*Wendy Wheeler* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Intro > The purpose of the present book, then, is to argue for the reality of the world, especially the reality of human biology and its consequences, and to seek a fuller understanding of articulate language as the most recently evolved expression of a semiosis which informs all nature. Wheeler sees Raymond Williams as being ahead of his time. Long before biosemiotics, he believed that perception creates worlds, not just discovers them. Recent advances in biosemiotics, by Thomas Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer, help to extend Williams' work. Her main target in this book is neoliberalism, specifically the neoliberal idea that only individuals exist, not societies. She also challenges the linguistic turn initiated by Saussure, which was: > an intellectual argument, that all discourses are constructed ‘power/knowledges’ (Foucault), which do not describe reality (which has no independent existence outside of language), and can, thus, be endlessly deconstructed (Derrida) to reveal their ideological nature Neoliberalism was embraced by the right and the linguistic turn was embraced by the left. Both ignored human biology, which was deeply rooted in the social. Wheeler is still very much invested in the idea of progress: > Importantly, I also hope that these things to which I am drawing the reader’s attention will go some way to giving the lie to the pessimistic idea that there is no such thing as progress. Our progress, as Hegel (the first philosopher of ‘evolutionary’ consciousness as systemic) describes it in The Phenomenology of Spirit, certainly proceeds by indirection; but, complex and indirect as it is, it is real. A dispirited culture which has lost sight of this, which buries itself in the conviction of meaninglessness, is simply one which has given itself over, mistakenly, to the inevitability of hopelessness and cynicism. # Quotes # References [Jablonka 2005 - Evolution in four dimensions: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation in the history of life](zotero://select/items/1_KQPUKWUP)