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In
this ground-breaking synthesis of evolutionary and cultural theory, Wendy
Wheeler draws on the new field of complex adaptive systems and biosemiotics
in order to argue that – far from being opposed to nature – culture is the
way that nature has evolved in human beings. Her argument is that these evolutionary
processes reveal the fundamental sociality of human creatures, and she thus
rejects the selfish individualism that is implied both in the biological reductionism
of much recent evolutionary psychology, and in the philosophies of neoliberalism.
She shows, instead, that the complex structures of biosemiotic evolution have always involved a creativity which is born from the difficult but productive phenomenological encounter between the Self and its Others; and she argues that this creativity, in both the sciences and the humanities, is fundamental to human progress. In this major contribution to both cultural studies and ecocriticism, Wheeler shows how complexity and biosemiotics forge the link between nature and culture, and provide a new and better understanding of how ‘the whole human creature’ operates as both social and biological being.
Reviews:
Stunning yet gentle
gestures towards a very different eco-politics
Wheeler's book is a quiet triumph. Although there are an increasing number
of thinkers doing more than just bridge the divide between science and culture,
few perhaps do it this well. And few write so clearly without sacrificing
complexity - in this case the complexity of relations that Wheeler refuses
to relinquish in favour of either a reductionist science or (even worse in
her book) reductionist political cultures, such as those of neoliberal performance
management. The most pleasurable surprise for me in this book is the suggestion
of a new politics, based on a new sensitivity, across the nature-culture divide,
to what the important Danish biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer has called biosemiotic
freedom. Truly a series of steps forward for those rethinking the basics of
culture, biology and freedom. And a very interesting, practical, way of bringing
"theory" of all kinds to bear on urgent eco-political agendas as they play
themselves out - not only in the stratosphere, but in everyday life.
August 26, 2008 By Dr. Andrew K. Murphie "Ib" (Sydney, Australia)
Read a review of The Whole Creature by John Pickering, University of Warwick (in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14, No 3.
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Publication date March 2006
Cultural Studies BIC category GTS