Transcending the mid-most target: Paul Cobley and the cultural implications of biosemiotics

Abstract

Abstract Having been intimately aligned with the research agenda of biosemiotics since his colleague Thomas Sebeok first started using the term in 1992, Paul Cobley has consistently argued against the idea that the primary aim of biosemiotics is to make an intervention in the discourse and epistemology of the life sciences. Instead, he argues for the potential of a biosemiotically informed humanities for refashioning the ways in which we humans come to understand our situation within a world of signs and other organisms – as well as our existential duty of care for preserving the diversity and flourishing of both through the development of an anti-volunteerist ethics. Paul Cobley’s 2016 Cultural implications of biosemiotics fills a much-needed lacuna in the literature of biosemiotics in focusing with laser-like precision on those aspects of our human being – politics and aesthetics, education and ideology – that, Cobley rightly claims, have gone disproportionately under-analyzed and even under-appreciated in biosemiotics, due to its competing emphasis on reformulating biology. As one of the justly accused, I would like to take the occasion of this Festschrift to show the extent to which I now believe that Paul’s more expansive understanding of the purview of biosemiotics is, indeed, the proper one.