The life of signs and the signs of life: bases and implications of Thomas A. Sebeok’s global semiotics

Abstract

AbstractThomas Sebeok is a major representative of contemporary semiotics who dedicated his entire academic career to weaving his semiotic web, aware from the outset of the interdisciplinary nature of the field. On the belief thatwherever there is life there are signs, he extended the scope of the discipline well beyond verbal language and culture. The sign–life relationship is vital for all lifeforms on Earth, human and nonhuman, and demands close attention. Current developments in communication studies globally tend to have an exclusive focus on human signs, losing sight of communication understood in a broad sense as converging with life, with respect to which in reality human communication is only a part. Sebeok’s biosemiotic approach to semiosis, his “global semiotics” offers a foundational critique and response to anthropocentric and phonocentric tendencies that in language and communication studies have insistently exchanged the part for the whole. Today, in the world of global and globalized communication, such shortsightedness does not only indicate a characteristic limitation in sign and communication studies, but represents a generalized attitude that is putting life in danger over the planet. As “semiotic animals” we are called to take responsibility for the health of semiosis globally.