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Biopolitics Meets ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276416687375

Semiotic Thresholds journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

of Anti-Aging
Interventions
Ott Puumeister and Andreas Ventsel
University of Tartu

Abstract
Biosemiotics and the analysis of biopower have not yet been explicitly brought
together. This article attempts to find their connecting points from the perspective
of biosemiotics. It uses the biosemiotic understanding of the different types of semi-
osis in order to approach the practices of biopower and biopolitics. The central
concept of the paper is that of the ‘semiotic threshold’. We can speak of (1) the
lower semiotic threshold, signifying the dividing line between non-semiosis and semi-
osis; and (2) the secondary semiotic thresholds, signifying the borders between dif-
ferent types (iconic, indexical, symbolic) of semiosis. Speaking in terms of types of
semiosis means speaking in terms of different capabilities for normativity, which is
why the article uses the approaches of Michel Foucault on normalization in biopower
and of Georges Canguilhem on organismic normativity. As an example on which
biopolitics and biosemiotics could connect, the discourse of regenerative and anti-
aging medicine is used.

Keywords
anti-aging, biopolitics, biosemiotics, Foucault, normativity, semiotic threshold

Introduction
The present article aims to find the connections between the discipline of
biosemiotics and the analysis of biopower and biopolitics. Interestingly,
these two, united by the prefix bio-, have so far not explicitly been
brought together. Biosemiotics, striving to introduce the analysis of
semiosic processes into biology, has not overly concerned itself with
socio-political problems. The analysis of biopower, on the other hand,
has not made efforts to include within it approaches of theoretical

Corresponding author: Ott Puumeister. Email: ott.puumeister@gmail.com

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

biology. The analysis of biopower, it must be said, seems to be more

successful in bringing the concerns over biological control into the huma-
nities than biosemiotics in importing the knowledge of life as interpretive
activity into biology. This has no doubt to do with the fact that semiotics
cannot be envisaged as an exact experimental science. Biosemiotics, con-
centrating rather on the diversity and unpredictability of life in its
agency, is a strategy that complicates the view of evolutionary biology
by inserting in it the organism as a subject (Kull, 1999). By considering
‘the overall process as one of interpretation rather than one of specifica-
tion’ (Hoffmeyer, 2011: 59), there emerges the need to account for the
activity of meaning-making that has previously been relegated to the
domain of the humanities.
The following is an attempt to elucidate the possible usefulness of their
connections utilizing, on the one hand, the concept of the semiotic
threshold and the biosemiotic understanding of the different types of
semiosis, and on the other hand, the Foucauldian approach to biopower
and biopolitics.
The article is divided into three sections. The first elaborates the per-
spective of biosemiotics and the problem of semiotic thresholds. It is
impossible to speak of biosemiotics without making references to the
lower semiotic threshold, differentiating non-semiosis from semiosis,
the former being describable in terms of physical and chemical laws
and the latter demanding a vocabulary aware of rules, choices, and
agency (see Barbieri, 2008; Kull, 2014). Associating semiosis – mean-
ing-making – to the ability to make choices leads quite logically to the
statement, made by Thomas A. Sebeok, that ‘semiotics is coextensive to
life’ (Kull, 2012). A relation can be meaningful only if it arises from the
activity of choosing, whether non-conscious or conscious.
The lower semiotic threshold is complemented by secondary semiotic
thresholds marking the transition from one type of semiosis to another.
The biosemiotic understanding of types of semiosis stems from Charles S.
Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce divides semiosis into iconic (based on similar-
ity), indexical (based on factual proximity), and symbolic (based on con-
ventional attribution) relations (Peirce, 1868; 1931: 1.372). The
corresponding biosemiotic categories are vegetative, animal, and cultural
(Kull, 2009a). However, these categories should not be understood as the
all too familiar division of the world into human and non-human realms.
Culture, here, signifies a degree of conventionality, and serves as a heur-
istic concept that does not exclude non-human animals, and it is not to be
taken as a sign of human exceptionalism. Biosemiotics strives to over-
come the nature–culture division by analysing all life in terms of mean-
ing-making and by concentrating on the agency of living processes.
The second section of the paper elaborates on how we understand
biopower and biopolitics. We will employ the Foucauldian approach
and view practices and techniques of biopower as normative and
Puumeister and Ventsel 3

normalizing; that is, at one and the same time, creating norms and ensur-
ing that subjects are created in accordance with these norms. However,
we will also utilize Georges Canguilhem’s treatment of the concept of
normativity in an attempt to understand that the processes and organ-
isms controlled by power indeed have normative agency of their own,
which is also suggested in biosemiotics.
The third and final section of the paper focuses on arguing for the
usefulness of the biosemiotic vocabulary in describing and analysing
the practices and techniques of biopower. As an example, we will use
the domains of regenerative and anti-aging medicine; what is presented
will not be a thorough analysis but only a first approximation of what
could be done. The different levels of semiosis (iconic/vegetative; index-
ical/animal; symbolic/cultural) are put into use as an interpretive grid to
highlight the different normative capacities and techniques of normaliza-
tion present in regenerative and anti-aging medicine.

The Semiotic Threshold and the Biosemiotic Perspective

Semiotics is the study of signs, sign activity and sign systems – of mean-
ing-making. During most of the second half of the 20th century, the
prevailing strand of semiotics, at least in Europe, was that of
Saussurian semiology (see Saussure, 2011) which proposed a systemic
and structuralist understanding of society and culture. The study of
sign relations were articulated on the basis of Saussure’s principles of
general linguistics which, perhaps, is one of the reasons that semiotics as
a whole is often associated with the study of human (linguistic) culture.
Biosemiotics, however, has grown out from Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics
– popularized by Thomas A. Sebeok (see Favareau, 2007) – that enables
one to look beyond language and human beings when discovering and
studying sign processes.

The Biosemiotic Perspective

Biosemiotics has a twofold purpose: firstly, to introduce the notions of
‘meaning’ and ‘meaning-making’ into biology, and secondly, to show
that semiotic processes are not limited to human culture, but are already
present on the cellular level of life. Semiotics, in this manner, no longer
deals exclusively with human culture but is extended to the study of all
life. Stemming from this, the distinction between nature and human cul-
ture is not pertinent anymore: humans are no longer the sole proprietors
of signs and meaning. Biosemiotics is, therefore, an amodern or non-
modern discipline in Latour’s (1993) sense, refusing to divide the world
into natural and cultural realms.
The distinction most important to biosemiotics is that made between
the laws of physics and rules of life, a differentiation that also marks the
demarcation line between life and non-life. Correcting Peirce, who did
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

not draw a line between laws and rules, Kull (2014: 92) writes: ‘While
physics is about laws, semiotics is about rules (these rules include rela-
tions and codes)’. Semiotic relations are more readily describable in terms
of habits than laws, the latter having to hold perfectly while the former
are manipulable and controllable.
The distinction between life and non-life is also that between semiotic
and non-semiotic processes. ‘[L]iving nature is understood as essentially
driven by, or actually consisting of, semiosis, that is to say, processes of
sign relations and their signification – or function – in the biological
processes of life’ (Hoffmeyer, 2008: 4). What makes this identification
between semiotic activity and living processes possible is the very recog-
nition that life has agency, that it is capable of modifying the rules gov-
erning its processes. Life has the capacity to create meaningful relations.
A crucial thinker for biosemiotics, Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944),
has concentrated on the aspect of agency by coining the term umwelt, ‘the
phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal’, and thus bringing
together both the subject’s perception and modification of the environ-
ment (Uexküll, 1964). ‘Everything that falls under the spell of an Umwelt
(subjective universe) is altered and reshaped until it has become a useful
meaning-carrier; otherwise it is totally neglected’ (Uexküll, 1982: 31).
Accordingly, biosemiotics focuses on what is significant for the agent
(living organism) and what the agent does in order to transform both
itself and its environment into a whole (see also J. Scott Turner’s (2000)
account of the extended organism contesting the traditional borders of
the organism).
Biosemiotics does not consider the subject as opposed to the environ-
ment: the subject is formed within the latter by creating a meaningful
umwelt. One of the questions that biosemiotics confronts us with is: who
is the subject who creates the environment that is valuable to it? Can a
cell be considered a subject, for example? This, the question of bio-
logical value, is what the practices and technologies of biopower often
neglect.
For both Jonathan Beever and Kalevi Kull, biosemiotics introduces a
holistic perspective into ethical and moral discourse. ‘[T]he semiosic
holism of biosemiotics offers the broadest possible criterion for value,
one that coincides with life itself’ (Beever, 2012: 190). Beever refers to
Kull’s (2001) understanding of perspectives on biological value (repro-
ductive, meronomic, and functional) and on models of semiotic value
(valeur as sign network complexity, purposiveness, signification) as
‘demonstrating the potential link between our thinking about biological
and semiotic value’ (Beever, 2012: 188). Supporting itself to this continu-
ity, biosemiotics has mainly focused on ethics, which is ‘necessarily an
ecological ethic, bringing together the semiosphere [conditional space of
meaning-making processes] and biosphere in a theory of meaning tied to
individual umwelten and justifying the moral considerability of all living
Puumeister and Ventsel 5

things’ (Beever, 2012: 190). Having a glance forward to our discussion of

biopower, it is important to stress here the sites where the creation of
norms takes place. Meaning-making itself is a normative activity, carving
out and normalizing the umwelt and, by this action, creating subjectivity.
One of the ways in which to analyse the workings of biopower is to
follow the possible conflicts of biological values created by the organism
and the norms created in techniques of biopower.
In the next section, we turn to the problematic of semiotic thresholds
and ask, firstly, how is semiotic activity differentiated from non-semiotic
processes, and secondly, how are types of semiosis differentiated from
each other? The types of semiosis are related to the notion of ‘semiotic
freedom’, ‘that is to say the increase in richness of ‘‘depth’’ of meaning
that can be communicated: From pheromones to birdsong and from
antibodies to Japanese ceremonies of welcome’ (Hoffmeyer, 1996: 61).
The thresholds, marking the transition from one type of semiosis to
another, also mark the expansion of possible semiotic freedom and the
increasing variation in the mechanisms of meaning-making. Different
types of semiosis have varying degrees of semiotic freedom, and this
has implications on the manipulability of the sign processes: the greater
the freedom (of choice), the greater the flexibility. In addition, with flexi-
bility we have an increase in unpredictability. One of the operations of
biopower is the translation of one type of semiosis into another,
thus creating the presupposition that fundamentally unpredictable pro-
cesses are controllable through biological manipulation (for example,
human behaviour is controllable through modification of cellular
activity).

The Semiotic Threshold

The problematic of the lower semiotic threshold touches upon the gen-
eral theoretical question of the limits of semiotic analysis. It presupposes
the determination of the minimal characteristics necessary for the emer-
gence of semiosis: to distinguish signs from non-signs and to examine
under which conditions signs develop from non-signs or from non-semio-
tic systems (Kull, 2009a; see also Eco, 1976; Deacon, 1997).
According to biosemiotics, the minimal condition of semiosis is a
living cell that has the ability for the most elementary act of recognition
(Hoffmeyer, 1996). Kull argues that unlike the laws of physics, the rules
constituted by and constituting life require the presence of memory;
memory processes are, in their general structure, identical to communi-
cational processes. The biosemiotic approach stresses that life processes
and the phenomena of life are, essentially, communicative and restruc-
turing vital relations (Kull, 2008: 669), and that evolutionary adaptations
can be defined as sign relations constituting a ‘qualitative fit’ (Kull,
2009b).
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Biosemiotic processes are viewed not as causal in the physical sense

but stemming from the encounter of (at least) two non-compatible sign
systems, which could also be termed codes. ‘[I]n order to have a mean-
ingful communication, [. . .] meaning-making requires incompatibility of
codes and that the incompatibility or inconsistency is the source of inde-
terminacy, non-predictability and semiotic freedom’ (Kull, 2015: 4–5).
The rules governing vital processes thus always involve freedom and
the possibility of being ordered otherwise; they are not necessary.
The lower semiotic threshold designates the line between the animate
and the inanimate, or in other words, the point where unpredictability
becomes constitutive. As our starting point, we take Thomas A. Sebeok’s
position that ‘there could have been no semiosis before the appearance of
life in the universe’ (Sebeok, 1999: 86) and that ‘semiosis presupposes the
axiomatic identity of the semiosphere with the biosphere’ (Sebeok, 2001:
68). Inanimate nature is not capable of sign activity and signs emerge
with biological organization. Biosemiotics thus proposes that ‘the trad-
itional paradigm of biology be substituted by a semiotic paradigm the
core of which is that biological form is understood primarily as sign’
(Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, 1991: 138). Semiotics in general is thus inter-
ested in everything from the most basic biological relations to the com-
plex cultural systems. However, the border between life and non-life itself
varies according to schools; thus, in some cases, it is not entirely clear
what is excluded from the sphere of life.1 As Anderson and others put it:
‘Perhaps any system interacting with a living one takes on the properties
of life and/or becomes as well a mirror for projections of living observers’
(1984: 26). And this is why it is more pertinent to speak in terms of
threshold zones that are essentially fuzzy: there is not a transition but
multiple transitions (Kull, 2009a).
In any case, the biosemiotic (hypo)thesis is that the ‘properties of life’
emerge out of meaning-making interactions. So far we have discussed the
lower semiotic threshold zone, and it is now time to consider the second-
ary semiotic threshold zones separating systems based on different types
of sign activity. The types of sign processes and semiotic thresholds have
been conceptualized on the basis of Charles S. Peirce’s (1868) sign typ-
ology that distinguishes between iconic (relations of similarity),
indexical (relations of physical and factual proximity) and symbolic (rela-
tions of conventional attribution) sign processes. According to Kull
(2009: 15), we can differentiate between three levels of semiotic threshold
zones: (1) vegetative, based on iconic relations and recognition; (2)
animal, based on indexical relations or associations; and (3) cultural,
based on symbolic relations. The secondary threshold zones, then, dif-
ferentiate between (1) the vegetative and the animal and (2) the animal
and the cultural.
Kull (2008: 670) says that the transition from the vegetative to the
animal semiosis is relatively abrupt since indexicality enables the
Puumeister and Ventsel 7

organism to create relations that presuppose associative memory which

in turn presupposes the existence of the nervous system and the possibil-
ity to transform cellular relations based on experience: one cell has the
ability to communicate with several others. Organisms capable of animal
semiosis have the ability to compare recognized objects and, based on
this, to create new relations between these objects; they are capable of
manipulating different distance relations and viewpoints, and thus they
have the ability to map their space (Kull, 2009a: 21–2). In addition to
having spatial cognition, the organisms possessing animal semiosis are
capable of learning through experience.
The third semiotic level, the cultural, that emerges beyond the sym-
bolic threshold, has been the most analysed level of semiosis in social
sciences (see Deacon, 1997, for a thorough elucidation of symbolicity).
On the symbolic level, the organism has the ability to combine different
levels of semiosis. The symbol is, in semiotics, a sign that arbitrarily and
conventionally stands for the referent (Danesi, 2000: 14). It is thought
that the emergence of symbolicity provided the human being with the
means to think of the world in conceptual terms (Danesi and Perron,
2005: 87).
Symbolicity is commonly viewed as a presupposition of the adult
human being and of natural language; symbolic combination makes pos-
sible dependent substitution or conventionality. Conventionality in its
turn renders possible the formation of syntax and the usage of abstract
categories and meta-language; and language is associated with the ability
of temporal representation which is absent in animal semiosis. The sense
of time is inevitably accompanied by the diversification of memory – the
dimension of narrativity becomes important. Narrativity fixes the points
of beginning and end, enables the discrete differentiation of actors, causal
logic and the isolation of an event from background continuity. Symbolic
ability enables the human being to reorganize and restructure space (in
addition to simply sensing space, which can also be done by animals),
combine distinct systems and by this introduce asymmetry in these sys-
tems (Kull, 2009a: 22–3).
As indicated above, the borders between the semiotic levels are not as
clear-cut as it would seem; rather, it is a question of degree and range
within which the characteristics distinguishing these worlds form their
own hierarchies (Kull, 2009a; Zlatev, 2009). This observation poses the
following question: how are these borders constituted, and how could we
conceptualize these practices in relation to power relations? Anti-aging
medicine, for example, strives to show that interventions on the cellular
level (e.g. hormone therapies) are directly beneficial for the organisms’
healthy life span, thus equating values created on the cellular level to the
ones created on the organic level, although it is not at all clear
what effects these interventions have on the organism (see Samaras
et al., 2014).
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Biosemiotics and the Object of Biopolitics

In this section we will turn to the problems posed by the analysis of
biopower and biopolitics focusing on Foucault’s approach to normaliza-
tion and on Canguilhem’s views on normativity. In the authors’ view, the
creation of norms according to which to normalize agency and even
restructure normativity could be one of the connecting points of biopo-
litics and biosemiotics.

Biopower and Biosemiotics

Biopower, as Michel Foucault (2009: 1) defined it, is ‘the set of mechan-
isms through which the basic biological features of the human species
became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.’
Biopolitics and biopower can, similarly to biosemiotics, be described as
amodern in Latour’s sense in that it has always engaged in creating
hybrids, beings and processes describable neither in terms of culture
nor in terms of nature. If we look at aging, for example, we have to
take into account the biological processes underlying it, the social struc-
tures positioning the aged, the symbolic meanings contributing to
ageism, and so on and so forth. Similarly, we should not view anti-
aging as simply striving to fight biological aging. The problematic of
anti-aging is created in the meeting point of several agencies, all describ-
able as living but also governed by different types of sign processes and
rules of normativity.
When life becomes the object of power, power also has to account for
life as its subject, that is, as that through which power operates. Power
cannot be conceptualized as simply violence, as Foucault (1982: 789) puts
it: a power relation always involves freedom. Taking the biosemiotic
perspective seriously, we can say that even living cells show a degree of
freedom in that their interaction is semiosic and thus modifiable through
interactions and interpretation. This incorporation of freedom and
agency in the analysis of power is why we have chosen to follow a
Foucauldian approach to biopower and biopolitics rather than Giorgio
Agamben’s much more metaphysically pessimistic one presenting us with
the figure of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998). Bare life is an ontological figure
designating how it is possible at all that life enters into politics.
Agamben’s political ontology has, however, the tendency to seep
into the ontic sphere in the guise of concrete and specific forms of life,
transforming the latter into exaggerated tropes called to witness the vio-
lence of power (see Abbott, 2013: 27). The notion of bare life thus
involves the danger of viewing all practices of biopower and biopolitics
as violent and destructive while, for Foucault, biopower was essentially
productive.
When starting to deal with biopower, we must then ask: what does
biopower produce? And how does it produce? Our preliminary answer
Puumeister and Ventsel 9

will be: biopower produces governable subjectivities through techniques

of normalization. And these techniques constitute the governable subject
as a living being which means that the human being will be governed on
the basis of his or her ‘natural’ abilities and characteristics. In order to
get a better sense of what we are dealing with when talking of biopower
and biopolitics, we could say that biopower does not simply conduct
the conduct of subjects (Foucault, 1982), but also strives to deploy the
inherent normative capabilities of the subjects. How to connect cellular
processes to the government of populations? How should the genetic
make-up of individual organisms be altered and acted upon in order to
promote the health of groups at risk? Should the political subject be
understood as essentially a subject who is responsible for how his or
her biological processes translate onto the social field?
The central notions of Foucault’s approach to biopower are ‘norm’
and ‘normalization’. Discipline creates norms to which the conduct and
being of subjects has to conform; security strives to normalize from
within the living processes, positing a norm as inherent to subjects
(Foucault, 2009: 57, 63). Normalizing biopower thus aims to control
the subjects’ self-creation; or, speaking in semiotic terms, biopower
takes control of the interpretive means for the self-creation of the subject.
Biopower subjectivizes the whole of life’s processes, if we take into
account that life can be described as a meaning-making activity.
When dealing with biopower and biopolitics, Foucault is thus con-
fronted with the question of what language to use to analyse these prac-
tices that have seeped deep into the subjects’ lives and, in fact, create
subjectivities. While earlier he concentrated on discursive knowledge,
now the focus shifts to the relationality of apparatuses (dispositif). An
apparatus, he explains, is ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consist-
ing of [. . .] the said as much as the unsaid’ (Foucault, 1980: 194).
Studying discourse, his main focus was on linguistic statements; turning
his gaze towards apparatuses, he incorporates also non-linguistic elem-
ents and relations (exemplified, for example, in his analysis of spatial
relations in Discipline and Punish (1977)).
Biosemiotic vocabulary, focusing on the agency of living beings and
processes (see Tønnessen, 2015, for an elaboration on agent and agency),
could be a tool to elaborate also on the non-linguistic aspects of subject-
creation within the context of biopower. Both biosemiotics and
Foucault’s understanding of biopower have not only the merit of intro-
ducing human sciences to a domain outside language in which they were
imprisoned (Jameson, 1974) but also of problematizing the nature-cul-
ture and subjectivity-objectivity divide by treating it as a product of a
scientific approach that separates the world into the knowable and the
knowing.
Before we move on to analyse how the different levels of semiosis
could be applied to biopolitical phenomena, we will propose that on
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

all those levels we are dealing with normalization and normativity. In

short, the governmental and governing process of the productive inter-
ventions of biopower and biopolitics is normalization. While Foucault
acknowledges the materiality of discourse by turning to apparatuses, he
does not have the vocabulary to describe the agency of living processes.
For him, to speak of interpretation would still be to speak in terms of
human language; the biosemiotic vocabulary, on the other hand, is cap-
able of analysing the very material interpretive apparatus that the living
agencies deployed by technologies of power have at their disposal. The
focus on the different types of semiosis is not, of course, the only avail-
able approach, but, as we will try to show in the last section of the paper,
it can be a useful one. But first, let us turn in more detail to Canguilhem’s
concepts of norm and normativity and see how they can be considered a
connecting point between biosemiotics and the analysis of biopower.

Norm and Normativity

In his account of biopower, Foucault concentrates on the different types
of norms created in different apparatuses of power: sovereign, disciplin-
ary and security apparatuses (Foucault, 2009). It is the configuration of
power relations that transforms the subjects relevant for government.
But it is crucial to understand that it is not only the practice and dis-
course of government that creates norms but also the subjects who
always act with a degree of freedom. The norms created within the
apparatuses of biopower can be seen to compel the subject of power to
create him or herself in a certain way. Foucault has here spoken of ‘the
care of the self’ (1986). Techniques of biopower, claiming biological
processes for themselves, have the ability to put the creation of biological
value and signification to work in the service of social formation. And it
is here that normative activity of iconic and indexical type is given sym-
bolic significance.
This biopolitical confusion between types of norms created according
to different significational logics can be seen in what Nikolas Rose (2007:
5–6) has called the ‘molecularization’ of contemporary biopolitics: the
recognition that ‘life is malleable at the molecular level; no longer con-
strained by the apparent normativity of a natural vital order’. What is the
‘normativity of a natural vital order’? Georges Canguilhem defines it
thus: ‘Normative, in philosophy, means every judgment which evaluates
or qualifies a fact in relation to a norm, but this mode of judgment is
essentially subordinate to that which establishes norms. Normative, in
the fullest sense of the word, is that which establishes norms’
(Canguilhem, 1991: 126–7).
Every biological organism is itself the creator of norms; life is essen-
tially an activity of creation: ‘There is no biological indifference’
(Canguilhem, 1991: 129), which means that every organism must make
Puumeister and Ventsel 11

a judgment on everything it encounters: every action is significant in

establishing and creating the organism itself. Here we can see a direct
connection between Canguilhem’s view and a biosemiotic understanding
of life as always guided by intentionality in sign activity. While from the
biosemiotic point of view it could be said that every vital activity creates
a value, Canguilhem simply states: life is normative. An organism, how-
ever, is not an individual in the sense that it would be somehow self-
contained, that it would be able to create norms solely from the ‘inside’.
For Canguilhem, an individual must ‘fundamentally be thought in a
relation with something other than itself’ (Gayon, 2000: 22).
Normativity can be conceptualized as an organism’s active relatedness
to its milieu. From the above it can already be glimpsed that, for
Canguilhem, health, illness, and pathology are fundamentally subjective
concepts: there can be no objective pathology. It is the subject who is the
judge of its state of health, ‘because it is he who suffers’ (Rose, 2007: 85).
Similarly to Canguilhem, biosemiotics states that a semiotic process is
fundamentally normative which also ‘includes the possibility that the
representation is in error or that its consequence [. . .] can be either com-
patible with or incompatible with preserving the integrity of the living
system in which it occurs’ (Kull et al., 2009: 171). Disease (which
Canguilhem viewed not as a deviation but a different kind of norm),
for example, is not compatible with the living system, the organism as
a whole. Norms are thus not inherently valuable for the living system;
and ascribing norms from the outside, or translating them from a non-
compatible type of semiosis, can be harmful for the living agent.
Normativity is an interpretive activity, taking place at the intersection
of the bio-socio-politico-cultural relations.
Normativity is not something that an organism could possess in itself;
it is always in a context of power relations that normative activity takes
place. Nikolas Rose (2007) has shown that with the molecularization of
contemporary medical research and of biopolitics more generally, the
subject is to a certain extent excluded from the process of determining
a pathological state; it is so simply because the subject does not have any
cognition of what is going on at the molecular level of the organism. It is
on this fundamental level of the organism’s normativity on which
modern biopower has acquired the techniques for intervention. In con-
temporary molecular medicine it is no longer a question, then, of deter-
mining that a person is ill and of finding a cure for the disease; it is a
question of preventive screening of the people that are susceptible to
certain diseases. It may well be the case that by the time the abnormal
developments manifest themselves on the organic level it might already
be too late for a cure. Rose calls these practices the constitution of
‘protodiseases’ and ‘pre-patients’ (2007: 85)
Observing such domains as regenerative medicine and anti-aging
medicine which deal with age-related diseases and with the mechanism
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

of aging itself, we are tempted to think that everyone might already be

terminally ill without being aware of it. Here we encounter an extremely
fascinating case of translation between the iconic, the indexical, and the
symbolic order – to speak in biosemiotic terms. It is largely on the sym-
bolic super-organismic (cultural, social, political) order that it depends
whether or not a person who does not feel ill as an organism (indexical
level – the level of organic communication with the milieu) could, in fact,
be considered as having a disease at the most basic, iconic, sub-organis-
mic level (cellular metabolism).
The aging-as-disease view is not, as of yet, a mainstream one. It is still
considered ‘normal’ to age, to lose normative capacity while aging, and
to die. But the very fact that it is debated if aging (more generally, ‘being
a mortal living being’) is normal or a disease (an evolutionary misstep,
perhaps) should be enough to analyse some of these translational paths
that traverse (and put into question) the iconic-indexical-symbolic
division.

Biopower, Anti-Aging Discourse and Types of Semiosis

As said above, we will interpret the types of iconic, indexical, and sym-
bolic semiosis as corresponding to the levels of sub-organismic, organis-
mic, and super-organismic agency. In what follows, we will attempt to
describe these levels of anti-aging interventions both in terms of biopo-
litics and biosemiotics. Our proposal is that, in the context of biopower,
it would be more useful to view the object and objectives of anti-aging
medicine as biosemiotic rather than bio-chemical. In this manner, we can
trace more closely the agencies creating norms and biological values and
observe the meaning-making processes that are able to respond to the
techniques of biopower. In short, we should seek to detect the interpret-
ive aspects of the constitution of power relations on every level of
intervention.
Regenerative medicine is a rapidly evolving branch of medical
research, a branch that promises the cure of multiple diseases that are
caused by the premature death of differentiated cells or by deficiencies in
their functioning: ‘regenerative medicine replaces or regenerates human
cells, tissue or organs, to restore or establish normal function’ (Mason
and Dunnill, 2008: 4). Anti-aging medicine can be seen as both narrower
and broader than regenerative medicine: in the former sense, it employs
regenerative medicine’s research to fight the manifestations of aging; in
the latter sense, it can be taken as a general stance that regards aging as
undesirable and thus grounds the ‘fight’ against aging (see Binstock,
2003; Vincent, 2009). John A. Vincent divides anti-aging medicine
into three broad domains: (1) an activity aimed at modifying the appear-
ance of old age; (2) an approach that considers aging as a disease to be
cured; and (3) a view that aging is a fundamental biological process
Puumeister and Ventsel 13

(2009: 198–9). It must be stressed that all those domains work simultan-
eously on all three levels of semiosis and thus have the capability of
involving the whole of human existence.
Of the greatest interest to us are the second and third domains of anti-
aging medicine since they are expected to alter the very biological con-
stitution of the human being who Foucault (2002, 2003) has shown to be,
in modernity, a fundamentally finite being. Considered in the context of
biopower, regenerative medicine cannot, however, be seen as politically
neutral since, for example, stem cell therapies are directly associated with
fighting against the degenerative conditions of the aging populations and
promoting economic growth (Petersen and Krisjansen, 2015; Cooper,
2008). As Céline Lafontaine has argued, the objective, in the case of
regenerative and anti-aging medicine, is ‘no longer healing, it is regener-
ation, which in itself presumes no limit’ (2009: 62).
As medicine has become ever more prominent both as an institution
and as a discourse, it has the power not only to define and treat diseases
but also to prescribe social and individual behaviour. More and more
domains of the social come to be understood through medical vocabulary
– a process called ‘medicalization’ (Conrad, 1992). Recently a debate has
emerged also regarding aging: could aging itself, as a whole process, be
understood as a disease? To ‘medicalize’, to conceptualize as a disease,
would be a ‘way to make aging itself a legitimate goal for intervention’
(Schermer, 2013: 211): is aging ‘a legitimate target for medical interven-
tion’ or simply an excuse for ‘enhancement’?
The anti-aging discourse and research allows itself to be quite bold,
aspiring even to ‘stave off aging indefinitely’ (De Grey, 2007) and con-
ceptualizing aging as an enemy (see, for example, a website dealing with
anti-aging treatments, Fight Aging!)2 or promising rejuvenation by fetal
stem cell therapies, as in the EmCell Clinic.3 Anti-aging medicine cannot
thus be unproblematically assimilated into or identified with regenerative
medicine. Nor, for that matter, even to gerontology as a scientific discip-
line (Binstock, 2003). Putting all subtler distinction and ‘boundary work’
aside, we can put forward that anti-aging medicine, in contrast to both
regenerative medicine and gerontology, does not aim to simply ‘restore
or establish normal function’. For anti-aging medicine, it is rather a
question of how to expand the normal functioning of the organism to
its extremes – how to reconfigure the normal by altering the organism’s
normative capabilities. If aging itself becomes the object of medical inter-
ventions, diseases like ‘Alzheimer’s and arthritis become symptoms of
aging’ (Mykytyn, 2008: 315). Consequently, aging is transformed into
an underlying pathological state that gives rise to specific diseases.
Aging, for the ‘anti’ movement, is no longer normal (which is not the
same as to say that it is a disease per se).
But, if aging itself comes to be seen as pathological, then Canguilhem’s
subjective definition of pathology seems no longer pertinent: the subject
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

can sense him or herself to be in a normal state of health – the subject

does not suffer. Even when older people fall ill more often, they still feel it
to be normal: appropriate to their age. But the condition of the human
being – as a social, political and linguistic animal – means that also the
symbolic dimension can affect the iconic and indexical sign processes. In
what remains of the paper, we will try to elaborate how the biosemiotic
vocabulary of the different types of semiosis could possibly be used to
approach the field of anti-aging medicine.

The Iconic Interventions

The iconic type of semiosis is definitive of the cellular and molecular
levels of life. As suggested above, in the inanimate world there exist no
hereditary correspondences, or codes. With the emergence of semiosis we
can also speak of the emergence of choice and thus of agency: life can be
said to be a self-preserving set of codes (Barbieri, 2008).
Of course the sign processes of cells are extremely limited, but still, the
diversity of translational processes surpasses the determinate transla-
tions: for example, the processes of transduction or the communication
between the inside and the outside through the membrane; the sequence
of nucleotides in DNA and RNA (Barbieri, 2003). It is important to
stress that they are memory-based correspondences which enable the
cell’s functioning to be selective and individual. These types of iconic-
vegetative sign processes are probably the most common endosemiotic
processes (Kull, 2009). We could also say that they determine, in large
part, the normative capacity of the organism: cellular communication
determines the organism’s response to a disease. Is a specific part of a
body (an organ, a tissue) capable of regenerating itself and thus over-
coming a disease?
Employing here a biosemiotic vocabulary would mean, firstly, going
further than simply describing the chemical aspects of cellular processes
and concentrating on semiosis, and secondly, resisting the temptation of
ascribing either indexical or symbolic capabilities to iconic semiosis. As
suggested, iconic processes have the very simple ability of recognition
based on similarity, which means that it is the basic process of differen-
tiating self from the other, of creating the borders that make individu-
ation possible. Iconic semiosis is therefore fundamental but also
extremely basic and simple, and it involves the least of semiotic freedom.
Now, the manner in which anti-aging discourse employs molecular
level processes is suggesting that they can be directly made to immortalize
the organism. For example, if we look at the hopes rested upon telomeres
and telomerase in promoting prolongevity and health (Mitteldorff, 2015;
Varela et al., 2016), we are immediately faced with the problem of what
do telomeres actually achieve for an organism? In addition, laboratory
research is, of course, not at first applied to humans and so there is also
Puumeister and Ventsel 15

the question of species-specific effects: what would telomeres, lengthened

in mice – who ‘are not among the species whose lifespans are limited by
telomere attrition’ (Mitteldorf, 2013: 1056) – manifest in human beings?
Here it is not a question of asserting that semiotics has better tools to
understand molecular chemistry but to point out the inappropriateness
of using a vocabulary that carries with it the dangers of biological
determinism.
The iconic level of sign processes are also related to the possible haz-
ards of regenerative and anti-aging medicine, for example that the cells,
in long-term cultivation in vitro, have a tendency to transform into can-
cerous cells (Gage, 2000). The dangers observed on the iconic level mani-
fest themselves most clearly on the indexical one where organismic
individuation takes place. Thus we cannot isolate the processes of one
level from the others, and it’s also here that we can again see the inter-
relatedness and co-existence of all the levels of semiosis in the human
organism.
One consequence of regenerative medicine is thus the transformation
of the normativity of the organism. Still, we have a political problem on
our hands. First, biomedical techniques intervene in the biological devel-
opment of the organism, which enables us to ask: is the constant and
continuous reproduction of cells pathological or normal? ‘At which
moment in time does aging become a disease? The more we know
about the start of molecular and intracellular processes early in life, it
appears, the more states will become ‘‘disease’’’ (Schermer, 2013: 217).
Second, the goals that motivate the development of regenerative medi-
cine are not solely defined in strict scientific discourse, but are defined
symbolically as political: whether to fund certain research projects or not
is conditioned by social and political, contingent, norms. We have a
constant dynamic or a translation between the iconic, the indexical and
the symbolic levels. And biopower can be understood as a set of tech-
niques for exactly this translation: for example, how is cellular activity
translated into symbolic and social behaviour?
The biosemiotic agency at work on the molecular level is the most
elementary and basic one and thus the most difficult to account for as
an agent within the context of biopower: it always tends to appear as an
object to be modified. Thus it is crucial to stress the biosemiotic norma-
tive capacities, the potential for meaning-making, and state that even
here we are dealing with the relations of techniques and agencies. As
Foucault (1982) has taught us, to analyse power, we always have to
look for the points of resistance, and here it would mean search for
the agencies put to work in order to create meanings that they possibly
could not produce. For this reason social scientists would do well to
concentrate on the medical and scientific research done, and to the trans-
lations of this research into the language of social control and also into
the discourse of human sciences. For example, the constant talk of
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

‘secrets of aging’ echoes quite obviously that of the ‘meaning of life’ when
the structure of DNA was discovered and the straightforward transfer of
the biosemiotic to social semiotic was supposed.

The Indexical Interventions

Indexical semiosis presupposes the existence of the nervous system and the
ability to transform the relations between the cells; it presupposes the com-
munication of numerous cells (Kull, 2008: 670; Barbieri, 2009: 236).
Indexical semiosis in the human being can be conceptualized through
Canguilhem’s notion of normativity in the context of an organism’s
umwelt: the organism’s subjective active relatedness to its milieu which cre-
ates the subjective experience as such. When speaking of anti-aging, we can,
on this level, see that of course the ‘aging related diseases’ (atherosclerosis,
cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc.) cause illness, ‘a subjectively interpreted
undesirable state of health’. But, in old age, the feeling of illness could be
regarded as normal (Schermer, 2013: 215–16): aging is inevitably accompa-
nied by certain diseases and deficiencies in normative capacities.
Regenerative medicine and research, in its academic sense, focuses on
these subjective illnesses of the organism which it strives to treat through
intervention on the cellular, molecular, iconic level. Anti-aging medicine,
however, strives to constitute aging as an objective disease which must be
articulated at the symbolic (social, political, cultural) level. Even the
Estonian Social Ministry’s project of active aging now states that
‘aging is a process that takes place the entire life, that is, from birth to
death’ (Aktiivsena, 2013: 5). And it is through raising consciousness of
the people that it is seen to be possible to, in a sense, fight aging: to get
people to exercise and engage in more healthy life-styles, to get them to
strive towards their subjective well-being throughout their lives, both
psychologically and physically.4 Although aging is not currently regarded
as a disease, it is increasingly an incentive for people to act preventively,
to form their inner experience of existence based on the discursively
constituted process of continuous and life-long aging.
The meeting point of biopower and biosemiotics could here be the
body, the organism individuated within a social context. The biosemiotic
range of significations is already much wider than on the iconic level and
is much more simply subjectified. This is why we can here already speak
of technologies of the self: how a subject is being formed through the self
acting upon the self. How to act on oneself in order to be(come) healthy?
As said, from the viewpoint of anti-aging medicine, the subject must
recognize him or herself to be affected by pathology even if s/he does
not feel him or herself to be affected by any diseases. Here we can also see
how the indexical becomes the meeting point of the iconic and the sym-
bolic: the molecular processes of aging are asserted to be modifiable and
controllable through exercise, self-discipline, and so on.
Puumeister and Ventsel 17

The indexical type of semiosis could be conceptualized as the biosemio-

tic bodily process of individuation through technologies of the self that are,
when we look at anti-aging medicine, ascribed by biopolitical discourses of
healthy and actively aging. This points us already in the direction of sym-
bolic signification but is still analysable non-linguistically: the individu-
ation of the body into a social subject cannot be accounted for solely in
symbolic terms. Social scientists could here concentrate on the relations of
anti-aging discourse to the material technologies of the body (measuring,
exercise, discipline, nutrition, etc., that constitute the body as controllable
and subjectifiable both by the self and the social context).

The Symbolic Interventions

It can be said that interventions on the iconic and indexical levels are
made possible on the basis of articulations on the symbolic level of sign
processes, the level most commonly posed as definitive of human cul-
tural, social, and political activity. We can observe how the iconic and
indexical levels are put to work towards constructing a better symbolic
realm (political utopias of an ageless society). The discourse surrounding
anti-aging and regenerative medicine is not purely political or purely
scientific; it is a mixture of different discourses that all try to speak the
truth of life: ‘[T]hose who generate barriers to finding and transplanting
adult tissue/organ stem cells for financial, religious, political, or other
reasons’ (Weissman, 2012: 665). Religious organizations have been
strictly opposed to utilizing human embryonic stem cells on the grounds
that, with stem cells, we can already speak of a ‘potential person’; but, as
Cooper (2006: 10) has pointed out, stem cell research has overcome the
limits of the person: ‘[S]tem cell research is not fundamentally interested
in the production of a person, who as a limit over-determining the pro-
gressive differentiation of cells can only represent a waste of life’s incal-
culable possibilities of self-regeneration.’
Thus, a person, a cultural, social and political ‘figure’ – a discursive
construct – would hinder the potentialities of ‘life itself’. If a person were
to develop from the cultivated stem cells, it would mean the curtailment of
the potential unlimited regeneration and proliferation of life. Could it also
mean that the person, a fundamental juridical and political figure, could in
fact come to obstruct politics? The specific example that Cooper (2006: 13)
gives here is the patenting of ‘a purified preparation of pluripotent human
embryonic stem cells’: the person has traditionally been the category that
has been protected from commodification through patenting, and thus
everything that has the potential to directly modify or transform the
person could not have been patented. Thus, in the case of patenting stem
cells, human biological life on the cellular level needs to be separated from
the person. Life on the cellular level, ‘a generic process of human (re)gen-
eration, common to all bodies, has been incorporated into the laws of
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

invention’ (Cooper, 2006: 13). Here we have an excellent example of the

ways in which knowledge of the cellular processes of life (the iconic level)
start to reconfigure the political sphere (symbolic). When politics comes to
be seen more and more through biological processes, the person’s role in
politics starts to transform. If politics turns to life, tries to ‘harvest’ life’s
potentialities on the molecular (iconic) level, could the person become an
outdated and obsolete political-ethical subject?
We would be better off treating the category of the person as an end
result of processes and practices of (self-)normalization and (self-)govern-
ment, while keeping in mind that for biosemiotics, the self in question ‘is a
community structured to obey the laws of the logic of otherness, the self is
a community of dialogically interrelated selves’ (Petrilli, 2003: 90–1). The
self is an agent (trans)forming both itself and its umwelt by creating sig-
nificant (biological) values. The interventions of anti-aging and regenera-
tive medicine put forward certain demands for these processes in relation
to the management of populations, demands that cannot themselves be
understood from the point of view of the category of the person: (1) on the
iconic level, cellular processes transcend the activities and the identity of
the person ‘from the inside’, and these processes form an active multipli-
city which could be (and often is) conceptualized as a population that
discards the person as irrelevant: cellular population is what is pertinent
for the (re)generation of life; (2) on the indexical level, the finite (mortal)
existence of the human person is rendered problematic at the time when it
is posited that the population of cells could, in principle, be immortal; and
(3) on the symbolic level we can see how the person is constantly made to
serve the security of the larger population.
What is understood here under the term ‘life itself’ is the life operating
on the molecular and iconic level. In attempting to interpret the oper-
ations of ‘life itself’ in terms of the symbolically constructed figure of the
person, the two inevitably end up in conflict. However, if we were to use
the biosemiotic notions of sub-organismic, organismic, and super-orga-
nismic agency, we would see that the molecular level is inseparable from
the latter and cannot be regarded as independent at all. ‘Life itself’ can
thrive without the person but it cannot do so without the organism in
which to regenerate and reproduce. Biosemiotic vocabulary does not
need the concept of ‘person’ as an ethical and political agent; it needs
that of an organism, the whole of which needs to be taken into account in
evaluating states of health and disease. From the biosemiotic perspective,
the ‘politics of life itself’, to use Rose’s (2007) term, would be impossible
and we would always need to consider the holistic network of interacting
agencies on different levels, using different types of semiosis. This way the
biopolitical translation of molecular activity directly into personal char-
acteristics could perhaps be avoided. In other words, we need to rethink
the symbolic ethical-political agency when analysing biopower: the
‘person’ still belongs to the theories of contractual approaches.
Puumeister and Ventsel 19

Conclusion and Notes on Future Possibilities

The above article attempted to find the connecting points between bio-
semiotics and biopolitics, two perspectives that have previously not expli-
citly met. This was done by employing the biosemiotic understanding of
different types of semiosis as an interpretive grid in order to analyse the
practices of biopolitics and biopower. The biosemiotic perspective has
the potentiality to offer us a fresh view of the agencies employed and
controlled by biopower. The distinction between iconic, indexical, and
symbolic sign processes makes us understand that each level of biose-
miotic agency has different capabilities for normativity according to the
types of relations they create and take part in. Looking through the lens
of semiotic thresholds, we can say that the principal operation of bio-
power is normalizing one type of semiosis in terms of another, such as
utilizing symbolic terminology to explain and put to work iconic semi-
osis. This can be seen clearly when molecular level processes are seen as
directly causing human behaviour and constitution.
The article, however, does not aim to be conclusive and totalizing; we
do not wish to say that this is the only manner in which to approach the
possible connections between biosemiotics and biopolitics. For example,
the analysis of biopower could be used to scrutinize the discourse of
biosemiotics. From this perspective, we could ask: Is biosemiotics, per-
haps, itself inherently normalizing in dividing life and semiosic processes
into three types? Is biosemiotics itself contributing to the practices of
biopower by proposing a new description of life as sign process that
can be read and manipulated? Is biosemiotics contributing to the per-
petuation of the language metaphor in considering life processes? In the
context of biopolitics, it is important that the borders of these levels are
not absolute and harsh but gradual and, to a certain extent, always con-
ventional (symbolic). The definition of life becomes traversed by different
discourses (economy, religion, morality, national culture, etc.) and the
power relations between them. Through the concept of the semiotic
threshold we can (1) analyse the articulation processes that strive to
define life; (2) explain the objectives of different delimitations; (3) pro-
pose how some discourses attain a hegemonic status.
We have not had the time and space here to go into both directions
and so have presented a possible path from biosemiotics to biopolitics,
but in the future we would like to return to the issue with a fuller set of
relations going both ways.

Acknowledgements
The authors would especially like to thank Lauri Linask and Timo Maran from the
University of Tartu for their insightful and encouraging comments during the revision
of the article, and of course all the anonymous referees for giving us the reason to think
about our writing more thoroughly.
20 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Funding
This work was supported by the IUT2-44 and the Marie Curie International Research
Staff Exchange Scheme Fellowship within the 7th European Community
FrameworkProgramme (EU-PREACC project).

Notes
1. Inside the discipline of biosemiotics, there is constant discussion over whether
the levels of semiotic activity are simply epistemological tools for understand-
ing different sign processes (in which case indexical and iconical signs would
simply be variations of symbolic signs) or are ontological in the sense of
describing the inherent mechanisms of living beings (see Deacon, 1997;
Sonesson, 2006). Regarding the purpose of the present article, this discussion
is significant only in that it brings out the dynamic nature of the borders
between these levels of semiosis; already within the discipline of biosemiotics
it has not been settled (it would indeed be interesting to see which viewpoint
assumes a hegemonic position within the discipline itself).
2. See: www.fightaging.org/about/
3. See: www.emcell.com.
4. See: www.fightaging.org/introduction/: Three steps toward longevity: (1)
Stop damaging your health; (2) Adopt a better diet and lifestyle; (3)
Support progress in longevity science.

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Ott Puumeister is a graduate student in the Department of Semiotics at

the University of Tartu, Estonia. He defended his MA thesis (Non-iden-
tificational politics and the political subject) in 2013. His main research
interests are biopolitics and biopower, semiotics of power and theories of
subjectivity.

Andreas Ventsel is a senior researcher in the Department of Semiotics at

the University of Tartu. He defended his PhD in 2009 (Towards semiotic
theory of hegemony. Tartu University Press), where he integrated the
Essex School’s theory of hegemony and the Tartu-Moscow School of
cultural semiotics. His current research interests include political semi-
otics, political communication, discourse theories, semiotic mechanisms
of identification, and power relations in online communication.