immanence

I’ve been struggling with how my triadic framework for interpreting art works relates to C. S. Peirce’s categories.

When I first developed my triadism (fleshed out in Ecologies of the Moving Image) into the non-Peircian terms of materiality, experience, and representation — which I did in the context of teaching a course on the environmental arts — I loosely considered the first of these to be analogous to Peircian firstness, the second to secondness, and the third to thirdness.

The point, in my teaching, was not to adhere strictly to Peirce, since my students weren’t studying him, but just to have a handy triadic formula that would be useful for making sense of the eco-arts in ways that get beyond the customary overemphasis on representation in favor of experience (including affect) and materiality. Materiality deals with the stuff that’s just there (one element); experience involves a second — the artist, the reader or viewer, et al. (two); and representation makes sense and meaning of the stuff and its shapers and perceivers in real-world contexts (three); thus Peirce’s categories loosely fit. Whether students got the Peirce or not, they could follow that.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this way of ordering the three may be un-Peircian. Or at least that there was a second way of connecting it to Peirce that was sufficiently different from the first and had important consequences.

Let me break it down here.

Interpretation 1: “M-E-R”

Tying materiality to firstness makes sense if we think of firsts, seconds, and thirds as making up a Whiteheadian “actual occasion” (which is where I began).

An actual occasion is made up of a subject (or becoming-subject, since the actual occasion is only such while it is occasioning), an object or set of objects (or rather, becoming-objects), and the prehension by which the first connects with the second. The object is what’s given (thus, first); the subject is that which emerges, and is of the nature of a representation (thus, third); and the prehension is the act by which subjectivity and objectivity are conjoined. (A caveat is coming up.)

That’s the way I made the connection in EMI, which resulted in the three triads pertaining to the film-world, the film experience, and the film-real world. My quick formula for this basic triad was:

1. Stuff 
2. Stuff happens
3. “So that’s what’s happening!”

(The caveat: One could suggest that as the end product, the subject is a second rather than a third; and that the process of prehension is third, as it’s more akin to semiosis. I’ll address that shortly, as it relates to where I’m heading.)

Materiality, in this sense, is given (first); experience is the act of prehension, the way in which one thing connects with, acts on, is constrained by, another thing (second); and representation (which includes the emergence of subjectivity as a form of semiosis) mediates (third).

Even with Jaime Nubiola’s variant of Peircian-Whiteheadian reconciliation, which equates firstness with eternal objects, secondness with prehension, and thirdness with symbolic reference, this still works. Eternal objects can be taken to be virtual (in a Deleuzian sense), prehension actual (in its actualization), and symbolic reference — representational (or actual in its representation, which involves both virtual and actual elements). While we don’t normally consider material to be virtual and indeterminate, it is the stuff of which things are made, and it is only settled once we have objectified (or “seconded”) it somehow.

Interpretation 2: “E-M-R”

The alternative interpretation builds on Peirce’s distinction of firsts as possibility, and therefore as open indeterminacy; seconds as “brute” and discrete actuality; and thirds as generalized mediation (or representation). Or as he puts it in a 1875 fragment, “By the third, I mean the medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and last. The beginning is first, the end second, the middle third. The end is second, the means third. The thread of life is a third; the fate that snips it, its second.” [CP 1.337, emphasis added]

What Peirce means by this is that the second is the result of determination and opposition, while the third is the sense, habit, or generalization that arises to mediate oppositions, contributing to further growth in the process. This is a crucial part of Peirce’s trichotomy, since if we rendered seconds as the process and thirds as the result, we’d only really have a dyad: two objects encounter each other and produce a third. There’s no openness, only complete determination. As Pelkey puts it,

“Peirce’s system can only be understood by reforming old dyadic habits that confuse the middle with the end — by giving up on the idea of counting ‘one, two, three’.”

Instead, with Peirce’s process semiotic we have the end result in the position of the second, and the mediation of the two in the position of the third. Ergo, evolution. If the evolutionary process should ever come to a standstill (as it presumably will at the end of time), it will be as a second, not as a third. After that, nothing.

Back to my MER vs. EMR. If things are experiential in their nature (as a panexperientialist account requires), then it makes sense to think of firstness as the openness of experience as it happens: the experience itself as it is found from within it. There is no outside; a first is sufficient into itself, and fully indeterminate. Materiality, by contrast, is fully determined; it is that which can be observed, measured, and so on, because it has ossified. It is present as past, object to the subject of mediation (thirdness). Semiosis, finally, is determining; it is in process of making a determination, of mediating through representation and generalization.

Materiality, then, is closer to secondness — the determined nature of something that has already happened. Experience, which is open, is firstness. Representation remains a third, and is distinguished by virtue of being determining. Semiosis is always in process of making determination, never of being fully determined (which would make it a second) or being indeterminately open (which would be a first).

The formula, then, should look more like this:

1. Stuff happening = Experience (open, indeterminate, virtual, “Feel”)
2. Stuff has happened = Materiality (actual, determined, “Real”)
3. “This is what’s happened(/ing)” = Representation (determining, “Ideal”)

Those are the two options: MER versus EMR. The difference between them arises when we try to pin “materiality” and “experience” down to the categories. Perhaps I shouldn’t be trying to do that at all. But I find the three terms useful for making sense of art, and students get them.

The question is whether the experiential is (as 2ndness) the process of encountering the firstness of things (named “materiality”), or if it is (as 1stness ) the radical openness of any experiential moment, the ecstatic feel of that moment, in all its texture and possibility. And whether the material is (as 1stness) the object encountered in whatever shape, form, feel, and texture it takes, or if it is (as 2ndness) the result of causal determination, which is objectively measurable, but no longer active except as object. Of two two — affect/experience and materiality — which is more open, and which more closed?

There is, of course, the experience of materiality, which is part of what draws an artist or audience member to a piece of art. Then there are the environmental impact statements from the use of resources in the making of that art. The first seems to me more akin to firstness; the second to secondness (even if the experience of dealing with those impact statements involves firstness). It bears reminding that in our actual experience, both of these are always shot through with thirdness; no way around that for interpretive beings like us.

As you can see, I’m leaning now toward EMR: 1stness as Experience, 2ndness as Materiality, 3rdness as Representation.

Peirce’s writing on the categories is rich and open enough, I think, to leave some wiggle room if and when they are connected to wiggly terms like “experience” and “materiality.” The question is which is preferable — which is better at getting at the Peirceness, the “process-semioticity,” of the triad. Some might say I should just give my students Peirce and stick with “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness,” but that doesn’t save us from the task of weaning ourselves off of the linearity of “1, 2, 3…” (the point that Pelkey makes quite well).

I’d love to take a poll of Peircians (and Whiteheadians) to see what they think. I’m a bit hesitant, though, as I suspect I’ll just get more confused… 🙁