Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness
they are invariably there at their depths and in their collective core. They undergird the larger, choreographic vision of cultural performance that is advanced throughout. As Umberto Eco once acknowledged with regard to his debt to Peirce, if there is anything of value in the work presented here, it is Peirce who deserves the credit, even if the connections to his writings are not always as lucid and rigorous as they ought to be.
Figure 0.2. Visitors performing on boulders beside the trail to Lower Yosemite Fall Viewpoint, April 2009. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.
In this regard, these chapters, as a collection, are intended to advance a theory of cultural performance that contributes to Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. In so doing, they are intended to increase and enhance the theoretical diversity of research on human performance most broadly considered. However, and moreover, they seek to demonstrate that adopting Peirce’s pragmaticism does not entail abandoning other, more widely used approaches to the study of performance, be they those of critical theory or (post-)phenomenology, interpretive ethnography or some other anti-essentialist branch of constructionism, hermeneutics, or textualism, feminism, historical materialism, Actor-Network-Theory, or variations of vitalism or affect theory. Peirce’s semeiotic is not cast here as a superior substitute. To do so would be to undermine the basic spirit of its pragmaticism—the spirit that seeks always, as movement analyst Irmgard Bartenieff once urged, to “use what you find [and] go with what works” (1980).
Peirce’s theory, instead, is intended to serve in an articulatory capacity. It is brought into play so as to complicate rather than to replace insights that have been gained from other approaches to performance theory.9 It does so by relating them to a relatively general, inclusive, more widely applicable theory of performance—a theory of sign performance, or semiosis in Peirce’s terms10—“sign” here being conceptualized, again, in the broadest possible terms. Human beings themselves, in Peirce’s framework, qualify as signs (EP2: 324). Human performance is itself but one variety of semiosis. Performance, for its part, is understood from this pragmaticist perspective, as one mindful way of making things lively when they might not necessarily otherwise be so—of making them matter when they otherwise might not, and of making them somehow consequential in a world whose consequences may seem always already overdetermined. The pragmaticist semeiotic is meant to function, in this regard, as a platform that expands the conceptual horizons of more well-established theoretical approaches currently employed in performance research of all kinds, better elucidating their explanatory power, granted including some constraints thereon.
This pragmaticist semeiotic of performance, in its breadth of application to nonhuman processes, as well as in its focus on mindful “alivening” or “mattering,” is unlike conceptualizations of performance that can be traced to Austin’s speech-act theory, to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, to Saussurian structuralism and its post-structuralist descendants, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, and to all other theories of performance that depend on humanist models of symbolism or meaning-making. It is aligned to some degree with Victor Turner’s etymological and ethnographic understanding of performance, which foregrounds the creative dynamism (or “play”) evident, both along the symbolic spectrum of human performance that stretches from ritual to theater, as well as in the ludic nature of the performance environment itself (Turner, 1982). However, this semeiotic of performance also, as previously indicated, parallels somewhat Richard Bauman’s executional theory of performance, in its intent to define performance, not in terms of an array of qualified genres, but rather as an aspect evident in the full spectrum of meaning-making practices under consideration (1977). Perhaps its closest kin would be found in the respective works of Richard Schechner (1985) and Joseph Roach (1996). Schechner’s definition of “restored behavior” recognizes the fundamental character of recurrence that is also posited as basic to performance considered semeiotically (1985: 36–37). Roach’s conceptualization of performance in terms of a vexing, transgenerationally continuous process of reproduction and substitution or surrogation also parallels the understanding of performance here advanced as a kind of communication whose being necessarily transcends, even while it also depends on the lives of individual performers whose identities may be radically diverse (1996: 2–4).
In attempting this semeiotic articulation, it should be noted that the kind of inquiry undertaken here belongs to a specific area of Peirce’s philosophy that is separate and fundamentally different from those more typically explored in Peirce scholarship. I situate it within what Peirce viewed as the relatively neglected “Rhetorical” branch of his pragmaticism, rather than in its Logical or Grammatical (formalist or taxonomic) branches (EP2: 327).11 In this rhetorical regard, this book makes no attempt (as does the majority of philosophical work on Peirce’s semeiotic) to preserve a focus on the general character of signs, as that may be evident in abstract, heuristic scenarios and definitions. Rather, it bases its arguments in what Peirce studies scholar Vincent Colapietro has described as “thick descriptions of actual practices”—a strategy indicative of rhetorical inquiry, as Colapietro has characterized it (2007: 19).12 This book addresses the communicative practices of specific, historically situated human agents, as well as nonhuman actants,13 who in this case are present and active in the Yosemite National Park landscape. It concerns real-life visitors and waterfalls, rangers and trails, concessionaires and even actual bears, and a great host of others, all of whom are caught up in particular interactions and performative pursuits.
Rhetorical inquiry, pragmaticistically defined, is a preoccupation with “the adaptation of the forms of expression of [a piece] of writing [or other mode of symbolization] to the accomplishment of its purpose” (Peirce CN3: 180; cited in Colapietro 2007: 17). This “adaptation” entails a process of sign change or modification, a tailoring of the sign to a particular contextual purpose or application. Rhetorical analyses are intended to foreground a kind of “sign-in-motion” aspect of a given semeiotic event and to illuminate the effect of a given sign’s adaptability in relation to its intended, also-moving, also-living, also-mattering receiving sign or “Interpretant” (in Peircean terms).
Rhetorical analyses, in other words, focus directly on the active performativity of signs. They foreground their efficacious persuasiveness—their ingenuity and innovation—as well as their ability to impart pleasure or some other comparable quality or feeling (Colapietro 2007: 35; EP2: 326). Such analyses may be as much concerned with the creation of identity as with processes of encoded communication between fully formed subjects, as several chapters in this volume seek to illustrate. Rhetorical inquiry, as Colapietro observes, is also more prone than logical or grammatical inquiry to work toward the discovery of previously unknown forms of sign performance, rather than marking the limits of meaning-making inherent in given grammars or established logics (Colapietro 2007: 19, 31, 35). As Peirce phrased it, rhetorical inquiry seeks to understand how “one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another” (CP 2.229). Several chapters, in this respect, focus on visitor experiences that involve creative, initiating processes of meaning-making, or what may be termed “semio-genetic” performances (Chandler 2012).14
Most important for the purposes at hand, the rhetorical semeiotic approach, given its focal interest in observing how signs go about “bringing forth” or “giving birth” to new signs and thoughts, illuminates the ways in which signs are inherently changing and dynamic figures. The rhetorical approach, in sum, is the approach that gives the greatest degree of attention to the processual primacy of semeiotic activity as Peirce conceived of it. It underscores Peirce’s insistence that, regardless of all else, sign phenomena must be understood as always already and continually