Invisibility, Colors, Snow: Arctic Biosemiotics and the Violence of Climate Change

Abstract

This article conceptualizes contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic through a semiotic register. Different living beings perceive different things, and these differences amount to different worlds, not merely different worldviews. Building on Eduardo Kohn’s reading of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and theorists of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, the article analyses how signs in and between living organisms and their environments are political matters of life and death. Via the themes of invisibility, colors, and snow, the article traces semiotic relations between different living beings and their Arctic ecologies to weave a semiotic understanding of contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic and the role of climate change therein. The article defines the violence of climate change as a violence of not being able to recognize oneself, and builds on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multinaturalism to explain what it means that one world ruins other worlds.

The afterlives of state failure: echoes and aftermaths of colonialism

“…Colour plays a central role in how we make sense of the world, and colour-coding is of particular significance for security matters (Andersen et al, 2015; Lemay-Hébert, 2018). It forms part, not only of particular systems of meaning (Andersen et al, 2015) but also has a performative dimension (Vuori et al, 2020) and is intimately tied up to how we make sense of the world (Du Plessis, 2021). In addition, maps – as referent objects – but more importantly mapping processes can be apprehended as straddling the (post)colonial divide, with current practices building on past, colonial, practices; in other words, current practices are the material and conceptual afterlives of colonial forms.…”

Place dialogue

“…The words ‘work’ and ‘works’ reflect the fact that nonhuman things have purposes or objectives, and we can think of their actions in teleological terms linking communications to outcomes. In the human world, too, the colours of things relate to the teleological purpose of survival: it often works for a marginalised group to maintain its national identity by wearing, displaying and celebrating certain colours (du Plessis 2021). The teleological logic spills over between human and nonhuman ways of being in place.…”

“…Making meaning is a serious business for humans and nonhumans alike. Interpretants are the ends of communication but they are also quite often the (literal) ends of lives (du Plessis, 2021; Wheeler, 2006). Despite the finality of teleological communications for individual creatures there is no final word.…”

Book Review: Planetary Specters: Race, Migration and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century

“…I also knew the—by now—paradigmatic suggestions that the Anthropocene is more aptly labelled the Capitaloscene, Plantainoscene or Eurocene (Moore 2015; Haraway 2015; Grove 2018). Lastly, I am conscious to be weary of any talk of resilience and adaptation - I have myself theorized the violence of climate change in a way “that pushes back against the idea that forced climate migration is a practical problem of adaptation and not a genocidal process” (du Plessis 2020:16). These are all attempts, we could say, of re-politicizing climate change.…”