Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness
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Название: Choreographies of Landscape

Автор: Sally Ann Ness

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Культурология

Серия: Dance and Performance Studies

isbn: 9781785331176

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ 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).

      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 transforming in character. It foregrounds the ways in which all signs are works-in-progress, 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.

      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).

      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, СКАЧАТЬ