The Interpreting Organism

Literary formalism attributed meaning to the interactions of devices in the text itself, rejecting extra-textual influences, such as author background, historical situation, or interpretation by the reader. Reader-response theory and poststructuralist approaches have supplanted these earlier formalist approaches, taking up phenomenological methods with a subject-centred perspective. A text can have multiple meanings depending on the reader and context-related factors. Some of these principles could be applied to biology as organisms interpret their environment in a meaningful way. Biology has been combined with semiotics into a new discipline, biosemiotics, in which the organism and its relations to the environment are based on the interpretation of signs. Rather than Saussure’s dyadic sign (signifier/signified), the Peircean triadic sign is adopted; the organism interprets its objects in the environment. Umwelt, the species-specific and subjective relation of the organism to its environment (based on cybernetic feedback loops), underpins biosemiotics. While these developments have undermined structuralist perspectives, a literary poststructuralist school inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis has revised structuralism, shifting meaning from the text to reader yet retaining some of the principal tenets of its structuralist roots. Various positions are offered by the text, producing a decentred subject. In biology, a shift in the concept of biological identity is also needed, from one based on a self-centred view of the organism to one based on change and relationships.