Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness

13. “Actant” is a term used by Bruno Latour (2005) to identify agentive participants in an assembled network that may or may not be human subjects.

14. “Semio-genesis” is defined by Jerry Chandler as simply “the process of creating signs” (2012). Chandler distinguishes between “intentional” and “natural” forms of semio-genesis, which are seen to produce “cultural” (or “human”) and “natural” forms of semiosis, respectively. It is one main contention of this study that landscape performances may constitute hybrid processes of intentional-natural semio-genesis as well. In focusing on such creative processes of sign initiation, it should be emphasized that the signs “born” are not absolutely or entirely new in every conceivable respect, as no sign, semeiotically conceptualized, could be (EP2: 328). Nonetheless, it is in the respects in which they are creative and in which they manifest the performance of initiative that they are considered semio-genetic. On the political significance inherent in this capacity to initiate significant movement, see Lepecki (2012c: 34).

15. See, for example, Stanley J. Tambiah (1979); Roy A. Rappaport (1979); E.V. Daniel (1987, 1996), Webb Keane (1997, 2007), Richard Parmentier (1987); Sally Ann Ness (1992), J. Lowell Lewis (1992), Diane Mines (2005), Carol Hendrickson (2008), and Eduardo Kohn (2013). All focus on thick descriptions of actual practices, looking at processes of sign transformation as they provide insight into actual cultural and historical contexts. None self-identify as specifically “rhetorical” (or logical or grammatical), but rather claim simply to employ Peirce’s theory of signs without indicating any specific branch of it. This claim is discussed in more breadth in Ness (2012).

16. The entire area of Yosemite National Park is much larger than Yosemite Valley. In its entirety the park is 1,169 square miles, or roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. However, 94 percent of the park’s land is designated wilderness area that can only be reached on foot along some 800 miles of trails (Swedo 2011: 1; Medley 2002: 8). It is estimated that 95 percent of Yosemite’s visitors go only to Yosemite Valley (Wells 1998: 1).

17. The oral historical dimension of this research, the Yosemite Visitors Project, took place between 2005 and 2012. More than sixty interviewees have participated in the project, which seeks to document the diversity of visitor experience among individuals who have family histories of visiting the park for three generations or more.

18. In stressing the “non-metaphorical” character of this choreographic identification, I adopt the general perspective of Lepecki and the cultural theorist Andrew Hewitt, who have recognized that such a non-metaphorical identification has substantial political consequences for the study of performance. The perspective leads to the recognition that, in Lepecki’s words, “choreography is, in itself, the very matter, indeed, the very matrix, of politics’ ‘function’” (Lepecki 2013: 155). This function, as Hewitt has phrased it, is politics’ “disposition and manipulation of bodies in relation to each other” (Hewitt 2005: 11). See Lepecki (2012a, 2012b, and 2012c) for further discussion of this perspective.

19. The most obvious and critical “other” in this regard would be the semiotic sign theory of Ferdinand de Saussure as it can be seen to undergird (post-)structuralist and critical theories of sign production. The second most critical comparison would be to the theory of Ernst Cassirer, whose work was of fundamental importance to the interpretive ethnography of cultural performance as developed by Clifford Geertz. The discussion in this section orients itself primarily in relation to Saussurian semiotic theory, although the positions taken could be opposed to Cassirerian theory as well. A full explication of these contrasts must await future publication.

20. Peirce’s view here on the development of signs is particularly closely aligned with Henri Bergson’s view on the location of images as they relate to human consciousness (2007).

21. Eduardo Kohn has advanced a somewhat similar pragmaticist definition of form that also identifies it as fundamentally processual. Kohn asserts, “By ‘form’ here, I am referring to a strange but nonetheless worldly process of pattern production and propagation, a process Deacon (2006, 2012) characterizes as ‘morphodynamic’—one whose peculiar generative logic necessarily comes to permeate living beings (human and nonhuman) as they harness it” (2013: 20). For a detailed discussion of how the Form of the Sign can be understood processually as it relates to “Information,” see Fuhrman (2010).

22. Lepecki, following Aristotle, has employed the term energeia as “energy that energizes,” or “movement that in moving, triggers action.” “Energeia,” Lepecki elaborates, “qualifies movement (kinesis) not only as something that moves, but as motion that acts” (2012c: 32). The source of a semeiotic sign’s capacity to perform as such, in this regard, is a particular intensification of energy originating in its distinctively triadic moving “signature” rather than in any content or material it might also possess or “carry.”

23. The use of “thing” here to indicate an object that has acquired the character of a Sign is intended to invoke Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory definition of “thing” (an object that has acquired performativity and becomes an actant in an assemblage) as well as that utilized by André Lepecki in his inter-subjective movement/action-constituted conceptualization of the “political thing” (2012b, 2012c). Lepecki’s notion of the “political thing,” in particular, parallels closely the definition of a semeiotic symbol (of certain political kind). Lepecki writes, “The political thing is a difficult, ever-evolving commitment, it is less an object and a subject than a movement defined by inter-subjective action—one that, moreover, must be learned, rehearsed, nurtured, and above all experimented with, practiced and experienced” (2012b: 3; emphasis in text). It should be noted that Lepecki’s definition of a political thing corresponds specifically to what is termed a Symbol’s Qualisign in Peircean sign theory, that aspect that conveys its qualitative “essence.” On Latour’s definition, see Jane Bennett’s discussion of “thing power” as it relates to Actor-Network-Theory (2010).

24. The close alignment of Bateson’s cybernetic theory of mind with Peirce’s semeiotic has been recognized and explicated in greater detail by Gary Furhman (2010), Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008), and myself (Ness 2007, 2008a, 2008b). As Hoffmeyer notes, Bateson’s definition of information as differences that make a difference “comes so close to a genuine triadic Peircean sign as to be nearly indistinguishable” (2008: 42; cited in Furhman 2010: 188).

25. See, for example, Peirce’s 1897 essay “Division of Signs” (CP 1.228), which gives the often cited definition “A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” See also Peirce’s 1899 note on his 1867 landmark essay “On a New List of Categories” (CP 1.564–65). He writes, “A representation is that character of a thing by virtue of which, for the production of a certain mental effect, it may stand in place of another thing.” He goes on, however, to acknowledge that his conception of such a “representation” was not general enough to cover all of the classes included in his idea of the sign. Likewise, in his 1902 definition of “Represent” for the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Peirce wrote that to represent was “to stand for, that is, to