Biosemiosis and Posthumanism in John Clare’s Multi-Centred Environments

This chapter interprets Clare’s poetry in terms of biosemiosis, a theoretical approach that understands semiosis (the use and interpretation of signs) not just as an exclusively human activity but as characteristic of and fundamental to all life. Instead of organizing environments around a single dominant point of view, Clare in much of his poetry distributes cognitive agency throughout the environment, including not only various humans but also other mammals, birds, and even insects and flowers. Many of Clare’s poems, especially in his Northborough period, in this way offer a multi-focal, biosemiotic version of environment, constituted by multiple centres of perception and agency and overlapping networks of semiosis and cognition. The physical destruction of the commons for Clare also impoverishes this richly interactive ‘semiosphere’, or sphere of semiotic activity. The chapter concludes by exploring the contemporary implications of this biosemiotic approach to Clare’s poetry as a version of posthuman, multi-species worldmaking. Clare’s biosemiotic poetics decentres the human, while making it clear how our human forms of meaning, subjectivity, and perception depend on our immersion in these multi-focal semiotic networks all around us.