Home > Positioning > Persons > Hoffmeyer

Jesper Hoffmeyer (1942–2019)

Hoffmeyer turned biosemiotics from a programme into a developed theory of life. Trained as a biochemist, he argued that sign processes run through the whole of life, from the single cell upward, and that life and semiosis are coextensive. He gave the field much of its working vocabulary — semiotic freedom, code-duality, semiotic scaffolding — and much of its organisation.

Jesper Hoffmeyer (1942–2019), Danish biochemist and biosemiotician, born in Slangerup. He took his degree in biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen (1967), spent a year at the Collège de France in Paris, and taught at Copenhagen for the rest of his career — associate professor, then head of the Institute for Biological Chemistry — turning increasingly to the philosophy of biology, for which Aarhus awarded him a doctorate in 2005. He was president of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (2005–2015), co-edited the journal Biosemiotics, and was central to the annual Gatherings in Biosemiotics from 2001; the Semiotic Society of America named him a Thomas Sebeok Fellow in 2000.

Key concepts

Signs from the cell upward. Hoffmeyer’s central claim is that semiosis is not confined to animals with nervous systems but runs through the whole of life, beginning in the molecular signalling of the single cell — life and semiosis are coextensive. It is the most expansive claim the tradition has made, and its most contested. Building on Peirce’s triadic sign and Uexküll’s Umwelt, he carried Sebeok’s programme into a systematic theory (Signs of Meaning in the Universe, 1993; English 1996).

Semiotic freedom. The depth of meaning a living system can produce and interpret — and the degree to which its responses are open rather than fixed. Hoffmeyer held that semiotic freedom tends to increase over evolutionary time — on his account, the long arc of life runs toward creatures that can mean and read more.

Code-duality. With Claus Emmeche, the proposal that life runs on two interlocking codes — a digital code (the reproducible genetic record) and an analog code (the living organism itself, in its behaviour and form). The two are continually translated into each other across the generations, and their interplay is what makes a lineage at once stable and able to change.

Semiotic scaffolding. Living systems steady and sharpen their activity by leaning on networks of signs — cues, habits, regularities — within the organism and between organisms and their surroundings. Semiosis is not only interpretation in the moment but a built-up scaffold that shapes what comes next.

Where Hoffmeyer stops

Hoffmeyer’s reach is the source of both his influence and the dispute around him. Running semiosis down to the cell is the tradition’s boldest move, and critics charge that it over-extends the sign — that calling molecular signalling “interpretation” reads meaning into chemistry where cause and effect would do. The charge is unsettled. His own answer kept the frontier exactly at life: semiosis is coextensive with the living, so below life — in non-living chemistry and physics — he made no claim, and whether sign-relations have any pre-biotic floor he left outside his programme.

Key works

See also: Semiotics · Biosemiotics · von Uexküll · Sebeok · Peirce · Bateson