Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness
symbol included—are understood to achieve significance in a manner that is not necessarily dependent on anything they have or possess. Their intelligent life depends instead on how the movements they inspire and/or perform bring new relationships into being. A sign is significant in that the movements it produces make relationships happen, and these relationships forge or sustain connections that matter in some intelligible way. They are relationships that “have roots and bear fruits,” as Colapietro somewhat playfully characterizes them, relationships that are both “grounded and growing” (1989: 22). To borrow from Gregory Bateson’s more abstract cybernetic framework, which closely parallels Peirce’s semeiotic, the signs of Peircean pragmaticism create moving “patterns that connect” (1979: 10). In so doing, they generate differences “that make a difference,” intelligently speaking (Bateson 1972: 453; 1979: 250).24
So it is that the scent of frying bacon becomes a semeiotic sign as it connects a hungry bear to a source of food. A small pile of stones becomes significant as it brings a lost hiker together with a hard-to-find section of a trail. A rocky ledge becomes vitally meaningful when it enables a precariously balanced climber to achieve a more secure position on a rock wall and avoid taking an injurious fall down a treacherous granite face. Any trail, path, road, or route in its capacity to move travelers into new relationships within an environment they seek to explore performs as a semeiotic sign. Likewise, any linguistic concept that moves a user into a new relationship to the world it references performs as a sign as well, as does any part of speech that enables its users to make connections between concepts in the language to which it belongs.
The kinetic, relational conceptualization of the Peircean semeiotic sign produces a relatively large sphere of adaptability to both human and nonhuman processes in one all-important respect as far as the symbols of landscape performance in particular are concerned. It is a respect that Peirce made explicit only in his later, most rhetorically oriented work. The definition characterizes a sign’s most fundamental agency (or performative character) as being one of mediation rather than representation. While in his earlier (and more often cited) writings Peirce defined signs in general as having the capacity to “represent” or “stand for” something,25 in his later work Peirce determined that the concept of representation was itself too narrow to characterize all of the many ways that a sign, as he conceived of it, could operate and perform as such. He wrote of this transition, “I did not then know enough about language to see that to attempt to make the word representation serve for an idea so much more general than any it habitually carried was injudicious. The word mediation would be better” (CP 4.3; cited in Colapietro 1989: 18; emphasis in text).26
Mediation, as Colapietro observes, is “deeper than interpretation,” just as semiosis—the full range of sign performance—is “wider than representation” (1989: 25). Although many semeiotic signs indeed conform to the “standing for” representational definition, others achieve significance without necessarily performing in a manner that, strictly speaking, could best be characterized as representational. Mediation, rather than representation, describes, for the later Peirce, the full range of intelligent processes that the signs of pragmaticist semeiotic theory in all its branches can be understood to enable. Mediation may involve what Peirce characterized as a “quasi-mind” as opposed to a specifically human mind. A quasi-mind, minimally, is “capable of varied determination” in relation to the sign’s intelligible movement (EP2: 544n22; cited in Fuhrman 2010: 171). Here, again, the pragmaticist semeiotic presents a basic and challenging theoretical formulation—one that borders on the unthinkable from humanist semiotic perspectives.
The shift from representation to mediation also reinforces the dance-like character of the pragmaticist sign, rhetorically conceived. It foregrounds the choreographic identity of semiosis in general by asserting that the play of relationships-in-movement in which all kinds of signs participate agentively can matter—can “bear fruits” or make differences, intelligently speaking—even when that play entails nothing that could be identified as a representational, “standing-for,” sort of process. Signs—even symbols—do not have to stand to make sense. They can move (in-)formingly as well.
Such an enlargement of the conceptual spectrum of what can be conceived of as sign performance has critical consequences for landscape performance. Once the sign spectrum is so extended, it gains the capacity to define as semeiotic experiences, activities, and processes whose influence on conventional cultural performances would otherwise go unrecognized. The Merced River, for example, as it may mediate vital relationships between bodies—human and nonhuman alike—once they are caught up in its currents, can achieve significance as an actant in a nonrepresentational but meaningful process of semiosis. A mouse in Curry Village, when it leaves droppings inside the insulation of tents that bring campers into contact with the deadly Hantavirus lung disease, does the same. So does a campfire, when its light draws strangers into new relationships with one another. The Yosemite Valley landscape, in its capacity to attract people from all over the world and to move them, along with all of the landscapes and places to which they are themselves related, into new relationships with one another, performs on a monumental scale as a mediating, nonrepresentational sign. It may also function simultaneously (and multi-stably) as a representational sign in its capacity to “stand for” an ideal wild and scenic, quintessentially American image of landscape.
In part, the chapters that compose this volume seek to illuminate in landscape performance just these kinds of mediating nonrepresentational sign performances in the Yosemite environment and to identify some of the ways in which they interface and integrate influentially with more conventional representational and unambiguously cultural kinds of performance processes. In this regard, this book documents some instances of the genesis and modification of representational signs as such rhetorical processes may be observed to be occurring in relation to “broader and deeper” processes of nonrepresentational mediational semiosis. These processes involve nonhuman actants in critically influential ways.
A semeiotic symbol, then, simply by virtue of its definition as a Peircean sign, is conceptualized as an agent of relational movement, mediating or representational, and not necessarily of human design and inspiration. In these most basic respects, it is adaptable to the analysis of a relatively broad array of performative phenomena. However, the Peircean symbol, approached rhetorically, is also relatively general with regard to its own particular semeiotic character. That moving character is defined as emphasizing one main quality, and again, it is not one that humanist sign theories would foreground. It is not arbitrariness or conventionality or intelligent (human) superiority that defines the pragmaticist symbol as it compares and contrasts with other kinds of semeiotic signs. Rather, it is the symbol’s capacity for enduringly creative, intelligently relational recurrence that identifies it as such. This definition, in its own way, further enlarges the pragmaticist symbol’s conceptual adaptability, its rhetorical efficaciousness. Once again, this enlargement has critical consequences for landscape performance in Yosemite National Park.
The Performativity of the Semeiotic Symbol
Peirce conceived of the symbol as nothing more and nothing less than a sign that is itself and relates specifically to a regularity, rule, law, or habit. In 1895, he wrote:
The word Symbol has so many meanings that it would be an injury to the language to add a new one. I do not think that the signification I attach to it, that of a conventional sign, one depending upon habit (acquired or inborn) is so much a new meaning as a return to the original meaning. Etymologically it should mean a thing thrown together… (CP 2.297; emphasis in text)27
A symbol, rhetorically approached, is a semeiotic sign that performs as such when the habit that constitutes it becomes an agent of intelligible relational movement vis-à-vis some habitual or regularly reoccurring phenomena—some generality. In this regard, it is the kind of sign—the only kind—that can enable memory. It is the only kind of sign that can be an agent