Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness

yielded some of the most influential literature on American wilderness landscapes ever produced, once derisively characterized Yosemite-inspired authors as an “army of literary travelers who have planted themselves [in Yosemite] and burst into rhetoric.” He sardonically called to would-be Yosemite writers, “Here all who make California books: dismount and inflate!” (cited in Bergon 1994: 136). King’s words give any author of an interpretive bent more than a little pause before taking up the subject of Yosemite. Even guidebooks to the park acknowledge that Yosemite has been the target of more “gushing adjectives” and excessive hyperbole than any other Californian destination—and probably any other western American destination as well (Whitfield 2002: xi). Its inflated touristic and nationalistic rhetoric has served, among other things, to obscure the harsh realities of land-use conflict and control that are central to the landscape’s actual cultural and historical character (Solnit 1994).

      In my efforts to avoid the pitfalls of such romantic excess, I have endeavored to emulate the work not of King, but of his contemporary, the explorer and ethnologist John Wesley Powell. Though vastly different in theoretical and ideological orientation, my expeditions into the park—if they can be seen to merit such a label—nonetheless have not been altogether unlike Powell’s. I have sought, as he did, to discover the landscape’s character, to collect samples and recordings of it. I endeavor now to present these findings to an audience who might have preferred to do the exploring and discovering (and performing and choreographing) for themselves but, for one reason or another, were not able to come along on the journey. However, my visits, as Solnit has written of her rephotographing expeditions, were not focused on the discovery of “the untouched and truly unknown,” as were Powell’s. Rather, they explored, as Solnit also identifies, “conjunctions, overlaps, patterns, [and] meanings in the steep, intricate, hallowed, scarred landscape of Yosemite” (Solnit 2005: xiv). In my case, all of these were to be found not in visual images, such as Solnit collaborated in rephotographing, but in various relatively energetic types of visitor performance.

      Powell’s geographical representations of his explorations of the American frontier won the admiration of Wallace Stegner, arguably the greatest twentieth-century author of western American landscape literature. Stegner was so impressed by Powell’s technically exacting accuracy and his careful attention to detail that he honored Powell’s work with the designation “art without falsification” (1954: 191). If I engage here in a rhetorical project, it is with the intention of meeting that same exacting standard of description. My effort is hopefully more akin to Powell’s or to Stegner’s own—or to that of Klett, Solnit, and Wolfe—than it is to those of the more popular stylists Yosemite seems prone to attract. The reader alone, of course, is left to judge the results.

      Notes

1. The visits were of three to ten days in length—typical of overnight visitor practice and within the maximum length-of-stay limits set by the park management.

2. While the concept of cultural performance is most often associated with Clifford Geertz (1973), my use of it here comes directly from Milton Singer’s work (Singer 1984). Singer adopted the concept as developed by Lloyd Warner in Warner’s studies of Yankee City celebratory practices (1959) and treated it as an explicitly semiotic concept, applying the theory of signs developed by Charles S. Peirce to the description and interpretation of its ethnographic referents. In this respect, Singer’s approach and his definition of cultural performance, paraphrased above, are most closely aligned with those employed in this study.

3. The reference here to Wittgenstein’s enigmatic concept of a “form of life,” both a culturally relative and a humanly general way of living, is intentional (Wittgenstein 1967; 1953: 206).

4. I have discussed in earlier work the utility of the duck-rabbit image in relation to dance performance specifically as well. See Ness 2008b.

5. See Crouch and Malm (2003: 253) for a discussion of landscape defined in such textualist terms.

6. See, for example, Lyotard’s discussion of the “scapeland” of the lost traveler (1989) and Adrian Ivakhiv’s account of the Sedona landscape as understood by New Agers (2003).

7. For an overview of the different conceptualizations of landscape forthcoming from geography, anthropology, and the visual arts, see Hirsch (1995: 1–30) and Dorrian and Rose (2003: 13–19).

8. The writings of Peirce will be cited in this volume using abbreviations standard in Peirce scholarship. EP1 and EP2 refer to The Essential Peirce, Volume 1 (1867–1893) and The Essential Peirce, Volume 2 (1893–1913) (Peirce Edition Project 1992 and 1998 respectively). CP refers to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes 1–8 (1931–1958). CN refers to Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation, Part Three: 1901–1908. The term “pragmaticist” refers specifically to the philosophical approach Peirce developed and which he contrasted with other philosophical work, particularly that of William James, that has also been identified under the more well-known rubric of “Pragmatism.” “Semeiotic” is used to refer specifically to Peirce’s sign theory, as he did himself (CP 8.343; cited in Colapietro 2007: 18), and to distinguish it from other sign theories that go by the more well-known labels “semiotic” or “semiological.” See James Hoopes (1991), James Liszka (1996), and Cornelis de Waal (2001) for summary overviews of Peirce’s semeiotic that are beyond the scope of this introduction. Daniel (1987) also provides an excellent introductory overview adopting a cultural anthropological perspective.

9. The concept of articulation as it is here employed is drawn from Mark Franko’s use of the term in an address given at the conference Weaving Politics, in Stockholm, Sweden, 2012.

10. “Semiosis,” it should be noted, is typically defined in Peirce scholarship in terms that do not explicitly employ the concept of performance. Definitions approaching the concept from logical and grammatical perspectives more often characterize semiosis as the “action,” “activity,” and/or “information processing” of signs (Colapietro 1989: 19; De Tienne 2006; Fuhrman 2010; Stjernfelt 2014: 40, 118). While Colapietro does not include the term “performance” in his etymologically focused definition, I employ it here as the concept that most accurately characterizes the way in which the transformative movements of semiosis are foregrounded in Peirce’s rhetorically oriented arguments. The concept of performance is here posited as the conceptual parallel, from a rhetorical approach, to those of “exformation,” “transformation,” and “metaformation” that André De Tienne has identified in relation to the logic of “information” explicated in Peirce’s writings, both early and late (De Tienne 2006: 3). “Performance,” in sum, is the concept that best characterizes the most basic and general identity of semiosis as it appears from the rhetorical standpoint here adopted.

11. All technical terms taken from Peirce will be capitalized initially to indicate their belonging to Peirce’s semeiotic. After their introduction, the terms will no longer be capitalized unless it would create confusion not to capitalize them, but they will be employed as technically defined unless otherwise noted.

12. Despite the similarity in terms, Colapietro makes no reference here to Geertz’s renowned conceptualization of “thick description”