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 of reproduction and also of reiteration. A symbol can itself perform and embody evolutionary processes—processes of gradually changing and cumulative, generalizing intelligence. From a pragmaticist perspective, this is as true of conventional human symbols, such as those of human language, as it is of symbols moving in nonhuman environments and processes. Peirce argued emphatically in 1904 on this issue:
A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with the power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality. This appears mystical and mysterious simply because we insist on remaining blind to what is plain, that there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol. (EP2: 324)28
Symbols continually grow, their own intelligence modifying and compiling with each new relational movement made in each new application or instance of performance. Their growth processes determine with gradually increasing clarity their definition. Wittgenstein’s image of a concept as being like a thread in its interweaving of diverse strands of grammatical practice aligns closely, in this regard, with that of the temporally extensive semeiotic symbol (1953: section 67). Peirce identified the nature of the symbol—human and nonhuman alike—with the living action of thought in precisely this kind of continuum-producing patterning. “The body of the symbol changes slowly,” he wrote in 1903, “but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones” (EP2: 264). The threadlike continuity of a symbol’s living, changing form is made possible by the recurrence of its multiple acts of determination, acts of recognition based most primitively upon the feeling and re-feeling of similarity (or, in the most basic life-forms, of re-membrance; EP2: 320, 322).
A semeiotic symbol may be constituted by a cultural rule of recognition, such as the linguistic convention that consistently associates the combined English language phonemes /d/, /i/, and /r/ with the various species of animals all understood to belong to the genus Cervidae—the deer family. The various operations of human languages that are based in habits of recognition, composition, and application, among many others, qualify as symbols in pragmaticist terms as well. The habit or regularity that constitutes a semeiotic symbol, however, can also be a social convention related to reoccurring performances of physical activity, such as the social convention of driving on the right and passing on the left when conducting a vehicle on an American roadway. Such an action-oriented conventional symbol may acquire the character of “tradition” if it develops into relatively elaborate practices, as with Milton Singer’s great and little traditions of cultural performance.
Any cultural performance, ethnographically speaking, is necessarily constituted by semeiotic symbols, insofar as it is passed on regularly from senior to junior members of a cultural group. The Firefall tradition of Yosemite Valley—a nightly summertime performance staged between the years of 1872 and 1969—is, perhaps, the greatest and most famous example of such a symbol in Yosemite National Park. The Firefall was a performance that consisted of pushing the burning embers of an enormous bonfire off the edge of the Valley’s most popular panoramic viewpoint, Glacier Point—a granite cliff 3,214 feet high.29 The legendary Firefall remains one of the most deeply loved, rhetorically potent symbols of Yosemite National Park. Although park policies currently prohibit its enactment, the Firefall lives on in the experience of countless visitors, both those who actually witnessed and remember its performance as well as those who have learned to imagine it through the representations of others. The Firefall tradition illustrates the semeiotic symbol’s capacity for endurance and adaptation, even across diverse ontological modalities of relational movement. It is a symbol that originated in actual transformative habits related to material objects but persists and recurs in relationships—no less moving—of remembered and imagined sign performance.
In addition to symbols of tradition that exhibit very high degrees of regularity, even to the point of “ossification,” as Stanley Tambiah (1979) identified in some of the most extreme cases, semeiotic theory also recognizes relatively creative and incipient processes of sign recurrence as symbolic forms of semiosis as well. A contemporary project of rephotography undertaken in Yosemite between 2001 and 2003 by visual artists Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe in collaboration with Rebecca Solnit, for example, illustrates this relatively generative end of the spectrum of symbol semiosis. Eventually titled Yosemite in Time, the project consisted of five separate expeditions into Yosemite, during which the photographers methodically staged acts of exceptionally exacting photographic recurrence (Klett, Solnit, and Wolfe 2005: xi). That is, they returned to locations where some of Yosemite’s most renowned photographers—Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston among others—had made a number of their most influential images. There, they reenacted the work of the original artists as precisely as the existing conditions would allow. Wolfe and Klett retook the earlier shots, not only in exactly the same places in the landscape, but also at the same times of the year and even at the same times of day, when possible. Their intent was to duplicate not the image that had originally been made (sometimes more than one hundred years previously), but rather the taking of the original
