Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness

of gradually changing and cumulative, generalizing intelligence. From a pragmaticist perspective, this is as true of conventional human symbols, such as those of human language, as it is of symbols moving in nonhuman environments and processes. Peirce argued emphatically in 1904 on this issue:

A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with the power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality. This appears mystical and mysterious simply because we insist on remaining blind to what is plain, that there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol. (EP2: 324)²⁸

      Symbols continually grow, their own intelligence modifying and compiling with each new relational movement made in each new application or instance of performance. Their growth processes determine with gradually increasing clarity their definition. Wittgenstein’s image of a concept as being like a thread in its interweaving of diverse strands of grammatical practice aligns closely, in this regard, with that of the temporally extensive semeiotic symbol (1953: section 67). Peirce identified the nature of the symbol—human and nonhuman alike—with the living action of thought in precisely this kind of continuum-producing patterning. “The body of the symbol changes slowly,” he wrote in 1903, “but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones” (EP2: 264). The threadlike continuity of a symbol’s living, changing form is made possible by the recurrence of its multiple acts of determination, acts of recognition based most primitively upon the feeling and re-feeling of similarity (or, in the most basic life-forms, of re-membrance; EP2: 320, 322).

      A semeiotic symbol may be constituted by a cultural rule of recognition, such as the linguistic convention that consistently associates the combined English language phonemes /d/, /i/, and /r/ with the various species of animals all understood to belong to the genus Cervidae—the deer family. The various operations of human languages that are based in habits of recognition, composition, and application, among many others, qualify as symbols in pragmaticist terms as well. The habit or regularity that constitutes a semeiotic symbol, however, can also be a social convention related to reoccurring performances of physical activity, such as the social convention of driving on the right and passing on the left when conducting a vehicle on an American roadway. Such an action-oriented conventional symbol may acquire the character of “tradition” if it develops into relatively elaborate practices, as with Milton Singer’s great and little traditions of cultural performance.

Any cultural performance, ethnographically speaking, is necessarily constituted by semeiotic symbols, insofar as it is passed on regularly from senior to junior members of a cultural group. The Firefall tradition of Yosemite Valley—a nightly summertime performance staged between the years of 1872 and 1969—is, perhaps, the greatest and most famous example of such a symbol in Yosemite National Park. The Firefall was a performance that consisted of pushing the burning embers of an enormous bonfire off the edge of the Valley’s most popular panoramic viewpoint, Glacier Point—a granite cliff 3,214 feet high.²⁹ The legendary Firefall remains one of the most deeply loved, rhetorically potent symbols of Yosemite National Park. Although park policies currently prohibit its enactment, the Firefall lives on in the experience of countless visitors, both those who actually witnessed and remember its performance as well as those who have learned to imagine it through the representations of others. The Firefall tradition illustrates the semeiotic symbol’s capacity for endurance and adaptation, even across diverse ontological modalities of relational movement. It is a symbol that originated in actual transformative habits related to material objects but persists and recurs in relationships—no less moving—of remembered and imagined sign performance.

      In addition to symbols of tradition that exhibit very high degrees of regularity, even to the point of “ossification,” as Stanley Tambiah (1979) identified in some of the most extreme cases, semeiotic theory also recognizes relatively creative and incipient processes of sign recurrence as symbolic forms of semiosis as well. A contemporary project of rephotography undertaken in Yosemite between 2001 and 2003 by visual artists Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe in collaboration with Rebecca Solnit, for example, illustrates this relatively generative end of the spectrum of symbol semiosis. Eventually titled Yosemite in Time, the project consisted of five separate expeditions into Yosemite, during which the photographers methodically staged acts of exceptionally exacting photographic recurrence (Klett, Solnit, and Wolfe 2005: xi). That is, they returned to locations where some of Yosemite’s most renowned photographers—Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston among others—had made a number of their most influential images. There, they reenacted the work of the original artists as precisely as the existing conditions would allow. Wolfe and Klett retook the earlier shots, not only in exactly the same places in the landscape, but also at the same times of the year and even at the same times of day, when possible. Their intent was to duplicate not the image that had originally been made (sometimes more than one hundred years previously), but rather the taking of the original image itself. Their goal, in other words, was the perfection of recurrence in relation to certain highly original photographic performances. As a consequence, the project illuminated in magnified form not only the ways in which the Yosemite landscape had changed, sometimes dramatically, over the passage of time, but also the performative aspects of the earlier photographers’ creative processes.

Yosemite in Time also entailed a “Third View” aspect in which the recurrence of rephotography was itself reenacted. This strategy was employed to move beyond the “then and now” binary that a single retaking was limited to representing. The again-retaken images became integral to the composition of layered panoramic composites that were one eventual outcome of the group’s collaborative process. With the incorporation of these “third views,” rephotography, as a creative strategy, became capable of suggesting, in Byron’s words, “the idea of a continuum” that presented an “understanding of change as continuing beyond our own time” (cited in Solnit, 2005: xi). In this regard, Yosemite in Time exposed in its third-view collages of the park landscape the earliest stages of symbolic growth in relation to certain originary practices of landscape photography. In their creation of a continuum of recurring imagery, the rephotographic performances of Byron and Wolfe constituted the birth of semeiotic symbols—symbols capable of representing the endurance of a photographic intelligence as well as depicting ongoing, nonhuman processes of change occurring in the landscape over time.³⁰

      These examples of conventional semeiotic symbols, whether they are located at the ossified or the incipient end of the symbolic spectrum of recurring performance, are basically comparable to those typically recognized in humanist sign theories of symbolism. However, the pragmaticist symbol category is not limited to the study of such conventional human symbols alone. As Ransdell has emphasized this point, “the symbolic and the conventional cannot be identified, in any case, at least as regards the way in which Peirce construes the nature of symbolism” (1997: ¶54). Pragmaticist symbols are also conceivable that are not the products of societal traditions and distinctly cultural forms of law- or rule-following.

Peirce was quite insistent on this point, although he typically focused his own, predominantly logical, analyses on conventional societal symbols. He repeatedly noted in his definitions of the symbol and its component elements that conventional symbols formed only one part of the symbol’s larger spectrum of semiosis. In 1902, for example, his definition of the symbol specified that a sign could be considered to qualify as a symbol, “whether the habit is natural or conventional, and without regard to the motives which originally governed its selection” (CP 2.307).³¹ In 1908 he observed that “the power of growth” characteristic of the symbol was manifest in all “living” signs, whether those of plant life or of distinctly human “institutions” such as “a daily newspaper, a great fortune, [or] a social ‘movement’” (EP2: 435). As Peirce studies scholar Gary Fuhrman has summarized Peirce’s perspective, the symbol concept leads to the understanding that “organisms, persons, and social institutions alike can now be regarded as living systems [of information]”