Perhaps only Victor Turner’s definition of a symbol as “a positive force in an activity field” rivals Peirce’s as far as the applicability and referential inclusiveness of the conceptualization is concerned (1967: 20). From a rhetorical regard, a Peircean sign is basically kinetic rather than substantial. Whatever else it may be, a pragmaticist sign is always moving in a certain way. It is a “moved mover,” in Colapietro’s terms (1989: 22). Its agentive, performative character is born in movement, not in content. It emerges in activity—in transition, transformation, transmission, or translation or in some other kind of changeful process. Again, if the “e” in the Peircean spelling of “semeiotic” might be encoded with yet another meaning (multi-stably), it might also be read as signaling this kinetic performative identity of the rhetorically approached Peircean sign.
A semeiotic sign, in performance, moves movingly, as it, in its turn, has been so moved. This triple moving-ness is the source of its performative identity—its energeia,22 or actualizing capability—as well as its meaningfulness and intelligence. One could say, in this regard—indeed one should say—that the pragmaticist sign’s most basic performative character is dance-like. It is so in the sense that it is its thoughtful moving-ness that enables all of its relational capabilities. All other identities—intellectual, substantive, aesthetic, executive, political, argumentative, conceptual, placial, persuasive, all of them—emerge out of and remain continuous with this most basic dance-like identification.
A semeiotic sign may be a movement itself. It may be as simple as a mule-packer’s jerk on the reins of his horse, or the raising of a deer’s head at the sound of a shotgun, or a column of smoke rising into the sky above a forest fire. Signs, however, may also be inherent in material objects—in “things” of virtually any kind.23 If they are so inherent, however, they invest objects and/or the places of their being with a certain capacity to perform—to inspire or to bring about some kind of significant relational change. A giant boulder sitting in the middle of the Merced River, as it affords a means for visitors to jump into cool water on a hot summer day, plays host to a sign in this manner. The sun’s warmth, when it enables campers to get out of their sleeping bags and start their day, becomes a sign as well, as do the words of cheerful greeting that campers may employ with their neighbors while they are arising. “Beautiful day!” “Excuse me, can I heat some water on your camp stove?” “The summit will be out of the clouds by 9:30, don’t you think?” Such words and phrases inspire and move along processes of emotional, logical, imagined, and also physical significance. Linguistic speech acts, too, in this regard, are pragmaticist signs in their capacity to serve as agents of intelligent relational movements.
As a consequence of their kinetic conceptualization, the rhetorical processes of semeiotic signs—the symbol included—are understood to achieve significance in a manner that is not necessarily dependent on anything they have or possess. Their intelligent life depends instead on how the movements they inspire and/or perform bring new relationships into being. A sign is significant in that the movements it produces make relationships happen, and these relationships forge or sustain connections that matter in some intelligible way. They are relationships that “have roots and bear fruits,” as Colapietro somewhat playfully characterizes them, relationships that are both “grounded and growing” (1989: 22). To borrow from Gregory Bateson’s more abstract cybernetic framework, which closely parallels Peirce’s semeiotic, the signs of Peircean pragmaticism create moving “patterns that connect” (1979: 10). In so doing, they generate differences “that make a difference,” intelligently speaking (Bateson 1972: 453; 1979: 250).24
So it is that the scent of frying bacon becomes a semeiotic sign as it connects a hungry bear to a source of food. A small pile of stones becomes significant as it brings a lost hiker together with a hard-to-find section of a trail. A rocky ledge becomes vitally meaningful when it enables a precariously balanced climber to achieve a more secure position on a rock wall and avoid taking an injurious fall down a treacherous granite face. Any trail, path, road, or route in its capacity to move travelers into new relationships within an environment they seek to explore performs as a semeiotic sign. Likewise, any linguistic concept that moves a user into a new relationship to the world it references performs as a sign as well, as does any part of speech that enables its users to make connections between concepts in the language to which it belongs.
The kinetic, relational conceptualization of the Peircean semeiotic sign produces a relatively large sphere of adaptability to both human and nonhuman processes in one all-important respect as far as the symbols of landscape performance in particular are concerned. It is a respect that Peirce made explicit only in his later, most rhetorically oriented work. The definition characterizes a sign’s most fundamental agency (or performative character) as being one of mediation rather than representation. While in his earlier (and more often cited) writings Peirce defined signs in general as having the capacity to “represent” or “stand for” something,25 in his later work Peirce determined that the concept of representation was itself too narrow to characterize all of the many ways that a sign, as he conceived of it, could operate and perform as such. He wrote of this transition, “I did not then know enough about language to see that to attempt to make the word representation serve for an idea so much more general than any it habitually carried was injudicious. The word mediation would be better” (CP 4.3; cited in Colapietro 1989: 18; emphasis in text).26
Mediation, as Colapietro observes, is “deeper than interpretation,” just as semiosis—the full range of sign performance—is “wider than representation” (1989: 25). Although many semeiotic signs indeed conform to the “standing for” representational definition, others achieve significance without necessarily performing in a manner that, strictly speaking, could best be characterized as representational. Mediation, rather than representation, describes, for the later Peirce, the full range of intelligent processes that the signs of pragmaticist semeiotic theory in all its branches can be understood to enable. Mediation may involve what Peirce characterized as a “quasi-mind” as opposed to a specifically human mind. A quasi-mind, minimally, is “capable of varied determination” in relation to the sign’s intelligible movement (EP2: 544n22; cited in Fuhrman 2010: 171). Here, again, the pragmaticist semeiotic presents a basic and challenging theoretical formulation—one that borders on the unthinkable from humanist semiotic perspectives.
The shift from representation to mediation also reinforces the dance-like character of the pragmaticist sign, rhetorically conceived. It foregrounds the choreographic identity of semiosis in general by asserting that the play of relationships-in-movement in which all kinds of signs participate agentively can matter—can “bear fruits” or make differences, intelligently speaking—even when that play entails nothing that could be identified as a representational, “standing-for,” sort of process. Signs—even symbols—do not have to stand to make sense. They can move (in-)formingly as well.
Such an enlargement of the conceptual spectrum of what can be conceived of as sign performance has critical consequences for landscape performance. Once the sign spectrum is so extended, it gains the capacity to define as semeiotic experiences, activities, and processes whose influence on conventional cultural performances would otherwise go unrecognized. The Merced River, for example, as it may mediate vital relationships between bodies—human and nonhuman alike—once they are caught up in its currents, can achieve significance as an actant in a nonrepresentational but meaningful process of semiosis. A mouse in Curry Village, when it leaves droppings inside the insulation of tents that bring campers into contact with the deadly Hantavirus lung disease, does the same. So does a campfire, when its light draws strangers into new relationships with one another. The Yosemite Valley landscape, in its capacity to attract people from all over the world and to move them, along with all of
