DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-164

Susan Petrilli

University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Italy

susan.petrilli@gmail.com

Augusto Ponzio

University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Italy

augustoponzio@libero.it

Abstract

Thomas A. Sebeok is no doubt a major representative of contemporary semiotics. With Sebeok the boundaries of this discipline have extended beyond historical-natural language, beyond culture. Such amplification is possible largely on the basis of an axiom that is pivotal to the global semiotic perspective: where there is life there are signs, that is, signs are present wherever there is life. Sebeok was the first to point out that semiotics is “global semiotics”, because all life-forms depend upon the action of signs (semiosis). Moreover, as a “semiotic animal” capable of “metasemiosis,” the human being has a capacity for responsibility and is responsible, first of all, for life and its health over the entire planet. From this perspective semiotics is also semioethics.

1. Going back to our 2002 monograph on Sebeok

As we claim in the opening pages of our Italian monograph on Thomas Sebeok, I segni e la vita. La semiotica globale di Thomas A. Sebeok, 2002, this particular master of the sign is no doubt a major figure in semiotics today.(1) With Sebeok the boundaries of this discipline have extended beyond historical-natural language, beyond culture. Such amplification is possible largely on the basis of an axiom that is pivotal to the global semiotic perspective: where there is life there are signs, in other words signs are present wherever there is life. Sebeok was the first to point out that semiotics is “global semiotics”, because all life-forms depend upon the action of signs (semiosis).

In this monograph, we present Sebeok’s semiotics, his global semiotics or semiotics of life, and consider its influence on scientific research and the current historical-social situation. This is the main task of the first part which is entitled “Ricognizioni”. Taking off from this platform we then move on in the second part, entitled “Il punto,” to formulate a few conclusions, as provisional as they may be, concerning central problems and concepts in semiotics.(2) Following Sebeok, I segni e la vita (Signs and Life) overall not only addresses semiotics as a discipline, but also semiotics understood as the capacity for reflection on signs, proper to human beings, semiotics understood as the capacity for conscious awareness and responsibility. Here reference is to responsibility of the semiotician, once we recognise with Sebeok that to deal with signs is to deal with life.

Today the relation between semiosis and life needs special attention given that it is vital for humans as much as for all other life-forms. But such a focus is not at all easy to reach in the contemporary world. In fact, human communication at a planetary level has developed to the point where it pervades the entire social reproduction process, that is, not only the level of circulation where commodities are exchanged, but also the processes of production and consumption. The consequence is that the signs of this order of communication tend to be the only ones we human beings take an interest in. This leads us to loosing sight of the larger picture, the far vaster dimension of communication, that involving all of life over the planet. Human signs only constitute a minimal part of communication thus described and are totally dependent upon it.

Anthropocentrism has generally dominated over the study of signs, especially since the rise of semiology, following Ferdinand de Saussure, with its specific programs and fields of research. But today with current developments in global communication, anthropocentrism is not only a flaw in a discipline, but a danger to all of life over the planet.

Nowadays we witness the hypostatization of human communication as an effect of globalization. This process goes together with privileging the communicative function as the absolute function. This not only involves privileging human signs, but also reducing them to the status of a communication means, internal to the current world system.

On his part, instead, Sebeok has insisted on the function of signs, beyond the communicative function, on semiosis as modelling worldview, being a preliminary condition for communication (see also Danesi and Sebeok 2000). This is the case for all living beings. But for what concerns humans from the time of their appearance as hominids – and which enabled their evolution through to the current phase – their species-specific modelling device is such that it constructs not only one world, as in the case of other living species, but numerous worlds, un undetermined number of different worlds (the multiplicity of historical-natural languages is proof of this): this is what Charles S. Peirce tagged “the play of musement”. Sebeok took up this expression as his formula for human modelling and used it as the title of his 1981 book.

More than by the word, the human being is characterized by language, where by “language” is understood “modelling device” of the world, one capable of inventing an infinite number of possible worlds. In Sebeok’s work, the critique of semiotic anthropocentrism is accompanied by the critique of phonocentrism. Speech and the different historical-natural languages are a manifestation of language understood as a modelling device, a mute modelling device up to the transition, in human evolution, from homo habilis to homo sapiens. Nor are historical-natural languages simply a means of communication. They too become (with respect to language, secondary) modelling systems.

It follows from all this that the function of signs is not exhausted in communication. Moreover, human communication is not reduced to communication as it occurs in the current global communication system. On the contrary, rather than limit ourselves to carrying out the role of organic communicators, functional to today’s reproduction system, we are endowed with a capacity to plan economic-social and cultural worlds altogether different from the existing world. This is important to underline considering how manifestly destructive the global communication system is at different levels, not only in quantitative terms, but also qualitative.

On the question of modelling in language and knowledge, we believe it most important to evidence the relation to “simulation,” that is, “imitation”. Misunderstandings relatively to the concept of “imitation” are largely due to the fact that the word “imitation” is often wrongly interpreted as passive repetition, rather than as innovation and as oriented in a creative sense to varying degrees. More than just evidence the creative valency of “imitation”, we need to explain the sense of “imitation”, with an interpretant that shifts its meaning so as to evidence the active, creative, inventive role of imitation. In the first place this interpretant must free the semantic field of “imitation” from the juxtaposition imitation/innovation or creativity, as well as from interpretation of imitation as being subject to a model, instead of as modelling activity. To this end the interpretant we propose for “imitation” is “simulation”. Imitation is simulation. And simulation is a modelling process.

The expression “signifying simulation” (Bettetini 1991) refers to the simulation processes inherent in verbal language and all other sign systems. Simulation is the specific object of knowledge theory and of studies on cognitive processes generally, or of epistemology when a question of studying scientific languages and therefore theory of scientific knowledge.

Signifying simulation lies outside the boundaries of semiotics and belongs to the bordering territory of theory of knowledge and epistemology. However, it is of interest to semiotics when, as metasemiotics or philosophy of language, it addresses the processes of their formation and conditions of possibility, thereby abandoning a purely descriptive approach to the study of signs. In this case, the theory of verbal language and of the sign generally is connected with theory of knowledge and of cognitive processes generally. On their part, theory of knowledge and epistemology which study signifying simulation and therefore languages and signs as well, frequently invade semiotics, even without knowing, and therefore must necessarily confront themselves with semiotics.

Primary signifying simulation in the human being is what we have identified as language. This statement is completely free from phonocentric implications. In fact, language is distinguished from speech whose specific function is communication. As anticipated above, language as we are describing it is a modelling device. According to Sebeok, its specific characteristic is what the linguists, logicians and semioticians calls “syntax”. Thanks to syntax modelling uses construction pieces that can be assembled in an infinite number of difference ways and create an indeterminate number of models that can be deconstructed to reconstruct different models with the same pieces. This enables us not only to produce worlds like other animals, but also an infinite number of “possible worlds”.

All this allows for that complex “play of musement” traceable not only in the “good” simulation of fiction and the different forms of artistic creation, as in the imaginary of myths, relations, popular beliefs, social utopias, e in the “bad” simulation of lying, deception, ideology as bad conscience (cf. Bonfantini and Ponzio 1997, 2006), but also in all forms of investigation, from the most immediate and unconscious present in ordinary perception to investigation oriented scientifically.

As a modelling device language has an iconic relation with the universe it models. On this aspect may we recall studies by Peirce, Wittgenstein, Jakobson, Sebeok.

Human language (or simply “language”) includes both verbal and nonverbal language. Verbal language is both oral, or vocal language, that is, speech, and written language. Written language is usually considered as secondary with respect to oral language as a result of a “phonocentric” orientation (cf. Derrida’s critique). According to such a perspective written language is no more than an external cover, transcription. Instead, on the basis of considerations by Sebeok on the origin of language, oral language itself, speech is secondary: secondary with respect to language understood as primary modelling, specific to the human being, while on the level of phylogenesis speech comes later. Verbal language, whether oral or written, and therefore historical-natural languages, and their transcription systems, where they exist, presuppose language understood as modelling. Just as nonverbal languages presuppose language.

Speech, like language, made its appearance as an adaptation, but for the sake of communication and much later than language, exactly with Homo sapiens. Speech organizes and externalizes language. Consequently, language too ended up becoming a communication device, enhancing the nonverbal capacity already possessed by human beings; and speech developed from language as what some evolutionary biologists call a derivative exaptation (cf. Gould and Vrba 1982: 4–15).

Important to underline is that thanks to language not only do human animals produce worlds similarly to other species, but, as Leibniz stated, they can also produce an infinite number of possible worlds. This brings us back to the “play of musement,” a human capacity that Sebeok following Peirce (1931–1966) considers particularly important for scientific research and all forms of investigation, and not only for fiction and all forms of artistic creation.

2. Reasoning with Sebeok: on the relation between sign and interpretant

For Sebeok the “cardinal notion” of semiotics is the sign (see Sebeok 1994b: 1, trad. It. 51). We have made a few observations on this account, which we will now recall. Sebeok posits that all components in the definition of sign (i.e., in addition to Sign the Object and Interpretant) are signs in turn, “as its species”. This ends by leaving such notions unexplained.

According to Sebeok (1994b: 10-14), both the Object (O) and the Interpretant (I) are Signs. Consequently, we may rewrite O as Son and I as SIn so that both the first distinction and the second are resolved in two sorts of signs (Ibid.: 12–13).

In our opinion and in accordance with Peirce who reformulated the classic notion of substitution in the medieval expression aliquid stat pro aliquo in terms of interpretation, the sign is firstly an interpretant. The Peircean terms of the sign include what we propose to call the interpreted sign on the side of the object, and the interpretant sign in a relationship where the interpretant makes the interpreted possible. The interpreted becomes a sign component because it receives an interpretation, but the interpretant in turn is also a sign component endowed with potential for engendering a new sign. Therefore, where there is a sign, there are immediately two, and given that the interpretant engenders a new sign, there are immediately three, and so forth ad infinitum as conceived by Peirce with his notion of infinite semiosis or chain of deferrals from one interpretant to another.

To analyze the sign beginning from the object of interpretation, that is, the interpreted, means to begin from a secondary level. In other words, to begin from the object-interpreted means to begin from a point in the chain of deferrals, or semiosic chain, which cannot be considered as the point of departure. Nor can the interpreted be privileged by way of abstraction at a theoretical level to explain the workings of sign processes. For example, a spot on the skin is a sign insofar as it may be interpreted as a symptom of sickness of the liver: this is already a secondary level in the interpretive process. At a primary level, retrospectively, the skin disorder is an interpretation enacted by the organism itself in relation to an anomaly which is disturbing it and to which it responds. The skin disorder is already in itself an interpretant response. To say that the sign is firstly an interpretant means to say that the sign is firstly a response (cf. Petrilli 1998: 1.1. and 2014: 1.1.). We could also say that the sign is a reaction: but only on the condition that by “reaction” we mean “interpretation” (similarly to Morris’s behaviourism, but differently from the mechanistic approach). The expression “solicitation-response” is preferable to “stimulus-reaction” in order to avoid superficial associations with the approaches they respectively recall. Even a “direct” response to a stimulus, or better solicitation, is never direct but “mediated” by an interpretation. Unless it is a “reflex action,” the formulation of a response means to identify the solicitation, situate it in a context, and relate it to given behavioural parameters (whether a question of simple types of behaviour, e.g., the prey-predator model, or more complex behaviours connected with cultural values, as in the human world).

The sign is firstly an interpretant, a response through which something else is considered as a sign and becomes its interpreted, on the one hand, and which is potentially able to engender an infinite chain of signs, on the other. Consequently, the “ambiguity” of the concept of semiosis discussed in the entry “Semiosis” in Enyclopedia of Semiotics, edited by Paul Bouissac (1998), does not concern the term but the phenomenon itself of semiosis. In fact, semiosis is at once a process and relation, activity and passivity, action of sign or action on sign, including sign solicitations and responses, interpreteds and interpretants.

In Peirce’s view, semiosis is a triadic process and relation whose components include sign (or representamen), object, and interpretant. “A Sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object” (CP 2.274). Therefore, the sign stands for something, its object, “not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea” (CP 2.228). However, a sign can only do this if it determines the interpretant which is “mediately determined by that object” (CP 8.343): as stated, semiosis is action of sign and action on sign, activity and passivity. “A sign mediates between the interpretant sign and its object” insofar as it refers to its object under a certain respect or idea, the ground, and determines the interpretant “in such a way as to bring the interpretant into a relation to the object, corresponding to its own relation to the object” (CP 8.332).

3. Proceeding together with Sebeok

Global semiotics is an important instrument for the study of signs today, given that the world we inhabit is the world of global communication (Sebeok 1994a, 2001). Global semiotics identifies the study of signs with the study of all life forms over the planet and is the historical development of the human capacity for semiotics, that is, metasemiosis, therefore conscious awareness and critique. In addition to indicating the general science of signs, “semiotics” is the term used by Sebeok to indicate the specificity of human semiosis. This concept is proposed in a paper of 1989, “Semiosis and semiotics: what lies in their future?” (see Sebeok 1991: Ch. 9), and is vitally important for a transcendental founding of semiotics given that it explains how semiotics as a science and metascience is possible. Sebeok writes:

Semiotics is an exclusively human style of inquiry, consisting of the contemplation – whether informally or in formalized fashion – of semiosis. This search will, it is safe to predict, continue at least as long as our genus survives, much as it has existed, for about three million years, in the successive expressions of Homo, variously labeled – reflecting, among other attributes, a growth in brain capacity with concomitant cognitive abilities – habilis, erectus, sapiens, neanderthalensis, and now s. sapiens. Semiotics, in other words, simply points to the universal propensity of the human mind for reverie focused specularly inward upon its own long-term cognitive strategy and daily maneuverings. Locke designated this quest as a search for “humane understanding”; Peirce, as “the play of musement” (Ibidem: 97).

Sebeok has shown how in the whole semiobiosphere, the human being is the only animal capable of semiotics in the sense that it not only uses signs, but also reflects on signs. Therefore the human being is a rational animal, that is, a “semiotic animal” (Deely, Petrilli, Ponzio 2005). To claim that the human animal is a “semiotic animal” means to claim that humans are endowed with a capacity for metasemiosis, for reflecting on signs and taking responsibility. By “responsibility” is understood responsibility for the whole of life, that is, for the whole of semiosis, for all living beings on Earth. It ensues that responsibility concerns semiotics as a general science of signs and the semiotician as a semiotician (cf. Deely 1998). Awareness of responsibility in such terms is particularly important today given that, as anticipated, semiosis on the planet, that is, life, is in serious danger in the face of the destructive character of the human world of global communication.

The first part of another book we have co-authored together, Semiotics Unbounded (2005), is entitled “Semiotics and Semioticians”. A good part is dedicated to Sebeok’s global semiotics.

As claimed by Lévi-Strauss:

A lire les ouvrages de Sebeok, on est confondu par sa familiarité avec les langues et les cultures du monde, par l’aisance avec laquelle il se meut à travers les travaux des psychologues, des spécialistes de neuro-physiologie cérébrale, de biologie cellulaire, ou ceux des éthologues portant sur des centaines d’espèces zoologiques allant des organismes unicellulaires aux mammifères supérieurs, en passant par les insects, les poissons et les oiseaux. Ce savoir plus qu’encyclopédique se mesure aussi aux milliers de noms d’auteurs, de langues, de peuples et d’espèces composant les index des ouvrages écrits ou dirigés par lui, et à leurs énormes bibliographies. (Lévi-Strauss 1986: 3)

For Sebeok semiotics is more than just a science that studies signs in the sphere of socio-cultural life, “la science qui étude la vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale” (Saussure 1916: 26). Before contemplating the signs of unintentional communication (semiology of signification), semiotics was limited by an exclusive focus on the signs of intentional communication (semiology of communication). This was the main trend in semiology following Saussure. However, after Sebeok semiotics is not only anthroposemiotics, but also zoosemiotics, phytosemiotics, mycosemiotics, microsemiotics, machine semiotics, environmental semiotics and endosemiotics (the study of cybernetic systems inside the organic body, on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels). All this is developed under the umbrella term biosemiotics or just plain semiotics. According to the global semiotic perspective, signs and life converge as do semiosis and behaviour among all living beings.

In Sebeok’s view, biological foundations, therefore biosemiotics, are at the epicenter of studies on communication and signification in the human animal. From this viewpoint, the research of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, teacher of Konrad Lorenz and one of the cryptosemioticians most studied by Sebeok, belongs to the history of semiotics. Sebeok’s semiotics unites what other fields of knowledge and human praxis generally keep separate either for justified needs of a specialized order, or because of a useless, indeed harmful tendency toward short-sighted sectorialization. This attitude is not free of ideological implications, often poorly masked by motivations of a scientific order. Biology and the social sciences, ethology and linguistics, psychology and the health sciences, their internal specializations – from genetics to medical semiotics (symptomatology), psychoanalysis, gerontology and immunology – all find in semiotics, as conceived by Sebeok, the place of encounter and reciprocal exchange, as well as systematization and unification. However, systematization and unification are not understood here neopositivistically in the static terms of “encyclopedia”, that is, in terms of the juxtaposition of knowledge and linguistic practices or reduction of knowledge to a single scientific field and its relative language, for example, neopositivistic physicalism.

Sebeok develops a view that is global thanks to his continuous and creative shifts in perspective, which favour new interdisciplinary interconnections and new interpretive practices. Sign relations are identified where for some there only seemed to exist mere “facts” and relations among things, independent from communication and interpretive processes. Moreover, this continuous shift in perspective favours the discovery of new cognitive fields and languages which interact dialogically (cf. Bakhtin 2008). They are the dialogic interpreted-interpretant signs of fields and languages that already exist (cf. Ponzio 1990, 1993, 2004a, b, c). In his explorations of the boundaries and margins of the various sciences, Sebeok dubs this open nature of semiotics “doctrine of signs”.

Developing and specifying Peirce’s idea that the entire universe is perfused by signs, Charles Morris recognized that semiotics could be extended to the organic in its wholeness: for there to be a sign there must be interpretive activity by the living organism (cf. Petrilli 1999). Following Morris (1971), Sebeok develops this thesis and claims that the entire life sphere is made of signs. This means that even a microorganism, for example a cell, flourishes insofar as it interprets signs. Sebeok extends the boundaries of semiotics to a maximum with his “semiotics of life” or “global semiotics”. Anthroposemiosis is only a small part of this. And within the sphere of anthroposemiosis an even smaller part is represented by verbal language. Even human beings, like all other members belonging to the sphere of zoosemiosis, communicate above all through nonverbal signs (see Sebeok 1998, 2001). Furthermore, the basis of all voluntary communication is formed of endosemiosic processes like those relative to the immunitary and neural systems.

Thanks to Sebeok the science that studies the semiotic animal, i.e. the human being – the only animal not only capable of using signs (i.e. of semiosis), but also of reflecting on signs through signs, anthroposemiotics, has today freed itself from two traditional limitations: anthropocentrism and glottocentrism.

With regard to the first, anthroposemiotics no longer coincides with general semiotics but rather is a part of it. Semiotics is far broader than a science that studies signs solely in the sphere of socio-cultural life. Semiotics also studies the signs of unintentional communication (semiology of signification); but before this it was limited by exclusive preference for the signs of intentional communication, Saussure’s sémiologie (semiology of communication). By contrast, semiotics following Sebeok and his “global semiotics” studies communication not only in culture, but also in the universe of life generally. With regard to the second aspect, getting free from glottocentrism, the critique of glottocentrism in anthroposemiotics must be extended to all those trends in semiotics which refer to linguistics for their sign model. Anthroposemiotics insists on the autonomy of non-verbal sign systems from the verbal and also studies human sign systems that depend on the verbal only in part, despite the prejudicial claim that verbal language predominates in the sphere of anthroposemiosis. To get free from the anthropocentric and glottocentric perspective as it has characterized semiotics generally implies to take other sign systems into account beyond those specific to mankind.

In his article “The evolution of semiosis” (in Posner, Robering, and Sebeok 1997-2004, vol. I), Sebeok explains the correspondences connecting the branches of semiotics with the different types of semiosis, from the world of micro-organisms to the superkingdoms and the human world. Specifically human semiosis, anthroposemiosis, is represented as semiotics thanks to a species-specific “modelling device” called “language”. This observation is based on the fact that it is virtually certain that Homo habilis was originally endowed with language, but not speech. Sebeok’s distiction between language and speech corresponds, even if roughly, to the distinction between Kognition and Sprache drawn by Müller in his 1987 book, Evolution, Kognition und Sprache (see Sebeok in Posner, Robering, and Sebeok 1997–2004, I: 443).

That the human being is a semiotic animal also means, as anticipated, that it is the only animal existing that is capable of awareness, of responsibility: the human being is responsible for semiosis over the entire planet, that is, for life, which unless proven otherwise only exists on the terrestrial globe. Again we have dealt with this issue in a series of earlier writings, in particular in another co-authored book of 2003 titled Semioetica (see also Ponzio and Petrilli 2014).

In Semiotics Unbounded, we refer to Mikhail M. Bakhtin, another important figure from the twentieth century, who is not generally taken into consideration in semiotic or philosophical circles, and unjustly relegated to the sphere of literary criticism. But in all his writings he repeats, “I’m a philosopher”, that his reflections belong to the sphere of philosophy of language. He also qualifies his thoughts in terms of semiotics and metalinguistics. An important focus in his writings is his critique of the reduction of communicative processes to relations between the sender and receiver and between langue and parole, as improperly established by Saussure.

A particularly interesting aspect of Bakhtin’s work is his insistence, from his early studies, on the problem of responsibility – he characterizes this interest as “moral philosophy”. Bakhtin established a very close relation between sign and otherness: signs flourish in the relation with others, and require a responsible standpoint towards them, without alibis and without evasion. There is a close connection between Sebeok and Bakhtin. It is not incidental that Bakhtin too has always viewed the biological sciences with great interest (Bakhtin 1926). In his book on Rabelais he evidenced the inseparability and intercorporeal compromission of all living individuals, including human beings, in organic and nonorganic processes throughout the entire universe.

4. Confronting Sebeok with Ferruccio Rossi-Landi

Among the various authors we have studied in addition to Sebeok, in the field of semiotics, another author who has had an important influence on our works is the Italian philosopher of language and semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921–1985). Between these two masters of the sign and guides in our research we have detected some fundamental points of convergence, in spite of the differences that no doubt are present.

 As from the early 1960s Rossi-Landi proposed and developed his hypothesis of language as work from his early writings of the 1960s onwards. According to this approach the two definitions of man as laborans and as loquens coincide. Natural divisions that oblige one to assign verbal work and nonverbal work, the production of messages and the production of merchandise to separate regions do not in fact exist. In both cases we are dealing with semiosis, with the linguistic work of modelling. On the basis of such a claim it is possible to establish a connection between Rossi-Landi’s concept of work, on the one hand, and the concepts of primary, secondary and tertiary modeling as elaborated by Sebeok, on the other.

Similarly to Sebeok, Rossi-Landi criticized those theories that reduce the problem of the origin of language to the problem of communication. As writes Rossi-Landi in Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni: “We must evidence the nonreducibility of language to mere communication, otherwise it would not be possible to place the capacity of language in a coherent framework concerning the phylogenesis of nerve structures and relative psychic functions” (Rossi-Landi 1985: 234).

In Rossi-Landi’s view, language understood as work is at the origin of the different historico-natural languages; these in fact are viewed as the product of language as work. Linguistic work reactivates languages and endows them with new value through the parole. The latter is individual only because each single elaboration is individual. However, the model of production is social (see Rossi-Landi 1968, 1973, 1975, 1992).

In our view, all this puts us into a position to relate Rossi-Landi’s concept of “language as work” to Sebeok’s concept of “language as primary modeling”.

Commodified and alienated work is a characteristic of today’s social system. Work in the expression “linguistic work” evokes something that is juxtapposed to play, and therefore may lead one to believe that linguistic work contrasts with the “play of musement”, as described by Peirce. But let us remember that Sebeok too evoked the play of musement to the end of characterizing the human being as a semiotic animal, therefore to evidence specifically human primary modeling or what he calls “language”.

The truth is that the concepts of “linguistic work” and “play of musement” (expression that corresponds to the title of a book by Sebeok) do not contradict each other. As Rossi-Landi explained, work and play are not juxtapposed, indeed play requires preliminary work as well as work for its performance, work no doubt that is particularly agreeable .

Another point where Rossi-Landi’s position and Sebeok’s come together concerns the critical stand taken by both against hypotheses that attempt to explain the origin of language on the basis of the need to communicate.

For both Rossi-Landi and Sebeok language is what makes the constitution, organization and articulation of properly human work possible. Speech and historico-natural languages presuppose language understood as the capacity for syntactic construction and deconstruction proper to human modeling which, as a result of syntax, is capable of producing an indefinite number of possible worlds.

From this point of view both Sebeok’work and Rossi-Landi’s work may be associated to an approach in semiotics envisaged by myself with Susan Petrilli and which we have proposed to call “semioethics”.

5. Going beyond in the sign of Sebeok: semioethics

Semiotics, understood not only as a science but as an orientation perspected by semioethics, arises and develops in the field of anthroposemiosis. Therefore, it is connected with the Umwelt and species-specific modelling device (or language) proper to human beings. And as we have just observed, this species-specific primary modelling device endows human beings (differently from other animals) with the special capacity to produce a great plurality of different worlds, whether real or imaginary. The implication is that human beings are not condemned to remain imprisoned in the world as it is, to forms of vulgar realism. Semiotics is a fact of the human species. But the possibility of its effective realization is a fact of the historical-social order. Our Umwelt is a historical-social product in addition to a biosemiosical endowment, so that any possibility of transformation or alternative hypotheses finds its effective grounding and starting point, its terms of confrontation, the materials necessary for critique and programming in historical-social reality as it gradually evolves and is distinguished from merely biological material.

A global and detotalizing approach to semiotics demands openness to the other, the extreme capacity for listening to the other (see Petrilli 2013; Ponzio 2009). Therefore, it presupposes the capacity for dialogic interconnection with the other. Accordingly, we propose an approach to semiotics that privileges the tendency towards detotalization rather than totalization. Otherness opens the totality to infinity or to “infinite semiosis,” leading beyond the cognitive order or the symbolic order to enter the ethical order, which implies infinite involvement with the other, therefore responsibility towards the other.

Note 1. The Italian monograph on Sebeok, published in 2002 with Spirali in Milan, was followed by another monograph on Sebeok’s global semiotics co-authored by ourselves with Marcel Danesi, Semiotica globale. Il corpo nel segno, 2004 (Graphis). In English, Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life by Petrilli and Ponzio was published in 2001 in the series Postmodern Encounters (Icon books), promoted by Paul Cobley. In personal conversations in Bari with myself and Augusto Ponzio in the early 1990s, Sebeok had happily foreseen that this “extraordinary young man” would contribute to semiotics and its dissemination internationally. In fact, Cobley is now the newly elected President (at the VII World Semiotic Conference, Sofia, 2014) of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, but before this most importantly director (with Kalevi Kull) of the flourishing book series “Semiotics, Communication and Cognition,” published with De Gruyter Mouton, in addition to acting as editor of numerous collective publications and promoting the work of others in semiotics. So on this account too, as a talent scout Sebeok saw well. And today in fact Cobley’s commitment to semiotics after Sebeok has now been officially recognized by the Semiotic Society of America with the nomination of 9^th Sebeok fellow (2014).

Our monographs and numerous essays on Sebeok and his work on the sign is also the result of our own lifetime work dedicated to translating his books into Italian: In fact, I segni e la vita (2002), which appeared with Spirali, was preceded, in 1998, by publication in Italian translation by Susan Petrilli of Sebeok’s 1991 monograph, A Sign is Just a Sign with the same publishers. In 1984, Spirali had already published the Italian translation (by Massimo Pesaresi) of Sebeok’s book of 1981, The Play of Musement. Other books by Sebeok published in Italian translation by S. Petrilli, in consultation with A. Ponzio, include Sebeok’s 1979 monograph The Sign & Its Masters, in 1985 (Adriatica, Bari), his 1986 book, I Think I am a Verb, in 1990 (Sellerio, Palermo), and his 1991 book, Semiotics in the United States, in 1992 (Bompiani, Milano). In 1998 we also published an original collection of essays by Sebeok under the title Come comunicano gli animali che non parlano (Edizioni dal Sud, Modugno, Bari), which does not have a counterpart in English. By Sebeok and with Sebeok is another volume we co-authored with him, Semiotica dell’io, published in 2001, Italian translation by S. Petrilli (Meltemi).

Note 2. The fifteen chapters forming I segni e la vita are divided into two blocks: Part I, Ricognizioni, contains the following eight titles: 1.For a global approach to semiosis; 2.The interdisciplinary perspective of American semiotics; 3.Towards the signs of Gaia and beyond; 4.Signs on the masters of signs: a transition book; 5.Languages and non languages; 6.How other animals communicate; 7.Planetary semiotics and world communication; 8.Semiotics of learning and education; Part II, Il Punto, contains the following seven: 1.The sign; 2.Semiosis and semiotics; 3.Icon, index and symbol; 4. The origin of language and writing; 5.Linguistic creativity; 6.Bioethics, semiotics of life and global communication; 7.Semioethics and global semiotics.

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