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SEMIOTIC WORLDS. PLANTS // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 3 (37). P. 159-181

The ecological conception of a new dialogue between man and nature is ripening. This concept is biosemiotics. According to the concept, nature is perceived as an equal actor of the coevolution of humankind and the living creatures on our planet. The idea of the research is to use biosemiotics – a pre-linguistic level of semiotics, semantic processes which happened in the living sphere – as a tool or conceptual framework for describing biological phenomena at all levels of life organization. The relevance of the concept can be driven by the unstable relationship between culture and nature, and can be used to initiate safe cultural forms and practices between the different worlds of living. Biosemiotics understands life as the existence and interaction of living communities, where signs are created, interpreted in different ways and have meaning. Basic semiotics covers almost all living forms on the tree of life. Meaningful behavior has been documented even in unicellular organisms. We cannot but view plants from the same perspective, as there have been a lot of discoveries in plant biology. The author takes plants interaction and communication as of individual organisms, as they construct their own ontological worlds. New data of plant signaling and behavior have revealed that plants have their own sensory-motor apparatus: higher plants with a vascular system have the functional cycle, i.e. a sensory-motor loop mediated by electrical impulses; and plant studies of their cognitive skills and behavior have found that plants not only passively adapt to the environment, but also actively transform and construct it, i.e. create an umwelt. Thus, the author sets a question of the existence of semiosis between plants. Through the lens of a biosemiotic approach, she describes an example of a symbiotic interaction of American polyculture: maze, pumpkin, and beans. This approach is supplemented by the concept of 4E (embedded, extended, enactive, and embodied) cognition, with the addition of the fifth E – ecological, which reveals plants’ affordances, namely, entanglement of affordances of the environment with the morphological affordances of any plant and the possibility to use these affordances for their own needs. The author made an attempt to integrate the concept of enlogue (by Segei Chebanov) into the phytosemiotic approach. Enlogue is a tool for communication with another. It is a link between living organisms, as well as between a living organism and a non-living thing. This link or connection is always reversed. Enlogues (two or more) are involved in the formation of a sign. Mutual links, or enlogues, create an umwelt. The research highlights the importance of a further development of the biosemiotic approach as well as the need for the development of a new descriptional language. As an additional issue for further examinations is a question: How can we properly describe non-human phenomena in human language? And what is “properly” in that case?

Keywords: biosemiotics, phytosemiotics, umwelt, function circle, affordance, sign, enlogue, semiotic fitting, ontological worlds, biological need, enactivism, 4E-cognition