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 Perhaps only Victor Turner’s definition of a symbol as “a positive force in an activity field” rivals Peirce’s as far as the applicability and referential inclusiveness of the conceptualization is concerned (1967: 20). From a rhetorical regard, a Peircean sign is basically kinetic rather than substantial. Whatever else it may be, a pragmaticist sign is always moving in a certain way. It is a “moved mover,” in Colapietro’s terms (1989: 22). Its agentive, performative character is born in movement, not in content. It emerges in activity—in transition, transformation, transmission, or translation or in some other kind of changeful process. Again, if the “e” in the Peircean spelling of “semeiotic” might be encoded with yet another meaning (multi-stably), it might also be read as signaling this kinetic performative identity of the rhetorically approached Peircean sign.

      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.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ