action of a mediational, nonrepresentational semeiotic sort. It related methodically one type of emerging regularity, my transforming throat condition, to another, the circulatory patterns of air and dust occurring repeatedly at the summit of Half Dome. The emergence of the apricot-chewing habit constitutes a semio-genetic event. It exemplifies as well Fuhrman’s concept of “interhabitation,” as all landscape performances do—a “coupling of human habits with their living context (the biosphere) as guided by mutual interaction and communication between members (instances, manifestations) of the global human bodymind” (2010: 194).
The chewing technique as I continued to perfect it on that day gradually proved to be an enduring agent of meaningful and intelligible relational change. It effectively lessened my coughing enough so that I could manage to begin speaking a few words of reassurance to Susto and the other students who had come with me. Eventually, it enabled me to breathe well enough to descend safely from the summit to the Valley floor some forty-seven hundred feet below. Eventually, it gave new meaning to the act of chewing apricots altogether, as well as giving rise to a new habit of chewing them on subsequent hikes in other places in a comparable manner.
Eventually, this nonconventional symbol became increasingly integrated with a variety of culturally conventional forms of sign performance. As it did, it revised somewhat my thinking about what a wool hat, a dried fruit, and a student could mean, not only in Yosemite, but in the world at large. The slow, moisture-focused apricot chewing that I—as an intentional subject—learned to coordinate on Half Dome’s summit also has come to serve as a commemorative process—a symbol that has moved some ways down the continuum toward fully conventionalized representational status in its own right. Whenever I enact it, it re-presents and re-members in and through all that can be recognized as “me”—involuntary organs included—the extraordinary relationships that were at play when and where I first found myself to be practicing it and preserving my life through its performance. It might someday achieve the status of a conventional cultural performance as well, although that certainly is not the case at present. However, the possibility of it becoming even a little, if not a great, tradition cannot be dismissed completely. The very character of recurrence, the intelligible regularity of any semeiotic symbol’s moved moving-ness, provides the conditions for processes of adaptation, recognition, modification, and remembrance to occur and reoccur in and by its very performance. By so doing, its performance transforms intelligibility into intelligence, and mediational continuity (standing— as in persisting—through a series of relational moves) into representational “standing for.” Any kind of symbol, in this respect, is “conventionalizable”—even one as humble as the chewing of dried apricots.
Conclusion
The chapters in this volume attempt to provide more examples like the one above of various kinds of nonconventional and hybrid forms of symbolic semiosis. Landscape performance, summarily defined, is just such an interweaving, metamorphosing, and choreographic coordinating of diverse human and nonhuman symbol mediations, representational and otherwise. It is a kind of performance conceivable only in the terms of the relatively inclusive, broadly applicable, rhetorical conceptualization of the pragmaticist symbol, both as a dance-like, kinetic, semeiotic sign and also as a sign whose identity is grounded in creatively evolving recurrence.
Clarence King, the eminent nineteenth-century geologist and mountaineer whose expeditions into the Sierra Nevada mountains yielded some of the most influential literature on American wilderness landscapes ever produced, once derisively characterized Yosemite-inspired authors as an “army of literary travelers who have planted themselves [in Yosemite] and burst into rhetoric.” He sardonically called to would-be Yosemite writers, “Here all who make California books: dismount and inflate!” (cited in Bergon 1994: 136). King’s words give any author of an interpretive bent more than a little pause before taking up the subject of Yosemite. Even guidebooks to the park acknowledge that Yosemite has been the target of more “gushing adjectives” and excessive hyperbole than any other Californian destination—and probably any other western American destination as well (Whitfield 2002: xi). Its inflated touristic and nationalistic rhetoric has served, among other things, to obscure the harsh realities of land-use conflict and control that are central to the landscape’s actual cultural and historical character (Solnit 1994).
In my efforts to avoid the pitfalls of such romantic excess, I have endeavored to emulate the work not of King, but of his contemporary, the explorer and ethnologist John Wesley Powell. Though vastly different in theoretical and ideological orientation, my expeditions into the park—if they can be seen to merit such a label—nonetheless have not been altogether unlike Powell’s. I have sought, as he did, to discover the landscape’s character, to collect samples and recordings of it. I endeavor now to present these findings to an audience who might have preferred to do the exploring and discovering (and performing and choreographing) for themselves but, for one reason or another, were not able to come along on the journey. However, my visits, as Solnit has written of her rephotographing expeditions, were not focused on the discovery of “the untouched and truly unknown,” as were Powell’s. Rather, they explored, as Solnit also identifies, “conjunctions, overlaps, patterns, [and] meanings in the steep, intricate, hallowed, scarred landscape of Yosemite” (Solnit 2005: xiv). In my case, all of these were to be found not in visual images, such as Solnit collaborated in rephotographing, but in various relatively energetic types of visitor performance.
Powell’s geographical representations of his explorations of the American frontier won the admiration of Wallace Stegner, arguably the greatest twentieth-century author of western American landscape literature. Stegner was so impressed by Powell’s technically exacting accuracy and his careful attention to detail that he honored Powell’s work with the designation “art without falsification” (1954: 191). If I engage here in a rhetorical project, it is with the intention of meeting that same exacting standard of description. My effort is hopefully more akin to Powell’s or to Stegner’s own—or to that of Klett, Solnit, and Wolfe—than it is to those of the more popular stylists Yosemite seems prone to attract. The reader alone, of course, is left to judge the results.
Notes
1. The visits were of three to ten days in length—typical of overnight visitor practice and within the maximum length-of-stay limits set by the park management.
2. While the concept of cultural performance is most often associated with Clifford Geertz (1973), my use of it here comes directly from Milton Singer’s work (Singer 1984). Singer adopted the concept as developed by Lloyd Warner in Warner’s studies of Yankee City celebratory practices (1959) and treated it as an explicitly semiotic concept, applying the theory of signs developed by Charles S. Peirce to the description and interpretation of its ethnographic referents. In this respect, Singer’s approach and his definition of cultural performance, paraphrased above, are most closely aligned with those employed in this study.
3. The reference here to Wittgenstein’s enigmatic concept of a “form of life,” both a culturally relative and a humanly general way of living, is intentional (Wittgenstein 1967; 1953: 206).
4. I have discussed in earlier work the utility of the duck-rabbit image in relation to dance performance specifically as well. See Ness 2008b.
5. See Crouch and Malm (2003: 253) for a discussion of landscape defined in such textualist terms.
6. See, for example, Lyotard’s discussion of the “scapeland” of the lost traveler (1989) and Adrian Ivakhiv’s account of the Sedona landscape as understood by New Agers (2003).
