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This essay is part of a book project, tentatively titled, Do We Need a Semiotics After Geontopower? The essay begins with an overview of the atmospheric conditions of an old debate about how to liberate theories of mind, communication and language from their humanist enclosure. It does so by highlighting a few scientific and public debates about what constitutes evidence of prehuman, and nonhuman animal and plant forms of mind and communication. The purpose of this brief foray into complicated debates is to conjure the sense-intuitions circulating around these arguments about the political and ethical stakes of describing a kind of existence as having this or that quality of language and mind. The essay then puts pressure on how these sense-intuitions about communication and mind are scaled—how a sense of the stakes of mind to the treatment of existence becomes a quest to model a general theory of a post-humanist mind. This takes me to the commonalities between a certain way of producing a posthumanist mind and the strategies of environmental protect within the movement for the rights of nature. Why do these approaches feel to some like they are the best way of verifying that prehuman, nonhuman animal and plant forms, and nonlife have semiotic capacities as one supports First Nation and Indigenous earthkin?The essay ends by summarizing the broader content and stakes of Do We Need a Semiotics After Geontopower?
Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Fri,) studied this question.
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