which are mapped myriad expectations and desires” (2005: ix). And as Leonard McKenzie, one of Yosemite’s chief naturalists during the twentieth century, once remarked, “Among the Earth’s distinctive places, this showcase occupies a distinctive niche in the human spirit” (cited in Neill and Palmer 1994: 15).
It is only in conceiving of landscape in general, and of landscape performance in particular, in this multi-stable, vexed way that these concepts stand a chance of moving the study of cultural performance (one might now want to put quotations marks around the word “cultural” here) into some relatively unknown fields of meaning-making. Only in this way can the concepts lead thinking toward encounters with certain stages of performance, cultural and otherwise, that have gone relatively unnoticed in performance research, but which may be seen to bear, at times tellingly, on kinds of performance that definitely have not done so. My hope, in this regard, is that the phrase’s awkwardness is temporary. As its definition becomes more familiar, it may acquire a certain admirable quality and value in its own right, as may the somewhat unconventional kinds of performance it seeks to illuminate.
A Rhetorical Semeiotic Approach
There are a number of theoretical sources employed and engaged in this book. Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the post-phenomenologists who have extended his work; Henri Bergson and the “Bergsonism” that informs Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, as well as the vitalism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—all of these figures loom large throughout the pages that follow. So do certain anthropological luminaries such as Gregory Bateson, Victor Turner, Tim Ingold, Arjun Appadurai, and Saba Mahmood. Theorists of choreographic performance André Lepecki and Erin Manning are also crucial to the mix. All assist variously in the complex project of working through diverse facets of landscape performance. However, the theorist who plays the greatest role, although not always the most visible, is the sign theorist and scientist/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. It is through Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic that I have come to see the relevance and the value of the other approaches herein employed.8 Likewise, it is in relation to Peirce’s sign theory that I have identified some of their limitations. Although Peirce’s semeiotic and his rather formidable terminology are not always on the surface of these chapters, they are invariably there at their depths and in their collective core. They undergird the larger, choreographic vision of cultural performance that is advanced throughout. As Umberto Eco once acknowledged with regard to his debt to Peirce, if there is anything of value in the work presented here, it is Peirce who deserves the credit, even if the connections to his writings are not always as lucid and rigorous as they ought to be.
Figure 0.2. Visitors performing on boulders beside the trail to Lower Yosemite Fall Viewpoint, April 2009. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.
In this regard, these chapters, as a collection, are intended to advance a theory of cultural performance that contributes to Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. In so doing, they are intended to increase and enhance the theoretical diversity of research on human performance most broadly considered. However, and moreover, they seek to demonstrate that adopting Peirce’s pragmaticism does not entail abandoning other, more widely used approaches to the study of performance, be they those of critical theory or (post-)phenomenology, interpretive ethnography or some other anti-essentialist branch of constructionism, hermeneutics, or textualism, feminism, historical materialism, Actor-Network-Theory, or variations of vitalism or affect theory. Peirce’s semeiotic is not cast here as a superior substitute. To do so would be to undermine the basic spirit of its pragmaticism—the spirit that seeks always, as movement analyst Irmgard Bartenieff once urged, to “use what you find [and] go with what works” (1980).
Peirce’s theory, instead, is intended to serve in an articulatory capacity. It is brought into play so as to complicate rather than to replace insights that have been gained from other approaches to performance theory.9 It does so by relating them to a relatively general, inclusive, more widely applicable theory of performance—a theory of sign performance, or semiosis in Peirce’s terms10—“sign” here being conceptualized, again, in the broadest possible terms. Human beings themselves, in Peirce’s framework, qualify as signs (EP2: 324). Human performance is itself but one variety of semiosis. Performance, for its part, is understood from this pragmaticist perspective, as one mindful way of making things lively when they might not necessarily otherwise be so—of making them matter when they otherwise might not, and of making them somehow consequential in a world whose consequences may seem always already overdetermined. The pragmaticist semeiotic is meant to function, in this regard, as a platform that expands the conceptual horizons of more well-established theoretical approaches currently employed in performance research of all kinds, better elucidating their explanatory power, granted including some constraints thereon.
This pragmaticist semeiotic of performance, in its breadth of application to nonhuman processes, as well as in its focus on mindful “alivening” or “mattering,” is unlike conceptualizations of performance that can be traced to Austin’s speech-act theory, to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, to Saussurian structuralism and its post-structuralist descendants, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, and to all other theories of performance that depend on humanist models of symbolism or meaning-making. It is aligned to some degree with Victor Turner’s etymological and ethnographic understanding of performance, which foregrounds the creative dynamism (or “play”) evident, both along the symbolic spectrum of human performance that stretches from ritual to theater, as well as in the ludic nature of the performance environment itself (Turner, 1982). However, this semeiotic of performance also, as previously indicated, parallels somewhat Richard Bauman’s executional theory of performance, in its intent to define performance, not in terms of an array of qualified genres, but rather as an aspect evident in the full spectrum of meaning-making practices under consideration (1977). Perhaps its closest kin would be found in the respective works of Richard Schechner (1985) and Joseph Roach (1996). Schechner’s definition of “restored behavior” recognizes the fundamental character of recurrence that is also posited as basic to performance considered semeiotically (1985: 36–37). Roach’s conceptualization of performance in terms of a vexing, transgenerationally continuous process of reproduction and substitution or surrogation also parallels the understanding of performance here advanced as a kind of communication whose being necessarily transcends, even while it also depends on the lives of individual performers whose identities may be radically diverse (1996: 2–4).
In attempting this semeiotic articulation, it should be noted that the kind of inquiry undertaken here belongs to a specific area of Peirce’s philosophy that is separate and fundamentally different from those more typically explored in Peirce scholarship. I situate it within what Peirce viewed as the relatively neglected “Rhetorical” branch of his pragmaticism, rather than in its Logical or Grammatical (formalist or taxonomic) branches (EP2: 327).11 In this rhetorical regard, this book makes no attempt (as does the majority of philosophical work on Peirce’s semeiotic) to preserve a focus on the general character of signs, as that may be evident in abstract, heuristic scenarios and definitions. Rather, it bases its arguments in what Peirce studies scholar Vincent Colapietro has described as “thick descriptions of actual practices”—a strategy indicative of rhetorical inquiry, as Colapietro has characterized it (2007: 19).12 This book addresses the communicative practices of specific, historically situated human agents, as well as nonhuman actants,13 who in this case are present and active in the Yosemite National Park landscape. It concerns real-life visitors and waterfalls, rangers and trails, concessionaires
