The Letter “A” and the Evolution of Digital Language

To playfully reenact the history of the exponential takeoff of human written language and the origin of both arbitrariness and digitalization as human modes of relation and communication, just turn the letter “A” upside down and recover the ancient pictogram (an icon–a sign that stands for its object on the basis of resemblance) of a horned animal.  Where once that pictogram stood for that animal (in, admittedly, a range of ways, from quarry to non-human person to deity), after that icon is inverted and thus severed (a predatory act of violence) from the object it resembles, the upside-down animal head (now our “A”) can be made to stand not for a tangible thing in a user’s environment (say that animal) but for a sound or a set of sounds, a set of arbitrary phonological objects not connected by resemblance or causality to the letter (no longer “A” [pun intended] pictogram) “A.”  These sounds, mere ghosts of the original iconic animal head, may be combined with the sounds represented by other letters and assembled into words or parts of words, a literal reader’s digest(ion).  Thus is it that the stiff pictogram with a narrow range of objects becomes the “infinitely flexible everything,” that is, everything from the grammatical indefinite article “a” to the cognitive marker “ah” to “applesauce.”  And what we write is no longer obvious to the uninitiated, to those who didn’t turn everything (at least the animal head of language) upside down.  In conclusion, “I A[not animal]M A[not animal] REA[not animal]L Robert LA[not animal]NGDON.

Dear Askarealsymbologist, You seem to have an interest in the symbology of the natural world. Do you have a definition of such a symbology?

Thanks for asking. Here is my most recent definition of the study of the symbology of nature, a field called “biosemiotics”:

Biosemiotics: The study of living things in their relations to each other and to the person(s) doing the study especially in terms of their roles as entities involved in communication processes, communication processes understood as actions and interactions involving the deployment of signs—though not necessarily involving intentionality, if intentionality must imply self-consciousness—and including

(a) everything from ironic verbal communication and lying in humans to the ironies involved in biological mimicry, including, for example, how viruses, in a Trojan-horse-like manner, may fool the immune systems of their prospective hosts or how birds feign injury or engage in ventriloquism to mislead predators or how a toad escapes from its predator by becoming a stone (i.e., by creating the sign of a stone in place of itself in the mind of its predator) and thus escaping down the rabbit hole of itself; and including

(b) everything from how even elements of the physical substrate (say rocks) can get themselves incorporated into biological, aesthetic, and even ethical codes (thus, objects become objectives) to how even plants can engineer their own evolution through signing actions designed, as it were, to elicit responses (other signs and signing action) from animals and humans, responses that further the interests of the plants (see Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire); and including

(c) finally, how living things create their own environments (rather than merely adapting to a supposed monolithic Environment) through the deployment of signs in a three-fold process called (after Jesper Hoffmeyer and Claus Emmeche’s “code-duality”) code-triadicity, that is, through the generation of (1) analogical (physiological, anatomical, morphological, and behavioral) signs, (2) digital (genetic) signs, and (3) digilog (epigenetic) signs—signs that mediate between environments and genes. And so living things, for biosemioticians, are very “postmodern” in that they themselves create the virtual ecologies to which they then themselves adapt, and so on, in a boot-strapping process whereby the self-organizing web of life (the biosphere) always only functions within what Juri Lotman calls the semiosphere.

(In addition to those authors cited above, I acknowledge as integral to my formation of the above definition the work of R. C. Lewontin, Jacob von Uexküll, Thomas Sebeok, Michael Shapiro, and Michael Haley.)