Somasis: Confusing Biological And Social Orders Of Complexity

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 47-8):

By two or three months of age, then, the infant’s expressive but pre-symbolic behaviour can be modelled, as shown in Figure 2.1, as either ‘biological behaviour’ or ‘social communion’. The former may have meaning for the adult but is unaddressed, while the latter involves shared address but no content. Both are regarded here as examples of ‘somasis’, that is, human vocal and bodily behaviour that is not being deployed for meaning-making.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, bodily behaviour that does not realise meaning is irrelevant to a model of semiotic systems. It has only become an issue here because the authors take the view 'from below', expression, in contradistinction to the SFL perspective 'from above', content.

[2] To be clear, classifying 'social' as 'biological' confuses different orders of complexity. On Halliday's model, which the authors have previously cited, but misunderstood, a social system is of a different order of complexity, because it is a biological system with the added component of value. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 508, 509):

Physical systems are just physical systems. Biological systems, however, are not just biological systems; they are at once both biological and physical. Social systems are all three: social, biological and physical. …

A biological system is a physical system with the added component of "life"; it is a living physical system. In comparable terms, a social system is a biological system with the added component of "value" (which explains the need for a synoptic approach, since value is something that is manifested in forms of structure). A semiotic system, then, is a social system with the added component of "meaning".

On Halliday's model, an infant's pre-symbolic behaviour of 'social communion' is, as the name implies, social, not biological ('somatic'). That is, it is biological with the added component of value. The value, in this model, can be understood in terms of Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, which proposes that neural systems include inherited 'values', which bias the perceptual categorisation of experience toward categorisations that have been naturally selected to be of adaptive value to the organism's ancestors. This can be seen, for example, in the peacock's courtship display, where the fanning of a peacock's tail selects a perception of positive value in the neural system of a peahen. 

In the case of the 'social communion' of a human infant, the infant's 'expression with no symbolic content' selects a perception of positive value in the neural system of an adult, thus biasing the behaviour of the adult towards the caregiving of the infant, and through that, the strengthening of a social structure: a social bond between infant and caregiver.