Purpose
In debt to the research question ‘How may we understand the moving body ecologically?’, this wholly theoretical PhD project employs biosemiotics and ecological theory to propose on a holistic conceptualization of the body that moves by the nature of its relations as a biological being. By this study, I seek to illuminate the nascent field of humans’ semiotic agency in sport.
Project description
The project deepens the critique of an absolute conceptual human-nature divide by pursuing an ontological reorganization: from horizontally juxtaposing human agency and external nature’s assumed lack there of, as two same-levelled and separate types of the living, to a vertical continuum model of life as agential meaning-making beginning with the cell – whether human or not – and peaking in ability at the constitutively dependent homo sapiens mind. If a biosemiotic life view such as this holds merit, the moving body when engaging in sport games may be understood in a new ecological light, by proxy of seeing ecology itself anew.
Less in terms of its experiential and formative value, so secondarily, from i.e. our pre-reflective experiences with, embodiment and perception of the nature-made as classically highlighted by phenomenology, ecological anthropology and environmental psychology respectively, and more in primary constitutive terms. In result, the potential actions of anthroposemiotic agents could be seen as an interaction, our play an interplay, with the basic constituents of the body and its higher-order cognition as a semiotic whole, before the subject’s experience at all takes place – pre-somatic rather than pre-reflective, perhaps? – like a spatiotemporal microcosmos of the evolution of life, from cell to Self.
On this basis, it appears paramount to the preservation not just of nature, but of our Selves, to recognize that the once untouched natural landscape at the end of our bodies’ relation to the world is rapidly in motion too; uprooted from its original state by the pull of a technomodern society always and relentlessly lying ahead of the ecologically given. By remaking our common ecospheric origin into a technospheric Elysium for some, modern semiotic agents simultaneously recreate ourselves bottom-up from biophysical composition and physiological capability to the accumulated innovations of the mind, possibly resulting, in turn, from the spherically engulfed body of the person. Here, I have found sport games to provide a unique theoretical entrance point into understanding the role of fiction in particular when observing this process of semi-cyclic recreation by the advent of the technosphere.
The papers are hereby organized to showcase how the recent development of the modern sport organization parallels that of society at large, changing the surrounding world of the athlete or sport enthusiast in the process: from outdoors free-roaming in wilderness in nature sport (paper one) to stationary emersion out of the physical realm entirely with regards to where the game takes place; now the antithetical no-space of cyberspace in esport (paper two) where all that is left of the nature-made is, equally antithetically, its mere representation. Lastly, my concluding paper processes previous findings and new insights with the objective to generate a conceptual tool for studying the particularities of semiotic life-worlds arising within sports specifically, hopefully contributive to making the realm of sport more amenable to biosemiotic investigations in sport and body philosophy.
