life-forms exhibit as well. These various kinds of sign processes and the circulations of information, or in-forming-ness, they enable and facilitate are, of course, not identical in every respect. However, it may be the case, in some instances, that the general character of performativity they all exhibit—the basic processes of evolving intelligence they accomplish—form a spectrum, widely varying at its extremes, to be sure, but nonetheless a spectrum of symbolism that is continuous.
The pragmaticist concept of the symbol thus rejects the assumption that human symbolic performances, even of the most sophisticated varieties, occur in a realm of meaning-making that is governed or determined only by their own uniquely human design and character. On the contrary, whether great or little, all human symbolic conventions have the capacity to interface with—literally to communicate with—nonhuman signs of symbolic varieties, to be influenced by them and to articulate with them, as well as to influence them in turn. Human beings, in pragmaticist terms, are symbol translators par excellence. They move continually between and interweave intelligently environmental, organismic, and sociocultural forms of semiosis (to name but a few), becoming constituted by and constituting them in so doing. Such coordination permeates virtually every aspect of human life, even the most culturally elaborate. Landscape performance is but one example of this kind of cross-spectrum coordination of symbolic performance.
Such claims regarding the Peircean symbol and symbolic semiosis, as I have already been at some pains to acknowledge, may seem fantastically naïve or nonsensically broad from the perspective of humanist, lingui-centric semiotic theories. However, they are justifiable and productive when viewed in light of the precise, ecological definition of the pragmaticist symbol on which they are founded, and that light, I will argue, emanates most brightly from Peirce’s rhetorical branch. The relatively large, inclusive spectrum of semiosis defined by the pragmaticist symbol is conceivable because of its own relatively general, fundamentally choreographic character, the character best foregrounded in rhetorically oriented forms of semeiotic inquiry.
The Rhetorical Conceptualization of the Semeiotic Sign/Symbol
In embarking on this argument, it must be noted at the outset that in its most fundamental character, the semeiotic symbol is, before all else, a kind of semeiotic “Sign.” The sign is the most basic, all-inclusive conceptual formation of the whole of Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. Whether they operate by rules, resemblances, or contiguities, whether they are interpreted politically, aesthetically, economically, religiously, logically, or otherwise, whether their character be that of a diagram, a gesture, or a royal decree, all vehicles of meaning-making imaginable are still, first and foremost, signs from a semeiotic point of view. This is as true for the symbol in all its diversity as it is for any other kind of meaning-relating phenomenon. To understand the symbol, from any branch of Peirce’s semeiotic, one must first understand what it means to claim that it is, as Peirce understood it to be, a sign.
The particular rhetorically adapted characterization of the pragmaticist sign that I advance here is not one that has been stated previously in the terms employed, either by Peirce himself or by any of his interpreters. Some, admittedly, might find it controversial. Peirce, however, gave many definitions of the sign concept, allowing for some latitude on the subject. The relatively underdeveloped status of the rhetorical branch of Peirce’s semeiotic, I argue, allows for considerably more. In formulating the present definition, I have “rhetoricized” two definitions that come from Peirce’s later writings, neither of which was identified by him as specifically or particularly rhetorical in character. These were formulated in 1903 and 1906 respectively. Drawing on both of them, I define a pragmaticist sign, approached rhetorically, as “an agent of intelligent, or at least intelligible, relational movement.”
The 1903 definition that inspires this rhetorical conceptualization was given in part of Peirce’s Syllabus, in an essay titled “Sundry Logical Conceptions” (EP2: 267–88). This “mature” definition of the sign, as it is sometimes called (EP2: 325), is phrased in the terms of Peirce’s ceno-pythagorean Universal Categories (EP2: 272), or “Universes of Experience,” as he eventually termed them (EP2: 435; 1908). In this definition, Peirce characterizes signs as “facts of Thirdness” (EP2: 272). As such they manifest as “triadic” relations. These are relations whose being consists in “bringing about” connections between more basic (monadic and dyadic) relata that previously were unrelated in the particular way that the sign connects them (EP2: 267, 269).
In that they belong to Peirce’s Universal Categories, signs are essentially relational in character. This characteristic I identify in the rhetorical definition of the sign above, specifying that the movements signs perform are “relational.” In their capacity to bring about or make manifest triadic relations, signs may be characterized as relationship instigators (logical and grammatical discourses more often characterize them as “determiners” or “informers”). In this respect, they are agentive, as the definition specifies. And, in that Peirce identified all triadic facts as “intellectual” (EP2: 171), or possessing entelechy, a concept Peirce took from Aristotle, they have the capacity, if not the demonstrated and/or recognized ability, for intelligent or at least intelligible (potentially intelligent) performance. As Peirce wrote, “Thought plays a part” in all cases of Thirdness (EP2: 269), and “wherever there is thought there is Thirdness” (EP2: 269). The 1903 Syllabus definition, in this manner, identifies three of the four characteristics specified in the rhetorical definition here conceptualized: relationality, agency, and intelligibility/intelligence.
The second, even later definition, formulated in 1906, was given in a letter Peirce wrote on March 9 of that year to his English colleague Lady Victoria Welby. In this formulation, Peirce defines a sign as “any medium for the communication or extension of a Form (or feature)” (1977; EP2: 477). This definition identifies two characteristics corresponding to the 1903 definition. As a “medium,” the sign is relational, and in its embodiment or manifestation of some form or feature, it is intelligible if not intelligent.
The fourth and most distinctive characteristic that the rhetorical definition above also identifies—the processual or moving character of the sign—may at first seem lacking from these 1903 and 1906 definitions. Here, it must be remembered that from a rhetorical perspective, as Peirce himself defined that point of view, any “form” involved in semiosis (or any feature or fact or thing or bit or unit or atom for that matter) is always apparent as a form in process, a form whose being is that of “bringing forth.” That is, forms, rhetorically conceived, are understood as living forms, as forms whose being is “being-born,” so to speak, or form-ing. A sign’s identity as such a “form-ing”—which is what matters most about the sign, rhetorically conceived—is what I have termed “movement” in the rhetorical definition given above.21 Peirce himself characterized such form- movement as the “essence” of semiosis, at times speaking of “thought-motion” as that which signs, particularly those of Logic, functioned to describe (1906, cited in Stjernfelt 2014: 78).
The rhetorical definition of the Peircean sign here conceptualized, then, does no more than identify from a rhetorical vantage point the four fundamental distinctive features Peirce attributed to signs according to their particular categorical classification as “facts of Thirdness.” It recognizes their relationality, their agency, their form-ing-ness, and their thoughtfulness. While it may read very differently from more standard logically and grammatically oriented definitions, it is nonetheless as consistent with Peirce’s pragmaticist orientation as they are and might arguably be seen to better represent what is most foundational to his thinking—“processuality,” if there might be such a term—despite its emerging from a relatively neglected area of his semeiotic.
The Peircean symbol is not, in this rhetorical regard, necessarily the transmitter of some kind of meaningful content that “it” conveys. Although many sorts of symbols, and other pragmaticist signs as well, conform to this definition, it is
