interests and to conduct and construct themselves accordingly. However, I argue in every chapter that the situation in reality is not so simple. There is far more to the symbolic life force of the Yosemite landscape than such societally oriented theories can recognize, let alone explain or predict.
To be sure, top-down perspectives on meaning-making in Yosemite demand attention. However, there are also always ways in which landscape performance initiates in its ecological relations what André Lepecki, following the work of Jacques Rancière and Steven Corcoran (2010), has identified as dissensus in visitor experience. Landscape-initiated dissensus, “the rupturing of daily habits,” short-circuits precisely the kinds of societal meaning-making to which sociological perspectives assign priority (Lepecki 2013: 153; see also 2012c). Landscape performance, in this regard, has the capacity to de-subjectify culturally constructed subjects, producing in visitors what Lepecki has argued for choreographic performances generally speaking: a kind of subjectivity “that always exceeds predetermined acts and intentions … composing … a particularly singular actualization of what really matters” (2012c: 38).
What “really matters” on and in the stages of the Yosemite landscape are movements of significance more powerful and complex than human social and cultural institutions and their discourses and policies can fully command and control. The politics of landscape performance, in this regard, is a politics that holds in its balance the relation between social consensus and ecological dissensus, between institutional power and subjective freedom. This is in large part why visitors, no matter how carefully policed, regulated, crowded, and managed, continue to bond with the landscape in extraordinarily profound, subjectively liberating ways. In their performances of great and little traditions alike, they become signs—creatively evolving signs—of the very real freedoms as well as the controlling social discourses (not to mention the laws of nature) that together, in their own respective manners, constitute the park landscape.
Figure 0.3. Amna Shiekh climbing on the Columbia Boulder, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.
Peirce’s rhetorical branch of semeiotic is of critical value in advancing the relatively expansive interpretive agenda identified above. In the remaining sections of this introduction, I seek to clarify how and why this can be the case. The justification lies primarily in the extraordinarily broad definition accorded to the concept of semiosis and to the pragmaticist concept of the sign. These concepts, rhetorically adapted, can be understood as rooted in a kinetic and, I will argue, non-metaphorically choreographic, dance-like theory of reality.18 It is a theory that situates humankind in a universe composed of significant occurrences literally brought to life in embodied relations of performative movement. As such, the rhetorical project undertaken here is extensive, seeking to understand, in Peirce’s terms, “just what the processes are whereby an idea can be conveyed to a human mind and become embedded in its habits” (EP2: 329, 330).
Performing at the Interface of the Cultural and the Nonhuman: The Semeiotic Symbol
Of all the myriad sign classifications that compose Peirce’s semeiotic, the most critical one for the study of landscape performance, and perhaps the most challenging of all, is that of the semeiotic “Symbol.” Peirce developed a precise, technical definition for the symbol that is in some respects extremely unusual. It may even seem to border on the nonsensical or the ridiculous at first pass, since its conception is so different from comparable definitions advanced in other, more widely employed sign theories.19 However, the validity of the pragmaticist symbol, unpalatable as it may seem at first, becomes increasingly compelling the deeper one ventures into the heart of Peirce’s rhetorical semeiotic. The deeper one ventures, the more clearly it manifests how radically expanded are the possibilities for human performance when its significance is comprehended not in relation to the possession or conveyance of information, but in relation to the staging of intelligent movements.
Perhaps the most challenging feature of the pragmaticist definition of the symbol is that it must be understood as not being applicable exclusively to signs that have been invented and that are governed entirely by human beings and their social and cultural institutions and conventions of signification. Such a specifically human class of signs does not exist anywhere in the classifications of pragmaticist theory, as understood by any of its branches. This is a very basic feature of Peirce’s semeiotic. Its consequences for the symbol, and through it, for landscape performance, are vitally important.
Pragmaticist sign theory, in brief, does not grant human minds the sole rights to the production, recognition, and employment of any category of sign performance, even those, such as the symbol, that include human language and mathematics. Peirce’s semeiotic is not “humanist” in this particular respect, as are the most influential and widely employed sign theories today. As Peirce scholar Joseph Ransdell once observed, Peirce’s semeiotic does not even formulate a concept of a specifically linguistic (and so assumedly distinctly human) sign. Ransdell elaborates in this regard:
It is often thought that [Peirce’s] conception of the symbol is more or less the same as the conception of the linguistic sign. But this is not so: there are entities which we ordinarily regard as words which are not symbols, and there are symbols which can by no reasonable stretch of usage be rightly called “words.” (1997: 16)
In high contrast to sign theories oriented by the concept of the linguistic sign, pragmaticist sign theory proceeds on the assumption that the relations of significance that inform every general type of semiosis are to be found both within and without human thought and human minds. If the extra “e” in the Peircean spelling of “semeiotic” could be assigned a specific encoded meaning, in this regard, it might best be read as signaling this post-humanist orientation of Peirce’s theory.
Colapietro summarizes the pragmaticist perspective on this inclusive character of semiosis in relation to environments created and governed by nonhuman elements and processes as follows:
At least in some cases, we are not the initiators of but the respondents to a world that is always already meaningful to some degree. The world of our experience is always already constituted as a realm of signs. If we have a sufficiently general grasp of the nature of signs, we cannot avoid concluding that at least some phenomena are signs of nature. To understand the nature of signs ultimately ought to lead us to see the signs of nature. We are in a continuous dialogue with the natural world as well as with other humans. (1989: 21)
Symbols, in this respect, may be considered to inhere in reality, human as well as nonhuman. In the terms of Peirce scholar Frederik Stjernfelt, they may be considered its “natural inhabitants” (2014: 1). They may be conceived and performed by humans, but they may also be encountered in experience and discovered by human beings. They may persist in reality, whether or not they are ever so discovered. Their emergence, as well as their evolution and cultivation—their thoughtfulness—is not necessarily tied to human mental or cognitive processes. As Peirce himself observed:
Thought [i.e., the development of signs] is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc. of objects are really there. (CP 4.551; cited by Colapietro 1989: 19; the bracketed insertion is from Colapietro)20
This, in brief, is what may be called the ecological orientation of Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. It makes the symbol, as Peirce conceptualized it, exceedingly difficult to comprehend from humanist semiotic orientations. While the conventional sign productions of human social and cultural discourse
