The excursion through the small world that surrounds us, the world of the family, the home, food, and dress helps us understand the immediacy of the swarm of symbols that envelops us. This immediacy is not so evident in the great social theater, where powerful institutions and strong confrontations – though replete with symbols – disconcert us with their thunderous spectacle. It is a paradoxical spectacle of technological progress and misery, of wealth and of wars, of massive communication and loneliness, of political celebrities and famous stars, of judgments and crimes.

The small world that environs us is very similar to the world surrounding the animals – the Umwelt – that the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, today regarded as the founder of biosemiotics and to whom I briefly referred in chapter 3, defined and studied. For Uexküll each animal species has its own Umwelt that, in turn, is made up of two worlds respectively connected to a receptor system and an effector system. The first (the Merkwelt) is a set of signs that the organism is capable of perceiving, and the second (the Wirkwelt) is the part of the world that is capable of affecting. So there is a world composed of objects to which the animal can pay attention and another world composed of the objects that can be affected by the action of the organism. Together they form an animal’s Umwelt.