Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness
demonstrating with especial clarity the unfolding, “passing-on-ness” or temporal “forward-ness” of semiosis as it gives shape to new kinds of sign performance and performers. This is so even when the temporal focus of rhetorical analysis may be aimed “backward” as it were, on the relationship between signs and their various sources (or “Objects”) of inspiration, as is the case in the study of Peircean symbols—which, as the discussion that follows elaborates, happens to be the case at hand.
Peirce’s later work gave increasing critical attention to this rhetorical branch of his semeiotic (Colapietro 2007: 17, 30). The majority, if not the entirety, of ethnographic work on cultural performance that has employed Peirce’s semeiotic theory to date has done the same, although more in a de facto than an explicit manner.15 My present aim follows this ethnographic path as well. I seek to “trace out a trajectory,” as Colapietro has characterized the effort, of Peirce’s rhetorical branch as that trajectory may be seen to form in relation to landscape performance (Colapietro 2007: 18). It is a trajectory that requires some adaptation or modification of the standard logically and grammatically oriented terms representing Peirce’s semeiotic. This is necessary given that rhetorical inquiry entails the specialized study of certain aspects of signs—emergent, creative, evolving aspects—that are not at issue in these other branches. In general, it entails the study of signs as they proceed or move into human awareness and learning, via active, embodying performing—a kind of study more than a little bit familiar to choreographers the world over.
In this rhetorical regard, I am concerned in all of the chapters that follow with the many ways by which the signs of the Yosemite landscape perform so as to realize a particular purpose: that of persuading visitors to bond with the park and to feel and act and think and live as though the park belongs individually and personally to them and they to it. This is no mean rhetorical feat when one considers that Yosemite is a place that currently receives over four million visitors a year, the great majority of them coming only between the warmer months of April and September. Moreover, most of these masses visit only an area known as Yosemite Valley (or just “the Valley”), which is hardly more than seven miles long and just one mile wide at its widest point. While visiting, their conduct is so strictly regulated by the policies of the National Park Service that they are allowed only a small margin for creative, individualistic, or idiosyncratic behavior—the kind of behavior that might induce a person to believe that they, in fact, have some kind of special, unique, or personal connection to the park environment, despite the huge crowds with whom they typically must share it.16
Despite these adverse circumstances, however, personal and individual connections to the landscape are regularly (though not unfailingly) forged and deeply felt. Yosemite, as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously observed upon his first view of Half Dome, is in a touristic class by itself to the extent that it “comes up to the brag and exceeds it” for more of its visitor population than its observable circumstances might lead one to expect (cited in Sargent 1971: 3). Yosemite remains one of the most attractive ecotourism landscapes in the world, as it has been for more than a century. It does so as much, if not more, for the manner in which it stages and secures “ceremonies of connection,” as Solnit has identified them, as it does for its capacity to afford encounters with pristine, untrammeled wilderness (2005: 106).
In the research visits that I have made to the park since 2004, I have witnessed and documented this bonding occurring in countless cases, among visitors who vary in virtually every imaginable respect—age, ethnicity, nationality, sex, economic class, gender, religion, occupation, and on down the list. I have witnessed it occurring in the performance of both great and little traditions as Singer conceptualized them: in the playing of card games by flashlight on rainy nights and in the summiting of massive granite domes and peaks on cloudless summer days. Despite the overcrowding, the regulations, the commercialization, and the generic character of visitation practices—and sometimes even because of them—subjective connections to the landscape happen. They also endure, at times for generations, as the oral historical research on which this study is also, in part, based confirms unambiguously.17
How does the Yosemite landscape perform this persuasive feat, when so much would seem to be working against it? This is the underlying analytical question that motivates each of the chapters in this volume. The answers vary. Some relate to discourses of beauty, nature, desire, and nationhood. Others relate to transcendent spiritual experiences and dreams. Some connect to immediate sensations of pleasure or pain, others to embodied constructions of virtuosity or the lack thereof. Still others concern experiences—acted and imagined—of freedom, power, family, and/or community. And some relate simply to the living of life itself (or, better, it-self). Each chapter affords a glimpse of the multi-stable variability that the Yosemite landscape sustains and proliferates in visitor performance.
This rhetorical concern with the Yosemite landscape entails giving critical attention not only to the means by which the landscape achieves (or fails to realize) its purpose, but also to the purpose itself—to why it is that the landscape is capable of performing in this particularly persuasive way and to what the consequences of this are, not only for its visitors, but for all who participate in the life and in the operation of the park. There are many in the social sciences—too many to cite—who would argue that these capabilities and consequences are predominantly political and economic, de-individualizing (if not dehumanizing) and manipulative in character—and, of course, essentially human in design. They would assert that the landscape’s performativity merely reiterates meaning in an institutional, “top-down” sort of way, persuading visitors to conform to large-scale politico-economic interests and to conduct and construct themselves accordingly. However, I argue in every chapter that the situation in reality is not so simple. There is far more to the symbolic life force of the Yosemite landscape than such societally oriented theories can recognize, let alone explain or predict.
To be sure, top-down perspectives on meaning-making in Yosemite demand attention. However, there are also always ways in which landscape performance initiates in its ecological relations what André Lepecki, following the work of Jacques Rancière and Steven Corcoran (2010), has identified as dissensus in visitor experience. Landscape-initiated dissensus, “the rupturing of daily habits,” short-circuits precisely the kinds of societal meaning-making to which sociological perspectives assign priority (Lepecki 2013: 153; see also 2012c). Landscape performance, in this regard, has the capacity to de-subjectify culturally constructed subjects, producing in visitors what Lepecki has argued for choreographic performances generally speaking: a kind of subjectivity “that always exceeds predetermined acts and intentions … composing … a particularly singular actualization of what really matters” (2012c: 38).
What “really matters” on and in the stages of the Yosemite landscape are movements of significance more powerful and complex than human social and cultural institutions and their discourses and policies can fully command and control. The politics of landscape performance, in this regard, is a politics that holds in its balance the relation between social consensus and ecological dissensus, between institutional power and subjective freedom. This is in large part why visitors, no matter how carefully policed, regulated, crowded, and managed, continue to bond with the landscape in extraordinarily profound, subjectively liberating ways. In their performances of great and little traditions alike, they become signs—creatively evolving signs—of the very real freedoms as well as the controlling social discourses (not to mention the laws of nature) that together, in their own respective manners, constitute the park landscape.
Figure 0.3. Amna Shiekh climbing on the Columbia Boulder, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.
Peirce’s rhetorical branch of semeiotic is of critical value in advancing the relatively expansive interpretive agenda identified above. In the remaining sections of this introduction, I seek to clarify how and why this can be the