ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
compulsiveness and self-realization, describing a potentially constructive process at
work. These acts of repetition undertake a process of reversal, as Bishop moves
excesses of emotion or doubt through circuits of repetition so as to reconfigure
suffering into an alternate state. Thus, her poetics describe a process of working
through subjectivity in conflict.
Congruous with this subjective labor is an ongoing search in both the natural world
and the industrialized modern world for traces of connection and community. Her
poetics disclose life-affirming relational ties that extend beyond the human order and
into a nonhuman order. An admirer of Darwin’s “endless, heroic observations,”
Bishop was influenced by his naturalist’s eye, which can be traced throughout her
imagery and, like Darwin, her thinking as a critic and poet drew from the lessons of
the natural world. As a student of his optics, she worked against the generalizing
impulse that is a product of hypostatizing habits of looking and communicating.
In its formal, thematic, and technical articulations, her repetition is elementally tied to
an organic process. Her poems present repetition as an activity that enables
apperception and re-discovery, laying the groundwork for ingenuous communication.
Not merely a unifying formal element or a conceit that lends itself to art (in all
senses), repetition discloses an event, an immanent becoming that unfolds through a
semiotic process. In her attunement to the signals that define relations among and
between animals and humans, Bishop ultimately taps into a biological evolutionary
understanding of the communication and reception of signals. Her poetic ethos calls
for a consideration of optical and communicative strategies in their most inclusive
sense. Biosemiotics approaches the evolution of a semiotic system as coincident with
the evolution of life and examines forms of communication and signification found in
and between living systems. According to the International Society for Biosemiotic
Studies, “Biosemiotics . . . [examines] forms of communication and signification
found in and between living systems. It is thus the study of representation, meaning,
sense, and the biological significance of codes and sign processes, from genetic code
sequences to intercellular signaling processes to animal display behavior to human
semiotic artifacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought” (ISBS). It reaches
across the fields of biology, philosophy, linguistics and communication studies to
ground code and sign-making processes – the channels by which data and signals are
sent and received among living organisms – in biology (ISBS).
In the realm of communication, the transmission of quality, reliability, and honesty
from the signaler to the receiver is imperative. The evolutionary biologist Amotz
Zahavi, extrapolating from Darwin’s theory of natural selection, sought to explain
what Darwin could not: the waste or excess that an individual incurs in displaying its
sexual fitness for potential suitors. While for Darwin natural selection is premised on
the species’ elimination of unfavorable traits over time as a mechanism for survival,
Zahavi developed the concept of the honest signal and the “handicap principle” to
explain the phenomenon whereby individuals possess characteristics or behave in
such a way as to communicate “honestly,” even at the cost of making themselves
vulnerable to attack (Zahavi 1-11). According to Zahavi, these handicaps are signals
to other individuals. Extrapolating from sexual selection, he applied his theory of
signaling to all realms in which individuals communicate.
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