Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness
definition accorded to the concept of semiosis and to the pragmaticist concept of the sign. These concepts, rhetorically adapted, can be understood as rooted in a kinetic and, I will argue, non-metaphorically choreographic, dance-like theory of reality.18 It is a theory that situates humankind in a universe composed of significant occurrences literally brought to life in embodied relations of performative movement. As such, the rhetorical project undertaken here is extensive, seeking to understand, in Peirce’s terms, “just what the processes are whereby an idea can be conveyed to a human mind and become embedded in its habits” (EP2: 329, 330).
Performing at the Interface of the Cultural and the Nonhuman: The Semeiotic Symbol
Of all the myriad sign classifications that compose Peirce’s semeiotic, the most critical one for the study of landscape performance, and perhaps the most challenging of all, is that of the semeiotic “Symbol.” Peirce developed a precise, technical definition for the symbol that is in some respects extremely unusual. It may even seem to border on the nonsensical or the ridiculous at first pass, since its conception is so different from comparable definitions advanced in other, more widely employed sign theories.19 However, the validity of the pragmaticist symbol, unpalatable as it may seem at first, becomes increasingly compelling the deeper one ventures into the heart of Peirce’s rhetorical semeiotic. The deeper one ventures, the more clearly it manifests how radically expanded are the possibilities for human performance when its significance is comprehended not in relation to the possession or conveyance of information, but in relation to the staging of intelligent movements.
Perhaps the most challenging feature of the pragmaticist definition of the symbol is that it must be understood as not being applicable exclusively to signs that have been invented and that are governed entirely by human beings and their social and cultural institutions and conventions of signification. Such a specifically human class of signs does not exist anywhere in the classifications of pragmaticist theory, as understood by any of its branches. This is a very basic feature of Peirce’s semeiotic. Its consequences for the symbol, and through it, for landscape performance, are vitally important.
Pragmaticist sign theory, in brief, does not grant human minds the sole rights to the production, recognition, and employment of any category of sign performance, even those, such as the symbol, that include human language and mathematics. Peirce’s semeiotic is not “humanist” in this particular respect, as are the most influential and widely employed sign theories today. As Peirce scholar Joseph Ransdell once observed, Peirce’s semeiotic does not even formulate a concept of a specifically linguistic (and so assumedly distinctly human) sign. Ransdell elaborates in this regard:
It is often thought that [Peirce’s] conception of the symbol is more or less the same as the conception of the linguistic sign. But this is not so: there are entities which we ordinarily regard as words which are not symbols, and there are symbols which can by no reasonable stretch of usage be rightly called “words.” (1997: 16)
In high contrast to sign theories oriented by the concept of the linguistic sign, pragmaticist sign theory proceeds on the assumption that the relations of significance that inform every general type of semiosis are to be found both within and without human thought and human minds. If the extra “e” in the Peircean spelling of “semeiotic” could be assigned a specific encoded meaning, in this regard, it might best be read as signaling this post-humanist orientation of Peirce’s theory.
Colapietro summarizes the pragmaticist perspective on this inclusive character of semiosis in relation to environments created and governed by nonhuman elements and processes as follows:
At least in some cases, we are not the initiators of but the respondents to a world that is always already meaningful to some degree. The world of our experience is always already constituted as a realm of signs. If we have a sufficiently general grasp of the nature of signs, we cannot avoid concluding that at least some phenomena are signs of nature. To understand the nature of signs ultimately ought to lead us to see the signs of nature. We are in a continuous dialogue with the natural world as well as with other humans. (1989: 21)
Symbols, in this respect, may be considered to inhere in reality, human as well as nonhuman. In the terms of Peirce scholar Frederik Stjernfelt, they may be considered its “natural inhabitants” (2014: 1). They may be conceived and performed by humans, but they may also be encountered in experience and discovered by human beings. They may persist in reality, whether or not they are ever so discovered. Their emergence, as well as their evolution and cultivation—their thoughtfulness—is not necessarily tied to human mental or cognitive processes. As Peirce himself observed:
Thought [i.e., the development of signs] is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc. of objects are really there. (CP 4.551; cited by Colapietro 1989: 19; the bracketed insertion is from Colapietro)20
This, in brief, is what may be called the ecological orientation of Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. It makes the symbol, as Peirce conceptualized it, exceedingly difficult to comprehend from humanist semiotic orientations. While the conventional sign productions of human social and cultural discourse may often qualify as symbolic in Peircean terms, so may the signs of nonhuman animal communications and even the semiosis of bio-semeiotic signs that plant life-forms exhibit as well. These various kinds of sign processes and the circulations of information, or in-forming-ness, they enable and facilitate are, of course, not identical in every respect. However, it may be the case, in some instances, that the general character of performativity they all exhibit—the basic processes of evolving intelligence they accomplish—form a spectrum, widely varying at its extremes, to be sure, but nonetheless a spectrum of symbolism that is continuous.
The pragmaticist concept of the symbol thus rejects the assumption that human symbolic performances, even of the most sophisticated varieties, occur in a realm of meaning-making that is governed or determined only by their own uniquely human design and character. On the contrary, whether great or little, all human symbolic conventions have the capacity to interface with—literally to communicate with—nonhuman signs of symbolic varieties, to be influenced by them and to articulate with them, as well as to influence them in turn. Human beings, in pragmaticist terms, are symbol translators par excellence. They move continually between and interweave intelligently environmental, organismic, and sociocultural forms of semiosis (to name but a few), becoming constituted by and constituting them in so doing. Such coordination permeates virtually every aspect of human life, even the most culturally elaborate. Landscape performance is but one example of this kind of cross-spectrum coordination of symbolic performance.
Such claims regarding the Peircean symbol and symbolic semiosis, as I have already been at some pains to acknowledge, may seem fantastically naïve or nonsensically broad from the perspective of humanist, lingui-centric semiotic theories. However, they are justifiable and productive when viewed in light of the precise, ecological definition of the pragmaticist symbol on which they are founded, and that light, I will argue, emanates most brightly from Peirce’s rhetorical branch. The relatively large, inclusive spectrum of semiosis defined by the pragmaticist symbol is conceivable because of its own relatively general, fundamentally choreographic character, the character best foregrounded in rhetorically oriented forms of semeiotic inquiry.
The Rhetorical Conceptualization of the Semeiotic Sign/Symbol
In embarking on this argument, it must be noted at the outset that in its most fundamental character, the semeiotic symbol is, before all else, a kind of semeiotic “Sign.” The sign is the most basic, all-inclusive conceptual formation of the whole of Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. Whether they operate by rules, resemblances, or contiguities, whether they are interpreted politically, aesthetically, economically, religiously, logically, or otherwise, whether their character be that of a diagram, a gesture, or a royal decree, all vehicles of meaning-making imaginable are still, first and foremost,