Peirce's semiosis.

From Vincent Colapietro's _Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity_: "The body itself is, in its own way, a medium. In 'Some Consequences,' Peirce claims that 'the organism is only an instrument of thought.' But since thought is essentially a process of semiosis, the kind of instrument that the organism provides is that of a medium. The person is not 'shut up in a box of flesh and blood.' The body is not principally something in which the self is located; rather it is the most immediate medium through which the self expresses." Peirce's genius was in recognizing that the self is always a virtual and communal entity: the product of an ecology of signs coming through and out of the self. What we call the self or the subject is actually a network, locatable in and through a series of other permeable and permeating networks: total semiosis. Thus, the semiotic ecology of things exists on a continua, from nature to persons, and from minds to concrete things and back.