How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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information. How they do so is both continuous with and different from indices. Just as indices are the product of relations among icons and exhibit unique properties with respect to these more fundamental signs, symbols are the product of relations among indices and have their own unique properties. This relationship also goes only in one direction. Symbols are built from a complex layered interaction among indices, but indices do not require symbols.
A word, such as chorongo, one of the Ávila names for woolly monkey, is a symbol par excellence. Although it can serve an indexical function—pointing to something (or, more appropriately, someone)—it does so indirectly, by virtue of its relation to other words. That is, the relation that such a word has to an object is primarily the result of the conventional relation it has acquired to other words and not just a function of the correlation between sign and object (as with an index). Just as we can think of indexical reference as the product of a special configuration of iconic relations, we can think of symbolic reference as the product of a special configuration of indexical ones. What is the relationship of indices to symbols? Imagine learning Quichua. A word such as chorongo is relatively easy to learn. One can learn that it refers to what in English is called a woolly monkey quite quickly. As such, it isn’t really functioning symbolically. The pointing relationship between this “word” and the monkey is primarily indexical. The commands that dogs learn are very much like this. A dog can come to associate a “word” like sit with a behavior. As such, “sit” functions indexically. The dog can understand “sit” without understanding it symbolically. But there is a limit to how far we can go toward learning human language by memorizing words and what they point to; there are just too many individual sign-object relationships to keep track of. Furthermore, rote memorization of sign-object correlations misses the logic of language. Take a somewhat more complex word like causanguichu, which I discussed earlier in this chapter. Non-Quichua speakers can quickly learn that it is a greeting (uttered only in certain social contexts), but getting a sense of what and how it means requires us to understand how it relates to other words and even smaller units of language.
Words like chorongo, sit, or causanguichu do of course refer to things in the world, but in symbolic reference the indexical relation of word to object becomes subordinate to the indexical relation of word to word in a system of such words. When we learn a foreign language or when infants acquire language for the first time there is a shift away from using linguistic signs as indices to appreciating them in their broader symbolic contexts. Deacon (1997) describes one experimental setting where such a shift is particularly apparent. He discusses a long-term lab experiment in which chimps, already adept in their everyday lives at interpreting signs indexically, were trained to replace this interpretive strategy with a symbolic one.21
First, the chimps in the experiment had to interpret certain sign vehicles (in this case keyboard keys with certain shapes on them) as indices of certain objects or acts (such as particular food items or actions). Next, such sign vehicles had to be seen as indexically connected to each other in a systematic way. The final, and most difficult and most important, step involved an interpretive shift whereby objects were no longer picked out in a direct fashion by the individual indexical signs but instead came to be picked out indirectly, by virtue of the ways in which the signs representing them related to each other and the ways in which these sign relations then mapped onto how the objects themselves were to be thought to relate to each other. The mapping between these two levels of indexical associations (those linking objects to objects and those linking signs to signs) is iconic (Deacon 1997: 79–92). It involves not noticing the individual indexical associations by which signs can pick out objects in order to see a more encompassing likeness between the relations that link a system of signs and those that link a set of objects.
I am now in a position to account for the sense of separation—which I experienced as panic on the bus ride I described earlier—that the symbolic creates. I can now do so with regard to the more basic forms of reference to which it relates and with which it is continuous.
The symbolic is a prime example of a kind of dynamic that Deacon calls “emergent.” For Deacon, an emergent dynamic is one in which particular configurations of constraints on possibility result in unprecedented properties at a higher level. Crucially, however, something that is emergent is never cut off from that from which it came and within which it is nested because it still depends on these more basic levels for its properties (Deacon 2006). Before considering symbolic reference as emergent with respect to other semiotic modalities it is useful to think about how emergence works in the nonhuman world.
Deacon recognizes a series of nested emergent thresholds. An important one is self-organization. Self-organization involves the spontaneous generation, maintenance and propagation of form under the right circumstances. Although relatively ephemeral and rare, self-organization is nonetheless found in the nonliving world. Examples of self-organizing emergent dynamics include the circular whirlpools that sometimes form in Amazonian rivers, or the geometric lattices of crystals or snowflakes. Self-organizing dynamics are more regular and more constrained than the physical entropic dynamics—such as those involved, for example, in the spontaneous flow of heat from a warmer to a colder part of a room—from which they emerge and on which they depend. Entities that exhibit self-organization, such as crystals, snowflakes, or whirlpools, are not alive. Nor, despite their name, do they involve a self.
Life, by contrast, is a subsequent emergent threshold nested within self-organization. Living dynamics, as represented by even the most basic organisms, selectively “remember” their own specific self-organizing configurations, which are differentially retained in the maintenance of what can now be understood as a self—a form that is reconstituted and propagated over the generations in ways that exhibit increasingly better fits to the worlds around it. Living dynamics, as I explore in greater detail in the following chapter, are constitutively semiotic. The semiosis of life is iconic and indexical. Symbolic reference, that which makes humans unique, is an emergent dynamic that is nested within this broader semiosis of life from which it stems and on which it depends.
Self-organizing dynamics are distinct from the physical processes from which they emerge and with which they are continuous, and within which they are nested. Living dynamics have a similar relation to the self-organizing dynamics from which they, in turn, emerge, and the same can be said for the relation that symbolic semiosis has to the broader iconic and indexical semiotic processes of life from which it emerges (Deacon 1997: 73).22 Emergent dynamics, then, are directional both in a logical and in an ontological sense. That is, a world characterized by self-organization need not include life, and a living world need not include symbolic semiosis. But a living world must also be a self-organizing one, and a symbolic world must be nested within the semiosis of life.
I can now return to the emergent properties of symbolic representation. This form of representation is emergent with respect to iconic and indexical reference in the sense that, as with other emergent dynamics, the systemic structure of relationships among symbols is not prefigured in the antecedent modes of reference (Deacon 1997: 99). Like other emergent dynamics symbols have unique properties. The fact that symbols achieve their referential power by virtue of the systemic relations they have to each other means that, as opposed to indices, they can retain referential stability even in the absence of their objects of reference. This is what confers on symbols their unique characteristics. It is what allows symbolic reference to be not only about the here and now, but about the “what if.” In the realm of the symbolic, the separation from materiality and energy can be so great and the causal links so convoluted that reference acquires a veritable freedom. And this is what has led to treating it as if it were radically separate from the world (see also Peirce CP 6.101).
Yet, like other emergent dynamics, such as the vortex of a whirlpool formed in a river’s current, symbolic reference is also closely tied to the more basic dynamics out of which it grows. This is true in the way that symbols are constructed as well as in the way in which they are interpreted. Symbols are the outcome of a special relationship among indices, which in turn are outcomes of a special relationship that links icons in a particular way. And symbolic interpretation works via pairings of sets of indexical relations, which are ultimately interpreted by recognizing the iconicity between them: all thought ends with an icon. Symbolic reference, then, is ultimately the product of a series of highly convoluted systemic relations