immanence

I shared my previous post on the Peirce-L discussion forum and received about 16 responses in five days. The following is an edited version of the summary response I sent to the forum regarding the main comments presented there. I’ve eliminated names or substituted them with single initials where that seemed warranted.

I’ve received about 16 responses so far (most shared on the list, but a few sent to me personally), have read all of them now (though not all the supplementary material that was shared along with them), and have some preliminary thoughts I’d like to share in response.

By far the most frequent comment has concerned the way in which my question seemed to ignore the basic principle by which Peirce’s phaneroscopic categories mutually imply each other and are therefore inseparable. It appeared to several respondents that I was attempting to separate firstness from secondness from thirdness, and to assign each to one of my three terms: experience, materiality, and representation.

While it’s quite true that I was seeking to assign the categories each to one of my three terms, or at least to ask whether it’s possible and useful to do that, I was not intending to separate the categories from each other. Just as thirds imply seconds and firsts (and the other ways around), so does representation (in my account) imply materiality and experience, and vice versa (vices versae?). Materiality is never something in and of itself; it is experienced and represented (or conceived), and its identification as “materiality” is itself an idea. And so on.

That said, I’d say that the general tenor of the responses was close to a consensus that “no,” the three categories cannot be easily assigned (individually) to materiality, experience, and representation, and that in fact each of my terms could be examined with reference to each of Peirce’s categories.

I agree with the criticism that my EMR/MER triads are not semiosic or “genuine” triads. They are intended as heuristic organizing devices — pragmatic metaphors, if you will — informed by Peirce’s categories.

To E.’s question “Since you are not analyzing the art-experience as a semiosic-experience, then why use them?,” I would reply as follows:

(1) because I find Peircian/triadic thinking to be useful in and of itself and I believe that a triad such as this (EMR/MER) can be helpful to teach that kind of thinking; and

(2) because I have found that teaching about the environmental arts (loosely speaking) requires taking each of these three dimensions — materiality, experience, and representation — seriously, in a way that resembles the “irreducibility” of the Peircean categories.

In much writing about environmental literature, for instance, representation is overemphasized; experience and especially materiality are underemphasized. When one shifts to eco-art, eco-theatre, ecomusic, or ecocinema, the other two (experience and materiality) become more prominent. Seeing them as equal in significance is, for me, a useful step to take. I find myself unable to reduce any of them (experience, materiality, representation) to the others; and my hunch was that this makes them similar to Peirce’s categories. So I tried to connect the two triads. That’s where I am now.

I should note that the framework developed in my book on cinema is rather different and more complex from what I presented in my question to the list. My use of Peirce there is both more conservative (elucidating his notions of signs, categories, normative sciences, and more) and more liberal (in its efforts to find correspondences with Whiteheadian metaphysics and Guattari’s “three ecologies,” and in my revision of previous applications of Peirce to cinema studies, for instance by Deleuze, Cubitt, and others).

To J., who advises starting “with the three normative sciences of aesthetics, ethics, and logic,” I can report that I indeed “start with” the normative sciences there when I approach the matter of film viewership: i.e., how we as viewers can cultivate habits of viewership consistent with a Peircian understanding of cinema. I refer to that as an “eco-ethico-aesthetics” of film viewership, taking logic to be more or less coterminous with “eco-logic,” since my object of study was ecological thinking and representation (cf. pp. 294-299 in the book).

I find all of the suggestions for pursuing triadic interpretation of the arts helpful and insightful, and by and large confirming of some of what I’ve tried to do in my work thus far. C.’s suggestion to “proceed backwards” from thirdness to the “physical corporeality of secondness” and the “sensory terminus a quo of firstness” feels to me very close to the way I’ve interpreted films in my cinema book.

I find H.’s articulation of three triads particularly helpful:

“From the point of view of the picture, better: Regarding the picture as a thing, I would say, that firstness is the possibility of application, that is the fact, that the thing may be experienced as a picture. Secondness is the form, the shapes of colours, that is a result of representation. Thirdness is the structure of the thing, that is materaility: Pigments, binder, canvas, frame. So, from the picture as a thing it is: ERM.

“Now, from the artist’s perspective it is: Firstness is a representation of something the artist has in her/his mind, secondness is the material he/she is using to depict it, and thirdness is the experience of a result: A successful work accomplished. This is RME.

“From the perspective of the viewer it is the material picture working as a representamen (first), the viewers experience connecting it with an object (second), and seeing it represent some thoughts and feelings (thirdness), so it is MER. If one does not agree with these proposals, at least it may be possible to agree with that easy assignment of ontological elements to categories or sign elements is not possible.”

Rather similarly, K. wrote to me that each of my three categories (materiality, experience, and representation) can be treated in terms of firstness, secondness, and thirdness (e.g., materiality as “mere unencountered… stuff,” secondness “as physically present stuff,” and thirdness as “the physical sign vehicle”, etc.). All of this makes perfect sense to me and, in one way or another I think, is related to some way in which I’ve tried to think the “fullness” of cinema — as object and material product, as world encountered by viewer and emotional/intellectual experience, as set of discourses, etc.

That said, there is much more work I could have done, even sticking to the very core semiotic triad of object, representamen, and interpretant. (Kelly Parker’s article on “Normative Judgment in Jazz” is a particularly lucid and helpful example of the application of that triad to a single piece of music, which I would recommend to students as a wonderful starting point in this “field.”)

A few commenters note that firstness is more a matter of quality than of experience, with experience being closer to Peircian secondness, since it is dyadic (a matter of “outward clash”). A few others seemed to lean closer to my “EMR” triad, where materiality is directly related to “a concrete actualization of an artwork,” while experience is ambiguous at worst and closer to firstness (the “sensory terminus a quo“) at best. I am still trying to understanding H.’s “supplementary” suggestion of an “ERM” triad (i.e., experience as 1stness, representation as 2ndness, materiality as 3rdness!) — which is a good thing, as the “inversion” has gotten me thinking!

Taken together, the comments might appear to suggest that any of “my” triads — EMR, MER, ERM, REM, et al. — could be usefully correlated with Peirce’s categories. If I was looking for a clear winner between the two I had proposed — EMR and MER — I am left with no such prize.

Finally, with respect to J.’s observation that “the discussion of Peirce’s categories… has undergone such debasement that it now borders on a style of philosophical astrology,” I suspect that, at least with this effort to align the categories with my independently-derived triad of experience-materiality-representation, I must plead guilty as charged. 😉

Thanks again for all your insightful comments, as well as the supplementary readings. I’ve benefited from all of them.