K O D I K A S / C O D E Volume 41 (2018) · No. 3 - 4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) Abstract: In current debates about the Anthropocene, the notion of ‘ technosphere ’ has gained analytical traction. It is loosely defined as the conjunction of all technological systems embodied in artefacts that have been created by humans since the domestication of fire and the invention of the first tools. Authors such as Peter Haff argue that the technosphere can and should be investigated as a physical phenomenon. We agree but raise the question of how those features can be accounted for that are often conceived of as specifically human, such as culture, agency, consciousness and creativity. We suggest that technosphere science needs to include semiotics: All physical interactions in the technosphere are mediated via physical signs, and signs also mediate human action. This requires a fundamental rethinking of our common conceptions of doing science; especially, we advocate a richer conceptualisation of causality. We build on two classical approaches to semiotics: C. S. Peirce ’ s semiotics, as further developed in modern biosemiotics, and Yuri Lotman ’ s notion of semiosphere. We posit the principle of ‘ bimodality ’ , where technosphere interactions are always and everywhere in the two modes of matter-energy transformations and semiosis. In this framework, we suggest that the economy is a core constituent of the technosphere, mediating between physical processes and human agency. To pursue the implications of our approach, we suggest that research into the phenomenon of the city and urbanisation is a central concern of semiotic analysis of the technosphere. In the evolution of urban systems, physical aspects (such as the evolution of material networks and physical flows) always work together with semiotic aspects of social networks, to produce the semiosphere of a city. Keywords: Anthropocene, technosphere, semiosphere, biosemiotics, Peirce, Lotman, agency, design, cities 1 Introduction: The case for strengthening the role of human sciences in Anthropocene research Recent advances in geology and Earth system sciences suggest that we have entered the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene (Monastersky 2015; Zalasiewicz et al. 2017), although the term itself is contested (Grusin 2017; Schneiderman 2015). By this notion, researchers and increasingly the informed public refer to the well-established fact that human action and its physical manifestations have become a geological force shaping the further evolution of the biosphere and the Earth system, with climate change being the most salient phenomenon in public debate and the policy domain. This observation raises the question of which methods are most appropriate for analysing the Anthropocene (Verburg et al. 2016; Malhi 2017). Scientists tend to assume that we can extend established scientific methods based on principles of causal analysis, quantification and model-building (for example, Donges et al. 2018). In practical terms, this means, for example, that models of climate change are enriched by models of human global society, politics and the economy. We can also ask how the ‘ human sciences ’ or the ‘ humanities ’ are most relevant here, since they deal with human action (Latour 2015; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017). The important point has been raised in the debate that scientific approaches tend to be a Procrustean bed into which the bewildering complexity, dynamics and creativity of human life is pressed, constructing a ‘ system ’ out of what may appear to be a mess: Wars, technological revolutions, cultural upheavals, religious fundamentalism, economic crises and miracles, you name it. The humanities in the broadest sense have made great progress in describing and understanding these phenomena, but they apply different methods from those of the sciences and are divided into various disciplines that lack a common ground in method, even within a single discipline, e. g. sociology. The textual disciplines, including philosophy, history, linguistic, literary and cultural studies, together with the ‘ new humanities ’ (Posthumanities Hub 2019), have drifted even further apart from the sciences, each side doubtful about the other ’ s capacity to describe the real. Viewed from the outside, ‘ anything goes ’ here, from qualitative to quantitative analysis, from Marxism to libertarian thinking, from game theory to hermeneutics, from positivism to postmodernism. Model builders in the sciences will be apt to select those approaches that are methodologically close to their own, such as economics, the human science that claims to be scientific in the sense that it is based on quantitative analysis, mathematical modelling and increasingly also experimental approaches (e. g. game theory). The economic mode of modelling often seems to be under-complex in comparison with current practice in the sciences because it remains wedded to certain fundamental propositions about how markets work and individuals behave (economists increasingly agree, e. g. Banerjee 2020). This springs to the eye in the difficulties that researchers face when fixing even the most central parameters of the models, such as interest rates, grounded on more fundamental drivers such as time preferences (Cohen et al. 2020). Therefore, we think it is necessary to explore systematically how the humanities may be included in scientific approaches to the Anthropocene. Already, this need is recognised in down-to-earth research on behavioural aspects of policies directed at the challenge of climate change, such as effective measures for saving energy (Sorrell 2015). There may be a bias towards integrating engineering and economics in energy policy, but researchers recognise that this angle is far too narrow (Sovacool 2014; Spreng 2016). Another area in which this need is salient is grounding the analysis of global change in the analysis of local processes and conditions, which are plural and diverse almost by definition (Biermann et al. 2015). Necessarily, we diagnose a tension between the micro-level analysis of single phenomena, where methodological plurality can be handled pragmatically, and the need to refer to 176 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) unifying conceptual frameworks when trying to build global models of the interaction between humans and the Earth system. In other words, when dealing with the Anthropocene, we are in search for a unifying theory that can provide the foundations on which specific models of global change can build, such that differences can be understood as emergent, rather than simply listed as if they illustrate mere complicatedness. In this paper, we want to suggest that such a theory is available, in the form of a metalanguage that can help to integrate the different sciences and methods. This is derived from semiotics, the science of signs. Currently, semiotics is mostly a fringe approach across various disciplines where it has found its specific applications, such as in linguistics and in literary studies in the humanities, or in biology as biosemiotics (see Chandler 2017; Eco 1976; Nöth, 1990); and needless to say there are differing, mutually incompatible traditions in semiotic analysis. Nowhere it is the dominant paradigm. However, we think that this opens the possibility that organising these peripheral applications into one general framework will be a very powerful means to achieve cross-disciplinary integration. In the context of the Earth Sciences, this potential has already been recognised by Baker in suggesting the concept of ‘ geosemiosis ’ (1999); and Petrilli and Ponzio ’ s cognate compound of the ‘ semiobiosphere ’ (2007). In detailing our approach, we go back to two thinkers who have shaped modern semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce and Yuri Lotman. From Peirce, we take the analysis of semiotic causality and the basic analysis of signs; from Lotman we take the concept of the semiosphere and its dynamics and creativity. We connect the notion of semiosphere, itself derived from V. I. Vernadsky ’ s (1998) theory of the biosphere, with another concept that emerged in scientific discourse about the Anthropocene, the ‘ technosphere ’ (Haff 2012; Herrmann-Pillath 2013). By this term, some researchers directly identify the material structures and impact that human action has created over the past millennia, and which is directly observable both in geological sediments and in the current distribution of technological artefacts across the globe. It includes both intentionally designed structures and unintentionally produced by-products (such as waste in the form of plastic residuals) (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017 a). We submit and defend the claim that for analysing technosphere evolution, semiotics is essential. We introduce the principle of the bimodality of the technosphere and semiosphere, meaning that physical causality mediated by technology is always and necessarily a semiotic phenomenon. To achieve the goal of synthesising interdisciplinarity, we need to fix various focal points and guiding perspectives. Our purpose is to establish a conceptual apparatus that can account for the planetary extent of Anthropocene phenomena, linking the transformational processes of life (the biosphere), semiosis (the semiosphere) and artefactual evolution (the technosphere). Within the term ‘ semiosis ’ (the operation of signification in whatever medium, from biogeochemical signals to languages to social and technological media) we include all signification, communication, language and culture. ‘ Semiotic space ’ - the semiosphere - is of planetary extent, enveloping the larger environment of the Earth system. Lotman (1990) developed the idea of the semiosphere from Vernadsky ’ s concept of the biosphere. This move enabled a radical reconceptualisation of semiotics. It shifts from a focus on abstract sign systems with an atom-like ‘ smallest unit of signification ’ (i. e. the Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 177 signifier in Saussurian linguistics: Chandler 2017) and on the individual utterance (rules of selection and combination of units), to a more fundamental model of the relations between two or more untranslatable systems. These may be found at the micro-scale of signs or the macro-scale of languages and cultures. This model puts communication (translation between and among incommensurable codes) and culture (social groups that make and share knowledge) at the heart of understanding human forms of life. In linking Lotman ’ s approach with modern forms of semiotics as deployed in biosemiotics (Salthe 1993, 2007; Wheeler 2016 is a kindred effort), we argue that these ideas are productive for analysing technosphere evolution and its interaction with other planetary spheres. Our approach is from a systems and evolutionary perspective, wherein the function of culture is to constitute and sustain the internal coherence of groups, creating identities within and boundaries between groups, as envisaged in modern theories of group selection (Sober and Wilson 1998; Leigh 2009). It is groups that produce and reproduce knowledge, which is the resource for both ‘ sustainability ’ (transmission of capabilities across generations) and ‘ adaptability ’ (system-level change in the context of environmental uncertainty). Within this evolutionary-complexity model, ‘ language ’ cannot be seen as an individual accomplishment or practice, nor can it be understood in the singular, whether abstract (as in Saussurian linguistics) or any particular language (e. g. German, Mandarin). Semiosis requires “ an open number of diverse languages, each of which is reciprocally dependent on the other ” (Lotman 2009: 2). Reality (extra-lingual objects) cannot be known via one language alone, but only partially through a multiplicity of languages, mutually untranslatable (or of limited translatability). It follows that semiotics focuses on boundaries between languages or cultures, on translation between mutually untranslatable systems, and on dialogic relations within and among language-systems. Communication (semiosis in use) only emerges as the output of constant translation across boundaries, with all the attendant mixed motives, misunderstandings, desire, duplicity, hostility and lies that characterise any cross-border dialogue. Semiosis at once governs and undermines the relations of any living organism with any other (without using the term ‘ semiosis ’ , this idea originated with von Uexkuell and Kriszat 1956). Thus, you need to know where you (organism) and ‘ we ’ (cultural group) stop and the external environment begins; within that context you must recognise potential meal and potential mate; distinguish your prey from your predator, amity from enmity. You must learn how to interact with all comers while (where necessary) disguising your own purposes like Trickster. In any semiotic encounter, there is no such thing as the flow or transmission of information or truth, only signals that must be perceived, filtered, interpreted, answered, used, or not, by each organism in dialogue with others, before communication can be said to have occurred or knowledge to have been made. All these capabilities are subject to evolutionary pressure and adaptation, such that semiosis in the biosphere has itself evolved elaborate, complex and adaptable mechanisms, well beyond the limits of the human or of natural language, to govern meaningful interactions within and between species (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). Our paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 details the concept of technosphere and develops one central idea of this paper: Technosphere evolution is not subject by human agency, but human agency is a driver that is endogenously constituted by technosphere evolution. 178 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) Section 3 introduces the notion of bimodality of technosphere and semiosphere, starting out by discussing the notion of ‘ design ’ in technology. We argue that design is semiosis mediating between producers and users of technology. Therefore, technological evolution is a population-level phenomenon crucially driven by multi-dimensional conjunctions of functions and meanings. Section 4 explores the analytical foundations for this, first in terms of Peirce ’ s triadic analysis of the sign, i. e. the interplay of efficient, formal and final causes, and second in terms of Lotman ’ s systemic macro-view of the semiosphere as a universe of fundamentally incommensurable semiotic systems aka languages. Section 5 presents the sketch of an application: This is the analysis of the city as the central artefactual complex of the technosphere. We argue that cities comprise a crucial empirical phenomenon in understanding the interaction between humans and the Earth system, and we defend the view that a semiotic approach to cities is most productive here. Section 6 draws conclusions for building better models of the geosemiotic and semiobiospheric Earth System in the Anthropocene. 2 The technosphere and the issue of human agency In current debates about the Anthropocene, the notion of ‘ technosphere ’ has attracted much attention and controversy (Haff 2012; Herrmann-Pillath 2013, 2018; Donges et al. 2017). Like the semiosphere, this term is coined after the precedent of the ‘ biosphere ’ : The claim is made that in the transition to the new geological age, human action results in, is mediated and enabled by and embodied in the technosphere. The term ‘ sphere ’ is explicitly conceived as an element in analysing the Earth system, which transcends other disciplinary approaches to technology, such as in economics. In the narrow geological sense, a sphere is a kind of layer in the Earth system, akin to a membrane, which is visible via the geological traces that it leaves. The biosphere is embodied in the geological strata filled with fossils and shaped by the impact of life on geological processes, including the proportion of gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the composition of sedimentary rocks. Similarly, the technosphere is visible in the very thin layer of similar material embodiments, the ubiquity of which has motivated the process of officially recognising the Anthropocene as a geological epoch (Williams et al. 2016). In addition, we can also measure the size and reach of the technosphere in the present (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017 a). However, for understanding the impact of human action on the Earth system this is not enough, as it only focuses on embodiments which are themselves ‘ timeless ’ , being products of evolution that no longer evolve. The idea that the biosphere is a regulatory system that governs many geological processes has gained analytical traction, taking radical form in the notion of ‘ Gaia ’ , i. e. approaching the Earth as a planet deeply shaped by living systems (Lovelock 1990). At this point the analogous treatment of the technosphere becomes highly controversial, raising two questions: 1. Is the technosphere just the human-made part of the biosphere, to which humans as biological organisms certainly belong? a. or is it emerging from the biosphere on a higher systemic level, hence encompassing the biosphere? Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 179 b. or are both spheres on the same level and co-evolve according to their own respective logic? 2. How far is the technosphere subject to human design? Alternatively, is the technosphere evolving according to its own evolutionary principles, like the biosphere? a. Even more complicated, does technosphere evolution enable human interference and even regulation of the biosphere, independent of the question of whether its own evolution is by human design? These are questions for the field, not for this paper, but we can highlight one methodological issue. The notion of technosphere goes significantly beyond the notion of ‘ technology ’ as usually understood, because it explicitly treats technology as a system that is global and allencompassing. Since technological artefacts harness physical mechanisms and are always materially embodied, it seems straightforward to suggest, as Haff does, a ‘ physical theory of the technosphere ’ (Haff 2018). However, while affirming its physical nature, we contend that the concept of technology also requires a sociocultural dimension. In the social sciences and the humanities, research on technology has flourished for decades, influencing foundational theorising, such as actor-network theory (Latour 2005) and the recent ‘ material turn ’ (for example, Bennett 2010). Here, we wish to highlight an issue that remains at the core of the questions above. This is the issue of human agency. A fundamental difference between biosphere and technosphere evolution could be that the former follows principles as envisaged by modern evolutionary theory, i. e. that there is no intentional design, whereas the technosphere might be conceived as being subject to human design. This could lead to the conclusion that in the long run, technological evolution might even subject the biosphere to human design, such as via genetic engineering or climate engineering (Wainwright and Mann 2018). However, this view is theoretically naïve in two senses, informed by the social sciences. The first perspective is provided by economics. On the one hand, most economists tend to think that technology is designed by humans, for example, in the context of the theory of entrepreneurship. But that does not mean that the outcome of human actions is fully determined by human design. On the contrary, modern economics is grounded in the idea that markets are complex systems that transcend individual design and are generators of information and knowledge that enable individual decisions but cannot be subject to human planning in turn (Hayek 1973). In the subdiscipline of evolutionary economics, this axiom has also been applied to technology: Technology evolves without being predictable by humans and susceptible to human design on the aggregate level: the creators of the internet could not imagine and design all the subsequent uses and inventions emerging from its evolution, which were mainly driven by markets (Mokyr 2009; Potts 2011). The second perspective is from debates across various disciplines, reaching from cognitive sciences to sociology, which highlight the distributed nature of human agency, for which new technical terms have been created, such as ‘ agencements ’ (Callon 2008) or ‘ assemblages ’ (De Landa 2006) in the social sciences or notions of distributed cognition in the cognitive sciences (Clark 2011). Taken together, these lines of thinking imply that human agency is not ‘ individualised ’ but enabled and embodied in sociophysical structures, which in turn are the ontological units to which the analytical notion of agency must be assigned. 180 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) The present authors have both argued for ‘ externalism ’ to explain human creativity, as opposed to the methodological individualism of the behavioural sciences. Externalism requires a semiotic (systems or network) explanation for creative, communicative and technological agency, rather than one sourced to individual needs, desires, decisions or actions (Herrmann-Pillath 2009; Hartley 2015 a). Externalism appears to be an evolutionary adaptation for the Homo genus, enabling complex ‘ reciprocity ’ - and species survival - at greater-than-kin scale (Bowles and Gintis 2013). If we combine these two perspectives into one, we can distinguish neatly between technologies as single devices and mechanisms on the one hand, and the technosphere on the other hand. The technosphere as such cannot be the object of human design if we approach the latter in the individualised sense. There is the possibility that collective processes and intersubjective dynamics drive the interaction between design and technosphere (compare Donges et al. 2017). But then we must acknowledge that these processes are themselves enabled and mediated by the technosphere. Even more fundamentally, it would be impossible analytically to separate human agency from the technosphere as a supposedly independent domain of ‘ material artefacts ’ , and vice versa. This would revive a Cartesian metaphysics that distinguishes ontologically between mind and matter and would uncritically posit the primacy of mind over matter. Human agency is conditioned and shaped by technosphere evolution and is at the same time one of its endogenous drivers. This is evident if we consider the role of media in shaping the distributed cognitive capacities of humans. Modern cognitive sciences have highlighted the substantial differences that a technique such as writing makes for cognitive operations (Menary 2007), which is further complicated by the role of technologies of printing and disseminating texts (Hartley and Potts 2014: 215 ff.). Along with other cultural theorists (Ong 2012), Lotman (1990: 245 ff.) argues that literary societies develop fundamentally different features than non-literary societies. Therefore, we cannot separate this specific technological domain from the human domain, but this is a process of cultural (group) not cognitive (individual) evolution. The same argument applies for technologies that enable specific forms of communication and social interaction. Logistical and transport technologies (a. k. a. physical communication) enabled the emergence and thickening of interregional and global webs of interaction, which in turn have shaped forms and expressions of human agency (McNeill and McNeill 2013). Infrastructural technologies enable the growth of cities as special places where collective human creativity is intensified, and so on (West 2017). All these technologies are grounded in more fundamental general-purpose technologies, especially in energy production, storage and transmission, and in equally fundamental ‘ social technologies ’ of power, hierarchy and organisation (e. g. ‘ all roads lead to Rome ’ ; Mann 1986). Obviously, we cannot adopt a naïve materialist position where technology is an ontologically separate domain that evolves without interference of the human side, but at the same time neither can we conclude that therefore human agency dominates and controls technosphere evolution (Haff 2014 a). Instead, we posit a complex system in which both domains are inextricably enmeshed via many feedback loops. For understanding this system, we need another analytical category that bridges the domains. This is the notion of the sign. Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 181 3 Bimodality of technosphere and semiosphere For an appropriate understanding of technology, it is of central importance to analyse the notion of ‘ design ’ , as was emphasised early on by Herbert Simon (1996). The meaning of this term is ambiguous: One the one hand, it refers to an activity of humans, which is the meaning that predominates in current debate; on the other hand, design is a property of the technological artefact. The term refers to both the activity and its results as manifest in the artefact. Technologies are subject to human design in the sense that individual artefacts are designed to work. However, this apparently commonsensical view is biased towards the production side of technology and overlooks the essential role of the user. Design mediates between forms of distributed knowledge embodied in technology; specifically, producer knowledge and user knowledge (Macedo and Herrmann-Pillath 2019). In practice, this means that producers of technology know how to make an artefact, but they also need to discover a design that enables users to apply the artefacts properly in functional contexts. As is well known from the history of technology, this does not mean that producers are able to anticipate all forms of user knowledge that emerge during the process of applying a technology. Often users invent new uses that then are taken up by producers in remaking the technology (e. g. Pink et al. 2018). In modern views of innovation, theorists have discarded the linear model - from invention to usage - in favour of a complex systems approach with multiple feedback embedded in networks of producers and users, and some would even assign the leading role to the user side (Hartley, Wen and Li 2015; Foth et al. 2011). The role of user knowledge is even more salient if we consider the technosphere in toto. Especially in economics there is a tendency only to look at the process of innovationproduction and hence recent-vintage technologies as these extend the productivity frontier. However, in fact, in the technosphere, all kinds of technologies of different vintages co-exist and work together, mainly driven by the evolution of user knowledge (Edgerton 2008). Thus, the career of any technology or technological artefact must include the dimension of innovation-consumption, most clearly seen in the fashion system, where Hartley and Montgomery (2009) call it ‘ consumer entrepreneurship ’ : How designed ensembles are chosen, combined and used, and by whom, becomes a directional resource of future production. User knowledge mediates between artefacts and functions, insofar as human interference is indispensable for making technology work, activating its fulfilling functions. In this process, design is crucial as it enables this activation. Accordingly, we can approach design as a sign. That means that every technology is not only a physical mechanism but also a semiotic process. This dual structure we call ‘ bimodality ’ of matter-energy (physical) mode and the mode of semiosis (Herrmann-Pillath 2013): l Technology involves the matter-energy mode in the sense that a physical artefact mobilises an efficient-causal mechanism that produces a certain physical effect: For example, the engine propels the car forward. l Technology involves semiosis in the sense that the design motivates users to relate the physical effect to specific functions: the car is a transportation device, a status good, a manifestation of individual autonomy. 182 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) In the background here lurks an important analytical distinction between individual and population level, related to the distinction between token and type (emphasized in Peircean semiotics, see Hulswit 2002 and Short 2007). Whereas efficient causality in the matterenergy mode is a series of strictly single instances of applying a technology ( ‘ tokens ’ ), the semiotic mode operates on the level of the co-evolution of signs, user knowledge and applications ( ‘ types ’ or ‘ forms ’ ). This is well known from the history of technology: Design is normally a long drawn out process. A standard example is the evolution of the design of bicycles, which initially manifested a wide range of variants (such as varying sizes of the two wheels or varying methods of propulsion) in an experimentation phase; then narrowed down to a standardised design in a mass-manufacturing and marketing phase; and later fanned out again, meeting needs in different contexts (different sports, age-groups and so on) in a customisation phase. Each of these phases depends on the previous one, but each solves the design problem differently: there is no ‘ ur-bicycle ’ whose form is determined by efficient causality; and all fixes are temporary. Design as a sign must be approached in the analytical framework of language: Language is a population-level phenomenon sui generis. However, at first sight, there is a fundamental difference between language and physical mechanisms: In the latter, the generative process seems unequivocally tied to a specific effect, whereas the signs and semantics of language are fundamentally arbitrary ( Joseph 2017). But this conclusion is premature: The causal effect is functionally indeterminate, it is the design that fixes the relationship between effect and function. For example, today bicycles come in a bewildering variety of designs related to various functional contexts, reflecting the evolutionary dynamics of markets which connect producers and users. Thus, we can say that technology evolves semiotically, governed by genres of usage. Bicycle-technology ‘ is ’ what users say it is, as determined and constrained by market maturity, where differentiation proliferates not only between elite (racing) and mass (once work-transport but now children ’ s leisure) but also across taste cultures or social network markets (Potts et al. 2008), based on lifestyle (e. g. using ecological materials like bamboo), catering for niche user-capabilities (motor-assisted bikes) or conspicuous consumption (status, branding and choice, e. g. Pinarello). As we see, we can relate the notion of design to both aspects of human agency that we introduced previously: l Design is the sign that mediates market dynamics in connecting producers and users, and therefore we can approach markets as the societal form that realise the semiosis of the technosphere. l Design mediates, enables and produces human agency vis à vis the functions that are fulfilled by the effect produced by the artefactual mechanism; semiosis establishes distributed agency. An important consequence of bimodality is that the evolution of the technosphere is fundamentally governed by semiosis, such that the physical effects of technological artefacts are inextricably enmeshed with and driven by semiosis or, in more familiar terms, are shaped by cultural evolution. As Veblen (1914) put it long ago, in the context of markets it is not possible to reduce the evolution of technology to engineering principles. We can sort this out analytically by distinguishing between meaning and function: Whereas in the Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 183 matter-energy mode, physical effects are established (will the bike work? ), in the semiotic mode meanings are established (will anyone want to use it? ). From this a simple definition of ‘ function ’ emerges: Function is the bimodal conjunction of meaning and effect. Searle (1995) approaches function as ‘ observer dependent fact ’ , even when referring to biological functions, such as the function of the heart. The technosphere is a cultural phenomenon because design is meaningful. Human food consumption, for example, involves complex meanings and technologies to transform raw matter into edible cooking. Dishes are indicators of group identity, they may represent idiosyncratic individual habits, as well as in-group status differentiation or gendered divisions of labour in food choices, preparation, sequence and service, and so on. This bimodality of food consumption can be grasped by the distinction between ‘ wants ’ and ‘ needs ’ (Witt 2000, 2016; Berridge 2009): Culinary technologies may be driven by functions as needs, such as the nutritional requirements of the human organism, but they are also, and often primarily, driven by culturally shaped wants: It is neither the nutritional efficiency of a substance nor your personal choices that makes it edible, but culture. Whales, dogs, dragonflies and locusts are all eaten in some cultures but are deemed inedible in others. Accordingly, we suggest that the principle of bimodality implies that the technosphere is one side of a coin that manifests the semiosphere on the other side. The technosphere is the semiosphere, insofar as functions are always established via semiosis, and the semiosphere is the technosphere, as all signs are material artefacts that are produced by technologies of semiosis. 4 Semiosis as driver of innovation: straddling the real and the possible The concepts introduced so far can be further detailed via reference to Peirce and Lotman. With the help of Peirce, we can pursue a more exact analysis of causal patterns in semiosis; with the help of Lotman we can understand the larger patterns of the evolving semiospheresystem, in particular the important aspect of creativity in the semiosphere, which translates into innovation as a fundamental marker of the technosphere. Turning to Peirce, we refer to modern interpretations, especially Short (2007) and the analysis of semiosis as conducted in biosemiotics (see Herrmann-Pillath 2013). One of the hallmarks of Peirce ’ s semiotics is triadic analysis, which ties up with the conjunction of three different types of causality (compare Deacon 2013). l In Aristotelian terms causality is efficient, final and formal. l Ontologically, Peircean semiotics distinguishes between object, sign and interpretant. l Technologically, these would correspond to artefact, design and user. The object is the artefact. Peirce conceives of the world as being fundamentally random (his ‘ tychism ’ ), so every object is causally connected with other objects in randomly producing effects. This is the domain of ‘ efficient ’ causality: The artefact causes effects, independent of its intended functions. This is a very important aspect in analysing the technosphere: The technosphere is permeated by artefacts which produce effects that are without function, commonly called ‘ waste ’ . Geologically, waste is the remnant of past technosphere activity 184 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) that is no longer functional. Effects of artefacts that have functions in the present are not waste. However, the criterion of efficient causality does not suffice to distinguish waste from non-waste. This distinction is established by semiosis. Semiotic causality is not efficient but supervenes on efficient causality. In a static perspective, the sign is what distinguishes waste from non-waste: This is ‘ formal ’ causality. We notice that Peirce himself did not relate to formal causes explicitly, but his notion of finality involves what Hulswit (2002) has analysed as transfer of form, which we diagnose analytically as formal cause. It should be noticed that this is arbitrary: For example, ‘ wasting ’ resources can be a sign of high social status, the essence of Veblen ’ s ‘ conspicuous waste ’ (such as producing copious CO 2 by driving a Ferrari, which then contributes to global warming). The arbitrariness of the sign is reduced by the working of ‘ final ’ causality, which relates effects with functions. Final causality is the property of the evolutionary process that leads to the emergence of meanings of artefact. Thus, driving a Ferrari in Dubai cannot be explained by the needs of transport but emerges as a pattern in user wants, guided by its meaning as a status good in a social network market (Potts and Hartley 2015). In Peirce ’ s thinking, semiosis is a process that creates knowledge about the artefact. Peirce is one of the intellectual forebears of pragmatism. In this view, the object is what it does. However, what it does is ontologically indeterminate in a random world. Hence, semiosis is a process that imbues objects or artefacts with information (which can be interpreted in terms of mathematical information theory, see Herrmann-Pillath 2013, i. e. as semantic information, see Kolchinsky and Wolpert 2018). Information is the conjunction of meaning and effect in the function of the artefact. This relates to Peirce ’ s fundamental ontological assumption that regularities in the world are not pre-existing but evolve: If we approach regularities as constraining possible events, hence creating states with higher information content, then we can directly interpret the evolution of the semiosphere as a process of accumulating information embodied in emergent regularities. In the technosphere, single functions interrelate with other functions. In the semiosphere, signs never stand alone: A principle of semiotics is that signs can only be defined negatively, ‘ being ’ only what other signs in the system are not. This is a fundamental insight about language: The meaning of words is in their use (i. e. in rule-governed combinations or codes), and uses of words are embedded in the entire universe of relational meanings, including conflict over meaning, where ‘ conflict ’ can be characterised as disagreement with or defection from one population of rules (Dopfer et al. 2004) to establish another. Therefore, analysing semiosis is holistic - it ’ s a systems science - even if in practice we look at single artefacts and objects. Whereas efficient causal effects seem to stand alone, functions are always embedded in the entire web or networks of functions, mirroring the embeddedness of meanings of signs in the entire space of signs. Turning to Lotman ’ s analysis of the semiosphere: This directly connects with recent thinking about technology. We can distinguish between the current state of functions as mediated by semiosis and a potential state or possibility space of functions that could be achieved via the creation of new artefacts (Arthur 2009). However, such creativity is always determined and driven by the meanings established in the current state of the semiosphere. In other words, the semiosphere creates a set of possible worlds that can be discovered by Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 185 human action, with or without prior intention (for a related view, see Beckert 2016). Lotman ’ s concept of ‘ the semiosphere ’ is not confined to an abstract-universal model, however, because Lotman locates semiosis itself in the interaction between at least two systems, for example two languages at macro-scale or, at micro-scale, the communication between a mother (verbal) and infant (non-verbal). In each and indeed all cases, it is only as an interactive process of mutual translation between semiotic systems (that are in principle incommensurable or untranslatable one to the other) that communication and the creation of new meanings takes place. In other words, meaningfulness is not a ‘ function ’ of the speaker or of the language but of translation among different semiotic systems, which may be at macro-scale (speech-community or national language), or at meso-scale (institution, genre, specialist/ scientific codes), or they may be experienced as micro-systems (parent/ infant; doctor/ patient; artistic work/ reader-audience). The process of translation includes user-response (cybernetic feedback) as well as producer-intent and code-context, such that meaningful communication is always an approximation, that is, indeterminate and open in nature; open to deception and lies as much as to precision and truth. Technology too is dialogic in this structural sense; more like dance than monologue. In actualising certain states of these possible worlds, constraints are important that are conceivable in terms of efficient causality. In the history of technology, sometimes all these aspects concentrate in certain events of invention and innovation. Edison ’ s inventions of the electric bulb or the telephone are illuminating (Carlson 2000). Inventive activity is a sequence of random variations until a certain combination produces the desired effects, for which a large number of previously invented component artefacts need to be combined (Arthur, 2009). Specific functions relate to other functions. Edison was not only aware of these functional interdependencies within the artefact (filament, gas, bulb), but also in the wider economic and user (cultural) system: especially in the production and distribution of electricity - complex dynamics in markets and politics. His technological ‘ invention ’ of the incandescent filament was preceded by Sawyer-Man in the US and Swan in the UK. Edison eventually bought out both of these companies, such that economic clout constrained the technology by standardising it around his version. He was equally active in experimenting with social uses for electric light, promoting systems for streetlighting (modelled on gaslighting), electricity generation and the electric meter. 1 These trajectories result in the exclusion of possible alternatives, which in turn determines the further course of technological evolution. In other words, evolution in the semiosphere is always happening via the conjunction of realised and possible worlds, through patterns of path-dependency and generic familiarity. These may sustain an industry long after it is physically redundant, compared with potentially more efficient technologies (examples range from the internal combustion engine to cathode-ray TV-sets). Lotman argues that for enabling creativity (that is, the production of newness, not just the repetition of rules), what is essential are ruptures and tensions between different languages. This applies already on the microlevel, if we consider the relationship between different signs or different meanings of signs. As an example, consider the car and the possible transition from the internal combustion engine to the electric car (Macedo and Herrmann- 1 See: https: / / www.energy.gov/ articles/ history-light-bulb (for a US-centric view) (last access June 21, 2021). 186 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) Pillath 2019). At first sight, the functions fulfilled by both types of engines are the same, such as moving a car through space at a certain speed. But even on this level, there are different semantics involved: on the one hand, the semantics of performance and speed in the context of the car as a status good and, on the other, the semantics of environment and climate change. Although these semantic spaces are public and accessible to everybody, different groups in society activate them differentially, and therefore the ultimate trajectory of the evolution of automotive technology depends on how the different semantics are translated into each other. Therefore, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk are not just engineers, but also and primarily cultural innovators. The original Tesla sedan was a high-end high performance car: This artefact was a message intended to bridge the semantic space between status and environment, thereby opening up a new trajectory. Musk ’ s electric car ‘ signalled ’ macho sports car (narcissistic) rather than ‘ environment-friendly container ’ (oedipal) (Prato and Trivero 1985: 29). As Lotman points out, in such situations bifurcation (actually, multi-furcation) happens, which allows room for random factors or, better, individual factors to determine the realisation of a specific trajectory. Looking back at the history of the car, a similar situation was present when the electric car lost out against the internal combustion engine, and the car against other forms of public transport (Bonneuil and Fressot 2017). There is no clear-cut engineering or physical criterion to say which trajectory is selected, and even in the domain of the semiosphere there are no generic criteria that can explain this transition under the heading of functional efficiency alone. The continuous semiotic production of new possibilities for technosphere evolution is a defining feature of its ‘ imagined future ’ , theorised by the sociologist Jens Beckert (2016) as the core process of modern capitalism; hence, markets drive technosphere evolution. Following the principle of bimodality, these possibilities also have the physical dimension of ‘ adjacents possible ’ of the materially embodied state space of technosphere evolution (Kauffman 2000). The importance of the semiosphere concept to the Anthropocene is that it is the first theorisation of culture and meaning to encompass the entire human population and the whole planet, including semiosis among non-human species. Instead of focusing on ‘ this car ’ (technology-fix), such an approach assesses ‘ global system ’ - emission pollution, for instance. But to intervene in that, the productive energy of semiosis is needed, to persuade users to act in the interests of a unit - the planet - that they can never experience personally (a ‘ hyperobject ’ à la Morton 2013). Only since (post)modernity connected the world have whole cultures expanded to planetary extent, especially those associated with connective technologies and media. Thus, even as it participates in Anthropocene transformation at planetary scale, the semiosphere supplies a means for knowing that process and communicating it through global systems, with an impact on both human agency and technosphere effects. 5 Cities in the technosphere A central task in analysing the technosphere is to understand its internal structure and how this connects with specific forms of evolutionary dynamics. One way to approach that task is in the analysis of urbanism as a core phenomenon in technosphere evolution. In recent Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 187 research on cities, the concept of networks has become prominent, which allows the application of quantitative modelling and data analysis (overview in West 2017). The result of this research is that cities reveal a fundamental bimodal structure, manifest in two very different forms of dynamics: l One is the sublinear scaling of physical infrastructure, which means that cities are forms of economic organisation that save input costs, such as costs of transport or providing energy for buildings. This is mostly related to material infrastructure, i. e. the physical networks mediating matter-energy transformations. l The other is the superlinear scaling of a range of outputs, such as GDP or inventive activity, but also crime and other negative consequence of urban agglomerations. This is mostly related to the social networks shaping human interaction. In the most general terms, many phenomenological observations of life in cities have been vindicated quantitatively, such as the idea that cities increase the pace of all kinds of activities, from those as mundane as the speed of walking (Bettencourt et al. 2007) all the way to those that link semiosis with modernity, such as journalism and media, which are more intensive, more differentiated and more influential the larger the city (Hartley 1996: 33 f.), culminating in ‘ global cities ’ (Sassen 2018). Thus, we can say that one of most important aspects of the technosphere is that it is organised in the form of urban agglomerations with accelerationist tendencies. There are two driving forces. One is the economy, hence market dynamics: Cities are typically favoured in market selection, attracting migrants from the countryside, even though living conditions can be harsh, because their ‘ imagined futures ’ include higher income in the cities (see Fujita et al. 1999; Glaeser and Gottlieb 2009). The other is cultural: Cities are often experienced as liberating and inspiring places because of the vibrant diversity of their social life. Hartley (1996) identified the ‘ twin energies of modernity ’ as ‘ freedom ’ (institutionalised in representative democracy) and ‘ comfort ’ (material well-being, organised as markets), both accelerated in modernising cities. Hence, the bimodality of technosphere and semiosphere is salient, because such cities are dynamic experiments in living with clashing technosemiotic affordances within spatially compressed complex systems (Hartley et al. 2015: 69 - 79; Hartley 2015 b; Sennett 2019 refers to the two modes as ‘ cité ’ versus ‘ ville ’ ). At the same time, however, we can approach the dynamics of physical and social networks with similar formal analytical and modelling techniques (Batty 2017). We can approach cities in both physical (matter-energy) mode and semiotic mode, straddling the technosphere and the semiosphere. Much of econophysics research on cities highlights the former, whereas there is plenty of research in sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies that can be systematised under the umbrella of urban semiotics. The need for that cross-disciplinary integration comes to the fore if we consider that there is wide statistical variation in the patterns of social-network dynamics. This is because cities never fully exploit the potential of the social-network connectivity that results from their mere physical-mathematical properties (Bettencourt 2013). Social networks need to be enabled, organised and maintained; and cities have proven to be an efficient mechanism for coordinating such networks, where different kinds overlay and clash productively with each other in a confined space (Currid 2007). Urban infrastructure both enables and 188 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) constrains social connections, such as moving people from one place to another for meeting each other. But another type of constraint, which is at the same time an enabler, is what a city means to its users, and how they use the means, both analogue and digital, to navigate it. The link between the physical and the social here is creativity: What drives the evolution of technology is the creativity of the social systems that enable innovation. There are many forms of urban organisation that do not encourage economically liberal creativity, such as the large cities in authoritarian countries that are organised according to central planning. There is a direct linkage between the social and physical organisation of cities: Naturally grown (i. e. market-coordinated rather than centrally planned) metropolitan areas such as Tokyo have a much higher density of cross-connections in space than places such as Beijing, which are still shaped by their top-down legacy (World Bank 2014: 142 ff ). In a different Chinese city, by comparison, vibrant Shenzhen is driven by the cultural clashes, synergies and transformations that are embodied in the co-existence of hypermodern infrastructures and chaotic urban villages, triggering complex interactions between different social groups (Herrmann-Pillath, Guo and Feng 2020). Interestingly, these observations have gained prominence in the context of applied social science and economics, especially in the context of the two related areas of diversity and inclusion, on the one hand, and creative industries and service development, on the other. The core idea is that to generate the creative potential of social networks, it is essential to minimise cultural barriers to enhanced connectivity. Most significantly, these barriers are often manifest in the physical organisation of cities, such as the segregation of settlement areas of different ethnic and/ or socioeconomic social groups, with many forms of discrimination, also expressed in low access to the services of physical infrastructure, such as public transport enabling easy and fast commuting to other places. This is a topic where the semiotic view comes into its own. Cultural constraints to connectivity are based on ingroup/ outgroup discrimination. This ‘ we ’ vs ‘ they ’ distinction is fundamentally ambivalent, as it enhances connectivity within a group but lowers connectivity between groups; it increases distrust between groups but enhances trust within them, and raises willingness to share in the production of collective goods. That means the distinction is not simply unproductive or negative, but creates a trade-off (well established in research on social capital, e. g. Lin 2001). In our framework, this is an important aspect of the specific organisation of the semiosphere, where communication takes place intensively along the borders between groups. In the case of cities, the segregation of urban settlements shows the two modes operating in spatial terms, but ‘ we ’ groups are also virtual (that is, mediated and discursive), forming around occupations, affiliations and taste cultures as well as demographic differences (Currid 2007). Yet, the ‘ small world ’ phenomenon in social network analysis applies (Watts 1999): For enabling the flow of ideas and information among spatially segregated small groups, it is by no means necessary that connectivity among the overall population is enhanced. It is sufficient that a minority of individuals can move freely and connect the groups to achieve a high level of informational integration and high speed of information transmission. Of course, this makes the role of cultural factors highly complex and even idiosyncratic: Just consider the complex roles of cultural mediators and other individuals with the motivation and the capability to build bridges across groups, including all kinds of tricksters, both artistic and Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 189 entrepreneurial (Hartley 2012: 199 ff.). The city is the place where a multitude of distinct semiotic spaces can co-exist, thus creating many challenges to mutual translation and communication, but it also provides much room for human agency in terms of bridging those specials via individual cultural creativity. Analysts need to remember that bridges not only connect two sides, they can also be used to ‘ cross over to the other side ’ , which is a working definition of treachery. Cities are made meaningful, and thus more energetic, by their users and uses. The idea of ‘ urban semiosis ’ (Hartley 2015 b) links the imagined space of the semiosphere with the physical and technological fabric of cities, where the majority of humans now live, to provide a viable conceptual framework for analysing city dynamics, creativity and interactions. Cities are thus a prime candidate for relating research on local systems with research on global systems and eventually, the Earth system in toto. Despite being embedded in global networks of transport and communication - to the degree that often, past and present, global cities are more connected among each other than with their hinterlands - each city remains a unique case, with special local characteristics (Sassen 2018). Although we can identify general regularities in the development of cities, this does not help to explain why particular places have developed in a particular direction: The rise and fall of individual cities is often crucial for the development of entire regions and states. The analysis of cities can be put on a more secure footing if we apply semiotic concepts, especially the distinction between sign, meaning and function; and the distinctions and relationships among different (often clashing) semiospheres, given that the Lotmanian concept of semiosphere allows for the connected autonomy of many smaller-scale semiospheres or cultures (e. g. individual languages, nations, institutions, clubs, gangs, affinity and identity groups), within the overall planetary semiosphere. This move is highly relevant in practical terms. Urban planners often focus on the engineering aspect of cities, which operate in the analytical mode of causal efficiency (Sennett 2019). For example, crowded and messy urban places are often seen to be in need of urban renewal to achieve rationalisation and efficiency (again, the case of Shenzhen is illuminating, Herrmann- Pillath et al. 2020). This may overlook the role of semiosis in shaping urban settlements, structures and patterns of connectivity: Urban planning always needs to understand the social and cultural spaces within cities, which amounts to a genuine evolutionaryfunctional analysis, and a recognition of creativity as a driver of urban renewal, as the history of artists ’ quarters in low-rent districts of many global cities attests. This requires cross-disciplinary integration, which the concept of ‘ emergent urbanism ’ (Haas and Olsson 2014) begins to capture. 6 Conclusion: what kind of models do we need in Anthropocene research? An Earth system scientist would certainly raise the simple question: what does all this imply for building tractable models of the Earth system? We opt for a radical conclusion, inspired by Latour ’ s (2015) critique of the ‘ systems ’ term in this context. In his view, ‘ Gaia ’ (the geosphere + biosphere) is not a system but itself a fragmented, highly dynamic and conflictridden entity: a system of conflicting systems, if you like (and here he follows Lotmanian 190 John Hartley (Fremantle) & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (Erfurt) cultural semiotics). That means, we should not impose scientific standards of ‘ systematicity ’ on modelling the Earth system but should instead recognise its multi-layered and multiscale subsystems and project the contingency and indeterminacy of the humanities and social sciences on modelling practice. How could we achieve that? The first step, already well recognised in the debate, is the crucial role of local models (Biermann et al. 2015). A global model should be a model of linked local models, where the links are conceived as being highly randomised and fragmented. For example, a climate change model might start out from local models that include migration (as populations move from untenable places). But there is no unified model of global migration flows, as these will be determined by multifarious social, cultural and political factors, where the most convincing ‘ model ’ may be an artwork (e. g. Ai Wei Wei ’ s 2017 film Human Flow). 2 What is needed is a conceptual frame for analysing these linkages via migration and translation, which can integrate local models without putting them in the setting of a global model of the same type. In this context, standard global models should be constructed as sets of models with varying parameters, structures and assumptions, which are then approached as a pool that is integrated on a meta-level on which judgments about developmental trends are formed (Heal 2017). Next, we need to extend common models by adding qualitative frameworks for understanding cultural factors in the broadest sense (Herrmann-Pillath 2020). This is well known from practices of strategic forecasting in business and politics, where mathematical simulations are only one element of more complex expert systems, which might be enhanced by focus-group methods, as an example. In other words, there is the important question of how to organise the modelling process as a practice of distributed cognition, beyond the question of specific methods. One could argue that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process is already institutionalised in exactly this way: In other words, the IPCC is the ‘ real ’ climate model, rather than the various models that are applied by scientists to feed the IPPC process with information: As the geologist Victor Baker (1999) has argued, they are an essential part of ‘ georhetorics ’ in the semiosphere. But this implies that the institutions that govern the IPCC process are themselves important determinants of its epistemic status and performance, and that issues in introducing cultural diversity and governing discourse have scientific status in the rigorous sense (Latour 2015; Hiedenpäa and Bromley 2016). Further, understanding cultural factors requires a scientific approach to culture that overcomes the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. For achieving this, both sides need to move. If we look at the humanities, this would include the importation of methods from the sciences without blindly mimicking them. An important example for this is the highly productive use of the network concept in sociology and social media studies, which scientists often ignore (Scott 2011). The methodological debate is very rich and includes substantial contributions such as by the physicist-turned-sociologist Harrison White (2008), which have inspired mergers between mathematical modelling of social networks and cultural analysis. We think that this literature will help scientists to envision new approaches to modelling in their own disciplinary domains. 2 See: https: / / www.humanflow.com/ . Towards a Semiotics of the Technosphere 191 Finally (but far from completely), modellers can adapt model structures to technosphere realities viewed from the semiotic angle. Thus, the physical processes of energy use manifest high variance across types of cities (Creutzig et al. 2015). Technosphere evolution as an exploration of the adjacent possible is driven by the system of global cities, which are tightly interconnected in social networks (Sassen 2018). 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