and performative pursuits.
Rhetorical inquiry, pragmaticistically defined, is a preoccupation with “the adaptation of the forms of expression of [a piece] of writing [or other mode of symbolization] to the accomplishment of its purpose” (Peirce CN3: 180; cited in Colapietro 2007: 17). This “adaptation” entails a process of sign change or modification, a tailoring of the sign to a particular contextual purpose or application. Rhetorical analyses are intended to foreground a kind of “sign-in-motion” aspect of a given semeiotic event and to illuminate the effect of a given sign’s adaptability in relation to its intended, also-moving, also-living, also-mattering receiving sign or “Interpretant” (in Peircean terms).
Rhetorical analyses, in other words, focus directly on the active performativity of signs. They foreground their efficacious persuasiveness—their ingenuity and innovation—as well as their ability to impart pleasure or some other comparable quality or feeling (Colapietro 2007: 35; EP2: 326). Such analyses may be as much concerned with the creation of identity as with processes of encoded communication between fully formed subjects, as several chapters in this volume seek to illustrate. Rhetorical inquiry, as Colapietro observes, is also more prone than logical or grammatical inquiry to work toward the discovery of previously unknown forms of sign performance, rather than marking the limits of meaning-making inherent in given grammars or established logics (Colapietro 2007: 19, 31, 35). As Peirce phrased it, rhetorical inquiry seeks to understand how “one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another” (CP 2.229). Several chapters, in this respect, focus on visitor experiences that involve creative, initiating processes of meaning-making, or what may be termed “semio-genetic” performances (Chandler 2012).14
Most important for the purposes at hand, the rhetorical semeiotic approach, given its focal interest in observing how signs go about “bringing forth” or “giving birth” to new signs and thoughts, illuminates the ways in which signs are inherently changing and dynamic figures. The rhetorical approach, in sum, is the approach that gives the greatest degree of attention to the processual primacy of semeiotic activity as Peirce conceived of it. It underscores Peirce’s insistence that, regardless of all else, sign phenomena must be understood as always already and continually transforming in character. It foregrounds the ways in which all signs are works-in-progress, demonstrating with especial clarity the unfolding, “passing-on-ness” or temporal “forward-ness” of semiosis as it gives shape to new kinds of sign performance and performers. This is so even when the temporal focus of rhetorical analysis may be aimed “backward” as it were, on the relationship between signs and their various sources (or “Objects”) of inspiration, as is the case in the study of Peircean symbols—which, as the discussion that follows elaborates, happens to be the case at hand.
Peirce’s later work gave increasing critical attention to this rhetorical branch of his semeiotic (Colapietro 2007: 17, 30). The majority, if not the entirety, of ethnographic work on cultural performance that has employed Peirce’s semeiotic theory to date has done the same, although more in a de facto than an explicit manner.15 My present aim follows this ethnographic path as well. I seek to “trace out a trajectory,” as Colapietro has characterized the effort, of Peirce’s rhetorical branch as that trajectory may be seen to form in relation to landscape performance (Colapietro 2007: 18). It is a trajectory that requires some adaptation or modification of the standard logically and grammatically oriented terms representing Peirce’s semeiotic. This is necessary given that rhetorical inquiry entails the specialized study of certain aspects of signs—emergent, creative, evolving aspects—that are not at issue in these other branches. In general, it entails the study of signs as they proceed or move into human awareness and learning, via active, embodying performing—a kind of study more than a little bit familiar to choreographers the world over.
In this rhetorical regard, I am concerned in all of the chapters that follow with the many ways by which the signs of the Yosemite landscape perform so as to realize a particular purpose: that of persuading visitors to bond with the park and to feel and act and think and live as though the park belongs individually and personally to them and they to it. This is no mean rhetorical feat when one considers that Yosemite is a place that currently receives over four million visitors a year, the great majority of them coming only between the warmer months of April and September. Moreover, most of these masses visit only an area known as Yosemite Valley (or just “the Valley”), which is hardly more than seven miles long and just one mile wide at its widest point. While visiting, their conduct is so strictly regulated by the policies of the National Park Service that they are allowed only a small margin for creative, individualistic, or idiosyncratic behavior—the kind of behavior that might induce a person to believe that they, in fact, have some kind of special, unique, or personal connection to the park environment, despite the huge crowds with whom they typically must share it.16
Despite these adverse circumstances, however, personal and individual connections to the landscape are regularly (though not unfailingly) forged and deeply felt. Yosemite, as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously observed upon his first view of Half Dome, is in a touristic class by itself to the extent that it “comes up to the brag and exceeds it” for more of its visitor population than its observable circumstances might lead one to expect (cited in Sargent 1971: 3). Yosemite remains one of the most attractive ecotourism landscapes in the world, as it has been for more than a century. It does so as much, if not more, for the manner in which it stages and secures “ceremonies of connection,” as Solnit has identified them, as it does for its capacity to afford encounters with pristine, untrammeled wilderness (2005: 106).
In the research visits that I have made to the park since 2004, I have witnessed and documented this bonding occurring in countless cases, among visitors who vary in virtually every imaginable respect—age, ethnicity, nationality, sex, economic class, gender, religion, occupation, and on down the list. I have witnessed it occurring in the performance of both great and little traditions as Singer conceptualized them: in the playing of card games by flashlight on rainy nights and in the summiting of massive granite domes and peaks on cloudless summer days. Despite the overcrowding, the regulations, the commercialization, and the generic character of visitation practices—and sometimes even because of them—subjective connections to the landscape happen. They also endure, at times for generations, as the oral historical research on which this study is also, in part, based confirms unambiguously.17
How does the Yosemite landscape perform this persuasive feat, when so much would seem to be working against it? This is the underlying analytical question that motivates each of the chapters in this volume. The answers vary. Some relate to discourses of beauty, nature, desire, and nationhood. Others relate to transcendent spiritual experiences and dreams. Some connect to immediate sensations of pleasure or pain, others to embodied constructions of virtuosity or the lack thereof. Still others concern experiences—acted and imagined—of freedom, power, family, and/or community. And some relate simply to the living of life itself (or, better, it-self). Each chapter affords a glimpse of the multi-stable variability that the Yosemite landscape sustains and proliferates in visitor performance.
This rhetorical concern with the Yosemite landscape entails giving critical attention not only to the means by which the landscape achieves (or fails to realize) its purpose, but also to the purpose itself—to why it is that the landscape is capable of performing in this particularly persuasive way and to what the consequences of this are, not only for its visitors, but for all who participate in the life and in the operation of the park. There are many in the social sciences—too many to cite—who would argue that these capabilities and consequences are predominantly political and economic, de-individualizing (if not dehumanizing) and manipulative in character—and, of course, essentially human in design. They would assert that the landscape’s performativity merely reiterates meaning in an institutional,
