performances. As a consequence, the project illuminated in magnified form not only the ways in which the Yosemite landscape had changed, sometimes dramatically, over the passage of time, but also the performative aspects of the earlier photographers’ creative processes.
Yosemite in Time also entailed a “Third View” aspect in which the recurrence of rephotography was itself reenacted. This strategy was employed to move beyond the “then and now” binary that a single retaking was limited to representing. The again-retaken images became integral to the composition of layered panoramic composites that were one eventual outcome of the group’s collaborative process. With the incorporation of these “third views,” rephotography, as a creative strategy, became capable of suggesting, in Byron’s words, “the idea of a continuum” that presented an “understanding of change as continuing beyond our own time” (cited in Solnit, 2005: xi). In this regard, Yosemite in Time exposed in its third-view collages of the park landscape the earliest stages of symbolic growth in relation to certain originary practices of landscape photography. In their creation of a continuum of recurring imagery, the rephotographic performances of Byron and Wolfe constituted the birth of semeiotic symbols—symbols capable of representing the endurance of a photographic intelligence as well as depicting ongoing, nonhuman processes of change occurring in the landscape over time.30
These examples of conventional semeiotic symbols, whether they are located at the ossified or the incipient end of the symbolic spectrum of recurring performance, are basically comparable to those typically recognized in humanist sign theories of symbolism. However, the pragmaticist symbol category is not limited to the study of such conventional human symbols alone. As Ransdell has emphasized this point, “the symbolic and the conventional cannot be identified, in any case, at least as regards the way in which Peirce construes the nature of symbolism” (1997: ¶54). Pragmaticist symbols are also conceivable that are not the products of societal traditions and distinctly cultural forms of law- or rule-following.
Peirce was quite insistent on this point, although he typically focused his own, predominantly logical, analyses on conventional societal symbols. He repeatedly noted in his definitions of the symbol and its component elements that conventional symbols formed only one part of the symbol’s larger spectrum of semiosis. In 1902, for example, his definition of the symbol specified that a sign could be considered to qualify as a symbol, “whether the habit is natural or conventional, and without regard to the motives which originally governed its selection” (CP 2.307).31 In 1908 he observed that “the power of growth” characteristic of the symbol was manifest in all “living” signs, whether those of plant life or of distinctly human “institutions” such as “a daily newspaper, a great fortune, [or] a social ‘movement’” (EP2: 435). As Peirce studies scholar Gary Fuhrman has summarized Peirce’s perspective, the symbol concept leads to the understanding that “organisms, persons, and social institutions alike can now be regarded as living systems [of information]” (2010: 179). This understanding aligns with Peirce’s later definition of the symbol—that it is “a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech” (EP2: 264; 1903).32
Habits of relational movement performed by a living human being, in this regard, can be understood to constitute a semeiotic symbol, according to Peirce’s definition, even if such habits are unrelated, in whole or in part, to societal conventions and rules. When nonconventional habits of performance acquire significance by accomplishing connections that matter in some way—that “make a difference” in Bateson’s terms—to otherwise unrelated regularities, human or nonhuman, they, too, qualify as Peircean symbols. In the case of the Yosemite landscape, such symbols may play pivotal roles in emergent processes of self-landscape identification and subject formation, relating visitors to nonhuman regularities in the landscape in enduring, memorable, and profoundly moving, subjectively unique ways. They may even serve to influence and redefine the meaning of societal symbols, becoming actants in processes of “conventionalization” in their own right. In this regard, nonconventional human/nonhuman symbolic mediations can be of paramount importance in the rhetorical study of landscape performance.
A Case in Point: Chewing Apricots
I experienced the emergence of such a nonconventional semeiotic symbol when I was on the summit of Half Dome in June 2012. As I approached the summit, I felt a slight catch in my throat that caused me to cough. It was a very windy day, and there was a lot of granite dust blowing in the air. It seemed like nothing at first, but it didn’t go away. As I reached the summit, I was coughing very strongly. Susto, a student who had come along with me, gave me his hat and told me to breathe into it only through my nose and to exhale into it as well so as to create moisture. I did so and felt the cough stop worsening. However, it did not go away. We found a small cave at the rim of Half Dome’s face, where I started sipping some Emergen-C powder that Susto mixed into some of my water. We opened a package of dried apricots, and I started eating them very, very slowly.
As I ate, I became aware that a new kind of chewing habit was evolving in my mouth. It was not one I had intended to perform, but one I found myself performing nonetheless. I became aware that recurring movements of my jaw, mouth, and throat were now starting to feel similar to one another as they happened, and in some ways that I did not remember in relation to previous eating habits. This was a way of chewing whose distinctive features of action—only now being felt as distinctive—seemed to relate both cumulatively and with exceptional specificity to the present condition of my throat and to what felt at the time like the life-or-death need to produce moisture so as to calm the coughing action. The chewing habit quickly became partly intentional, but it also involved processes of my organism, and of the apricots as well, processes that were not subject to conscious control.
This new chewing habit was a patterned activity that related the apricots to my breathing in a way that mattered, a calming, moistening way that gradually changed my breathing’s character significantly as it diminished the severity of the cough and restored relatively normal processes of oxygen intake and exhalation. I had never chewed in quite this way before—with what I came to understand as such a careful deceleration of the jaw. I had never focused so intently on how my teeth could make the most out of the food’s soft, slightly juicy quality, squishing it in a way that produced what felt like the maximum amount of saliva in my mouth. I had never concentrated so completely on the feeling of slowly swallowing the liquid as it drained down into my parched windpipe—a windpipe that evidenced (or “indexed” as Peirce might say) the atmospheric patterns of the landscape on that day. This new habit of chewing was invented and performed largely, though not entirely, by parts of my organism that were operating on their own physiological, biosemiotic terms. It was reoccurring in relation to processes that “I”—the intending subject—did not completely govern or control. However, to the extent that that “I” could participate in the coordination process, I was fully involved in performing it as well.
In this last respect especially, this partially involuntary habit that was cultivated on the summit of Half Dome was not a habit that had conventional social rules fully determining its performance, although it was, of course, not absolutely unrelated to cultural conventions of eating, speaking, clothing, and even the apricot agribusiness. All the same, there is no great or little Yosemite tradition governing the chewing of apricots in this particular manner at this particular place for this particular purpose—or of breathing through a hat in the way that I did. I have never heard reports of Half Dome hikers developing the kind of coughing problem that I did, let alone responding to it in the way Susto advised me to do. The windy conditions on that day were highly unusual. In sum, this was not a cultural performance in the standard sense of the term. In Gilbert Ryle’s categories, made famous by Clifford Geertz, the chewing habit that had been developed was far more of a behavioral blink or involuntary twitch than it was a culturally constructed wink (Geertz 1973: 3–30).
The
