From signs of language and culture to semioses of life: appreciating Tom Sebeok’s role in the building of global semiotics

2.1 “Sebeok as a semiotician” in the Semio2014 roundtable

In appreciating Tom Sebeok’s contribution to the establishment of global semiotics, and in showing my indebtedness to my mentoring guide and master during my stay at the Indiana University, I assumed the honorary chairing duties for Vilmos Voigt, a linguistics professor from Budapest, who could not attend the congress for health reasons. I had personally invited the prospective participants to submit their abstracts for the thematic session “Sebeok as a semiotician” at the 12th World Congress of Semiotics in Sofia 2014. Under the heading of Semio2014, this session was organized for September 16, 2014, at 14:00–19:00 (18–1830) in Hall # 307 of the New Bulgarian building. Among those who had earlier sent their abstracts to me were the first seven scholars with their contributions: (1) Augusto Ponzio, Susan Petrilli, University of Bari, “Semiotics after Sebeok”; (2) Hongbing Yu, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, “The Sebeokian synthesis of two seemingly contrary traditions – viewed from China”; (3) Kalevi Kull, University of Tartu, “Thomas Sebeok library in Tartu”; (4) Marcel Danesi, University of Toronto, “The concept of model in Thomas A. Sebeok’s semiotics”; (6) Paul Cobley, Middlesex University, London, “Survival machines and the aesthetic”; (7) Zdzisław Wąsik, Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, “Presenting the Lectures on the Epistemology of Semiotics as an homage to Professor Thomas A. Sebeok and his Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies in Bloomington, Indiana”; (7) John Deely, University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, “The Hidden Third: Thomas A. Sebeok’s role is the passage from semiology to semiotics.” Finally, the session was crowned by (8) Eero Tarasti, whose paper “The Sebeokian vision of semiotics. From Finno-Ugrian studies via zoosemiotics to bio- and global semiotics” was added by the organizers of the Semio2014 (cf. Wąsik 2014).

Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli expressed their opinion that “Thomas A. Sebeok was the first to point out that semiotics is ‘global semiotics’ because all life-forms depend upon the action of signs (semiosis).” As they maintained: “From this perspective, semiotics is the development of the human capacity for becoming aware of semiosis – for metasemiosis.” Thus, in Ponzio’s and Petrilli’s appreciation: “As the only semiotic animal on earth, the human being is responsible for the whole of life: semiotics entails responsibility.” Therefore, as they concluded: “The semiotician must become also a “semioethician,” as we come to realize that life on our planet is in serious danger before the destructive character of national socio-economic behaviors today” (cf. Wąsik 2014).

With a strong allusion to the chapter by Thomas L. Short, “Why we prefer Peirce to Saussure” (1989), Hongbing Yu, in turn, argued that despite the “prevailing dominance of Peircean studies of signs in the West,” the Chinese semioticians knew how to manage with “the new Eastern stronghold of Global Semiotics as envisaged by the late Thomas A. Sebeok” as far as “both the Peircean tradition and the Saussurean tradition” had “been standing side by side ever since the early days of their reception.” In China, there was, at that time, a coexistence “of Peirce & Saussure.” Whereas “the Saussurean model of the sign” was considered only as consisting “of an irreducible dyadic relation of the signifier and the signified,” “the Peircean model of the sign” was acknowledged as offering “a higher degree of dynamism and dialogism, thus a more adequate explanatory power, inasmuch as it” was seen as “composed of an equally irreducible triadic sign relation of the sign (representamen), the object and the interpretant.” By this, Yu wanted to highlight that there “in the East, the unique Chinese way of treating things not so often in a black-and-white manner” had “nonetheless swayed the Chinese semioticians’ perception of the relationship between the Peircean and the Saussurean models of the sign.” Finally, Yu remarks that: “In the light of the China-specific interpretations and appropriations of Peirce and Saussure, […] none other than the late Thomas A. Sebeok, […] is strongly believed in Chinese semiotics to have contributed to achieving a synthesis of the two seemingly contrary traditions, especially with his Model of Models, viz. the Modeling Systems Theory” (cf. Wąsik 2014).

What Kalevi Kull had chosen as the subject matter of his talk was the idea of making “books and editing” as “a way of meaning-making.” As he said: “For more than three decades, Thomas A. Sebeok served as the editor of leading journals and book series in semiotics. He used to work at his home office where he collected a rich semiotic library.” Subsequently, Kull proudly revealed that starting from “2011, Sebeok’s library belongs to the University of Tartu, and is stored as a memorial library in the Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics of the University of Tartu.” “Sebeok’s collection,” consisting of “about 4,200 books and 700 vol of semiotic journals, among these volumes authored and edited by him,” in addition to “regular acquisitions and earlier belongings of semiotic literature by Tartu University Library” […] makes Tartu a very rich place for semiotic readings, open for students and scholars of the world. In the talk, some findings will be shared” (cf. Wąsik 2014).

The editor of Semiotica. Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Marcel Danesi, chose two concepts relevant for Tom Sebeok’s legacy, namely “semiosis” and semiotic “model.” He began with: “Especially in his later writings, Thomas Sebeok was striving to interconnect semiosis in species in emulation of his great intellectual predecessor, Jakob von Uexküll.” This was done, according to Danesi: “In order to liberate semiotics as a discipline from the cultural-ideological orientation it had taken in the decades of the 1960s through to the late 1980s, the era that foregrounded post-structuralism in semiotic analysis, Sebeok brought back the concept of model as conceived by Uexküll and developed by the Tartu School.” In Danesi’s view, Sebeok’s “goal was to eliminate jargon and abstruse solipsistic notions from poststructuralist semiotics by expanding the paradigm to focus on the nature of semiosis as a model-based and model-generating faculty of the brain and, as a consequence, to differentiate anthroposemiosis from zoosemiosis and phytosemiosis” (cf. Wąsik 2014).

Paul Cobley, in turn, argued “that Sebeok’s 1979 review of investigations into animals’ aesthetic behavior, originally cast as an early chapter of a much larger book, contains the key insight which drives contemporary, 21st-century semiotics.” His talk exhibited how Sebeok not only clarified “the modeling process as a whole, across verbal and averbal modes, but also” provided “an agenda for re-thinking tertiary modeling, the humanities and global arts policy” (cf. Wąsik 2014).

An extended version of Cobley’s talk found its continuation in his “9th Sebeok Fellow Address,” under the main title “Enhancing survival by not enhancing survival: Sebeok’s semiotics and the ultimate paradox of modelling” (Cobley 2014). In this address, Cobley stated that: “Tom Sebeok lives in recent memory partly because of his phenomenal networking, administration, editing, and promotion of individuals in semiotics as well as the disciplinary field in general. Yet this must not be allowed to obscure a body of published writings that is as original as it is eloquent.” What is more, Cobley addressed “Sebeok’s most penetrating insights arising from his consideration of a fundamental paradox in modern intellectual life” traversing “the bridge between the ‘hard’ and ‘human’ sciences” (Cobley 2014).

Zdzisław Wąsik expressed gratitude to the master saying that: “Throughout the last four decades Sebeok’s inspiring spirit permeated not only” his own “activity but also the scientific labor of the centers he had promoted or brought to life in Warsaw, Tartu–Moscow, Helsinki-Imatra or semioticians he had cooperated with, as in Budapest, Vienna, Paris, etc.” In his eyes, “Thomas A. Sebeok may be thus regarded as an embodied sign of the whole solipsistic conceptual and methodological framework of new semiotics. While contributing to the thematic session “Sebeok as a semiotician,” Wąsik referred “mainly to Jakob von Uexküll’s ‘Umwelt-theory’: A link between the semiotics of nature and the semiotics of culture, a topic” that had comprised “a large part of” his “vocational training received in the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies of the Indiana University at Bloomington” (cited and quoted, Wąsik 2014).

John Deely, one of the most faithful pupils and followers of Tom Sebeok from the time of the noteworthy ISISSS ’83, recalled the historical background of the competition between the disciplinary scopes of semiology and semiotics, seen in “a ‘contest’ between Peirceans and Saussureans as to which conception of sign, the Saussurean dyadic notion or the Peircean triadic notion, were ‘correct.’” Accordingly, he drew attention to the line of Sebeok in his path to the science of signs, which he called, following John Locke (1632–1704), “the doctrine of signs,” pointing out that “the Latin doctrina carried the notion not of ‘dogma’, meaning a logic of propositional statements to be accepted as true by scholars, but having rather an ideological character as a system of theological beliefs.”

As Deely illustrated, Sebeok’s work from 1963 (“Communication among social bees; porpoises and sonar; man and dolphin”) until 2001 (“Biosemiotics: Its roots, proliferation, and prospects”) “demonstrated that semiology, as based on Saussure’s model, was but a part of a much larger whole which, by way of Peirce’s demonstration that an interpretant is not only necessary to successful sign-action but need not be mental, extended the scope of sign activity to a perfusion of the universe as a whole.” As Deely summarized: “Thomas A. Sebeok, in short, was the éminence grise more responsible (through the constant and extensive exercise of his extraordinary editorial, writing, and organizational skills) than any single figure both for the emergence of Peirce’s work to the center-stage of semiotic development and for the sociological and organizational development of “semiotic societies” and congresses around the globe.” According to Deely, the “background centrality” of his life and work formed what his contemporaries have acknowledged, the notion of primary, secondary, and tertiary modeling systems (cf. Wąsik 2014).

2.2 Tom Sebeok’s legacy honored by contributions of his friends and collaborators

For the aims of a survey of opinions estimating the weight of Sebeok’s contributions, it is worthwhile to comment on some publications that were authored by a group of scholars who were elaborating and popularizing the basics of the discipline of global semiotics. Some of these estimations appeared as selected chapters in such collective monographs as, in particular, Ensaios em homenagem a: Essays in honor of Thomas A. Sebeok, edited by Norma Tasca; Towards a semiotic biology. Life is the action of signs, edited by Claus Emmeche and Kalevi Kull (2011); Semiotics continues to astonish: Thomas A. Sebeok and the doctrine of signs, edited by Paul Cobley, John Deely, Kalevi Kull, and Susan Petrilli (2011), or Biosemiotic perspectives on language and linguistics, edited by Ekaterina Velmezova, Kalevi Kull, and Stephen J. Cowley (2015).

The key position is taken up here by Myrdene Anderson. She was the first one of the “leading semioticians” who, together with John Deely, Martin Krampen, Joseph Morton Ransdell, and Thure von Uexküll, was assigned by Thomas A. Sebeok to verbalize a manifesto of global semiotics, known worldwide, under the title “A semiotic perspective on the sciences: Steps toward a new paradigm” (Anderson et al. 1984). The succeeding drafts of this position paper were circulated among the six semioticians involved, who gave their final comments with the aim in view to publish it in the journal Semiotica. To highlight the value of this manifesto, I will review the commemorating appraisals of Anderson on the basis of her “Chapter 2. Tackling Tom, lumper and splitter par excellence” (2011a) and additionally, also “Chapter 28. Anderson letter of 13 May 2002” (2011b).

In the same kind of relationship that Myrdene Anderson enjoyed with Tom Sebeok, one should place John Deely, the award holder of the second Sebeok fellow (1993),^[1] the highest honor given by SSA. He is discussed here in particular as the author of “Quondam magician, possible Martian, semiotician: Thomas Albert Sebeok” (Deely 1995); “Chapter 3. Semiosis: The subject matter of semiotic inquiry” (Deely 2005 [1991]); “Chapter 7. Thomas A. Sebeok and semiotics of the 21st century” (Deely 2011); and “Chapter 2. Semiotics ‘today’: The twentieth-century founding and twenty-first-century prospects” (Deely 2015).

A special locus on the organizational map of Tom Sebeok was occupied by the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School (an account of which is found in detail in the article “The Estonian connection,” Sebeok 1998), due to the personal bond he established with Juri Lotman (1922–1993), which consequently lead to vivid discussions on the conception of modeling systems. This special bond found its reflection in Sebeok’s last will, where he donated all the books from his home library in Bloomington to the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. Hence, the principal heir of this generous tribute, merging the traditions of Bloomington and Tartu, became Kalevi Kull and his collaborators. Although trained in biology (1975), Kull, who initially developed the field of eco-physiology, joined the Department of Semiotics in 1997, having acted as its head between 2006 and 2018. Bearing in mind Kull’s special adherence to Sebeok’s biosemiotics legacy, I have selected out of his numerous publications the following three representative publications, namely “Thomas A. Sebeok and biology: Building biosemiotics” (Kull 2003); “Semiotics is a theory of life” (Kull 2005); and “Chapter 11. The architect of biosemiotics: Thomas A. Sebeok and biology” (Kull 2011).

Perhaps the most important heir and continuator of the ISISSS tradition was Eero Tarasti, the Honorary President of the IASS-AIS. As John Deely wrote in his article “The isisss project: A report on the first annual international summer institute for semiotic and structural studies” (1981), the first annual International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies (ISISSS’80) was held at Victoria College of the University of Toronto in the third decade of June 1980. As documented on the pages of Semiotic Research Institutes/International Semiotics Institute, Imatra, starting from the year 1988, on the initiative of the Toronto Semiotic Circle, an international collegium of semioticians convened in Imatra. They created the International Semiotics Institute (ISI) to promote international teaching and facilitate the mobility of scholars and students in the field of semiotics.

Under the initial heading, the International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies: Imatra/Toronto Summer School of Semiotics, Imatra, with Eero Tarasti as director, became the headquarters of a global network of semiotic institutions for 25 years until 2013. In estimating the work and organizational achievements of this initiator of the semiotic paradigm on the international scale, Tarasti wrote a chapter “Thomas A. Sebeok, a portrait of a Finnougrian semiotician” (2011a) for the collective volume, Semiotics continues to astonish: Thomas A. Sebeok and the doctrine of signs. However, what Tarasti owes to Sebeok’s biosemiotics in the development of his existential semiotics is especially visible in his “Existential semiotics and cultural psychology” (2011b), Semiotics of classical music: How Mozart, Brahms and Wagner talk to us (2012), and Sein und Schein. Explorations in existential semiotics (2015).

There are, in my estimation, three reasons to also include here Susan Petrilli, an Italian semiotician, specializing in philosophy and theory of languages at the University of Bari, to a top group of faithful followers of Sebeok’s legacy. The first of the two factual reasons justifying the special exposure of Professor Petrilli is connected with her activity as a translator^[2] and popularizer of T. A. Sebeok’s works in Italy, and with her placement among recipients of the Sebeok Fellow Award. What is remarkable in this distinction is that not only was she named the seventh Sebeok fellow but also all her relevant papers were published in a special issue of The American Journal of Semiotics, together with her “Sebeok fellow plenary address: Semioethics and responsibility. Beyond specialisms, universalisms, and humanisms” (cf. Petrilli 2008; Nuessel 2008).

The third reason for acknowledging Petrilli’s importance stands in the collocation with my own career getting underway in the IU RCLSS. It was exactly during my stay at Bloomington in the summer of 1983 when she just started to initiate contacts with Sebeok in the course of his visits to Milan in Italy and Estoril in Portugal. The opportunity to take part in the Advanced Study Institute on “Semiotics and International Scholarship: Towards a Language of Theory,” organized by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in Estoril, Portugal, on September 18–30, 1983, was indeed, very appealing to me at that time. Unfortunately, I was not able to go there together with Tom Sebeok due to the visa requirements being impossible for me to fulfill as a citizen of Poland, a country belonging at that time to another political-military alliance, namely The Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), known as the Warsaw Pact (WP). Therefore, in appreciation of Sebeok’s legacy at this point, I will discuss the following publications, written by Susan Petrilli personally: “For a global approach to semiosis” (Petrilli 1995); “Sebeok’s semiosic universe and global semiotics” (Petrilli 2003); “Chapter 14. About a master of signs starting from The Sign & Its Masters” (Petrilli 2011).

Last but not least, a significant place amid the world-known functionaries from the IASS-IAS and at the same time the SSA was occupied at this point by Marcel Danesi. It was he who had succeeded Tom Sebeok’s spouse Jean Umiker-Sebeok (2002–2004) in the role of editor of Semiotica. Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (since 2004). Therefore I will then consider Professor Danesi as the author of “Deictic verbal constructions in English and language as a modeling system” (Danesi 1995), “Chapter 6. The semiotic foundations of knowledge: Remembering Thomas A. Sebeok” (2011), and “Signs, forms, and models: Modeling systems theory and the study of semiosis” (2015).

3.1 On the author’s vocational growth as a post-doctoral scholar in the USA

Among the direct achievements of my Fulbright scholarship, which I spent in Tom Sebeok’s RCLSS between February and December of 1982, was Semiotyczny paradygmat językoznawstwa (A semiotic paradigm of linguistics, 1987), the monograph accepted later as a basis for my habilitation. Written in Polish and subsequently popularized in English through numerous papers and lectures delivered at international congresses and conferences, this monograph contributed to the elaboration of (1) the conception of epistemology as a set of cognitive perspectives, (2) the typology of sign conceptions based on their modes of existence and forms of manifestation, (3) the introduction of a biosemiotic conception of subjective significance into the investigative domain of language sciences, and consequently (4) the distinction between axiosemiotic (value- and need-oriented significance) and praxeosemiotic (action- and purpose-oriented significance) spheres of culture.

A separate depiction of investigative results was summarized in my book An outline for lectures on the epistemology of semiotics (1998), enriched with the contents of the book Systemowe i ekologiczne właściwości języka w interdyscyplinarnych podejściach badawczych (Systemic and ecological properties of language in interdisciplinary investigative approaches, 1997) and several papers published afterward. The next monograph, Epistemological perspectives on linguistic semiotics (2003) received its final shape as a contribution to linguistic semiotics, supplemented by such articles as “Verbal means as signs of human needs” (1997) and “Jakob von Uexküll’s ‘Umwelt-theory’: A link between the semiotics of nature and the semiotics of culture,” delivered at a special session to Honor Thomas A. Sebeok’s 80th birthday in Imatra, Finland (2000). A comprehensive version of the latter article, thanks to the editorial elaboration of Winfried Nöth, constituted the chapter “On the biological concept of subjective significance: A link between the semiotics of nature and the semiotics of culture” published in the journal Sign Systems Studies of Tartu University (2001). More recently, a larger selection of related topics which I had the opportunity to present at numerous congresses and conferences have been collected in my fourth monograph (in English), namely, From grammar to discourse: Towards a solipsistic paradigm of semiotics (2016).^[5]

Thanks to Sebeok’s teachings, the basis of my scholarly experience had been extended through biological concepts of meaning as significance introduced to semiotics by Tom Sebeok following Jakob von Uexküll and elaborated by his son Thure von Uexküll on the international stage. Therefore, the outcomes of my research have been enriched by a new vision of the investigative domain of linguistic semiotics, the core of which made up four investigative areas, including the Umwelt theory, and the division of semiotic disciplines, the stance of collective solipsism, the notion of semiotic self, and the hierarchy of modeling systems of the world.

These four areas of global semiotics have recently opened a new space for my phenomenological epistemology, merging the philosophical frameworks of existential and transcendental semiotics with the biological and anthropological conceptions of subjective significance in the realm of living systems. In such an investigative framework, the interpersonal life-world of an outer self, who produces and receives concrete signs as meaning bearers, has been regarded as a counterpart of the (inter)subjective universe of an inner self, formed by the “sensual knowledge” originating from individual experiences and “consensual knowledge” about the meaning derived from the contents of collective communication. Exhibiting, in my internationally delivered papers, the semiotic interpretation of existence and life in terms of immanence and transcendence, I have described the immanent subjects as being in their surrounding worlds and transcendent subjects as being able to go beyond their life-worlds.

3.2 Confronting the species of signs with the category of the linguistic sign in the hierarchy to semiotic objects

In Sebeok’s conception, language was considered as the sixth evolutional category of human signs. In the third chapter of his academic handbook Signs: an introduction to semiotics, Sebeok (2001 [1994]) presents first, in a historical-ordering account, the six fundamental categories of signs, which he himself has called “six species of signs,” introduced, for the first time, in his article of 1975, namely signal, symptom, icon, index, symbol, and name. Subsequently, discussing the views of the respective authors, he delineates and illustrates them, in chapter 4 with the examples “symptom signs,” chapter 5 with “indexical signs,” chapter 6 with “iconic signs,” chapter 7 with “fetish signs,” chapter 8 with “language signs,” and chapter 9 with “language as a modelling system?”

The conclusive remarks are crowned there with the statement: “The cardinal points of this brief scenario are twofold: language evolved as an adaptation; whereas speech developed out of language as a derivative ‘exaptation’ over a succeeding period of approximately two million years.” As he admitted:

Several million years later, however, language came to be ‘exapted’ for communication, first in the form of speech (and later of script, and so forth). This relatively brief elapsed time was required for a plausible mutual adjustment of the encoding with the decoding capacity, but, since absolute mutual comprehension remains a distant goal, the system continues to be fine-tuned and tinkered with (Sebeok 2001 [1994]: 147).

Against Sebeok’s broad conception of sign and its categorization, I reduced my sphere of interest to the sign as an investigative object of linguistics among other semiotic disciplines. As a result, I proposed starting the discussion about the scope of linguistic semiotics with the search for the genus proximum of language as a system of signs. In order not to oscillate between incommensurable conceptions, I searched for a parameter common to all notional scopes of the term “sign” among other semiotic objects, investigated as facts or processes with regard to their meaning-indicating functions (Wąsik 2016: 22). This parameter was deduced from the classification of intelligible phenomena, specified as something that appears as known to the mind after having been (re)cognized by senses, or sensible stimuli, identified as something that the activates the body and affects the mind in the process of its apprehension.

Contrary to Sebeok’s enumeration of the so-called six species of signs, signal, symptom, icon, index, symbol, name, where the “language sign” is considered under the term name, I proposed a hierarchical classification of all semiotic objects, in which the highest place is occupied by either a phenomenon or a stimulus as the definitional genus proximum, whereas the lowest place belongs to the language (i.e. verbal) sign. Accordingly, in my approach (Wąsik 2016: 200–202), these seven classes of semiotic objects include: index, symptom, signal, appeal, symbol, icon, and sign. What is added to my classification is the category of “appeal,” introduced nota bene by Karl Bühler in his Theory of language: The representational function of language (1990 [1934]), originally published as Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (1965 [1934]).

Furthermore, each specimen of a particular class may be considered in terms of a token belonging to a particular type when it is characterized by a positive (plus) marker (+) or a negative (minus) marker (−). Thus, in the classificational typology, the semiotic objects occupy the hierarchical ladder with the following markers: index as an implicative phenomenon or an associated stimulus (+); symptom as an implicative nonartificial phenomenon or an associated nonintentional stimulus (+/−); signal as an implicative artificial phenomenon or an associated intentional stimulus (+/+); appeal as an implicative artificial nonsemantic phenomenon or an associated intentional noninferred phenomenon (+/+/−); symbol as an implicative artificial semantic phenomenon or an associated intentional inferred stimulus (+/+/+); icon as an implicative artificial semantic nonarbitrary phenomenon or an associated intentional inferred nonconventional stimulus (+/+/+/−); and sign as an implicative artificial semantic arbitrary phenomenon or an associated intentional inferred conventional stimulus (+/+/+/+).

3.3 Endo- & exosemiosis as intra- and interorganismic sign processes

For semioticians who alluded to the understanding of semiosis as sign processes, the distinction between endosemiosis and exosemiosis is still valid. These terms were coined by Sebeok in his Contributions to the doctrine of signs (1976).

By endosemiosis Sebeok meant the sign process that occurs within organisms, with exosemiosis being the sign process that occurs between organisms. More exactly, he determined “endosemiosis” to be “trains of sign transmission inside the organism” and “endosemiotic codes” to be “intraorganismic codes, e.g., genetic code, metabolic code, immune code, neural code.” Thus, “endosemiotics” constituted for him the “study of intraorganismic sign systems” and “exosemiotics” the “study of interorganismic sign systems” (cited and quoted, Sebeok 1976: 3).

More popular is the definition of semiosis established by Sebeok in the glossary of his introduction to semiotics, as the “capacity of a species to produce and comprehend the specific types of models it requires for processing and codifying perceptual input in its own way” (2001 [1994: 156]). Worth mentioning is here also Sebeok’s proposal for the separation of five “(super)kingdoms,” or rather investigative domains, dealing with the semiosis in, or semiotics of, bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and humans, in which “distinct but intertwined modes of semiosis have evolved” (Sebeok 1997: 440; For a detailed discussion and bibliography see Kull 2003: 53).

3.4 Sebeok’s concept of biosemiotic selfhood

Working at first in the domain of linguistics and cultural anthropology until the late 1970s, Sebeok devoted his energy to organizational spheres in semiotics around the world. He was among the founding fathers of IASS/AIS in 1969, who included Algirdas Julien Greimas, Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, Émile Benveniste, André Martinet, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Juri Lotman, and subsequently also of SSA, founded in 1975.

Significant at those times was his Presidential Address delivered October 12 to the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, Bloomington, Indiana, October 11–14, 1984. This address under the title of “Vital signs” marked his scientific credo (cf. Sebeok 1986 [1985]), which localized the semiosis of life in the center of semiotic interest where the domain of study should be the body of human organisms constituting as a text, which comprises signs, messages, and codes:

A human body is thus an inextricably complex text that has been encoded and determined by the combined action of nature and nurture (or that minuscule segment of nature some anthropologists grandly compartmentalize as culture). The text may at once be utilized and referred to. It perdures through life by unremittingly giving off streams of signs, among them, imperatively, the vitals. Any elucidating interpretation of a consecution of such signs comprises a message referring to a code […] (Sebeok 1986 [1985]: 60).

Perhaps, the most relevant statement about organismic subjectivity or agency in terms of the self is to be found in Sebeok’s handbook Signs: an introduction to semiotics, in which he says that: “The body of any vertebrate, including humans, is composed of a veritable armamentarium of more or less palpable indexical markers of unique selfhood” 2001 [1994]: 95. Among the four articles devoted to the concept of “the semiotic self” as synonymous with “the biosemiotic self,” the most informative is the chapter “The cognitive self and the virtual self” published in the collective book of Global semiotics edited by the author himself (cf. Sebeok 1991 [1979], 1991, 2001 [1998], 2001). Tom Sebeok states that, starting from 1977, he “began to explore the notion of the semiotic self” to explain the psychosomatic location of sign processes in organisms, such as passions and feelings (2001: 122). Therefore, when he poses the question of where “the semiotic self” is “located,” he provides two concatenated answers: in the first, maintaining that it is “in the organism’s milieu extérieur, on the level on an idiosyncratic phenomenal world […] – made up of exosemiosic processes of sign transmission” and in the second, claiming that it “enfolds […] in its milieu intérieur some body’s immunocompetence […] stored within the subjacent realms of its endosemiosic organs” (Sebeok 2001: 124). Hence, involved in the “web of semioses” the biological self takes part in “transformations, such as the cybernetic interplay in the first semiosic dimension, which is one of complementarism between ego and alter […], and in the second semiosic dimension between inner and outer” (Sebeok 2001: 125). In addition to the relation between ego and alter, Sebeok underlined that: “Any self can and must interpret the observed behavior of another organism solely as a response to its interpretation of its universe” (2001: 126). Accordingly, having raised and answered the question about the location of the semiotic self, Sebeok “also claimed that the semiotic self is engaged in continual scanning, or monitoring, or a process of meta-interpretation of its modeling system” (2001 [1998]: 133).

3.5 Primary, secondary, and tertiary modeling systems

What appears to be helpful in the understanding of the world beyond signs is the theory of modeling systems of reality, put forward by Juri Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, where the crucial role is ascribed to the semiotic self as a world-model-builder or world-view-designer. In his theses, published in 1967 under the title “Тезисы к проблеме ‘Искусство в ряду моделирующих систем’” (cf. Lotman 1967) and later translated as “The place of art among other modelling systems” (2011), Lotman describes a model as “an analogue of an object of perception that substitutes for it in the process of perception.” According to Juri Lotman: “A modelling system is a structure of elements and rules of their combination, existing in a state of fixed analogy to the whole sphere of the object of perception, cognition, or organization. For this reason, a modelling system may be treated as a language” (quoted and cited, Lotman 2011 [1967]: 250, emphasis in original).

At the Semiotic Society of America Meeting in 1987, Sebeok takes a constructive stand to Lotman’s claim by posing the question: “In what sense is language a ‘primary modelling system’?” He submits his modeling systems theory based on the detachment of nonverbal (natural) from verbal (conventional) and nonverbal (cultural) communication systems. At the same time, Sebeok mentions that it is very likely that the representatives of the species Homo habilis had the capacity of language without any verbal expression, claiming that: “Solely in the genus Homo have verbal signs emerged. To put it in another way, only hominids possess two mutually sustaining repertoires of signs, the zoosemiotic non-verbal, plus, superimposed, the anthroposemiotic verbal” (Sebeok 1988: 55).

In Sebeok’s view (1979), the human being also acts as a semiotic self in the capacity of a world-model builder on the level of biological organisms. Therefore, the human being’s primary modeling system of reality is created in the surroundings of animals through the mediation of effectors and receptors, i.e. on the level of indexical symptoms and appealing signals. Whereas the secondary modeling system, involving the extralinguistic reality of everyday life construed by the use of verbal means of signification and communication, appears only in the sphere of humans, and the tertiary modeling system, encompassing the extrasemiotic reality of human civilization being artificially created and generationally transmitted through tradition, entails the whole semiosphere of language and culture (discussed and cited by Wąsik 2016: 132–133).