and Self-Actualization Toward a Non-dual Existential Science of the Reconstruction of Person and Optimization of Functionality in Brain Injury Rehabilitation Gary Goldberg

Abstract Rehabilitation entails a person-centered process facilitating self-­ actualization and optimizing the functional reconstruction of the human organism when various constraints imposed by chronic pathological conditions such as acquired brain injury, musculoskeletal pain or limb loss impair significant functionality. Semiotics is the science of meaning and process-based functionality, while biosemiotics is the existential science of meaning and functionality associated with self-actualization in living organisms. The functionality of the intentional agent as the self-constructing and defining characteristic of the living organism is examined in the context of Kurt Goldstein’s holistic biological conceptual framework, based on his work in brain injury rehabilitation. The existential motive to ‘self-actualize’ involves a relational, intersubjective process for all organisms but especially the human ‘semiotic animal.’ Biosemiotics can inform and be compared with Goldstein’s ‘holistic biology’ through serving as a basic non-dual existential science of integrated whole-organism functionality accomplished through self-actualization. In viewing functionality as the brain-associated intentional cognitive agency that engages the body in solving everyday practical problems of existential significance, biosemiotics can be viewed as the relational science of organismic functionality, self-actualization, intersubjectivity and communication. As biosemiotics studies the extraction and transmission of relevant information conveying pragmatic action-­ oriented meaning through which experience and associated organismic intentionality unfolds, this perspective can shed light on the practice of brain injury rehabilitation. More generally, biosemiotics can offer a scientific foundation for medical rehabilitation, involving the optimization of consequential functionality and the regaining of meaningful performance capacity. Thus, biosemiotics provides insight into brain injury rehabilitation as an existential, person-centered enterprise. G. Goldberg (*) Clinical Adjunct Professor, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University Healthcare System, Richmond, Virginia, USA © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_8

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Keywords  Biosemiotics · Brain injury · Rehabilitation · Self-actualization · Person-centered · Existential biology

Introduction In this paper, I propose and substantiate the claim that biosemiotics can serve as a scientific framework for brain injury rehabilitation in its relationship to the process of self-actualization (Whitehead 2017; Goldstein 1939) and the ‘reconstruction of self’ (Gelech and Desjardins 2011) that occurs in a meaningful experiential or phenomenological framework following the existential transformation and challenge that a catastrophic acquired brain injury precipitates. I have come to this realization after being directly involved in the medical practice of brain injury rehabilitation for nearly forty years. I have recognized  — as did Kurt Goldstein  — the essential requirement for a non-dual ‘holistic biology’ (Goldstein 1939) that provides an existential extension complementing the conventional mechanistic fact-based model of organism which currently dominates modern medical science and Western culture (Whitehead 2019).

‘ Evidence-Based’ Mechanical Physicalist Medicine Contrasted with Biosemiotic ‘Person-Centered’ Relational Medicine The mechanistic understanding as applied to brain function is no doubt necessary and useful in uncovering relevant facts  – but not sufficient for the field of brain injury medical practice. In searching for the factual evidence that grounds so-called ‘evidence-based medicine,’ the value-laden existential issues unique to the individual person are set aside. While conventional evidence-based medicine makes clinical recommendations based on the response of the average individual in an identified population to a particular intervention, the individual variation that characterizes the actual substantial differences between individuals is viewed as context-dependent ‘noise’ to be removed from the data through ‘regression toward the mean.’ In person-­centered medicine where the personal context is recognized as a crucial inescapable modulating factor, it is precisely the context-sensitive observations that characterize the uniqueness of the individual as a self-actualizing adaptive relational conscious agent, including, for example, their personality, their values, their favored problem-solving strategies, their beliefs, and their cultural background, which are considered to be the primary significant information to be considered and fully recognized (Adler et al. 2002). One must incorporate the capacity to address questions not only of fact but also of personally relevant value, meaning and purpose unique to each injured person, which underlie the motivation for the rehabilitation process.

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Injury to the brain precipitates concerns and challenges that extend well beyond the mechanistic and into the existential, thus calling for an existential-humanistic approach to therapy. In the mechanistic context of conventional science, the subjective and objective perspectives are typically sundered into separate and non-­ contiguous domains resulting in a fundamentally dualistic orientation that views the subjective and objective realms as totally incompatible. The relational aspects that constitute the subjectivity and uniqueness of the system as a whole—i.e. the individual being served, functioning within their ecological context—are ‘transcended.’ In the process of seeking only the directly verifiable tangible facts considered to be the unquestionably ‘objective’ findings, the subjectivity of the person-served is dispelled and considered to be the ‘noise,’ the variability, out of which the ‘signal’ of the objective factual ‘truth’ is to be extracted. While brain injuries may vary in severity and consequence significantly, there is a common theme which is the holistic impact of the injury on the capacity of the person, as a unique individual in the context of their particular life-experience, to function—the playing out of the effects of the injury as they become manifest in their inimitable lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Brain injury rehabilitation necessarily involves the existential relational sphere of the basic personal functionality of the individual in which the subjective and objective nature remain fundamentally and inseparably integrated aspects of an underlying vital, dynamical continuum. The consequences of brain injury cannot be fully appreciated and therefore recognized as necessitating specialized treatment, from a perspective in which the elements of ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are inexorably separated from the elements of ‘brain’ and ‘body’—which is the case in conventional dualistic modern biomedical science based on the understanding of the body as a mindless, effectively ‘dead,’ de-vivified material mechanism. Such a nominalistic model follows Cartesian dualism which undergirds the conventional factually-bound ‘scientistic’ medical understanding. This approach works for the design, construction and repair of man-made technology and for conceiving of the brain within the body as a physical molecular machine, but it falls short when it comes to taking into comprehensive account the full complexity of the context-dependent existential performances of the individual living organism—the person-served—as an autonomous and environmentally embedded but intersubjectively communicative and interdependent experiential conscious agent (Rafiean 2010).

 urt Goldstein’s ‘Holistic Biology’ and the Existential K Challenge to Self-Actualization That Pathology Poses The human first-person perspective of rehabilitation was already apparent early on in my medical career treating individuals with acquired brain injury utilizing principles of person-centered care. However, this intuitive understanding of the process of facilitating adaptation to the complex and multifactorial disruption rendered by brain injury only attained clarity once I encountered the work of Kurt Goldstein.

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Particularly, his proposal for a ‘holistic biology’ formulated in his magnum opus, ‘The Organism. A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man’ (Goldstein 1939)—a book that I initially stumbled upon 25 years ago after its re-publication by Zone Books–which featured a deeply insightful and extraordinary introductory forward by the late Oliver Sacks (1995; see also Arts 2017)–whose popular books about various compelling neurological ‘adventures’ I had voraciously absorbed. Goldstein based the concepts he introduced on the accumulated experience that he garnered in providing rehabilitative care for over 2000 German soldiers who had sustained traumatic brain injuries during World War I, while carefully observing and documenting the phenomenological impact of the injury on the behavior and experience of the person, the influence of environmental factors on performance, and how the individual adapted with variable effectiveness to the challenges with which they struggled and, in response to which, they sought to develop successful compensatory strategies. Goldstein states the following regarding the holistic organismic approach to the symptoms that manifest in brain pathology: The survey regarding the factors determining the configuration of symptoms in brain damage has shown that the symptoms are only partly the direct result of the damage. It has further become evident that, to a greater or lesser degree, the symptoms are an expression of the organism’s struggle with the defect in its attempt to adjust itself in spite of some interference by the defect. The symptoms become understandable only from the organismic point of view…my own concept of the function of the organism was based on analysis of a great number of physiologic and psychologic phenomena—normal and pathologic—in man. I came to the conclusion that the basic motive of organismic life is the trend of the organism to actualize itself, its ‘nature,’ its capacities, as well as possible. I have tried to formulate the rules which govern behavior of the normal organism and guarantee self-­ actualization. (Goldstein 1948, 19, emphasis as in the original)

This orientation and focus in Goldstein’s work certainly seems to run parallel to the general project of biosemiotics (Whitehead 2017), which, in many ways, may be seen as a return to that which fundamentally animates the living being, enables it to sustain itself throughout its finite lifespan and to give rise to progeny so as to transcend itself, and gives purpose and direction to the actions taken by the organism to actualize its potential within the context of the environment in which it is embedded. Additionally, in order to function successfully in this manner—i.e.  to effectively self-actualize, the organism must accurately interpret and extract pragmatic meaning from its experience, and must be capable of adapting its behavior in accordance with changes in context. This is, again, quite consistent with the conceptualization of organismic nature and the process of adaptation that biosemiotics offers. Goldstein also recognized that one could not establish a science of meaning and value through linear causation involving the compounding of reflex mechanisms because of the essential role of reentrant self-reference in the functioning of living organisms (Goldstein 1963). This is consistent with the general idea that the behavior of open, nonlinear systems involves circular causation—i.e. ‘reentrant self-­ reference’—and is inherently relational; on the other hand, the dualistic nonrelational approach of conventional biomedicine is limited in that its application by definition

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is restricted to closed systems which are functioning acceptably close to a linear, non-recursive regime. In summarizing his critique of the ‘bottom-up’ reflex theory of behavior, so popular among his contemporaries, that attempts to explain the goal-­ directed movement and intentional agency of the whole organism through appeal to the mechanistic hierarchical modulation of an elemental stimulus-response interaction, he states: Thus, after having reviewed all the facts in this field, one reaches the following conclusion: we are dealing with a system in which the single phenomena mutually influence one another through a circular process, which has no beginning and no end. (Goldstein, 1963, 127)

Aron Gurwitsch (1966) summarizes what is unique and particularly laudable regarding Goldstein’s holistic and existential ‘conception of biological science’ of the organism, in terms of underlying philosophical assumptions: To avoid all misunderstanding, it should be emphasized that Goldstein is not putting observed facts in doubt, any more than he is doubting the value of analytic methods which permit the ascertainment of those facts, and that he emphasizes the importance of facts obtained by these methods for the elaboration of the idea of the organism. The conception of this idea has no other basis nor any other point of departure than observed facts. What is in question is not these facts as such, but, rather, the evidence which they provide for the reality of the organism; it is their significance for the organism. (Gurwitsch 1966, 88, emphasis added)

The contention here, then, is that when we consider the issue of the ‘significance’ of facts for the organism—that is, their relative meaning and value as ‘signs’ to be interpreted in the context of experience—, the science to be turned to is that which concerns itself directly with the process of sign interpretation, communication and signification in the context of the ongoing experience of living organisms, in the context of their life-world as they come to ‘know’ it and understand it to be, namely: biosemiotics. This discovery of Goldstein’s fundamentally existential, functionally oriented ‘holistic biology’ and the questions that it raised regarding the incompleteness of the conventional positivistic analytic approach to a mechanistic understanding of organismic life, was fundamentally transformative in terms of how I viewed and thought about my own work and how to best serve the persons I treated in brain injury rehabilitation. This was the beginning of a journey of philosophical discovery which initially led me to an informal subsequent investigation of phenomenological neuropsychiatry and the contemporary philosophy of science, medicine, health and biomedical ethics—primarily from the so-called ‘Continental’ philosophical perspective out of which Goldstein’s ideas emerged. This included an examination of the related works of Georges Canguilhem and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas—which I continue to view as of critically important significance in all of this particularly as it relates to ‘semioethics’ (Deely 2004; Petrillo and Ponzio 2009; Goldberg 2017), as well as to the process-relational thought and ‘philosophy of organism’ of Alfred North Whitehead.

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 he Reality of Communication and the Semiotic/Relational T Recovery of ‘Person’ in the Human Frame: A Peircean Perspective It was not until the subsequent discovery of the architectonic philosophical system, including the ‘pragmaticism’, triadic semiotics, associated relative logic and the overarching theory of ‘synechism’ (Esposito 2007)—the scientific evolutionary process metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce, after serendipitously coming across an introductory biographical article on Peirce authored by Peter Ochs (1993), that a whole new vista of profound and penetrating existential insight was opened up for me. I subsequently contacted Professor Ochs in 2014 and obtained permission to audit a graduate course he was teaching titled ‘Signs of Salvation. Pragmatic semiotics from Augustine to Peirce’ in the department of religious studies at the University of Virginia (Ochs 2014). This was a key point of departure and the opportunity to develop a new and enriched way of thinking about my work. It was at this point that I recognized that there was a powerful connection between biosemiotics, particularly, and my work in brain injury rehabilitation. However, I continue to believe that the relevance of biosemiotics to medical practice in general, as well as to bioethics (see, for example, Beever 2012), is only beginning to be recognized as a means of countering the positivist dominant dualistic medical ‘scientism’ that leaves the patient as ‘person’, as ‘conscious agent’ actively constructing and reconstructing a life-history, entirely out of the picture. Indeed, it continues to view bodily function purely in physical mechanistic terms, it undermines the fundamental constructive importance of empathy in the process of treatment and recovery, and it characterizes the intersubjective aspect of medicine and the foundations of healthcare in the reality of communication between provider and person served, as well as in engaging and educating family members, as the nebulous and scientifically intractable, soft ‘art’ of medical practice (Heschel 1972; Ramsey 2002; Deely 2012; Astrow 2018). This quickly led me to the recognition that there was a deep and fundamental connection between the application of Peircean triadic semiotics to the life sciences—i.e. precisely, as developed in the field of ‘biosemiotics’—and my own work in brain injury rehabilitation, where the pragmatic demands of everyday living and practical problem-solving in the context of the transformative existential challenges of a catastrophic acquired brain injury, and the optimization of the functionality of the person affected by such circumstances, are the central therapeutic concerns. Rehabilitation of the person with such an injury, as Goldstein recognized, cannot be successful without a full recognition of the subjectivity and the conscious agency of the individual person-served—the person, the meaning of whose life is in the process of being reconstructed and reconstituted—and their personality, cultural influences and personal preferences as well as the fundamental influence of all aspects—physical, cultural and relational—of the environment in which they are to be treated and into which they will be returning. This process cannot be fully understood without appreciating the context-dependence of behavior and the fundamental

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influence of environmental conditions on performance, as well as the person’s own existential struggle to adapt, to make do, and to ‘make sense’ of their situation. These are all fundamentally relational issues. These are all issues upon which an essential semiotic relational perspective sheds a great deal of light, particularly for the human being  who is, as far as we are aware, the unique ‘semiotic animal’ (Deely 2005, 2010). And this is where the deterministic, mechanistic, facts-only, ‘necessitarian’ approach that denies the reality of possibility and limits what is real exclusively to the sensed physical actuality of which one can become meta-­ consciously aware (Peirce 1892), fails miserably to meet the clinical challenges of rehabilitation. Furthermore, through promulgating a basically nihilistic attitude toward the possibility of recovery, it does the reprehensible disservice of taking away all hope for the prospect of improvement in functional status and it undermines the overall goal of a successful active reconstruction of the person and the achievement of an optimal level of reconstituted functionality (Gelech and Desjardins 2011).

 ridging the Gap Between ‘Fact’ and ‘Value’ Through B a ‘Semantic Closure Relation’ To do this form of medical rehabilitation work, one must successfully manage to bridge the perceived gap between the complementary aspects of ‘fact’ and ‘value.’ In discussing ‘value’ in relationship to the field of biosemiotics, Sharov (2019) indicates ‘the notion of value is very important for understanding the phenomenon of life…by evaluating objects and processes, an organism subjectively interprets the world and itself.’ Yet, Scottish philosopher David Hume (1888) claimed in his Treatise of Human Nature that there is a fundamental ontological distinction, a dichotomy, between what is (‘fact’) and what ought to be (‘value’), effectively stating that it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’—summarized as the principle of ‘No-Ought-from-Is’ (NOFI) sometimes referred to as ‘Hume’s Law’ (Pigden 2011). But it would seem that, with reference to living organisms, biosemiotics offers a scientific path for applying relative logic to reasoning about value and recognizing the relative value of ‘relations’ in an evolving existential context as the real entities which confer the capacity, from Goldstein’s non-dual holistic biology, for the organism to be autonomous and to self-actualize through the preservation and augmentation of these same relations over time. Sharov (2019) makes the point that there is a criterion for this process of valuing relations in autonomous systems such as living organisms, in that relations are valued and selected ‘only if they preserve and augment the same relations into the future, i.e. if these relations are self-­ reproducing.’ Sharov also makes the connection to the concept of a ‘semantic closure relation’ formulated and developed by Howard Pattee (1982, 1995, 2007) relative to the evolution of self-reference and the evolution of the organism as an autonomous agent. I would suggest that the ‘constructive evolution of

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self-reference’ is another way to express and understand Kurt Goldstein’s concept of ‘self-actualization’ as the primary motive of an autonomous living organism recognized as a ‘conscious agent’ engaged in the process of transforming its inherent  ‘potentiality’ into ‘actuality.’ The complementary ‘material and symbolic aspects of organisms capable of open-ended evolution’ over which Pattee (1995) argues there must be a ‘necessary semantic closure relation’ corresponds to the ontological distinction, viewed as a complementarity as well, between the notions of ‘fact’ and ‘value,’ respectively, as discussed above. Pattee makes this argument for the ‘semantic closure relation’ as follows: …self-reference that has open-ended evolutionary potential is an autonomous closure between the dynamics (physical laws) of the material aspects and the constraints (syntactic rules) of the symbolic aspects of a physical organization. I have called this self-referent relation semantic closure because only by virtue of the freely selected symbolic aspects of matter do the law-determined physical aspects of matter become functional (i.e., have survival value, goals, significance, meaning, self-awareness, etc.). Semantic closure requires complementary models of the material and symbolic aspects of the organism. (Pattee 1995, 9, emphasis added)

I ntegrating Complementary Approaches in Brain Injury Rehabilitation Now, how does this all relate to brain injury rehabilitation? In this venture, it is the functional aspects of the person-served as environmentally embedded ‘autonomous organism’ and as a self-reconstructing agent, which are paramount. The practical challenge in brain injury rehabilitation is, then, deciding when it is appropriate to utilize relevant material facts that emerge through the conventional science of ‘physical law’ and when it is best to recognize the critical importance and influence of symbolic values in this context which involves a process of mediation and discernment associated with Pattee’s ‘semantic closure relation.’ The challenge is to optimally blend these complementary perspectives ‘on the fly’ ultimately for the benefit of the person-served and the goal of optimizing their overall functionality. An example of primarily factual ‘material’ considerations drawing on data from conventional clinical neuroscience and neuro-psychopharmacological studies would be a decision regarding the choice to start a particular brain-injured person on a specific mood-stabilizing drug like lamotrigine to help manage their outbursts of unrestrained disruptive behavior. The idealized process would involve an evidence-­ based review of the facts addressing the effectiveness of lamotrigine in treatment of agitation for a comparable population of injured individuals with agitated behavior, assessing relative contraindications, as well as considerations regarding the risks of unwanted side effects, drug interactions, and so on. The astute clinician would attempt to weigh all these facts together with a careful review of the distinctive clinical features (such as behavioral antecedents or reinforcing consequences) characterizing the particular situation being addressed, but the predominant

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considerations would be the facts derived from the available scientific evidence obtained, ideally, through randomized controlled trials on a large sample of individuals presenting with the same problem, if such evidence indeed exists. It often does not. This would be in conformity with the approach of ‘evidence-based medicine.’ On the other hand, an example of a primarily values-based type of relational issue would be a much more challenging and nuanced decision that would consist in evaluating whether or not it would be appropriate to remove a brain-injured individual from a milieu-based treatment program, from which they were otherwise benefiting, due to risks associated with such episodes of uncontrolled disruptive behavior, despite best attempts to prevent such outbursts, that negatively impact the efficacy of treatment for other individuals in the program, and potentially place the identified agitated person at risk of injuring themselves or someone else. Optimally, one must attempt to incorporate both perspectives into an integrated approach to the treatment of the person who is struggling and suffering with the practical everyday consequences of the injury which may manifest as disruptive behavior and episodic agitation, either as a direct consequence of the injury or as a manifestation of the existential struggle to cope with the disturbing uncertainty precipitated by the injury, to the extent that the person may be aware of its consequences.

 he Distinction Between the Physical and the Relational T in the ‘Divided Brain’ Finally, we will finish up with some brief speculation about how Pattee’s idea of a semantic closure relation within an autonomous agential system between the physically material and the relationally symbolic may manifest in a consideration of the structure and function of the human cerebrum and its curious configuration characterized by a division into two separate but asymmetric cerebral hemispheres connected together by the large bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. For a person—such as myself—who is deeply intrigued by the operation of the human brain under both normal and pathological conditions, and its relationship to human functionality, in the general context of my work in brain injury rehabilitation, it is very tempting to look at these identified complementarities—‘material~symbol’ and ‘fact~value’ (here we introduce the ‘tilde’ symbol (~) to denote the notion of complementarity between constituent  constructs following the lead of Kelso and Engstrøm (2006))—and the concept of a ‘semantic closure relation’ between the two corresponding elements—from the perspective of human brain structure and function itself. Viewing these complementarities in the general context of the ‘Divided Brain Theory’ of neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist (2019), one can readily recognize the focal, mechanistic, material perspective in what McGilchrist has named the ‘emissary’ corresponding to the modus operandi of the ‘dominant’ linguistically capable egocentric left hemisphere. The dominating emissary, constituting a verbally

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constructed thinking and acting ‘self’, carries on an existential quest for certainty and self-preservation through the analysis of ‘the facts.’ It is ‘only the brute facts’ which constitute the necessitarian, quantitative realm of Peircean ‘Secondness’ and the sundering due to a pervasive  Nominalism—which one could well argue has been unleashed and empowered through Cartesianism and its corollaries—nominalism, materialism, individualism, phenomenalism, and sensationalism—in the general context of modern Western culture. On the other hand, it is the holistic intersubjective perspective that fully recognizes the primordial role of relation and semiosis unfolding on a continuous manifold—as in Peircean ‘synechism’—which constitutes the qualitative and creative, altruistic perspective of the ‘Master’—that of the so-called ‘nondominant’ right hemisphere which, though wordlessly ‘silent’ and without capacity for linguistic expression, is dominant for affect (e.g. as conveyed and received through tonal speech prosody and rhythm—see, for example,  Patel et  al. 2018), interoception (i.e. the reception of sensory information reflecting activity originating within the body) and the control of spatial attention. The right hemisphere, therefore, with its global, holistic perspective, should clearly be the Master at the helm surveying the broad expanse, while the emissary reports in from the crow’s-nest on the telescopic surveillance of the detailed facts drawn from the focal scenes available across the horizon. But that kind of cooperative complementarity is certainly not how things have evolved in the context of the dualistic ethos of modernity! We clearly need both perspectives dynamically mediated and delicately balanced appropriately in accordance with context to reach full capability in the process of self-actualization through which the real potential of the organism is  fully and optimally  actualized. McGilchrist explains this precarious dynamical balancing act between the hemispheric operational modes in this way: The hemispheres appear to stand in relation to one another in terms that ask for human understanding and the application of human values,… Putting it in such human terms, it appears essential for the creation of full human consciousness and imagination that the right hemisphere places itself in a position of vulnerability to the left. The right hemisphere, the one that believes, but does not know, has to depend on the other, the left hemisphere, the one that knows but does not believe. It is as though a power that has an infinite, and therefore intrinsically uncertain, potential Being needs nonetheless to submit to be delimited…in order to Be. The greater purpose demands the submission. The Master needs to trust, to believe in, his emissary, knowing all the while that that trust may be abused. The emissary knows, but knows wrongly, that he is invulnerable. If the relationship holds, then they are invincible; but if it is abused, it is not just the Master that suffers, but both of them, since the emissary owes his existence to the Master. (McGilchrist 2019, 428)

Here McGilchrist provides a tantalizing metaphor for how the two cerebral hemispheres are understood as interrelated and interdependent, and yet have clearly different perspectives that can either be seen as involved in a conflictual, competitive binary opposition, or can be viewed from the perspective of relative logic and ‘reasonableness’ as complementary, cooperative elements of a coordinated whole which relies on a process of temporal mediation presumably communicated through coordinating  signals that traverse the corpus callosum, the large bundle of fibers that cross the midline and interconnect the two hemispheres. If we view the dominant left hemisphere as oriented around necessary lawful focal interactions involving

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physical substance, and the right ‘non-dominant’ hemisphere as oriented around a global, biosemiotic, relational perspective, then support is offered for the argument of this paper, through an examination of the anatomy of the brain, viewed as itself a manifestation of the process of consciousness and how consciousness operates.

Concluding Thoughts We have barely scratched the surface in considering how biosemiotics may become a foundation for the development of a comprehensive existential science of brain injury rehabilitation practice. It is certainly hoped that others engaged in this medical field will see similar value in this pursuit. The relationship between biosemiotics and the overarching concepts of ‘value,’ ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ also leads to the recognition of a deep connection between biosemiotics, the recognition of the subjectivity of the person-served, and the often vexing ethical challenges encountered in the context of treatment of individuals with brain injury (Goldberg 2017). Given that biosemiotics and ethics are closely allied and intimately connected, (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005, 2009; Beever 2012; Tønnessen et  al. 2015; Cobley 2016) there is promise as well for not only the application of biosemiotics to the practice of brain injury medicine but also to the challenge of disentangling and equitably addressing the ethical dilemmas that often arise in the context of this activity (Malec 1993; McGrath 2007; Goldberg 2017). This paper has endeavored to cover much territory in a limited space, and therefore has tended to paint with broad strokes rather than in detailed distillation. It has been argued that a biosemiotically-informed relational approach to understanding the nature of the consequences of brain injury as it unfolds in an individual’s personal, existential, human frame can be used to complement the physicalist, mechanistic approach of conventional bioscience that provides factual, evidence-based (although not individually specific) guidance and recommendations for clinical decision-making. The goal of this review has been to attain a more complete and comprehensive understanding of how best to care for individuals and their care-­ givers, their family members, who are linked together in a ‘semiotic web’ facing the concrete, real-life consequences of brain injury, the trauma of which ruptures the semiotic fabric of an individual’s life. It is also suggested that these same concepts can be further generalized beyond their specific application in brain injury rehabilitation discussed here, to the development of an existentially informed humanistic person-centered approach to healthcare. Acknowledgments  The author would like to fully recognize the important contribution to the development of the ideas presented here due to ongoing discussions with Patrick M. Whitehead PhD to whom the author reached out after coming across a paper authored by Dr. Whitehead on the ‘naturalization of phenomenology’ (Whitehead 2015), and with whom the author shares a deep interest in the principles of the ‘holistic biology’ of Kurt Goldstein (see also: Whitehead 2019). While I came to this subject matter from the perspective of my work in brain injury rehabilitation, Dr. Whitehead’s path was by way of what might be considered the closely connected field of

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humanistic psychology. It should also be noted that we have previously presented together on this general topic at the national conference of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine, the preparation for which formed the generative kernel for this paper (Goldberg and Whitehead 2017). The author would also like to thank the editors for several very helpful suggestions for improving the quality of the paper. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Deborah S. Minden.

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la France et de l’Étranger, 129(3/4), 244–265] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41084538?read-­ now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Accessed 14 November 2019. Heschel, A. J. (1972). The patient as a person. In The insecurity of freedom. Essays on human existence (pp.  24–38). New  York: Schocken Books. https://collab.its.virginia.edu/syllabi/public/ b42fafac-15f4-49dc-8a4f-145aead78c66. Accessed 10 November 2019. Hume, D. A. (1888). Treatise of human nature. In L. A. Selby-Bigge (Ed.), A treatise of human nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. https://archive.org/details/treatiseofhumann01humeuoft/ page/n6 Accessed 14 Nov 2019. Kelso, J. A. S., & Engstrøm, D. A. (2006). The complementary nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Malec, J. F. (1993). Ethics in brain injury rehabilitation: Existential choices among western cultural beliefs. Brain Injury, 7(5), 383–400. McGilchrist, I. (2019). The master and his emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. McGrath, J.  C. (2007). Ethical practice in brain injury rehabilitation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ochs, P. (1993). Charles Sanders Peirce. In D. R. Griffin (Ed.), Founders of constructive postmodern philosophy (pp. 43–87). Albany: SUNY Press. Ochs, P. (2014). 14F RELG 7559-001, Course Syllabus: Signs of Salvation: Pragmatic Semiotics from Augustine to Peirce. Patel, S., Oishi, K., Wright, A., Sutherland-Foggio, H., et al. (2018). Right hemisphere regions critical for expression of emotion through prosody. Frontiers in Neurology, 9, 224. Published online 6 Apr 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2018.00224. Pattee, H. H. (1982). Cell psychology. An evolutionary approach to the symbol-matter problem. Cognition and Brain Theory, 5, 325–341. Pattee, H.  H. (1995). Evolving self-reference: Matter, symbols, and semantic closure. Communication and Cognition—Artificial Intelligence, 12(1–2), 9–28. Pattee, H. H. (2007). The necessity of biosemiotics: Matter-symbol complementarity. In M. Barbieri (Ed.), Introduction to Biosemiotics (pp. 115–132). Dordrecht: Springer. Peirce, C. S. (1892). The doctrine of necessity examined. The Monist, 2(3), 321–337. The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago, IL, April 1892, for the Hegeler Institute. Google Books Eprint. Internet Archive Eprint. Reprinted Collected Papers v. 6, paragraphs 35–65, The Essential Peirce v. 1, pp. 298–311. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2005). Semiotics unbounded. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Petrilli, S., & Ponzio, A. (2009). In P.  Cobley (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics (pp. 150–162). London: Routledge. Pigden, C. (2011). Hume on Is and Ought. Philosophy Now, 83. https://philosophynow.org/ issues/83/Hume_on_Is_and_Ought. Accessed 14 Nov 2019. Rafiean, S. (2010). Cybersemiotic Medicine: A framework for an interdisciplinary medicine. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 17, 65–93. Ramsey, P. (2002). The patient as person: explorations in medical ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sacks, O. (1995). Foreword. In K. Goldstein (Ed.), The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man (pp. 7–14). Modern reprint, New York: Zone Books. Sharov, A. A. What is biosemiotics? http://alexei.nfshost.com/biosem/geninfo.html. Accessed 14 Nov 2019 Tønnessen, M., Beever, J., & Hendlin, Y.  H. (Eds.). (2015). Biosemiotic ethics (special issue). Semiotik, 37, 3–4. https://doi.org/10.14464/zsem.v37i3-­4. Whitehead, P. M. (2015). Overcoming parallelism: Naturalizing phenomenology with Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 119, 502–509. Whitehead, P.  M. (2017). Goldstein’s self-actualization: A biosemiotic view. The Humanistic Psychologist, 45, 71–83. https://doi.org/10.1037/hum0000047. Whitehead, P.  M. (2019). Existential biology. Kurt Goldstein’s functionalist rendering of the human body. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 27(1–2), 206–224.

The Role of Biosemiosis and Dysfunctional Signaling Processes in Human Pathology D. M. Nowlin

Abstract  Why does the human body sometimes defend against harmless stimuli, even foods—the very source of the body’s basic requirements? These reactions are errors and can even be fatal. A dramatic increase in food allergies in recent decades has prompted a global research effort. However, even with advances in research, data are conflicting and have not brought medical researchers any closer to a consensus nor explained why many cases occur without immune-mediated processes. While the field of immunology has established that allergies are an inappropriate defense reaction of the immune system, this chapter argues that errant defense is a universal physiological phenomenon that can occur with any system in the body; it is not exclusive to the immune system and, significantly, may be contributing to a vast number of conditions. Errant defense results from dysfunctional signaling processes which alter stimulus interpretation, leading to erroneous perception of threat. The pervasive role of errant defense in pathology can be explained through a biosemiotic framework. Keywords  Defense physiology · Semiosis · Errant defense · Adverse food reactions · Threat conditioning · Sympathetic nerve activity · Pathological conditioning · Conditioned reflex

Introduction There is very little research in the field of medicine investigating the role of semiosis in biological behavior and pathology. Signs are viewed as stimuli that elicit mechanistic responses. Biosemiotics argues that living systems have agency which allows them to interpret signs in order to respond appropriately to contexts. The interpretation of signs determines behavior. Since behavior is central to pathology, the importance of semiosis becomes apparent; “yet, the problem of

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interpretation never enters into the discourse of modern biology” (Hoffmeyer 2014:20). The concept of subjective interpretation in living systems originated from Jacob von Uexküll’s (1864–1944) concept of Umwelt (Uexküll 1909). An Umwelt is the “self-world” of an organism which is shaped by its particular needs and the particular sensory receptors that have evolved to perceive stimuli meaningful to the organism. The boundary that separates the internal world (Innenwelt) from the external world (Umwelt) acts as an interface between the two and allows for the phenomenon of a ‘self’ (subject). In order to sense and perceive the external environment, sensory receptors are located on the physical boundary and are responsible for transducing stimuli in order to process information for appropriate effector responses (behavior).1 The cycle of perceptual and operational cues comprise the interdependent whole of the organism and its environment. This process is what Uexküll called the “functional cycle” (Funktionskreis), a precursor to cybernetics, general system’s theory and complexity theory (see Fig. 1). Biosemiotics has extended Uexküll’s model of a whole organism to cells and organs, which also have their own individual Umwelten and possess the agency of a

Fig. 1  Jacob von Uexküll’s functional cycle

 Biosemiotics uses terms such as “perception”, “meaning” and “interpretation” to describe the unconscious biological processes within organisms, and even within cells or organs, which are also considered to be semiotic systems. As Sharov et al. clarify: “Biosemiotics … is an evolutionary science because it explores the gradual emergence of each single quality, including broad phenomena such as life and mind. The mind-like properties found elsewhere in nature can be very different from the human mind. Biosemiotics does not promote anthropomorphism but acknowledges the diversity of semiosis across and within the various levels of biological organization. It also differs from radical monistic theories (e.g., physiosemiotics or pansemiotics), which overemphasize the transitional nature of changes to the extent that qualitative differences in effect disappear” (Sharov et al. 2015:2). 1

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‘self’ which allows for flexibility in information processing. According to a biosemiotic account of the functional cycle, the objective of any response to a stimulus (i.e., any semiotic process) is “always ultimately the objective of self-affirmation (of habits, physical or mental) and/or self-preservation” (Alexander 2013). While organisms evolve as unique interdependent wholes with their environment, they do not only encounter stimuli that are meaningful to their survival. Each organism lives in a world that by no means contains only such stimuli as are adequate for it. It lives not merely in its “own environment” (milieu) but in a world in which all possible sorts of stimuli are present and act upon it. The organism must cope with this “quasi-­ negative” environment. (Goldstein 1995:85)

Indeed, survival throughout evolution has not been easy. As the father of immunology, Ilya (Élie) Metchnikoff, observed, defense has played an integral role in the morphological and physiological development of living organisms. If we examine the organization of an animal or a plant, we find that their most characteristic features are their organs of attack and defense. The carapace of the crayfish, the shell of molluscs and the teeth of vertebrates, as well as many other organs, are so many means of protection to these animals in their perpetual warfare. The mere enumeration of all the organs acquired for the purpose of helping them in this struggle would involve a complete account of the comparative anatomy of animals. From active aggression to infection, there is but a short step. (Metchnikoff 1893:2)

Not only did Metchnikoff understand the importance of defense throughout the biological hierarchy, he suspected a close relationship between internal (immune) and external (fight or flight) defense a full century before it would become accepted in modern science. Therefore, one of the most important functions of organismal perception is the ability to identify a threat. Both animals and humans “have to make one essential judgment about nearly all situations”, which is whether or not they pose a threat (Gilbert 2002:275). In fact, Rolston (1988) characterizes an organism essentially as a “valuation system”. “Valuing is one of its crucial activities; what it values can mean life or death” (Rolston 1988:177). If a stimulus is valued as a threat, an organism will select from its repertoire of defense behaviors. Deely (2010) provides a simple representation of valuing objects as beneficial, a threat or neutral by using the symbols: +, − or 0, updated here (see Fig. 2). The defense reaction that results from a negative valuation is a reinforcement to preserve the ‘self.’

Fig. 2  Valuation is a vital component of perception. A negative valuation will initiate a defense response. The model applies to all living systems with defense response capabilities

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Identifying threats is a primitive function that exists throughout all biological scales, including single cell organisms, insects, fish and mammals. In multicellular organisms, a single cell or an organ must also identify threats and initiate defense at the local level to protect that specific system. In other words, living systems in the body have evolved with defense mechanisms for their own survival, as well as contributing to the survival of the organism in which they exist. In fact, most cell lineages, across all three domains of life (Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaria), defend themselves against infection, which challenges the prevailing view that a specialized set of immune cells are the “sole guardians of antimicrobial resistance” (Randow et al. 2013:1). In addition, a growing body of evidence also suggests that human cells have their own ‘fight or flight’ behavior in response to threats (Goligorsky 2001). While cells in the human body are normally obligated to sacrifice their own fitness for the sake of the whole organism, Aktipis et  al. (2015) argue that cells maintain some capacity to bypass this ‘trade off’ in an attempt at self-preservation. Cooperation and functional integration between living systems in an organism fluctuate and come in degrees depending on the state of the organism (Okasha 2011). All of these findings support the biosemiotic position which recognizes cells and organs as semiotic systems in their own right with their own functional cycles. The human body is not a single organism with “parts” that function like a machine. The body is a community of living systems within living systems, or selves within selves, each with their own boundary and need to interpret and respond to the surrounding environment. However, while perception and valuation have been crucial for survival (Kobayashi 2012), interpretive systems are not always accurate (Deely, 2010).2 As, Short (2007), Kull (2009) and Alexander (2013) make clear, fallibility is a basic feature of semiosis. Inaccurate valuation of a perceived threat, from any living system, can cause inappropriate or errant defense behavior which can lead to perilous outcomes, as is seen in cases of anaphylaxis. “Errant defense” can be defined as any negative, pathological or abnormal physiological reaction to a benign stimulus and can involve any system in the body. The stomach, large intestines, lungs, skin, heart or muscles, for example, are all capable of reacting defensively to, what should be in many cases, a harmless stimulus. The chapter will initially focus on common food sensitivities and allergies as an example. First, because it integrates the two topics of food and medicine in this volume, but second because the inconsistencies and contradictions within the field of food allergy reveal multiple problems inherent in the current model of allergy. Bringing these deficiencies to light will set the stage for a more comprehensive understanding of physiological defense. The following sections will build a framework of errant defense based on Pavlovian conditioning. Pathology caused by this phenomenon likely involves 2  Mistakes are possible because biological systems do not respond to food or threats per se, but to signs of food or threat, that is, things or situations that are associated with the positive effects of getting food or avoiding threats (see Alexander 2013).

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associations with aversive stimuli which are present during the acquisition of the conditioned reflex. The various reactions (symptoms) depend on the target organs or systems that become involved in the defense response. The types of stimuli that may become conditioned are potentially unlimited since the conditioning process relies on any form of stimulus that can be sensed from either exteroreceptors or interoreceptors. Since errant defense primarily involves aversive conditioning, the final sections of the chapter will discuss the important role of the sympathetic nervous system, the body’s main system of defense.

Problems with the Current Model of Food Allergy Pathological reactions to food have been documented as early as 2500 BCE (Daruna 2012) and Hippocrates (460–375 BCE) recognized that foods can elicit inappropriate reactions that are idiosyncratic (Sampson 2016). But the prevalence of cases has risen sharply in the developed world in the last few decades (Guandalini and Newland 2011; Joyce et al. 2018; Leung et al. 2014), becoming a global health issue (Carrard et al. 2015; Pawankar et al. 2012). Understanding the causes and the physiological mechanisms has been challenging for the field of allergy and immunology. Establishing a cohesive enterprise within the field has been equally problematic. There is on-going use of conflicting terminology among researchers (Bock and Sampson 2008; Sicherer and Sampson 2018) and no universal acceptance of terms and definitions for an adverse reaction to food. In addition, some of the long-­ standing theories have had to be revised in recent years since clinical presentation and diagnostics have not supported some of the most basic assumptions regarding immune involvement. These problems may be resolved by reframing this errant defense as a more widespread physiological phenomenon that can occur with other systems. Food allergies and sensitivities stand as exemplars of the errant defense phenomenon by demonstrating that one type of food can cause inappropriate defense reactions from different systems, depending on the individual. The peculiar problems that have confounded food allergy researchers warrant a reevaluation of the current model and may be suggesting a more pervasive issue contributing to pathology in general. The definition of a food allergy has been problematic for decades. Extensive references in the medical literature raise the issue, yet imprecise use of terms is still common. The most generally accepted definition of a food allergy is “a pathological, potentially deadly, immune reaction triggered by normally innocuous food protein antigens” (Yu et al. 2016:1). The response may be IgE-mediated, meaning that immunoglobulin E antibodies are produced by the immune system to defend against the protein, or non-IgE-mediated, which involves other components of the immune system aside from IgE antibodies. While laypersons are often faulted for misuse of the term “allergy”, medical literature is replete with contradictory terminology and

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definitions (Stein 2009). The terms “allergy”, “adverse food reaction”, “intolerance”, “sensitivity” and “hypersensitivity” are used with different meanings or differing criteria, depending on the author. The conflicting use of terminology was recognized in the early 1980s, yet there is still no consensus (Bock and Sampson 2008; Burks and Sampson 1992; King and King 1998; Stein 2009). The key factor creating much of the inconsistencies is the role of the immune system. The term “allergy” is most commonly used to indicate immune involvement. If a negative reaction is not associated with the immune system, it is often referred to as an “intolerance”—a term essentially used to avoid having to identify the underlying mechanism (Bahna 2006).3 The use of the word “intolerance” has become more narrow in recent years referring to reactions caused by specific disorders such as enzyme or chemical deficiencies, malabsorption, metabolic disorders or the presence of toxins, none of which involve inappropriate immune defense. If a lactose-intolerant patient suffers from pain and bloating after consuming a milk product, that reaction is not inappropriate per se. Indeed, the inability to digest lactose has a direct material cause: the lack of an enzyme. There is no misinterpretation of the lactose. On the other hand, errant defense reactions have indirect material causes or semiosic causes: something is sensed, perceived, interpreted as an irritant or threat and triggers a reaction as if it were an actual irritant. The reacting system is mistaking a harmless stimulus as a threat and reacting in a manner that is not beneficial to the body and can possibly cause the body harm. In conditions where an errant defense reaction is involved, medical tests are unable to detect a physical cause because, I argue, the cause is semiosic: the reacting system is “perceiving” a harmless stimulus as a threat and responding inappropriately. The immune system is unique in that it produces antibodies for specific antigens, which can be measured, making it possible to identify the actual stimulus eliciting the defense response; a function that was meant to be geared primarily toward microbial proteins. No other system provides such obvious stimulus-specific identifiers. If a patient experiences migraine headaches from bright light or loud noise, for example, there are no circulating complexes for those stimuli that can be measured. In these cases, it is the nervous system that is reacting inappropriately to the harmless stimuli (Weber 2008). Traditionally, such conditions have been referred to as “sensitivities”—a term also used within the field of allergy and immunology. However, these forms of sensitization, which are also inappropriate reactions to harmless stimuli (like allergies), have been conceptualized as different and separate from immune sensitization. From the viewpoint of errant defense as a universal physiological phenomenon, there is no difference. Any system in the body is capable of reacting inappropriately to a harmless stimulus, exogenous or endogenous.

3  The term “hypersensitivity” is used interchangeably with “allergy” and the term “sensitivity” has been used for both immune and non-immune-mediated symptoms.

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 edical Diagnostics Challenge the Current Food M Allergy Paradigm While some solid data on food allergy prevalence has been established, it has been predominantly based on IgE-mediated reactions (Acker et al. 2017; Sicherer and Sampson 2018; Wood 2003).4 The problem with these data is that adverse food reactions can occur with no IgE-mediated involvement or other immune components (Bégin and Nadeau 2013). Over 170 foods have been identified as being potentially allergenic, yet only five foods—milk, egg, peanut and to some extent wheat and soy—have been found to test for allergen-specific IgE concentrations that positively correspond with reactions from oral food challenge (Perry et  al. 2004). This means only five foods meet the criteria of a legitimate food allergy. Adverse food reactions not involving the immune system (or food intolerance mechanisms) have received little attention in medical research, even though the majority of cases result from non-immune mechanisms (Burks and Sampson 1992). Consequently, the prevalence of adverse food reactions is likely to be considerably higher than food allergy studies report, particularly since there is a lack of high-­ quality evidence based on oral food challenge, the undisputed gold standard for determining food allergy prevalence (Loh and Tang 2018). It’s puzzling, however, why oral food challenge is considered the gold standard when it’s been known for decades that fewer than 50% of reported allergic reactions can be verified by double-­ blind, placebo controlled oral food challenge (Burks and Sampson 1992). What is more is that this test fails to measure the presence of IgE which is the singular criteria that defines an allergy. Oral food challenge simply confirms an adverse reaction to the ingestion of a specific food. It does not confirm immune involvement. Therefore, the gold standard is not even a valid test for food allergies. The use of blood and skin tests further contributes to the confusion within food allergy research. Positive predictive values of skin prick tests are less than 50% and serum IgE immunoassays are found to be even lower (Fleischer and Burks 2015). Both are often used together to indicate the presence of allergen-specific IgE, but they still do not establish the diagnosis of food allergy (Sampson 1999). In other words, the presence of IgE does not necessarily equate to an “antibody reaction”. It does indicate the production of IgE which can be detected but not linked to any reactions. In fact, there has been a “dizzying array of disparate results” between skin tests, specific IgE test results and clinical outcomes over the last few decades (Sicherer and Sampson 2018:46). Moreover, results from serum food-specific IgE testing and skin prick tests have shown that cases of adverse food reactions may test negative for immune involvement (Bégin and Nadeau 2013; Guandalini and Newland 2011). “Presumptive diagnosis of food allergy based on patient history and on results of skin test or radioallergosorbent test is no longer acceptable, except  Immunoglobulin E (IgE) is produced by the immune system to defend against a specific food protein. The IgE binds to mast cells which then bind to the protein. When this occurs, inflammatory mediators are released causing the various symptoms associated with allergies.

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in cases of severe anaphylaxis after an isolated ingestion of a specific food” (Burks and Sampson 1992:S64).5 According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the results of allergy tests only show that IgE antibodies to food allergens are being produced (Boyce et al. 2011), but IgE does not equate to an allergy. Nor is IgE necessary for a pathological reaction to a food. In fact, the NIAID guidelines state that intradermal testing and measuring total serum IgE should not be used to make a diagnosis (Boyce et al. 2011). These guidelines reiterate the Burks and Sampson (1992) conclusion 20 years earlier, yet the same tests are still routinely used to diagnose food allergies. The heavy emphasis on IgE as the defining marker of a food allergy has been unfounded. There can be a relationship between IgE and food allergic reactions in some cases—that has been established—but it appears to not be the case in the majority of food reactions and the underlying nature of the relationship is still unknown. Curiously, the NIAID states that multiple studies demonstrate between 50% and 90% of presumed food allergies are not allergies (Panel N.S.E. 2010). But there is no further discussion on what the adverse reactions are, if not allergies. It is also not clear on how these percentages were determined since the NIAID states that intradermal testing and total serum IgE should not be used to make a diagnosis of allergy. On what basis, then, were those 50–90% ruled out? This assumption is common both in studies on food allergy prevalence and in the clinical setting, stating that actual allergy prevalence is substantially lower than patient perception or the perception of parents with children reacting to food (Hadley 2006; Kummeling et al. 2009; Loh and Tang 2018; Mackenzie and Venter 2010; Sicherer and Sampson 2018). The discrepancy is due to the fact that: (1) there is no accurate medical definition of “food allergy”; (2) no reliable form of measurement to make a diagnosis; and (3) a lack of research and understanding of adverse food reactions that do not involve the immune system. It is unclear in the first place why there is such a strong emphasis on determining if a reaction to a specific food is technically an allergy and involves the immune system or not since medical treatment is the same in either case: avoidance (Wood 2003; Sicherer and Sampson 2018). This is not to diminish the role of IgE in the development of immune sensitization. Indeed, the discovery of IgE has led to thousands of studies on the relevance of IgE antibodies to allergic disease and has played a central role in research and management of allergy related conditions (Platts-Mills et al. 2016). However, since the data have shown that IgE involvement is no longer considered to be the defining marker for food allergies, it would seem that research would shift its focus to other mechanisms. If the condition does not involve the immune system or any underlying mechanism such as those found with intolerances, then it is neither an allergy nor an intolerance, but it is still a pathological reaction to a food. The best term for any inappropriate reaction to a food, with or without immune involvement, is “adverse food reaction”, which is defined as “any untoward reaction after the ingestion of a food” (Burks and Sampson 1992). The

 Radioallergosorbent test (RAST) is a blood test used to detect specific IgE antibodies for allergens.

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same term used for all types of food reactions (except intolerances) is appropriate since the immune system is just one of many systems that can react. If an abnormal or inappropriate defense reaction does not involve the immune system, it must involve another system. Herein lies the blind spot that is at the heart of the contradictions and inconsistencies in the current paradigm. Inappropriate defense reactions to harmless stimuli have only been recognized in the field of immunology, but the evidence suggests that this phenomenon may be universal, occurring throughout physiology.

Errant Defense Is Not Exclusive to the Immune System Conditions caused by errant defense have been primarily attributed to errors of the immune system, as seen with both allergies and autoimmune diseases. However, a specialized field in defense physiology is needed that recognizes and studies defense of other systems, in addition to the immune system. Given that “pseudoallergic” conditions involve the exact same symptoms as allergies but with no immune involvement (Ortolani and Pastorello 2006), it becomes clear that the immune system in not the only system that reacts with inappropriate defense behaviors. If we find that errant defense is possible with other systems, this would solve many conundrums within allergy research. Adverse reactions to food have been blamed for a variety of symptoms involving virtually every organ system. These have included depression, drowsiness, headaches, palpitations, pruritus ani and arthritis, as well as more classical manifestations of allergic reactions such as urticaria, asthma, and anaphylaxis (Panush and Webster 1985:533).

Adverse food reactions can even occur in the form of uterine pain or contractions (Bock and Sampson 2008). Mast cells, which release histamines and other anaphylactic compounds during inflammatory and allergic reactions, can also react inappropriately to stimuli or stressors, without immune involvement.6 Mast cell activation can be localized or systemic, impacting two or more organs, and may contribute to a wide range of conditions such as urticaria, angioedema, flushing, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramping, fainting, tachycardia, wheezing, conjunctival hyperemia, itching and nasal stuffiness (Akin 2017). Mast cells are another system that can respond to a perceived threat, with or without immune involvement. If other systems can react inappropriately to benign stimuli, then the number of conditions related to errant defense is likely significant. Symptoms in these cases depend on the target organ and its repertoire for defense behavior. Take headaches, for example. Headaches and migraines have been known to be caused by the ingestion of food for over a century (Pinnas and Vanselow 1976). Triggers may include 6  Mast cells are located throughout the body and play an important role in inflammation by releasing mediators such as histamine into the local environment.

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food components such as tyramine, phenylethylamine, histamine, nitrites and sulfites, but the reactions rarely involve the immune system (Millichap and Yee 2003). These stimuli can directly influence the systems that release the neurotransmitters responsible for causing vasoconstriction or vasodilation. They can also directly stimulate the trigeminal ganglia, brainstem and cortical neuronal pathways involved in the migraines or headaches (Millichap and Yee 2003). This example illustrates that different systems are capable of reacting negatively to a stimulus, without the need for immune involvement. The question arises as to how a system can become reactive or sensitive to a benign stimulus.

Psychoneuroimmunology and Pathological Conditioning In 1974, Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen made in important discovery during a food aversion experiment on rats when pairing saccharin with cyclophosphamide, an immunosuppressant that causes nausea. With only one pairing, the rats learned to avoid the taste of saccharin. However, if the rats continued to be exposed to just the saccharin water (not the cyclophosphamide) they would die. The researchers concluded that the immunosuppressive effects of the cyclophosphamide became linked to the saccharin. This pairing caused the saccharin to act on the body’s immune system even though saccharin has no pharmacological action to suppress immune activity. With the saccharin triggering suppression of the immune system, the rats were unable to defend against pathogenic microbes. These findings were confirmed in later studies (Ader et  al. 1982; Pacheco-López et  al. 2005) and more recently confirmed in humans (Goebel et al. 2002). Unknown to the American researchers, their results corroborated the discovery made by Serguei Metalnikov (1870–1946) a half century earlier of a connection between the central nervous system (CNS) and the immune system. Studying defense reactions in invertebrates at the Pasteur Institute, Metalnikov was able to show that by selectively cauterizing specific parts of the nervous system in insects, he could either immunize or disrupt immunization, leading to the conclusion that immunization is not separate from the nervous system (1924). These studies, along with Pavlov’s, led to Metalnikov’s interest in the role of the conditioned reflex in immune activity. In the 1920s, a series of experiments tested immune activity in relation to Pavlovian conditioning (Metalnikov and Chorine 1928). In one experiment, 24 guinea pigs were injected with either tapioca, B. anthracoides, or staphylococcus filtrates into the peritoneal cavity while a sensory stimulus was simultaneously introduced to the surface of the skin, either a mild scratch or contact with a heated metal plate. Following a 2-week rest period, the scratch or heated plate was then applied alone. The peritoneal cavity was examined within 24–48 h. The control animals showed no change in leukocyte levels after applying the skin stimulus. Animals that were conditioned showed an immediate increase in leukocytes from the skin stimulus alone. These results revealed a direct link between the

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central nervous system and the immune system, and that the immune system was susceptible to conditioning, just as other systems in the body. The Metalnikov/Chorine study demonstrated that random stimuli, which are entirely unrelated to the immune system, could be conditioned and elicit the same defense behaviors when introduced alone (Ader et  al. 1982; Goebel et  al. 2002; Pacheco-López et  al. 2005). Based on these findings, the authors concluded that everything surrounding the patient could act as conditional stimuli and become associated with the symptoms of a condition. This led the authors to suspect that many chronic conditions such as asthma, heart disorders, or other neuroses may occur under the influence of conditioned stimuli that have nothing in common with the actual cause of the disease. Khan (1977) later referred to such conditions as “secondary hypersensitivities.” In these cases, the conditioning is pathological because it distorts the “interpretation” of a stimulus causing an inappropriate response that may be harmful to the organism—what I will refer to as “pathological conditioning”. What’s more is that it appears any type of stimulus can be conditioned to trigger inappropriate reactions. Experimental research has utilized visual, gustatory, olfactory, auditory, tactile and somatosensory stimuli for decades in the conditioning process. If conditioning is possible with cues from every sensory faculty, and those cues can be linked to a specific organ or system, the potential combinations of cues and physiological reactions is considerable. This may begin to explain the many adverse reactions that have been found to be caused by an enormous range of what should be harmless triggers, including stimuli from the environment, such as cold (cold urticaria), heat (cholinergic urticaria), changes in humidity, barometric pressure (vasomotor rhinitis), vibration (vibratory urticaria), water (aquagenic urticaria) and sunlight (polymorphic light eruption).7 Stimuli found to provoke reactive behavior may also come in the form of food additives (Metcalfe et  al. 2011), medications (Smith 2013), clothing (Le Coz 2006), chemicals (Elberling et  al. 2005), perfumes (Johansen 2003), animal dander and fur (Konradsen et al. 2015), insects (Golden 2017) and metals (Gawkrodger et al. 2000). Experimental conditioning has been shown to induce reactions to cold temperature as well as emotional stimuli (Khan 1977). Even natural language has been conditioned to elicit physiological defense reactions to specific words, such as “violin” (Luria and Vinogradova 1959) and other symbolic stimuli have been shown to become associated with allergens (Ader and Cohen 1993). Based on these diverse examples, ranging from vibration to emotions, words and symbolic stimuli, it becomes clear that nearly any form of stimulus that can be sensed may potentially be prone to conditioning, with or without mental perception.8 And the types of  These conditions are not caused by excessive exposure or extreme levels of the stimuli but what is considered to be normal thresholds. 8  While some stimuli may have intrinsic properties that are noxious depending on thresholds, thus affecting individuals differently, this is not relevant to the point being stated, which is that any form of stimulus appears to be amenable to aversive conditioning. 7

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reactions appear to be equally unlimited. Indeed, Pavlov himself concluded that “the reflex activity of any effector organ can be chosen for the purpose of investigation, since signaling stimuli can get linked up with any of the inborn reflexes” (Pavlov 1927/2003:17).

Types of Conditioning that Contribute to Pathology There are three distinct processes of learning that are relevant to pathology. The first is classical conditioning which is caused by a convergence of inputs from the neural pathways responsible for transmitting a conditioned and unconditioned stimulus (Johansen et al. 2011). The stimuli are sensed via receptors on the surface of the organism and that sensory information is then transmitted to the central nervous system where the inputs become entangled with other inputs due to temporal pairing. According to Hebb’s law (1949), the simultaneous action of cells leads to a marked increase in the synaptic strength between those cells, providing the neurological basis for learning. A conditioned stimulus (CS) is thus defined as a previously neutral stimulus that becomes associated with an unconditioned stimulus (US), triggering the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. The CS takes on a new meaning, as demonstrated in Ader and Cohen’s work with saccharin “standing in for” an immunosuppressant. Due to the association that is formed with the US, the interpretation of the CS is altered. Another type of learning process involves ‘sensitization’ which is a non-­ associative form of learning where repeated administration of a stimulus causes an amplified response of a cellular receptor (Shettleworth 2010). Either the stimulus itself is noxious, the repetition is too excessive, or the exposure is too intense (Ashmawi and Freire 2016). The understanding of sensitization is that a potentially dangerous stimulus alerts the organism so that it becomes responsive to “whatever comes next”, thereby increasing the response to both noxious and innocuous stimuli (Shettleworth 2010:143). A third process involves a change in valuation of a stimulus, as seen with aversive or fear conditioning: “Aversive conditioning depends on the capacity of previously neutral or even positive stimuli to become negative for an organism” (Lyon 2015:5, emphasis added). In pathological conditioning, the negative valuation is erroneous and leads to an errant defense response. This form of learning is likely the most common within pathological conditioning processes since noxious stimuli are ubiquitous and these unconditioned stimuli can become easily paired with random stimuli.

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Interoceptive Perception and Classical Conditioning The conditioning processes described above are commonly understood to operate from cues that are perceived by the five senses. Sensory receptors provide the inputs necessary for learning. However, inputs are not limited to sight, smell, taste, hearing or touch.9 Sensory receptors are also found on the surfaces of organs. Inputs from those receptors not only influence behavior of the various individual systems, they are also communicated to the central nervous system in order to ensure healthy integration of all the systems and to assist the CNS in monitoring the internal environment. Communication is achieved via sensory nerves called “vagal afferents” which innervate the visceral organs, as well as the eyes, skin, muscles and joints. This form of sensing is referred to as ‘interoceptive perception’ which detects information about chemical, mechanical, thermal and physical conditions and communicates this information through the visceral afferent fibers of the vagal nerve to the brainstem. Thus, internal perception also provides inputs from sensory stimuli. The next question that arises is whether these endogenous cues can become conditioned and if interoceptive physiology is vulnerable to pathological conditioning. In fact, several decades of experimental research had been conducted on the role of Pavlovian conditioning in visceral sensory physiology in the first half of the twentieth century in Russia and Eastern Europe before the published material was made available in English. The first study on interoceptive conditioning was reported by K. M. Bykov and I. A. Alekseev-Berkman in 1926 (Cameron 2001). Interoceptive conditioning involves applying the CS or the US directly to the receptors of visceral organs. Konstantin Mikhaĭlovich Bykov (1886–1959), a student of Pavlov, conducted extensive experimental research on interoceptive conditioning which was outlined in his book: The Cerebral Cortex and the Internal Organs, originally published in 1954  in Moscow. However, due to political issues at the time, Bykov’s theory was interrupted and remains only partially finished (Ádám 1998). Although there were various issues and deficiencies with his work, the “clear-cut scientific issues remained unsolved and provocative” (Ádám 1998:21). During the course of his research, Bykov discovered that multiple combinations of stimuli could be used, and that the both CS and US could be either interoceptive or exteroceptive. In other words, both external and internal stimuli could be used to condition visceral physiology. Bykov found that interoceptive conditioning followed the laws of Pavlovian conditioning and was capable of eliciting a multitude of behavioral responses. His first postulate was that there was no reason for any distinction to be made between the processes in stimulating the internal receptors versus the external receptors. In fact, interoceptors have since been found to be morphologically similar to external sensory receptors (Cameron 2001), though there are differences in terms of response to conditioning. Interoceptors require 9  The immune system has been conceptualized as a diffuse sensory system providing a “sixth sense” to detect antigens such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and tumor cells as well as non-living agents such as toxins, chemicals and drugs (Blalock and Smith 2007).

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more conditioning for the learning to be achieved, but once established they are more resistant to extinction and more likely to recover the association after extinction (Cameron 2001). Bykov ultimately concluded that any organ could form associative connections under experimental conditions and that there is no reflex reaction that is not subject to conditioning.10 While more experimental research is needed to support these claims, Cameron (2001) points out that “it is almost certainly correct that sensory afferent impulses from many organs, including many visceral organs, can function as CSs—as signals that come to influence and control behavior”. Thus, endogenous signals from the body’s various systems can become associated with unconditioned stimuli and impact physiological behavior. If a sensory afferent impulse is paired with an aversive stimulus, internal or external, the potential for pathology becomes apparent since erroneous defense behaviors could arise as a result. According to what is known about interoceptive conditioning and Pavlovian laws, it becomes plausible that a natural impulse from an internal organ could become a negative CS that elicits inappropriate defense behaviors (resistance/reaction). Indeed, Cameron raises the question of how visceral sensory processes might become dysfunctional, either innately or from conditioning, and how the dysfunction might contribute to pathology.

The Conditioned Reflex as Hidden Contributor to Illness Bykov’s extensive work on cortico-visceral relationships convinced him of the importance of the conditioned reflex in pathology. His conclusions led him to assert that “chance conditioning” could be responsible for disturbances in normal functioning of separate organs or whole systems of organs where no tissue lesions could be found.11 He stressed the wide-ranging potential impact of a conditioned stimulus, stating that: “while only lasting for a second or even a fraction of a second, [a conditioned reflex] sets into action a whole cycle of processes” (Bykov 1957:388). In other words, all of the complexity involved in a particular undiagnosed illness may ultimately be caused by a conditioned stimulus that came about by chance. This may explain why it has been difficult for medical researchers to identify the etiology of so many conditions. A semiosic process can be as determining on physiology as chemistry and physics, but remains hidden from current methods of medical testing. “These chronic changes in the viscera, leading to a change in the general state of the organism may, as we have seen, be an acquired, newly formed reaction of the organism arising because of the work of the cerebrum in forming a temporary connection” (Bykov 1957:389). According to Bykov, conditions may not, in fact, be  Bykov’s claim regarding the universality of conditioning in visceral organs had still not been fully proven over the course of 70 years of visceral conditioning research (Ádám 1998). 11  Bykov’s assertion of “chance conditioning” has been validated more recently from Hadamitzky et al. (2020) with their work on behaviorally conditioned endocrine functions resulting from “incidental conditioning.” 10

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congenital but formed by the experience of the individual which leads to a “perversion of normal activity”. Researchers today, from two separate fields of medicine— chronic pain and respiratory disease—are beginning to find that visceral sensory hypersensitivity and distorted reflex pathways are a primary disorder, meaning the underlying cause to various pathologies (Mazzone and Undem 2016). “Altered coupling of sensory input to behavioral output results in innocuous stimuli evoking behaviors that are characteristic of noxious sensory processing” (Mazzone and Undem 2016:1011). These findings support Bykov’s assertions from nearly a century ago. As it becomes more evident that conditioned reflexes may be an important contributor to pathology, elucidating the systems involved will become imperative. It has only been very recently that researchers have begun to map vagal sensory neurons and their molecular specializations (Kim et al. 2020; Kupari et al. 2019). The current understanding of the vagal sensory system remains poorly defined with scientists only beginning to understand how vagal inputs are received and integrated within central processing (Kupari et al. 2019; Mazzone and Undem 2016). Little is known of the neuroanatomy of central projections of distinct vagal subsets, thus there remains an incomplete understanding of how visceral events evoke appropriate behavior and reflex responses. This precludes rationally developed pharmacological or electroceutical interventions to modify aberrant sensations/reflexes. (Kim et al. 2020:3)

Vagal afferent nerves have not been commonly recognized for their role in defense (Kollarik et  al. 2010). One exception is the nociceptor—a specific type of nerve fiber that was originally understood to detect noxious stimuli (Sherrington 1906). However, the defining property of nociceptors had been reduced from the detection of noxious stimuli to the mediation of pain (Kollarik et al. 2010). More recently, however, nociceptors are being understood to evoke defensive reflexes; they are far more heterogeneous in terms of sensitivity to specific stimuli and a key function of a major subset of sensory afferents is the ability to discriminate noxious stimuli (Kim et  al. 2020; Patapoutian et  al. 2009). In fact, heterogeneity among neuron types within the visceral sensory system is what allows for “the ability to perceive, explore, and interpret the surrounding world” of the organ (Kupari et al. 2019:2508). The body’s interior serves as the Umwelt for the visceral organs which, like all living systems, must appropriately identify and defend against perceived threats. Thus, visceral organs have evolved to respond with local defense processes that are independent of the CNS and prevertebral ganglia (Ádám 1998). However, they also provide an important warning system by communicating the presence of injury or other threatening stimuli or conditions to the CNS via the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). In summary, conditioned reflexes can originate either locally, at the level of the organ, or via the brain and central nervous system. If the change in behavior is mediated by a local nervous system reflex without being processed in the brain, it is called an “axon reflex” (Mazzone and Undem 2016). If the change in behavior is caused by an association acquired in the brain and transmitted through descending projections, it is what Pavlov’s partner, I. F. Tolochinov, called “reflex at a distance”

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(Pavlov 1927a, b). This understanding changes what is commonly understood about classical conditioning, which has been traditionally viewed as a “cognitive-­ perceptual” phenomenon existing in higher and more complex levels of learning, “…or altogether a pseudophenomenon without its own ontological or heuristic status” (Razran 1961). But as Razran points out, a long and extensive history of experimental research in interoceptive conditioning has shown that unconscious interoceptive learning should stand as a prime model of all learning. In other words, learning is first biological. Cognitive learning came later in evolution and necessarily organized around the biological model.

Symptoms as Unconditioned Stimuli From their extensive experimental research over the course of decades, both Metalnikov and Bykov concluded that symptoms of an illness can become paired with random stimuli in the external environment which subsequently trigger the same symptoms. This means that the inputs from a diseased or distressed organ are capable of acting as an internal unconditioned stimulus (US) that  may become paired with a CS. Symptoms have been used experimentally as US in a number of studies. One example is  an established abdominal pain-related fear conditioning paradigm  where pain is induced using rectal distensions which serves as the US while being paired with visual cues, such as a circle or square, as the CS. (Benson et al. 2014; Icenhour et al. 2015; Kattoor et al. 2013). Thus, distressed physiology from a target organ can serve as input to the brain and be paired with a cue that is entirely unrelated to that organ. This demonstrates how a conditioned reflex can form from a natural US within the body (symptoms), rather from the external environment. Furthermore, these types of studies underscore the fact that pain, which can be elicited from either external or internal causes, is likely a major contributor to pathological conditioning. While the above conditioning paradigm is referred to as “fear learning”, in fact, it would be more accurate to use Pavlov’s term of “defense conditioning”. Indeed, the most common measurements for fear acquisition is skin conductance, heart rate and the freeze response (Lonsdorf et al. 2017)—all of which specifically measure sympathetic nerve activity, not fear per se. In fact, LeDoux (2014) argues that the term “fear conditioning” should be abandoned altogether. “Conscious fear can cause us to act in certain ways, but it is not the cause of the expression of defensive behaviors and physiological responses elicited by conditioned or unconditioned threats. We should not have called it a fear system” (2014: 2873). This distinction is important in developing a more accurate understanding of the conditioning phenomenon. By using the word “fear” the role of defense and the sympathetic nervous system become obscured. It is the defense drive inputs of SNA that is ultimately responsible for the formation of a conditioned reflex in aversive conditioning. Without it, the conditioned reflex would not be possible.

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The Formation of a Conditioned Reflex Long-term associative connections are formed when the strength of the synapses between those particular inputs are markedly increased and continually reinforced. This can be accomplished experimentally through CS-US intervals, the CS and US intensity and learning trial repetition during acquisition (Hadamitzky et al. 2020). These methods of stimulation seek to emulate conditions that exist outside the lab. They are dependent on two primary internal states: hunger and threat. Pavlov was aware that the unconditioned stimulus must be biologically salient. Therefore, when using food as the US, a state of hunger was necessary for acquisition to be successful. A state of threat is typically elicited via electric shock. Bykov also found that conditioned reflexes from interoceptors were easily formed by US related to food or threat. Therefore, Hebb’s postulate that associative learning is dependent on a cell’s activity correlating with another cell’s activity as a means to increase synaptic strength is not sufficient for the formation of a conditioned reflex (Grossberg and Levine 1987). In order to encode the association into long-term memory, distinct internal stimuli from activated appetitive or aversive states are required Grossberg and Levine (1987). The body’s universal mediator for aversive states is the sympathetic nervous system.12 SNA can be initiated from vagal afferents of an organ and transmitted to the brain due to a local threat at the level of the organ. Conversely, SNA can be initiated from the brain and projected to the visceral organs due to a perceived threat in the external environment. Not only are drive states needed to establish the reflex, they are also understood to have a reinforcing quality (Halperin 2000). Defense states likely exert the most weight on the synaptic connections since defense arguably demands more immediate attention and rapid response than hunger or fitness. If an organism cannot rapidly escape or defend against a threat, metabolism and reproduction become irrelevant. Based on what has been established in Pavlovian conditioning and interoceptive conditioning, an internal or external CS from any of the biological levels can become paired with an internal or external US, also from the various levels. This flexibility in what can serve as the CS or US across levels and between the internal and external environment suggests a vast potential for pathological conditioning. Thure von Uexküll (1997) argued these very points in his book, Psychosomatische Medizin: that conditioned reflexes played a role in human pathology, that signs are transmuted between the levels and are under the influence of conditioned reflexes, and that drive states play a crucial role in the conditioning process. In aversive conditioning, the linking of two stimuli from completely different domains becomes possible due to simultaneous inputs that occur with a spike in defense activity from the sympathetic nervous system. In sum, the conditioning process requires three types  The sympathetic nervous system is now understood to act as an interface between the brain and the immune system, confirming Metchnikoff’s assertion of a relationship between internal and external defense (Elenkov et al. 2000).

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Table 1  The three primary inputs involved in conditioning Input US Unconditioned stimulus A type of sign CS Conditioned stimulus A type of sign Drive state

Input description Any stimulus that activates a positive (appetitive) or negative (aversive) drive state

Input examples Food, electric shock, trauma

Any stimuli that can be sensed via interoceptive or exteroceptive receptors

Interoceptive stimuli: Endogenous agents, afferent impulses Exteroceptive stimuli: Visual, gustatory, olfactory, auditory, tactile, somatosensory stimuli Hunger, defense

Appetitive drive or aversive drive

Fig. 3  In pathological conditioning, the sign vehicle is received by the perceptual organ at the same time other inputs are received creating an association which alters the meaning or valuation of the CS to the subject

of inputs: sensory stimulus (CS), a stimulus that activates a drive (US) and the drive state (D) (see Table 1). Thus, a new model emerges for Uexküll’s functional cycle to represent pathological conditioning. The sign vehicle that is perceived by the subject is no longer pristine. What is perceived is the three forms of stimuli linked together which alters the meaning or valuation of the CS (see Fig. 3). The dysfunctional signalling processes in pathological conditioning distort the perception of a benign stimulus. Since the brain or any reacting organ are distinct organisms, their own errant response to a CS (increased SNA or symptoms) may serve as US during future exposures to the CS, potentially contributing to reinforcement or further pathological conditioning in other systems. Associated stimuli and the corresponding behavior tend to remain faithful so long as the associative links are reinforced. “A brief impetus from the cortical cells suffices to start events in the life of an organism in the same succession as was established when the temporary connection, based on an unconditioned reflex, was formed” (Bykov 1957:388; emphasis added).

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Since conditioned reflexes appear to be capable of involving nearly any system (per Pavlov and Bykov), and the possibility for sensory stimuli to become paired with aversive stimuli has already been established, the vast potential of pathological conditioning becomes apparent. It may perhaps explain why an organ can suddenly change behavior with no pathogen, toxin or lesion present and why the etiology of many conditions with defense-like behavior has remained elusive. Moreover, behavioral genetic data from monozygotic and dizygotic twin comparisons have shown a heritable basis for Pavlovian fear conditioning (Krause and Domjan 2017).

Defense Behavior of Target Organs The symptoms of any pathologically conditioned reflex depend on the reactive system’s selection of behaviors from their defense repertoire. A wide range of symptoms can result from defense behavior, including inflammation (conditions ending in “-itis”), redness, itching, expulsion or discharge, swelling, pain, cramping, anxiety, autoimmunity, rashes, desquamation (scaling of the skin) and intolerance. Another form of defense behavior is resistance. Kobayashi (2012) argues that there has been enormous evolutionary pressure on the nervous system to develop avoidance systems in response to potentially aversive stimuli as one defense strategy, including aversive associative learning. Each of these defense processes can be found throughout a multitude of conditions, suggesting that defense may be involved in the majority of pathologies, particularly when taking into account the number of conditions caused by pathogenic microbes. A defensive response implies a threat, either real or misperceived. Therefore, a perceived stressor must exist wherever there is defense-type behavior. Viewing pathology from an errant defense model may help explain a number of conditions. Diabetes, for example, is a disorder involving insulin, a hormone that allows sugar in the blood to enter cells. Type 1 diabetes is caused by the immune system attacking the beta cells of the pancreas, which is an inappropriate immune defense. Type 2 diabetes is caused by cells resisting insulin, which can lead to multiple pathologies. Insulin can also cause allergic reactions from other systems in the body—which is an errant defense of the reacting systems against the insulin (Heinzerling et al. 2008). One of the main pathogenetic mechanisms suspected for insulin resistance is activation of the sympathetic nervous system (Salvetti et al. 1993). The mechanisms involved in each these conditions strongly suggest that errant defense is motivating the behaviors. Cognitive stimuli have also been shown to elicit over-reactivity or emotional “false alarms” (Beck 1996)—the same phenomenon of stimuli causing an inappropriate reactions, but occurring on the socio-emotional level. Emotions may be viewed as an evolutionary by-product of the autonomic nervous system (Porges 1997). In fact, negative emotions have all been shown to operate in conjunction with increased SNA (Feldman et al. 1999; Levenson 1992; McCraty et al. 1995). Sympathetic nerve activity has been associated with a diverse range of pathological conditions including cardiovascular disease (Graham et al. 2004), hypertension

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(Grassi 1998), type II diabetes mellitus (Huggett et al. 2003), obesity (Grassi et al. 2007), depression (Barton et al. 2007), ulcerative colitis (Furlan et al. 2006), as well as polycystic ovary syndrome, hypertensive pregnancy, heart failure and myocardial infarction (Fu 2012). Much of the research on the SNS’s role in pathology has focused on factors specific to dysfunction with the SNS itself (Patel et  al. 2001; Waki et al. 2006; Yu et al. 2008) rather than on how SNA becomes dysfunctionally entangled or how SNA behavior in these conditions may be due to a perceived threat on some level. Fischer et al. (2009) emphasize that it is important to identify the signal triggering sympathetic overactivity. However, these studies focus on chemical or molecular signals that affect central sympathetic regulation or chronically elevated SNA on a functional level. Lacking a true theory of semiosis, these studies fail to understand what a signal “stands for” to the reacting system. More robust investigations are needed to identify threat cues on all levels since so many physiological behaviors involved in pathology indicate a defensive response.

The Sympathetic Nervous System: Mediator of Defense New lines of research are needed to understand the role of the SNS in the defensive reaction of specific organs or systems. Until recently, the sympathetic nervous system has been primarily studied as an “all-or-none” defense system, designed for rapid response to harmful threats in the external environment. This view of a “monolithic effector “ signaling globally is no longer supported (Morrison 2001). There is a growing recognition of “region-specific” sympathetic nerve activity that responds differentially with precise control of target organs and can occur acutely at varying magnitudes and in opposing directions, contributing to various disease states (Guild et  al. 2007; Rahmouni 2007; Osborn and Fink 2010; Subramanian and Mueller 2016). Experimental investigations conducted by Jänig and Häbler (2000) have shown distinct patterns of sympathetic reflex activity with a specificity in messages being transmitted from the central nervous system to target tissues. These findings counter the traditional view of the general arousal model of the SNS proposed by Cannon (1932) and instead reveal much more intricate operations. A more detailed elaboration could eventually lead to a better understanding of the idiosyncratic nature of defense reactions from different organ systems to specific stimuli. SNS mediation may also explain why some systems can react to offending agents that do not make any contact at all with a particular system, which is seen in the case of skin allergies (Daruna 2012). Mapping the differential activity of the SNS throughout various tissues presents a challenge. Thus far, most studies on sympathetic outflow have focused on blood vessels and the heart, even though the sympathetic nervous system innervates tissues throughout the body. The various methods that have been used over the last few decades to measure SNA are indirect (Barman and Yates 2017). The only accurate

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method for SNA measurement is microneurography which involves the insertion of a needle with an electrode directly into the nerve. Most of the data for microneurography, however, have been obtained through experimental conditions on anesthetized cats since such studies have not been possible with humans (Jänig and Häbler 2000). Since there appears to exist a much more complex defense network than what is currently understood, proper investigation would likely require both microneurography and neuroimaging of brain regions activated during a perception of threat. This approach would be invaluable in mapping defense processes at and between different levels and further demonstrate that “…the fight-or-flight response is just one of many options in an extensive repertoire of effector activation states in which the central autonomic network may exist” (Morrison 2001:R683). If errant defense and dysregulated sympathetic nerve activity play a prominent role in pathology, as argued, then modulation of SNA should prove to be clinically fruitful for a wide range of conditions. In fact, this has been the case. The most obvious example is the therapeutic effects of many pharmaceuticals which are due to modulation of sympathetic function (Barman and Yates 2017). Another moderately invasive procedure is also being used to block SNA in specific regions of the sympathetic ganglia. Stellate ganglion block (SGB), or “sympathetic block “, involves injection of a local anesthetic into or around the area of the stellate ganglion in the neck. The treatment has been used for the management of regional pain and other conditions but has more recently been used for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), primarily in combat veterans (Lipov and Kelzenberg 2012; Mulvaney et al. 2010, 2014). The treatment specifically addresses chronically activated SNA and has shown a high rate of success with over 70% of patients reporting significant improvement, some of whom report immediate relief following the procedure (Mulvaney et al. 2010, 2014). This is notable since little progress has been made in the treatment of PTSD and most treatments currently being used have shown little efficacy (Berg 2008; Lipov and Kelzenberg 2012). “A defining feature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is ‘physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event’ (DSM-IV, PTSD Criterion B.5)” (Orr and Roth 2000:225; emphasis added). PTSD is associated with increased sympathetic response to both benign and aversive stimuli (Peri et al. 2000). PTSD patients have also been found to be more susceptible to conditioning showing higher SNA in skin resistance, heart rate and EMG responses to the conditioned stimulus (Orr et  al. 2000). Even though heightened physiological responsivity to threat cues is highly indicative of a diagnosis of PTSD, physiological measurement is rarely used in the clinical setting which could provide valuable clinical and theoretical insight (Orr and Roth 2000). Instead, the focus has remained on self-report and interviews (Rosellini et  al. 2015). The more well-understood errant defense becomes, the more likely therapeutic intervention will be developed to address the reflexes involved in such conditions. A number of separate studies have also shown that surgical modulation of regional SNA alone can be effective in the treatment of a broad range of conditions including renal disease, bronchial disorders, epilepsy, depression, multiple sclerosis, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ulcerative colitis, diabetes and

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many others (Barbut et al. 2013; Rezai 2005; Poon et al. 2014; Libbus and Moffitt 2015). The remarkable diversity of conditions shown to improve by simply modifying or blocking sympathetic nerve activity is significant and suggests a pervasive influence of SNA and defense in human pathology.

Conclusion The many different manifestations of errant defense have been studied in various fields of medicine and psychology for decades but have not been contemplated as the same phenomenon. This is likely due to the fact that modern medicine has primarily approached the study and treatment of human pathology from specialized fields. In fact, specialization has characterized medical progress for nearly two centuries (Cassel and Reuben 2011). The separation of research programs, particularly in the field of immunology, has prevented more integrated perspectives. Indeed, as Thomas Sebeok, one of the founders of biosemiotics, stated: “Medicine, may in truth, be one of the few disciplines lacking an overarching theory…” (2001:55). The hypothesis of errant defense recognizes the pervasive nature of defense in the myriad behaviors expressed in pathology and puts a spotlight on faulty signaling and learning processes as a potential contributor to health conditions in the human population. Since the existence of the earliest organisms, the process of sensing, interpreting, valuing and responding to potential threats has been present in each step of biological organization. Thus, this critical function plays a vital role throughout physiology, which necessarily extends to psychology. Since errant defense occurs with different organs and systems, stemming from conditioned stimuli, the health conditions that result appear to have no mechanismal connection. However, as it is becoming more evident that conditioned reflexes may be an important contributor to pathology, new research paradigms should be developed in order to understand the phenomenon more fully. Crucial to such research is a theory of semiosis in order to understand sign process beyond lock-and-key mechanisms since living systems must be able to respond to a quasi-negative environment that includes increasingly complex and every-changing stimuli. As Bykov, and later Hadaminsky, Kim, Mazzone and Undem all concluded, a better understanding of aberrant reflexes could lead to therapeutic interventions that specifically target the reflex and potentially treat the underlying cause.

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Omics and the Biosemiotic Interaction of Food with Body, Mind, and Health Tomoko Obara, Yogi Hale Hendlin

, and Hiroyuki Matsumoto

Abstract  Foods first encounter the microorganisms in our mouths, stomachs, and guts, which influence our nutritional processing. The digested and absorbed n­ utrients are circulated throughout the entire body via the blood stream. The circulatory system not only transports biomolecules or metabolites produced by foods, but also serves as a conduit for cellular signaling carried by hormones reaching distant cells. In molecular biology, the specific biomolecules active in this process are classified according to their corresponding branch of omics sciences, such as the original five subfields of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, glycomics, and lipidomics. Each of these omics subfields defines aggregates of biomolecules and their quantities in biochemical terms, providing basic information for understanding the molecules involved in the maintenance of life. The act of eating foods modify the omics science data because the foods are being digested, the resulting biomolecules are being absorbed, and incorporated into the cellular structure. However, the changes of omics data themselves are noninterpretable as biosemiosis because the phenotypes affected by food intake will be realized through a holistic combination of all the omics data. Recently it has been recognized that “exosomes”, small vesicles

The authors dedicate this manuscript to the late Professor Dr. Shosaku Obara. T. Obara (*) Department of Cell Biology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA Y. H. Hendlin Erasmus School of Philosophy, Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] H. Matsumoto Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA Clinical Proteomics and Gene Therapy Laboratory, Kurume University, Kurume, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. H. Hendlin, J. Hope (eds.), Food and Medicine, Biosemiotics 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_10

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containing all classes of biomolecules identifiable in omics sciences, contribute to the endocrine network by transmitting material signals between remote cells via blood circulation. The original five omics successfully analyze different processes of a given biomolecule, but fail to illustrate the relationships between them or the interactions that induce their physiological effects. To remedy this scientific gap, we propose that the crucial additional omics subfield of exosomes represents the omics entities en suite, which through attending to multidimensional processes carry information interpretable by biosemiotic analysis. In other words, exosomes, but not omics information, carry phenotypically definable signals influenced by foods. Thus, investigating exosome signals on physiological and pathological effects enables understanding biosemiotic interactivity between foods and health. Keywords  Genomics · Proteomics · Omics sciences · Microbiota · Exosomics

Introduction Modern scientific inquiry into the biochemistry of digestion began only in the early twentieth century when the biochemistry group at the University of Cambridge led by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins first addressed the nature of life in the biochemical context. “Hopkins’s vision of the emerging field of biochemistry was that it was a discipline in its own right (not an adjunct to medicine or agriculture nor applied chemistry) that needed to explore all biological phenomena on the chemical level” (Weber 2018). The completion of the human genome would become the pinnacle of recent biomolecular research (Nature 2001). This epoch-making event summarized the architectural components of gene expression based on the DNA double helix structure (Watson and Crick 1953a, b) that had been revealed almost half a century earlier. Building the genome information assisted by the development of mass spectrometric technologies (Matsumoto et  al. 1999) established the founding pair of omics sciences, genomics and proteomics (Nature 2001; Abbott 2001). Other subfields of omics studies quickly followed, including as transcriptomics (Lowe et al. 2017), glycomics (Rudd et al. 2015), lipidomics (Yang and Han 2016), and more recently metabolomics (Ulaszewska et al. 2019; Jin et al. 2019). The practices of omics sciences are, broadly described, “to identify, characterize, and quantify all biological molecules that are involved in the structure, function, and dynamics of a cell, tissue, or organism” (Vailati-Riboni et al. 2017). Assisted by modern technologies, the emergence of multiple omics sciences in the history of science significantly involves systematically cataloging the molecules that compose life at a larger scale. Each omics science studies and builds a list of biomolecules that belong to each discipline. Eating foods affects the omics science data sets (see Fig. 1a). The flow of foods in the digestive system is illustrated in Fig.  1b. Attending to how the exogenous input of food modulates specific omics as well as how different subfields work together to digest biomolecules, provides an opportunity to both critically appraise

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a

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Foods Intake

Digestive System (breakdown of food and absorption of biomolecules into cells)

Digestion and absorption in stomach and guts. Gut bacteria influence this step of food intake.

Circulatory System (transporting of biomolecules and transmitting signals)

Transports biomolecules to cells. These biomolecules transmit physiological signals.

Organ System Roles

Omics processes

b

c Omics

Defined by biochemical analysis (genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, glycomics, lipidomics, & other omics disciplines); omics data per se are non-interpretable as biosemiotic signals

Exosomics

The study of non-cellular vesicles (exosomes) which contain biomolecules as categorized in the omics sciences. These biomolecules are secreted by each cell, and target and send endocrine messages to remote cells; thus carrying functional messages by themselves necessary for the maintenance of life

Fig. 1 (a) Food intake and the processing of the molecular components. (b) Illustrated diagram of human digestive system. Digestion takes place in stomach and small intestine. The digested products are absorbed in to the blood stream in small intestine. From William Crochot (Wikipedia). (c) The difference between omics and exosomics. Food intake and digestion produces biomolecules which actively become messengers for distal cell communication within the organism

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the current state of omics sciences, as well as think about how a biosemiotic perspective including symbionts in the gut microbiome interact with and change the encountered biomolecules. Our project aims to suggest for omics a similar biosemiotic perspective as the mathematician René Thom discusses regarding the real “chemical constraints on the dynamic of life,” while qualify the chemical models with the processual biological up- and down-regulating of living organism structures: any such constraint, and any chemical bond, can be considered as a geometrical factor in an appropriate space. Writing the equation, in atoms, that connects two constituents of a chemical reaction is one, the coarsest, of these constraints; the topology of biochemical kinetics and its relation with the spatial configuration of macromolecules are others that are certainly more decisive. On the other hand, what is it that assures us that the formal structures governing life as a stable process of self-reproduction are necessarily connected with the biochemical substrate that we know today? (Quote from Thom, p. 371) (Favareau 2009)

By linking omics sciences together through exosomics, the study of exosomes  – membranous extracellular vesicles released from cells carrying the bioactive molecules such as DNA, RNA, proteins, and lipids and capable of transmitting endocrine and paracrine signals – we aim to rectify some of the siloed analysis that occurs in contemporary omics science. Thus, it is apparent that vis-à-vis the biosemiotic aspects of food and medicine, we cannot avoid the involvement of gut bacteria, or microbiota, in the signaling process, controlling and maintaining the entire homeostasis of the body. In this chapter, we introduce two crucial factors: (1) exploring knowledge in the complex signaling systems revealed by omics sciences and the integration of omics information into a new class of omics, “exosomics”, and (2) the crucial involvement of gut bacteria that control the whole body, in relation to food intake and health maintenance. It should be noted that the semiosic process within a single body as described in (1) has been designated “endosemiosis” while that between separate bodies in (2) is “exosemiosis” (Favareau 2010a). When considering the biosemiotics of foods, these two types of semiosic processes are always in action. We conclude by suggesting that a biosemiotic study of exosomes can help contextualize the signal processes in omics research on biomolecules in general, bringing these siloed (gene, protein, lipid, glucose, metabolism, etc.) subfields into interaction with each other to better understand biochemical processes in their living context.

Omics Sciences and Their Importance Marcel Florkin, a renowned biochemist, published the first paper using the term biosemiotics in 1974. He argued in L’Evolution Biochimique that the “chemical makeup of organisms could drive evolutionary change” (Florkin 2009), meaning that the biochemistry of an organism was not just a passive result, but had driving force in evolution (Favareau 2010b). The importance of biomolecules for the history of biosemiotics, then is not a mere passing fancy, but helped inaugurate the field of comparative biochemistry and paved the way for examining biochemical systematics.

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In the interceding years, the sequencing of the human genome opened up the field of omics that expanded into various subfields investigating the properties and processes of biomolecules. For example, genomics defines a set of genes. Similarly, proteomics lists a set of proteins; transcriptomics, a set of messenger RNAs (mRNAs); glycomics, a set of carbohydrates (sugars) and glycoproteins; lipidomics, a set of lipid molecules; and metabolomics, a set of biomolecules involved in the intermediate metabolism originated from food intake. The datasets in omics sciences define an ordered 2-tuple consisting of the name of the molecule and its quantity, such as (Protein A, Quantity of Protein A) in the case of proteomics data sets. In each omics dataset, the following definition stands: (a) In genomics, a gene (or polydeoxynucleotide) has a name, and a genomics dataset consists of an ordered 2-tuple (Gene A, Quantity of Gene A). It should be noted that chromosomes carry a single pair of allelic genes, making the quantity of each gene rather constant, usually two, under normal circumstances. (b) In proteomics, a protein (or polypeptide) has a name, and a proteomics dataset consists of an ordered 2-tuple (Protein A, Quantity of Protein A). In contrast to the genomics datasets, the second element of the 2-tuple in proteomics and other omics datasets varies depending on the physiological state of the body. This property renders the omics datasets to significantly reflect the physiological conditions of the body, based on which biomedical scientists investigate health and disease (Matsumoto et al. 2005; Shitama et al. 2008). (c) In a similar context, a transcriptomics dataset consists of a 2-tuple (Transcript A, Quantity of Transcript A). (d) The 2-tuples in other omics datasets are (Carbohydrate A, Quantity of Carbohydrate A) in glycomics, (Lipid A, Quantity of Lipid A) in lipidomics, and (Metabolite A, Quantity of Metabolite A) in metabolomics. These different sets of descriptors aim at noting various states of biomolecules according to the process under study. The evolutionary development of biochemistry and molecular biology represented by the drafting of the genome DNA, including that of humans in the early twenty-first century (Nature 2001), and, more recently, the emerging role of many types of noncoding RNAs (Cooper et al. 2009; Harcourt et al. 2017) have added a plethora of knowledge to the molecular vocabularies of life. Renewed discussions regarding how to organize the huge body of molecular vocabularies to understand the essence of life in genomics and proteomics also flourished synchronous to these discoveries (Abbott 2001). The aim of omics sciences, such as transcriptomics (Lowe et al. 2017), glycomics (Rudd et al. 2015), and lipidomics (Yang and Han 2016) is to elucidate a systematic picture through the molecular vocabularies in each field. The omics sciences are based on the following premises: (a) that each omics can catalog biomolecules in the same category in toto; (b) that the element in each category is defined by a specific name and is quantifiable; and

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(c) that a systematic understanding of omics information and/or the combination of them (Matsumoto et al. 1999, 2005) could lead us to a proper understanding of biological phenomena at higher dimensions, such as memory, sleep, pain, emotion, and feeling. As such, each omics dataset depicts a set of elements defining biomolecules of the same kinds where the “set” is loosely defined in a similar manner to that of the set theory in mathematics. One way of defining “set” is such that “a set is a well-­ defined collection of objects.” (Fraleigh 1982) Here, a “collection is an aggregate of things.” (Fraleigh 1982) Since the emergence of genomics, other omics sciences developed and resulted in an overwhelming amount of data, creating a huge burden for reviewers and readers alike  – not to mention for biochemists and molecular biologists attempting to contextualize their new specific findings in the larger study of omics (Nicholson 2006). Most importantly, despite the availability of rich information, the promise of combinatorial integration (horizontal and vertical) remains hypothetical. In order to develop the primary omics languages to better understand higher-­ order biological reality, we need a proper understanding of a higher level of omics structure that describes a set of intercellular mediators, designated “exosomes,” through using the primary omics vocabulary. Exosomes (Tkach and Thery 2016) are membranous extracellular vesicles released from cells carrying the bioactive molecules such as DNA, RNA, proteins, and lipids. They transmit endocrine and paracrine signals and drive the repairing steps of diseased cells (Matsukura et al. 2019) as well as transmission of metastatic process in cancer propagation (Tkach and Thery 2016). As omics sciences accumulate the datasets representing material signals, one may notice a shortfall of the omics knowledge: because all biological processes are non-linear, the amount of data collected does not improve the ability to predict outcomes in proportion to the amount of data collected. Therefore, it is not surprising that amassed data accomplishes much less when it remains unassembled into an interpretable format. We hypothesize that exosomes play a role in making these biological processes, in ways that are unpredictable from the viewpoint of conventional omics sciences, insofar as they function as more or less arbitrary mediators between two different kinds of sets of objects. A study of the mediators between biomolecules across different classes adds a biosemiosic dimension to the omics effort. Thus, we propose a new class of omics category and designate it “exosomics” (See Fig. 10.1c). In the more general context, we predict the necessity of creating a new omics category implementing higher-order relationships of the material element in addition to the original five: genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, glycomics, and lipidomics. This is because the original five omics merely list the biomolecules of the same class, but do not illustrate the relationship between them or the interaction that renders their physiological effects. How have the omics sciences been created? Genomics based on the DNA (polydeoxynucleotides) sequences is regarded as the founder of proteomics, the field that studies the proteins (polypeptides). Thus, genomics and proteomics constitute the founding pair of omics. DNA transcribes several kinds of RNAs

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(polyribonucleotides), creating new classes of omics categories generally called transcriptomics. The proteins are synthesized based on the information encoded by RNAs, which are the transcripts of DNA. The proteins work as enzymatic catalysts to form the four major classes of biomolecules: polynucleotides (DNA and RNA), polypeptides (proteins), carbohydrates (sugar molecules), and lipids (fatty acids). Glycomics and lipidomics researchers study carbohydrates and lipids, respectively, both of which are direct catabolic products of foods. New omics disciplines focusing on other groups of biomolecular assemblies are necessary in order to enable the researchers to study biomolecular interactions at a higher dimension. The original five omics data build “meta-vocabularies” describing the biomolecular components without synthesizing the physiological meaning; therefore, the original five omics needs to be integrated by using the meta-vocabularies offered by the original omics. How do these omics datasets interact with biosemiotic subjects consuming food? It is apparent that: (a) The genes, the proteins, the transcripts (such as RNA), the sugars, the lipids, and the metabolites are objects of real existence. (b) Each class of objects are the biomolecule of interest studied in each omics discipline and the corresponding omics dataset shows the quantity of each biomolecule. (c) Eating foods changes the biomolecules of our body, and the results will be reflected on the omics datasets. Investigating how the changes in omics datasets affect health and disease conditions, leads to a goal of nutritional biomedicine based on which physiological and pathological states will be studied. (d) The changes of omics data under varying physiological conditions are regarded as changes in the material codes that governs life; thus the omics data influence the biosemiosic process involved in food intake and the following physiological changes; however, the correct interpretation of such code changes needs a systematic understanding of the interactions between the omics datasets. The practice of naming and quantifying biomolecules in our bodies by omics sciences provides with us tools (or vocabularies) that are useless unless the biosemiosic aspects of foods and omics interaction (Noth 1995) are considered. Further semiotic investigation is warranted to help clarify the relationship between the omics information and its involvement in biosemiotic processes of foods because the omics parameters will be constantly modified by food intake through digestion and absorption in the gut, transportation into the circulatory system, and biosynthesis and biodegradation of the biomolecules using the metabolites converted from the foods as materials. The process represents the classically established (sometimes called “canonical”) pathway of food intake and builds a physical foundation of body and mind maintenance. In the classical context, a proper understanding of the canonical nutritional pathway demands specific vocabularies for the understanding of the relationship between food and health through the optics of biosemiotics. Meanwhile, the results of recent research reveal a new reality of life as a microcosmic assembly consisting of ourselves and the microbiota that inhabit our bodies (Huttenhower et al. 2014; Sommer and Backhed 2013; Gilbert et al. 2016). These

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insights reveal the significance of the evolutionary constitution of animals (here focusing on humans) where food materials first encounter the microorganisms in our mouths, stomachs, and guts, which, depending on their biological diversity, substantially modifies our nutritional process. In this regard, we may say that our bodies and microbiota cooperate together and interact with nutrition, composing the real ecosystem properly designated as our body. The adverse effects on the harmonious ecosystem represented by the body and the microbiota are shown by microbiome-­association studies with many human diseases (Gilbert et al. 2016).

 ut Microbia Modify Omics Dynamics Through Modulating G Food Intake and Processing Food intake directly affects metabolomic outcomes because the ingested foods are digested and absorbed in the gut. Metabolic products flow into the blood stream and metabolomics inquiries qualify and quantify the resulting metabolites. The metabolites distributed through the blood stream will be absorbed into cells constituting the tissues and organs of the body. The metabolites become the building blocks of cellular components by the action of proteins exhibiting catalytic activity as enzymes. The biosynthesis of all four major biomolecules (nucleic acids [DNA and RNA], proteins, carbohydrates [sugars], and lipids) requires a constant supply of the metabolites. All of these processes must be controlled by the logics governed by the biosemiotic interactions of foods and health. It is well known that a large number of bacteria coexist in the gut with the hosts, helping with the digestion of food materials (Huttenhower et al. 2014). It became clear only recently, however, that the role of gut microbiota is more than simple digestive assistance (Sommer and Backhed 2013). Digestion and absorption are dynamic processes whereby gut microbiota interact with and metabolize food, including the various molecules and enzymes present. This contact recursively impacts gut microbiota. Gut microbiota dynamically interact with the food digestion and absorption of the host organism, through which they influence the metabolome signature, correlating with health and disease phenotypes (Gilbert et al. 2016). Recent investigations have paid closer attention to the interaction between gut microbiota and health and disease through food intake, as evidenced by an increasing number of related publications (Huttenhower et al. 2014; Sommer and Backhed 2013; Gilbert et al. 2016). Surprisingly, the gut microbiome influences the whole spectrum of biological phenotypes, starting from the effects of food intake to yet higher-order biological phenotypes, such as mood and psychological states (Ridaura and Belkaid 2015; Chu et al. 2019). Such interaction between microbiota and foods shows a defined correlation and reflects the species and population of microbiota inhabiting the human gut. What is not yet certain is the real causal relationships between foods and microbial inhabitance in the gut. However, the link between food intake (the kinds and amounts of foods eaten) and the flora of gut microbiota is well

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established. Therefore, microbiota constitute a factor that must be taken into account when studying the biosemiotics of foods.

 he Biosemiotic Vocabulary of Extracellular Vesicles T and Exosomes Mediating Higher-Order Cellular Communication In multicellular organisms, intercellular communication plays a key role in maintaining integrity and homeostasis. In higher vertebrates, including humans, a cardiovascular system consisting of heart and blood vessels functions as a conduit to distribute biomolecular materials produced and absorbed into blood systems through digestive mechanisms. Foods are the source of the biomolecular materials or metabolites. Along with the role of blood vessels as material-transporting conduits, important signaling molecules generally called “hormones” are transported from the originating cells to the destined cells; this process is the domain of the endocrine system, which also occurs through blood vessels. In the past decade, another significantly important signaling system conducted by distant cells entails “exchanging information by sending out signals composed of single molecules or, as increasingly exemplified in the literature, via complex packets stuffed with a selection of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, called extracellular vesicles (EVs; also known as exosomes and microvesicles, among other names)” (Tkach and Thery 2016; Riazifar et al. 2017; Thery et al. 2018). As noted above, the term “exosomes” is used to designate this type of non-cellular signaling aggregate consisting of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. The biomolecules carried by exosomes control the homeostasis of the organism by repairing and regenerating damaged cells and organs, likely through the action of their cargo molecules, including nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids, the precise mechanisms of which remain to be determined (Matsukura et  al. 2019; Riazifar et  al. 2017). Exosomes originating from cancer cells destroy the control mechanism of homeostasis, and exosome signaling causes adverse effects by contributing to metastatic cascades (Tkach and Thery 2016). The exosome datasets consist of the combination of omics information and exert the biomolecular effects through the elements of each omics combined. Thus, exosome datasets can be regarded as a unification of all omics information. On this basis, we propose to coin a new concept: “exosomics.” In the future, many types of exosomes, each of which exerts a specific physiological and pathological significance, will be classified and studied. These exosomes likely contain a different set of omics components and manifest different physiological and pathological meanings, which remains to be explored in the future. The higher omics language such as “exosomics” could be constructed with the “meta-­ vocabularies” of the original omics datasets.

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 ase Study: Interactions Between Foods and Health in Type 2 C Diabetes Mellitus (T2D) The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) describes T2D succinctly (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney 2020); Type 2 diabetes is a disease that occurs when your blood glucose, also called blood sugar, is too high. Blood glucose is your main source of energy and comes mainly from the food you eat. Insulin, a hormone, made by the pancreas, helps glucose get into your cells to be used for energy. In type 2 diabetes, your body doesn’t make enough insulin or doesn’t use insulin well. Too much glucose then stays in your blood, and not enough reaches your cells.

One can quickly recognize that vital signs measured in a clinical setting reflect omics information associated with T2D, which can be briefly summarized at each step as follows: 1. The symptomatic signature of T2D is an elevated level of glucose maintained in the blood stream. The elevated blood glucose level is detected as a dataset in metabolomics. 2. The elevated blood glucose level is caused by a failure in glucose control in the blood circulation, which can be caused by multiple factors. The T2D-causing multiple factors can be associated and/or attributed to information gathered in genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, glycomics, lipidomics, and metabolomics. 3. Since foods are the source of glucose in our bodies, what and how we eat influence the etiology and pathology of T2D. 4. Since glucose is an energy source that affects function of our muscular system and central nervous system, the dysregulation of glucose metabolism caused by T2D affects our well-being, resulting in fatigue and mental malfunctions. 5. Although glucose, a circulating metabolite produced by digested foods, plays a crucial role in the maintenance of energy metabolism in all cells, blood glucose at a higher concentration exerts cellular toxicity. The toxicity of glucose is caused by its aldehyde group that covalently modifies amino groups of proteins. When proteins are modified by the elevated levels of glucose, the proteins modified by glucose (called “glycosylated proteins”) become inactivated. The concentration of glycosylated proteins in the blood is a significant measure of the maintained concentration of glucose levels in an averaged time span, making it a reliable vital sign for the severity of T2D.  For this purpose, the level of glycosylated hemoglobin protein designated “hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c)” is used as a diagnostic measure. It should be noted that HbA1c is a glucose-modified hemoglobin protein, and its measured value belongs to the dataset of glycomics (or the combination of glycomics and proteomics, i.e., glycoproteomics). 6. Recently, exosomes have been recognized as playing a significant role in T2D (Dai and Dias 2018; Ying et al. 2017). 7. Microbiomes have also been implicated to be closely linked to the pathogenesis of T2D, which is likely through the influence of gut bacteria on the digestion and absorption of foods (Kolodziejczyk et al. 2019; Sharma and Tripathi 2019).

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The description of T2D shown above exemplifies a case how food intake influence blood glucose levels and how the failure of glucose metabolism leads to a pathological dysregulation of glucose and initiates T2D. During the pathogenesis of T2D, the cellular signaling governed by exosomes plays a significant role. This signaling process is involved in endosemiosis (Favareau 2010a). Moreover, the microbiome (symbiotic bacteria inhabiting in our body) modulates the digestion and absorption of nutrients in our digestive systems and control the omics signaling process involving our body and its symbiotic inhabitants: this process involves in exosemiosis (Favareau 2010a).

Summary and Conclusions The molecular understanding of genetic codes in the middle of the twentieth century initiated a new discipline called molecular biology, the main purpose of which is to understand the molecular mechanisms that sustain life. The subsequent investigations in microbiology developed together with a burst of technological development that occurred in other areas, such as microcomputers, software, and the Internet, set a pinnacle of achievement in the early twenty-first century with the completion of the draft genomes of human and other organisms. This led to the development of new disciplines based on the genome knowledge: omics sciences. Genomics and proteomics are the twin founders of the omics sciences, followed by transcriptomics, glycomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, and others. It should be noted that the omics information is assembled into a database and available to the public (for example, see http://www.genomicglossaries.com/content/omes.asp). The omics information renders datasets of molecules and their quantity that are specifically defined by each omics. In this review, we introduced a new omics area that we designate “exosomics” in the previous sections. Compared with the original omics vocabularies in fields such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, glycomics, lipidomics, and metabolomics, exosomics occupies an additional dimensional perspective of higher order because: (a) Exosomes consist of the combination of elements classified in each of the “primary” omics sciences. (b) Thus, the cargos carried by exosomes contain multidimensional information representing the primary omics, enabling the exosomes to exert a specific physiological or pathological function. (c) The original omics constitute a set of meta-vocabularies; in contrast, the emerging exosomics provides a vocabulary of higher order and defines physiological or pathological message, such as; (i) a signal for repair and regeneration of damaged cells, or (ii) a signal of tumor metastasis. (d) All of these omics vocabularies represent the close interaction of the molecular mechanisms of nutritional products with the gut microbiome.

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The DNA codes all the following biological processes represented by the omics data. The omics data are material signals and the essential components of biosemiotic processes. To our knowledge, investigations into the role of the material signals represented by omics sciences in the biosemiotic process within our body are scarce. Moreover, the material signals are significantly influenced by the relationship between our body and microorganisms inhabiting within us. Future arguments regarding the biosemiotics of foods and health should not avoid these omics vocabularies and their interaction with microorganisms inhabiting in our body. Acknowledgements  The authors thank Ms. Kathy Kyler for careful reading of the manuscript. The authors acknowledge the support of a Presbyterian Health Foundation Team Science Grant (20181517) to T.O. and Kurume University Research Fund to operate The Disease Proteomics and Gene Therapy Laboratory to H.M.

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Hiroyuki Matsumoto  Ph.D., is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, College of Medicine, at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Dr. Matsumoto has been studying cellular signaling and its projection to higher-order phenotypes using proteomics technology. Dr. Matsumoto argues that the proteomics developed in the past two decades enabled us to collect molecular signs that reflect the physiological and pathological states of our bodies, and that the logic to interpret the collected information resembles that of abductive inference, or abduction, developed by C. S. Peirce. The advantage of abductive inference is that, at the beginning stage, one needs no information on the system, but needs to collect data on the system. Based on the collected data, one would build a hypothesis based on which another data collection should be designed. Thus, our inquiry consists of the repetition of such inference and confirmation multiple times toward the ultimate goal: the truth.