Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to observe possibilities of anticipating ecological disasters from the point of view of semiotics, applying the theoretical framework to Vinciane Despret’s fictional narrative “Autobiographie d’un poulpe ou la communauté des Ulysse” (2021).

Paper long abstract:

This paper builds on the perspective of umwelt theory to look into personal worlds of animals, which fragment and decay in ecological crises, and identify the role of embodiment and ecosystem memory in this process, as well as potential avenues of anticipating such collapse. Within this semiotic framework, we examine Vinciane Despret’s fictional narrative “Autobiographie d’un poulpe ou la communauté des Ulysse” published in the collection Autobiographie d’un poulpe et autres récits d’anticipation (2021). The short story features a human community living in symbiosis with an octopus community that has gone extinct but that will slowly be revived as a few octopuses return to the site.

Following Jakob von Uexküll, umwelt can be interpreted as a sum of structural correspondences between animals’ subjective experience, surrounding ecosystem (environmental affordances), physiology (body) and behavior. In environmental conditions, where a species has evolved or developed for a long time, experience, ecosystem, body and behaviour correspond well to one another. In ecological crises and environmental change, the connections between these different aspects of umwelt become unreliable and may break down, leading to species extinction. Despret’s narrative offers valuable proposals to understand and potentially prevent the loss of ecosystem memory that takes place during the extinction process. Our text analysis will focus on the symbiotic practices between humans and octopuses, and the efforts of the former to decipher a message left in ink on pottery fragments by the latter, which highlights the risks of memory loss that goes together with ecological disaster.