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Review of The Whole Creature by John Pickering, University of Warwick (in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14, No 3.
…
when Wendy Wheeler's publishers describe her book as 'groundbreaking' … for
once they're right.
A book which offers a grand synthesis of cultural studies, dynamic systems theory and biosemiotics, along with a seasoning of Polanyi and Postmodernity, is taking on quite a task. But in what sense is it 'groundbreaking'? Cultural studies is a well established discipline. Dynamic systems theory has been influential since the pioneering work of von Bertalanffy in the 1940's. Biosemiotics dates back to the same period. However, it is the project to combine them to enrich our understanding of human sociality that breaks new ground. Moreover it carries a major political message, which is something that would enrich a lot of academic writing. Wheeler aims to demonstrate, among other important things, why the individualism idealised in mis-appropriated liberalism is just plain wrong (the author's emphasis, p127) and why efforts to commodify human relations based on love and trust are likely to fail (p77). Rampant individualism simply makes no sense once a systems approach to human action is taken properly on board. There can be no escape from the effects of our actions when causes and effects are parts of the same loop. Individual escape is possible of course, since effects injected into the loop may take a long time to re-appear as causes, but collectively, pigeons always come home to roost. Love and trust are part of the tacit knowledge and value that Polanyi points out both underlies and guides mere rationality. Wheeler's bringing together of such sources is eclecticism with attitude and makes the book a particularly piquant read, especially for those who already believe or want to believe these things.
The author sets out her stall very early on, always a helpful move. She traces the genesis of the book to her early reading of Raymond Williams' The Long Revolution. Published in 1961, Williams' book helped lay the foundations of British Cultural theory. Even though it has been engulfed by poststructuralism, of which Williams could have had only the slightest inkling, or none at all (Derrida was aged 31 when The Long Revolution appeared and had published nothing substantial), it remains an example of the scholarly, liberal (in the old sense) cultural analysis that had such a profound effect on the rapidly changing Britain of the 1960's. What Wheeler takes from the book is the insight that one can, at the same time and without contradiction, claim that human sociality is fundamentally to do with the expression of emotion and propose a fully materialist explanation of how it originated and how it is maintained. Wheeler's project is to justify this claim by showing how biosemiotics and dynamic systems theory provide the conceptual tools to fashion the explanation. This, as Jesper Hoffmeyer, a major figure in contemporary biosemiotics notes, discloses the political dimension to the subject and recovers an objective that he himself had had at the time of his early work. It is in this sense that the publisher is right to call the book groundbreaking.
But these are not happy times for grand syntheses, especially not on this broad and innovative scale. Aside from the dismissal of all over-arching metanarratives by postmodernists such as Lyotard and Jencks, those who prefer to understand things by taking them apart, intellectually and physically, appear to be having spectacular success. The dissection of both nature and culture proceed apace. Scientists, linguists, philosophers and even literary historians tend to avoid the general and the integrative for minute particularities and the analytic. Psychologists in particular suffer from this costiveness of the spirit and attempts to address the wider value framework around human consciousness are generally dismissed as a New Age superficialities. The effectiveness of piecemeal analysis, as shown especially in the successes of contemporary technology and science (genetic engineering and informatics being good examples) are taken to show that the fine grain of phenomena is in somehow the 'right' one at which to work. We have, it seems, begun to carve nature at her joints rather effectively. If the shape of the whole body is obscured in the process, well, so be it. That's the price of effective procedures.
So, then, is an integrative project such as Wheeler's a doomed by the intellectual milieu in which it appears? Far from it. Calling on Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty and, indirectly, Bahktin, Wheeler demonstrates how neglect of the body, the literal physical human body, this time, has hampered the efforts of both psychologists and sociologists to understand how the human mind and social being has evolved. The web of social knowledge, practices and values within which human cognition takes shape must have had an evolutionary history. That history is not merely the evolution of culture alone but of all living systems. Psychologists, missing the nub yet again, have done little more with evolutionary theory than to suggest it may be a constraint on cognition. If instead we take the line of Wheeler, Hoffmeyer, Sebeok and Peirce, we can see that biological and cultural evolution are actually the same process. Culture is biology pursued by other means. Evolutionary advance, Wheeler shows, can be more fully understood by following the ontological insights of C.S. Peirce and von Uexküll. Here, to paraphrase the title of chapter three, we find the key to Wheeler's grand project: nature is perfused with signs.
The patterns of causality in evolved systems are self-constructing, cyclic and actively produce cumulative adaptive change. For a proper materialist understanding of what is going on, this process of balancing pattern-preservation with pattern elaboration needs to be understood semiotically. This applies to any evolved system, whether it is biological or cultural and even whether we identify it as living or not. This was Peirce's great insight: the regularities in phenomena, what we call physical laws or plants or animals are the result of nature's 'tendency to take habits'. These habits are mediated by that sadly neglected Aristotelian concept: formal causation. Formal causes are those which produce correspondingly structured effects. These chain, loop and cycle themselves into self-maintaining patterns and processes maintained by the exchange of signs. Meaning, both in the sense of intended action and the sense of interpretation is what holds evolved systems together. In short: the causal texture of nature is semiotically mediated and biosemiotics, the study of naturally evolved signs, once extended to the social and to the physical levels of phenomena, is the discipline needed to understand this.
In following this line through its physical, biological and social consequences, Wheeler contributes to the growing momentum of Whiteheadian neo-organicism. Whether this was one of her intentions is not so important. While Whitehead is not mentioned in Wheeler's book, it is notable that the revival of interest in his work creates a milieu that is far more synthesis-friendly place. It is not a minority movement either. A recent Whitehead conference attracted over 500 scholars from around the world to Salzburg (see http://www2.sbg.ac.at/whiteheadconference/index2.html). At exactly the same time Salzburg hosted a conference on Biosemiotics (see: http://www.biosemiotics2006.org). Ironically, this was a pure co-incidence. Neither conference knew about the other - as the reviewer, who gave papers at both, discovered.
This odd separation is merely a matter of intellectual parochialism. Books like Wheeler's can help bring it to an end by showing how a radically organic (that is to say, materialist) view of nature such as Whitehead's, when combined with a radically semiotic view of nature such as Peirce's (also materialist, but expressed by other means), provide the conceptual tools to include the human phenomenon in the biological and the biological in the physical. This provision will allow experience itself, with its intrinsic emotionality and value, to be treated, along with other aspects of organic being, as part of the natural world.
It is this that makes experience a legitimate object for scientific concern and recovers William James' lost project: a radical empiricism that assumes that psychology deals, at base, with a world of pure experience. It is this return to James and the methodological pluralism that this entails that helps give Wheeler's project its political edge. Her scepticism about the virulent commodification of human emotional relation arises directly from Polanyi's recognition of the tacit dimension to human knowing, something that James anticipated in his concept of the 'fringe'. Likewise, once the full implications of seeing the human phenomenon as an organic process, emerging from the organic processes around it and primordially interdependent with them, then the sinister absurdity of neoliberal individualism becomes patent.
These sorts of insights are among the many good things we can look forward to as Wheeler's project, and those like it, gain strength, as they surely must. Another good thing is an end to what Mary Midgley calls the 'apartheid of mind and body' (Midgley, 2004). Midgley, presumably with philosophers and psychologists primarily in mind, advocates approaching the mental life of any creature, whether it be human or not, by considering it within its contexts: physical, biological and cultural. But, welcome though this proposal is, it is more a wish than a research programme. Moreover, advocacy for a larger view is not new. In Wheeler's groundbreaking project we see the beginning of the necessary new programme. It begins with the radical step of treating matter as mind-like rather than mind as matter-like. Here we find a lineage of organicism reaching back to Plato through Prigogine, Bergson and Whitehead and forward through Margulis, Kauffman and Midgley to Goodwin and Laughlin, for instance.
If reservations about the book are in order, they are that it may not go far enough in exploring the mind-like nature of materiality. It is also, perhaps a little too free with Terry Eagleton to claim him as an ally in the campaign to biologise human sociality and culture, given that he has recently said: 'Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver … morality and metaphysics … love, biology, religion and revolution … It is … rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.' (Eagleton, 2003)
But free or not, it's unnecessary; Wheeler's project stands on its own. This grand synthesis is a powerful resource with which to take forward and blend the humane understanding of sociality with our scientific understanding of the world. It is perhaps no accident that the cover pictures of The Whole Creature and Dennett's Freedom Evolves both feature the wonderfully organised patterns that appear as birds flock together. The individual actions of the parts give an intentionality to the whole. They are both signs that we have left the age of reduction and entered the age of emergence.
Reference:
Midgley, M. (2004). 'Mind and Body: The End of Apartheid'. In Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality, edited by David Lorimer. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Eagleton, T. (2003) After Theory. London: Basic Books.
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Publication date March 2006
Cultural Studies BIC category GTS