Neither Pressure Nor Play: On the Resonance Origins of Sign Systems and the Dissolution of the Human Semiotic Boundary
The Okonkwo-Bernstein Memorial Lecture, delivered to the Global Congress of Semiotic Sciences, Nairobi-Helsinki, 2250
Professor Azande Pieterse-Nakamura, Inaugural Chair of Transspecies Semiotics and Distributed Meaning, The Arredondo-Weiss Centre for Generative Sign Theory, Universidad Autónoma del Pacífico Sur, Valparaíso, Principal Investigator, the Resonance Semiosis Project (RSP-4, 2241–present)
I want to begin with an apology, and then with an archaeology.
The apology is owed to Professor Yael Okonkwo-Bernstein, whose 2075 essay on pressure semiotics I am about to argue was not merely incomplete but organised around a founding assumption that the evidence we now hold renders untenable. I offer this apology with full recognition that Okonkwo-Bernstein was one of the finest semiotic minds of her century, that her framework generated decades of productive research, and that she was, in the terms available to her, correct. The problem is that the terms available to her were wrong. Not wrong in the way that a bad argument is wrong, but wrong in the way that a correct map of a territory is wrong when the territory turns out to be larger, stranger, and differently shaped than the cartographer had any means of knowing. I owe her the apology of a scholar who has found the edge of the map and stepped off it.
The secondary apology is owed to Dr. Fumiko Arredondo-Weiss, whose 2075 counter-argument I will treat less kindly, because Arredondo-Weiss, despite the genuine insight of her objections to the pressure framework, retained without examination the one assumption she shared with her opponent: that sign systems are, at their origin, human productions. They are not. The evidence now compels us to conclude that they never were.
I will explain what I mean by this. But first, the archaeology.
The Resonance Semiosis Project began in 2241 as a materials science collaboration between the Universidad Autónoma del Pacífico Sur, the Institute for Cognitive Biophysics at Nairobi Central University, and the Sverdrup-Chandra Laboratory for Deep Neural Archaeology in Bergen. Its initial question was narrow and technical: whether the pattern of electromagnetic resonance produced by large aggregates of neurons engaged in shared cognitive tasks—what the Bergen group had been calling the field signature of collective thought—left any detectable material trace in the environments those aggregates inhabited. This is not, on its face, a semiotic question. It became one.
By 2243 the project had established, beyond reasonable dispute, that shared cognitive activity in enclosed or regularly inhabited spaces produces a measurable and persistent modification of the electromagnetic properties of the materials in that space. Stone, wood, compressed earth, certain ceramics, and—most dramatically, and most relevantly for the semiotic implications—the biological tissues of living organisms in sustained proximity to the cognitating aggregate: all of these retain what the project now designates a resonance impression, a structured electromagnetic trace of the pattern of collective thought that produced it. The trace is not random. It is structured. It has, in the technical sense that the RSP has spent eight years developing the instruments to read, content.
Professor Nneka Oduya-Strand, Director of Cognitive Biophysics at Nairobi Central and the project’s principal theorist, published the implications of this finding with characteristic directness in her 2247 monograph The Inhabited Sign: “We have been asking, for two and a half centuries of semiotic inquiry, how communities produce signs. We have not been asking whether communities produce signs. The RSP data require us to ask the second question, because the data show that what we have been calling sign production is, in a significant number of cases, sign reception—the human community detecting, and then encoding in transmissible cultural form, a structured pattern of meaning that the environment was already carrying before the community arrived, or that the community and environment produced together in a process that our existing vocabulary of agency and intentionality cannot adequately describe.”
The implications of this finding for the Okonkwo-Bernstein / Arredondo-Weiss debate are immediate and, I will argue, devastating to both positions. Okonkwo-Bernstein argued that pressure—survival necessity—generates semiotic richness. Arredondo-Weiss argued that pressure is insufficient, and that play, delight, and aesthetic invention are co-equal generative conditions. Both arguments assume that the sign system is generated by the community. The RSP data suggest that in a significant range of cases, the sign system is not generated by the community. It is encountered by the community in a form that already has structure, already has content, and that the community then learns to read—exactly as the Pacific navigator learns to read the ocean, except that the RSP data extend this model of reading-rather-than-writing to sign systems that both Okonkwo-Bernstein and Arredondo-Weiss assumed were unambiguously human productions.
Consider the case that most directly challenges the pressure thesis. In 2244, the RSP conducted detailed resonance mapping of the material environment of three mid-twentieth-century gay male gathering sites in Sydney, Australia—two former pub buildings on the Oxford Street corridor and a section of Hyde Park that historical records identified as a known cruising ground of the period. The choice of these sites was not arbitrary: they were among the sign-system communities most extensively documented by Okonkwo-Bernstein, and they were communities for whom the pressure account seemed most compelling. The survival stakes were genuinely extreme. The sign system was genuinely sophisticated. The pressure thesis predicted, for these sites, the highest possible density of human-generated semiotic content.
The resonance mapping found something different. The sites did carry extraordinarily dense semiotic content—the RSP instruments registered the richest field signatures they had encountered in any urban environment. But the content was not, or not only, of the kind that the pressure thesis predicts. Alongside the structured patterns that corresponded recognisably to the documented sign vocabulary of the community—the gestural codes, the spatial territories, the object semiotics—the mapping detected older layers of resonance impression, layers that predated the gay community’s use of these sites by decades or, in the case of the Hyde Park section, by centuries. The Hyde Park resonance impression included field signatures consistent with patterns of shared cognitive activity from the pre-colonial Gadigal occupation of the land—signatures that the gay community of the 1960s could not have known about and did not, as far as any historical record indicates, know about. And yet the specific section of the park they chose, from the full range of available park territory, corresponded almost exactly to the boundary of the densest Gadigal resonance impression.
Professor Walker-Ngata II—grandson of the Hemi Walker-Ngata cited by Arredondo-Weiss—who joined the RSP as a cultural consultant in 2245 and became, within two years, one of its most important theoretical voices, was characteristically direct about the implications: “My grandfather argued that Pacific navigation was not semiotic concealment but cosmological reading—that the navigator reads the ocean rather than writing it. The RSP data extend this argument beyond anything he could have anticipated. It is not only the navigator who reads rather than writes. It is the community in Hyde Park. It is, perhaps, the Victorian woman in the drawing room. The question is not whether human communities produce signs under pressure or produce signs in play. The question is what the sign-bearing environment was already carrying, and what the community learned to detect in it, and why certain communities in certain conditions develop the sensitivity to detect what others, in the same space, cannot feel at all.”
This last point—why certain communities develop the sensitivity—is where the pressure thesis retains its most defensible remnant, and where I want to be precise about what the RSP data do and do not establish. The data do not show that pressure is irrelevant to semiotic sensitivity. They show that pressure is not the generative condition of semiotic content. What the data suggest, and what Oduya-Strand has theorised at length in her 2249 paper “Tuning and Detection: A Revised Account of Semiotic Community Formation,” is that communities under pressure develop what she calls attentional tuning—a heightened sensitivity to subtle environmental patterns—and that this tuning enables them to detect resonance impressions that less attentionally tuned communities move through without registering. The gay men of 1960s Sydney were not generating their sign vocabulary from scratch. They were, in part, tuned by their circumstances into sensitivity to a semiotic environment that was already there, already structured, already carrying content that their predecessors in the same space had deposited and that the land had retained.
The implications for Arredondo-Weiss’s play-and-delight framework are equally unsettling, though differently so. Arredondo-Weiss argued that the Lindisfarne Gospels represent a counter-example to pressure semiotics: semiotic richness produced by devotional joy rather than survival necessity. The RSP has not yet conducted resonance mapping of Lindisfarne itself—the island presents significant logistical challenges, and the project’s current fieldwork is concentrated elsewhere—but the Bergen group’s preliminary satellite resonance surveys of the site have detected field signatures of unusual density and age that the group’s Director, Professor Sigrid Thorvaldsen-Okeke, described in a 2248 project report with notable restraint as “strongly suggestive of pre-Christian accumulated cognitive resonance of a kind that we are not yet able to characterise.” What this means, if it means what the data appear to suggest, is that the monks of Lindisfarne chose their location in part because the location was already doing something—already carrying a structured resonance impression from the human and, the data hint, non-human communities that had inhabited and moved through that island outcrop for millennia before the monastery arrived. The extraordinary elaboration of the Lindisfarne Gospels may not be, or not only be, the product of devotional joy. It may be the product of devotional joy amplified by a semiotic environment of unusual richness—a richness the monks could feel in their habitation of the place, could not name or theorise, and expressed instead in the only vocabulary available to them, which was beauty.
Here I must introduce the finding that has generated the most controversy within the RSP and within the broader field, and which I present here in its current state, which is preliminary, contested, and in my judgement unavoidable. The Bergen group’s deep neural archaeology work—the aspect of the project furthest from conventional semiotics and most dependent on the new instruments developed since 2230—has detected resonance impressions in non-inhabited environments: oceanic deep-water zones, primary forest canopy, and, most provocatively, geological formations with no significant history of human occupation. These impressions share the structural properties of the resonance traces left by human cognitive aggregates. They are not random. They are not artefactual—the Bergen team has subjected their instruments to every available form of error-checking and the signatures survive. And they predate any plausible human presence in their locations by intervals ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.
Professor Thorvaldsen-Okeke presented these findings to the RSP’s 2249 internal review with a statement I want to quote at some length, because it represents the clearest articulation I have encountered of what the data may require us to accept: “The conservative interpretation is that we are detecting the traces of non-human cognitive aggregates—other species, in sufficient density and sustained cognitive engagement, leaving resonance impressions in their environments, which human communities then encounter and learn to read. The less conservative interpretation is that we are detecting something we do not yet have a name for: a structuring property of certain environments that is not the product of any cognitive aggregate but that has the formal properties of structured meaning, and that living systems—human and non-human alike—learn to detect and respond to and eventually encode in transmissible cultural form. I am not prepared to claim the second interpretation. I am not prepared to rule it out.”
I am not prepared to rule it out either. And this is what renders both Okonkwo-Bernstein and Arredondo-Weiss not merely incomplete but organised around a founding assumption that may require abandonment. Both assumed, with the unexamined confidence of scholars working within a tradition that never questioned the assumption, that signs are made by minds. The RSP data suggest that minds may be, in part, detectors of signs that exist prior to and independent of the minds that detect them. If this is correct—and I repeat: the evidence is preliminary, contested, and in my judgement unavoidable—then the history of semiotics requires rewriting not at its edges but at its centre.
The fan snapping shut in a Victorian drawing room. The handkerchief placed in a Sydney pub. The phrase dropped into a digital feed. The swell read below the hull. Okonkwo-Bernstein read these as instances of human communities producing signs under pressure. Arredondo-Weiss read the last as an exception. The RSP data invite us to read all of them differently: as instances of communities whose circumstances had tuned them into sensitivity, detecting and encoding and transmitting in cultural form a structured semiotic environment that they did not invent, that was there before them, that will be there after them, and that we are only now developing instruments capable of beginning to read directly rather than through the communities that learned to feel it first.
Lady C—— wrote, in 1861, that the language of fans and flowers and dress was “the only territory that has always been entirely ours.” The RSP data suggest, with the gentleness appropriate to a correction of the dead, that she was wrong about the ownership but right about the territory. The territory was there before her. It will outlast the language she used to describe it. What was entirely hers, and what is entirely ours, is the extraordinary human capacity to enter an environment already dense with structured meaning, to attend to it with the particular quality of attention that circumstances have sharpened, and to make of it something that can be given to others—which is to say, to make of reception a gift.
That is not nothing. It may be everything. It is, in any case, not what either of my distinguished predecessors thought it was, and the work of saying more clearly what it is has barely begun.
Professor Azande Pieterse-Nakamura holds the inaugural Arredondo-Weiss Chair of Transspecies Semiotics and Distributed Meaning at the Universidad Autónoma del Pacífico Sur, Valparaíso, established in 2238 through the bequest of the Arredondo-Weiss Foundation and the co-funding of the UNESCO Global Archive of Living Sign Systems, itself the institutional legacy of the Okonkwo-Bernstein Institute. She is Principal Investigator of the Resonance Semiosis Project (RSP-4) and serves on the advisory board of the Bergen Institute for Deep Neural Archaeology. Her previous monographs include What the Stone Knows: Resonance, Impression, and the Non-Human History of Meaning (2246) and The Tuned Community: Pressure, Sensitivity, and the Detection of Pre-Existing Sign Structure (2248). She dedicates this lecture to the memory of Professor Yael Okonkwo-Bernstein, whose map she has left, and to the memory of Dr. Fumiko Arredondo-Weiss, whose delight in the surplus sign she has tried to preserve in the argument that supersedes it. She acknowledges that this lecture will itself, in time, require superseding, and finds this prospect more interesting than alarming.
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