Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness
is “a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech” (EP2: 264; 1903).32
Habits of relational movement performed by a living human being, in this regard, can be understood to constitute a semeiotic symbol, according to Peirce’s definition, even if such habits are unrelated, in whole or in part, to societal conventions and rules. When nonconventional habits of performance acquire significance by accomplishing connections that matter in some way—that “make a difference” in Bateson’s terms—to otherwise unrelated regularities, human or nonhuman, they, too, qualify as Peircean symbols. In the case of the Yosemite landscape, such symbols may play pivotal roles in emergent processes of self-landscape identification and subject formation, relating visitors to nonhuman regularities in the landscape in enduring, memorable, and profoundly moving, subjectively unique ways. They may even serve to influence and redefine the meaning of societal symbols, becoming actants in processes of “conventionalization” in their own right. In this regard, nonconventional human/nonhuman symbolic mediations can be of paramount importance in the rhetorical study of landscape performance.
A Case in Point: Chewing Apricots
I experienced the emergence of such a nonconventional semeiotic symbol when I was on the summit of Half Dome in June 2012. As I approached the summit, I felt a slight catch in my throat that caused me to cough. It was a very windy day, and there was a lot of granite dust blowing in the air. It seemed like nothing at first, but it didn’t go away. As I reached the summit, I was coughing very strongly. Susto, a student who had come along with me, gave me his hat and told me to breathe into it only through my nose and to exhale into it as well so as to create moisture. I did so and felt the cough stop worsening. However, it did not go away. We found a small cave at the rim of Half Dome’s face, where I started sipping some Emergen-C powder that Susto mixed into some of my water. We opened a package of dried apricots, and I started eating them very, very slowly.
As I ate, I became aware that a new kind of chewing habit was evolving in my mouth. It was not one I had intended to perform, but one I found myself performing nonetheless. I became aware that recurring movements of my jaw, mouth, and throat were now starting to feel similar to one another as they happened, and in some ways that I did not remember in relation to previous eating habits. This was a way of chewing whose distinctive features of action—only now being felt as distinctive—seemed to relate both cumulatively and with exceptional specificity to the present condition of my throat and to what felt at the time like the life-or-death need to produce moisture so as to calm the coughing action. The chewing habit quickly became partly intentional, but it also involved processes of my organism, and of the apricots as well, processes that were not subject to conscious control.
This new chewing habit was a patterned activity that related the apricots to my breathing in a way that mattered, a calming, moistening way that gradually changed my breathing’s character significantly as it diminished the severity of the cough and restored relatively normal processes of oxygen intake and exhalation. I had never chewed in quite this way before—with what I came to understand as such a careful deceleration of the jaw. I had never focused so intently on how my teeth could make the most out of the food’s soft, slightly juicy quality, squishing it in a way that produced what felt like the maximum amount of saliva in my mouth. I had never concentrated so completely on the feeling of slowly swallowing the liquid as it drained down into my parched windpipe—a windpipe that evidenced (or “indexed” as Peirce might say) the atmospheric patterns of the landscape on that day. This new habit of chewing was invented and performed largely, though not entirely, by parts of my organism that were operating on their own physiological, biosemiotic terms. It was reoccurring in relation to processes that “I”—the intending subject—did not completely govern or control. However, to the extent that that “I” could participate in the coordination process, I was fully involved in performing it as well.
In this last respect especially, this partially involuntary habit that was cultivated on the summit of Half Dome was not a habit that had conventional social rules fully determining its performance, although it was, of course, not absolutely unrelated to cultural conventions of eating, speaking, clothing, and even the apricot agribusiness. All the same, there is no great or little Yosemite tradition governing the chewing of apricots in this particular manner at this particular place for this particular purpose—or of breathing through a hat in the way that I did. I have never heard reports of Half Dome hikers developing the kind of coughing problem that I did, let alone responding to it in the way Susto advised me to do. The windy conditions on that day were highly unusual. In sum, this was not a cultural performance in the standard sense of the term. In Gilbert Ryle’s categories, made famous by Clifford Geertz, the chewing habit that had been developed was far more of a behavioral blink or involuntary twitch than it was a culturally constructed wink (Geertz 1973: 3–30).
The new habit, however, was an instance of landscape performance as I here define it. It also qualifies as symbolic action of a mediational, nonrepresentational semeiotic sort. It related methodically one type of emerging regularity, my transforming throat condition, to another, the circulatory patterns of air and dust occurring repeatedly at the summit of Half Dome. The emergence of the apricot-chewing habit constitutes a semio-genetic event. It exemplifies as well Fuhrman’s concept of “interhabitation,” as all landscape performances do—a “coupling of human habits with their living context (the biosphere) as guided by mutual interaction and communication between members (instances, manifestations) of the global human bodymind” (2010: 194).
The chewing technique as I continued to perfect it on that day gradually proved to be an enduring agent of meaningful and intelligible relational change. It effectively lessened my coughing enough so that I could manage to begin speaking a few words of reassurance to Susto and the other students who had come with me. Eventually, it enabled me to breathe well enough to descend safely from the summit to the Valley floor some forty-seven hundred feet below. Eventually, it gave new meaning to the act of chewing apricots altogether, as well as giving rise to a new habit of chewing them on subsequent hikes in other places in a comparable manner.
Eventually, this nonconventional symbol became increasingly integrated with a variety of culturally conventional forms of sign performance. As it did, it revised somewhat my thinking about what a wool hat, a dried fruit, and a student could mean, not only in Yosemite, but in the world at large. The slow, moisture-focused apricot chewing that I—as an intentional subject—learned to coordinate on Half Dome’s summit also has come to serve as a commemorative process—a symbol that has moved some ways down the continuum toward fully conventionalized representational status in its own right. Whenever I enact it, it re-presents and re-members in and through all that can be recognized as “me”—involuntary organs included—the extraordinary relationships that were at play when and where I first found myself to be practicing it and preserving my life through its performance. It might someday achieve the status of a conventional cultural performance as well, although that certainly is not the case at present. However, the possibility of it becoming even a little, if not a great, tradition cannot be dismissed completely. The very character of recurrence, the intelligible regularity of any semeiotic symbol’s moved moving-ness, provides the conditions for processes of adaptation, recognition, modification, and remembrance to occur and reoccur in and by its very performance. By so doing, its performance transforms intelligibility into intelligence, and mediational continuity (standing— as in persisting—through a series of relational moves) into representational “standing for.” Any kind of symbol, in this respect, is “conventionalizable”—even one as humble as the chewing of dried apricots.
Conclusion
The chapters in this volume attempt to provide more examples like the one above of various kinds of nonconventional and hybrid forms of symbolic semiosis. Landscape performance, summarily defined, is just such an interweaving, metamorphosing, and choreographic coordinating of diverse human and nonhuman symbol mediations, representational and otherwise. It is a kind of performance conceivable only in the terms of the relatively inclusive, broadly applicable, rhetorical conceptualization of the pragmaticist symbol, both as a dance-like, kinetic, semeiotic sign and also as a sign whose identity is grounded in creatively evolving recurrence.