Choreographies of Landscape: Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park 9781785331176

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Choreographies of Landscape

DANCE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES General Editors: Helen Wulff, Stockholm University and Jonathan Skinner, Queen’s University, Belfast Advisory Board: Alexandra Carter, Marion Kant, Tim Scholl In all cultures, and across time, people have danced. Mesmerizing performers and spectators alike, dance creates spaces for meaningful expressions that are held back in daily life. Grounded in ethnography, this series explores dance and bodily movement in cultural contexts at the juncture of history, ritual and performance, including musical, in an interconnected world. Volume 1 Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland Helena Wulff Volume 2 Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in Java Felicia Hughes-Freeland Volume 3 Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism and Social Change in an Irish Village Adam Kaul Volume 4 Dancing Cultures: Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance Edited by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner Volume 5 Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal Hélène Neveu Kringelbach Volume 6 Learning Senegalese Sabar: Dancers and Embodiment in New York and Dakar Eleni Bizas Volume 7 In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of an Afro-Brazilian Tradition Lauren Miller Griffith Volume 8 Choreographies of Landscape: Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park Sally Ann Ness

Choreographies of Landscape Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park

q Sally Ann Ness

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2016 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2016 Sally Ann Ness All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ness, Sally Ann. Choreographies of landscape : signs of performance in Yosemite National Park / Sally Ann Ness. pages cm — (Dance and Performance Studies ; 8) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-78533-116-9 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78533-117-6 (ebook) 1. Human geography—California—Yosemite National Park. 2. Cultural landscapes—California—Yosemite National Park. 3. National parks and reserves—Public use—Yosemite National Park. 4. Ethnology—California— Yosemite National Park. 5. Performing arts—Philosophy. 6. Ethnology— Philosophy. 7. Landscapes—Social aspects. 8. Symbolism. I. Title. GF504.C2N47 2016 979.4’47—dc23 2015028312 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78533-116-9 Hardback E-ISBN: 978-1-78533-117-6 Ebook

This book is dedicated to Yosemite’s visitors, past, present, and future; and especially to my daughter, Anna Lucile Reck, and those of her millennial generation.

Chinese tourists taking photos of themselves at Tunnel Viewpoint, Yosemite National Park, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

q viii x

I. Approach Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction

3

II. Visiting 1. Bouldering: Movements of the Unforetold

43

2. Climbing: Scenic-Obscenic Movement

72

3. Hiking: Self-World Transformations

101

III. Moving On 4. Unwinding and Changing Course

129

5. The Spartanburg Coincidence

155

Index

171

Illustrations

q

Frontispiece. Chinese tourists taking photos of themselves at Tunnel Viewpoint, Yosemite National Park, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

vi

Figure 0.1. Visitor Anna Reck choreographing a “small fact” of visitor experience inside a living oak tree in Yosemite Valley, 4 July 2005. Photo by Erich Reck (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

5

Figure 0.2. Visitors performing on boulders beside the trail to Lower Yosemite Fall Viewpoint, April 2009. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

9

Figure 0.3. Amna Shiekh climbing on the Columbia Boulder, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

15

Figure 1.1. Alan Moore preparing to climb the route Jacob’s Ladder, April 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

42

Figure 1.2. Moore climbing Jacob’s Ladder, April 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

51

Figure 2.1. Jamcrack’s vertical crack, a typical feature in Yosemite’s granite walls. Photo by Derick Fay, May 2010 (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

80

Figure 2.2. Author climbing on the unnamed crack before the incident occurred. Photo by Darrell Logan, May 2010 (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

81

Figure 2.3. Author at the top of the unnamed crack climb after the speech act occurred. Photo by Charlotte Tonnies Moore, May 2010 (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

95

Figure 3.1. Half Dome seen from Glacier Point, July 2005. The face of Tis-se-yak is said to be visible in the upper right quadrant of the north face. Photo by Katie Manduca (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

104

Illustrations ■ ix

Figure 3.2. Vernal Fall Bridge, June 2012, taken at around 8:00 am, at the beginning of an overnight trip to the summit of Half Dome. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

106

Figure 3.3. Backpackers on the alternate route up to the top of Nevada Fall, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

108

Figure 3.4. Bridge at the top of Nevada Fall, June 2012. Photo by Robert Finch II (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

109

Figure 3.5. View of summit from the end of the fourth stage, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

111

Figure 3.6. View from the top of Subdome, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

112

Figure 3.7. Cables of the final stage of the Half Dome hike, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

114

Figure 5.1. Yosemite Valley’s eastern end, October 2008. Half Dome is to the right. Royal Arches and Washington Column are in the center. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

154

Figure 5.2. A frontal view of Royal Arches, September 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

162

Figure 5.3. El Capitan, October 2005. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

163

Figure 5.4. Ranger in Camp 4, Yosemite Valley, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

167

Acknowledgments

q This book has been more than a few years in the making. It would not have been possible without the assistance of many generous and talented people—just the sort of people Yosemite seems prone to attract. Space will not permit a complete listing of all who deserve acknowledgment, and I apologize to those whose names do not appear. I am no less grateful to them for having been unable to include them here. The field research for this study required support both inside and outside the park. I am indebted to climbers Alan Moore and Darrell Logan, who volunteered to lead the climbs in Yosemite and who offered technical advice and assistance throughout my practice. This project literally would not have gotten off the ground without them. I am also indebted to climbers Ariel Bohr and Charlotte Tonnies Moore, who volunteered to serve as partners and coaches in gym training and who also accompanied me on climbing trips to Yosemite, as well as reading and responding to early drafts of various chapters. Both were key figures enabling the development of my climbing practice. Thanks are also due to climbers Doug and Sarah Jo Dickens, Drew Hecht, Shannon Moore, Young Hoon Oh, Amna Shiekh, John Vallejo, and Lyn Verinsky and to my climber/ colleague Derick Fay, all of whom provided much appreciated information and in many cases climbing support and assistance as well. In addition to the support given by climbers, my practice was also enabled and strengthened by Pilates trainer Kathryn Scarano, as well as by Drs Mary Ann Magoun, Melinda Ogg, and Hee Chul Kim and nutritionist Mary Sullivan. All of these individuals played essential roles. Their expert care is humbly acknowledged. I am also thankful for the field research assistance of Katherine “Katie” Manduca, Deirdre Sklar, Katherine Kendrick Graham and Robert Graham, Justine Lemos, Celia Tuchman-Rosta, Jun Ginez, Patrick Alcedo, Shyh-Wei Yang, Robert Finch II, Channing Carson, and Ernesto Carlos, who accompanied me into Yosemite on various visits and/or provided every kind of field support imaginable (really). While visiting the park, I am especially grateful for the assistance generously given to me by Yosemite assistant superintendant Scott Gediman, Yosemite research librarian Linda Eade, and Yosemite park rangers Joy Sellers Marschall and Mark Marschall. These individuals are living proof that the “ser-

Acknowledgments ■ xi

vice” in the U.S. National Park Service continues to mean something very real and admirable. With regard to the field research process, I also would like to acknowledge the late Steven P. Medley (1949–2006), who was serving as president of the Yosemite Association when my ethnographic research began, Christy Holloway, who chaired the Yosemite Association’s Board of Trustees during the years when my research in the park was most active, and the many members of the former Yosemite Association (now reorganized within the Yosemite Conservancy) who either served as volunteers in the park during the times that I myself camped there or who agreed to serve as interview subjects of the oral historical Yosemite Visitors Project I conducted, or both. What I learned from “YA” and its membership forms the backbone of my understanding of what it means to be a visitor in the Yosemite landscape. The greater part of that learning and the findings of the oral historical research await publication in a future volume. However, while there are too many individuals to name them all here (although every single one merits recognition), I would like to acknowledge especially Kathy Hopkins, Nancy Ornee, and Helen Brohm, who acted as extraordinarily helpful, exemplary YA members in support of my research process. With regard to the writing process, I am grateful to colleagues David Crouch, Mark Franko, Gary Fuhrman, Justine Lemos, Shakina Nayfack, Young Hoon Oh, Jonathan Osborn, and Paul Ryer, who read and commented on earlier drafts of various chapters. Sincere thanks are due to Steve Coleman and the attendees of the Anthropology Department Seminar of 25 April 2012, at Maynooth National University of Ireland, for their comments and responses to what has become the volume’s introduction. Members of Temple University and University of California, Riverside Dance Departments also provided helpful comments and suggestions in response to portions of the introduction read during lectures presented on both campuses in 2014. Some ideas in the introduction concerning the rhetorical branch of Peirce’s semeiotic and its relation to ethnographic research also took their initial form in comments made in the “Presentation” of the 2012 special double issue “Anthropological Inquiries,” written for the journal Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotique Inquiry. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the journal’s editor, Martin Lefebvre, in this regard. The participants of the 2008 “Transmissions” working group of the American Society for Theatre Research provided helpful comments on very early drafts of chapter 1. Thanks are also due to Nell Quest and Fran Mascia-Lees, who included an early version of chapter 2 on the panel “Sensing the Political: Materiality, Aesthetics, and Embodiment,” organized for the 2012 AAA Annual Meetings in San Francisco. Naomi Leite did the same with regard to chapter 3 on the panel “Touring Publics, Global Interconnections, and Interdisciplinary Engagements: Whither the Anthropology of Tourism,” organized for the 2013 AAA Annual Meetings in Chicago. In addition, grateful acknowledgment is made to Sharon MacDonald of the European

xii ■ Acknowledgments

Center for Cultural Exploration at York University (U.K.) and the participants of the 2013 invited lecture “Where the Scenic and the Obscene Meet: Ethical Subject Formations in Yosemite National Park,” who provided helpful commentary on an earlier version of chapter 2. Chapter 4 benefited greatly, if indirectly, from a “slow read” of Joseph Ransdell’s work that took place on the Peirce listserver after Ransdell’s death in 2010. Sincere thanks are due to Jon Awbrey, Jerry Chandler, Gary Fuhrman, Eugene Halton, Gary Richmond, and Benjamin Udell, among many others, for the roles they played in that read. I am also grateful to the individuals solicited by Berghahn Press to review the manuscript. Their comments and suggestions were very much appreciated and useful. Finally, on a personal note, I would like to acknowledge five colleagues, who are also the dearest of friends: J. Lowell Lewis, Carrie Noland, Christina Schwenkel, Eberle Umbach, and Carla Walters. Their support for this research and their faith in my abilities, in sickness and health, have been essential to this book’s completion. I owe them more than I can ever name or repay. Likewise, I am indebted to my husband, Erich Reck, and to my daughter, Anna, who have borne with me through the many years and strains of research and writing. Their patience, loyalty, love, and compassion have meant the world to me. Words fall very far short of the mark in expressing my gratitude to both. This research was made possible in part by grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2007) and the Huntington Library (2006) and by the continuous support of the University of California, Riverside. It should, perhaps, be mentioned that the study was undertaken without any financial or material support having been sought or received from either the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) or Yosemite’s concessionaire at the time, Delaware North Companies. The NPS did issue a permit for the field research process that allowed entry into the park for research purposes. However, the views presented here are in no way sponsored or otherwise associated with either entity.

Q

Part I

Approach

q Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot be denied—it speaks in silence to the very core of your being. —Ansel Adams, Yosemite and the High Sierra But is it possible to conceive the nervous system as living apart from the organism that nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves? —Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory The formations of the choreographic are many, expanding beyond the field of the aesthetic. —André Lepecki, Dance and Politics

Introduction

T

his book is about Yosemite National Park, the oldest preservation area in the United States, the original inspiration for the American conservation movement, and the template for the U.S. National Park Service as a whole. It is also a book about performance, both broadly and strictly speaking. It is a book about athletic performance and touristic performance, about human and nonhuman performance. Most especially, it is a book about cultural performance and choreographic forms of it in particular. Yosemite is not a small place. It inspires thinking on a relatively grand scale. In this regard, I seek in the chapters that follow to address in rather ambitious terms the very large issue of Yosemite’s cultural significance. I do so, however, in a way that compels attention to the very smallest details of the landscape’s char-

4 ■ Choreographies of Landscape

acter, through the standard ethnographic method of participant observation of visitor performances, including my own. The chapters gathered together in this volume illustrate certain kinds of visitor performance that I observed to be occurring regularly in Yosemite National Park during a series of twenty-two visits I made into it beginning in 2004 and ending in 2012.1 They are performances that differ somewhat in character from the kinds of cultural performance typically studied by ethnographers. They tend to be relatively informal, individualistic, and improvisational—more like jokes than like operas, to borrow Richard Bauman’s sociolinguistic terms (1977). In some cases, they push at the boundaries of what “performance” as a concept might best reference, as they often occur without any conventional sort of rehearsal process and without any human audience other than the visitors performing themselves. However, as with any cultural performance, whether it be something as spectacular as a masked Karneval parade in Upper Swabia or a god-dancing Cutalaimatan festival in Madras, or as rich in virtual meaning as a Balinese cockfight, Yosemite’s performances involve public displays of symbols popularly understood to be emblematic of given ways of life.2 They are enactments by means of which people—“visitors” in the park’s conventional discourse—express “what they believe themselves to be,” to borrow Lloyd Warner’s original phrasing (Warner 1959: 107; cited in Singer 1984: 110). They express it passionately, ethically, imaginatively, and spiritually, as well as ideologically. I studied Yosemite National Park as a stage for the enactments of what anthropologist Milton Singer termed the “great and little traditions” of cultural performance (Singer 1984: 165). I became interested in the littlest of the littler of these, as well as in the most energetic and newly minted, although I partook of as wide a variety as possible. It was with the performance of minor, often coincidental or unintended movements and gestures that I became the most concerned. These were acts as small as tripping over a tree root, flicking a pine needle off of a camper’s tent, or slamming shut the door of a bear-proof storage box that wouldn’t latch any other way. They were the kinds of small, but densely layered, ubiquitous facts of visitor experience that might have become the raw material of a work of choreography about Yosemite’s visitors had that been the project at hand. Indeed, they literally did come to serve that purpose, although not in any conventional sense of the term. Whether great or small, cultural performances provide the park’s visitors with what the pioneering anthropologist of performance Edward Schieffelin once identified as “cultural scenarios” (2005 [1976]: 3). They constitute culturally salient patterns of activity in which visitors may come to terms not only with who they have been meant to be, symbolically speaking, but also with who they, in point of undeniable fact, actually are—with the “stuff” of which they are made, as living organisms and as forms of human life.3 Perhaps most significantly, however, these performances enable visitors to encounter who (and with

Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction ■ 5

Figure 0.1. Visitor Anna Reck choreographing a “small fact” of visitor experience inside a living oak tree in Yosemite Valley, 4 July 2005. Photo by Erich Reck.

whom), they may be becoming as well, as far as their futures, both more and less vivid, are concerned. In this latter regard, Yosemite also serves as a stage—in both the spatial and the temporal sense of the term—for performance processes that, in their emergent, transformative character, bear a vague family resemblance to

6 ■ Choreographies of Landscape

those that anthropologist James Peacock, in his landmark study of the ludruk “rites of modernization” of mid-twentieth-century Surabaya, Java, observed and documented as well (1968). They also relate even more closely, however, to the incipient “events-in-the-making” created initially in 2006 for the Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series at the University of Montreal, Canada, and collaboratively “folded into” theoretical writing by Erin Manning (2009: 1–3). I have termed the particular type of performance I studied in Yosemite National Park “landscape performance.” It is admittedly an awkward phrase. However, it is so in part because it is designed to forge a new kind of connection between ideas that are normally kept apart. So, it vexes. On the one hand, the phrase can be understood as similar in meaning to “landscape painting” or “landscape architecture.” Landscape performance, in this sense, references kinds of performance that may take landscape as their primary subject matter. This sense of the phrase is relatively straightforward. On the other hand, however, the phrase is also meant to be understood in the way that phrases such as “musical performance” or “theatrical performance” or “dance performance” are. In this sense, landscape performance identifies landscape itself as something that is a kind of performance, something that is itself capable of performing. This is the definition that jars the most—unless it is taken as a relatively poetic expression (“performance” being read figuratively), or unless it is interpreted as identifying landscape as a discursive formation that determines the experiences of the human subjects who may be located and defined in relation to it—perhaps along the lines articulated by critical theorists such as Judith Butler or Michel Foucault. Neither of these interpretations, however, is my own. I seek to take the phrase as non-metaphorically as possible, and I do not define landscapes in general merely as human-made discursive formations. It is one main effort of this study, in fact, to demonstrate that such critical theoretical definitions are inadequate to the task of understanding exactly the kinds of performances that are here most at issue. Discursive definitions are not wrong, as far as they go, but they do not tell the whole story of landscape performance, either what it is or how it can come to mean all that it generally does, especially to visitors in Yosemite National Park. When both senses of the phrase are taken together, “landscape performance” begins to function in a way that is something like the duck-rabbit image made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953). That is, it can be understood to exhibit the character of a “multi-stable object” in the terms of phenomenological discourse (Downey 2004). It becomes a symbol that sustains simultaneously at least two equally valid understandings, the recognition of which depends on the particular perceptions and purposes of its various interpreters.4 I would characterize landscapes in general—and Yosemite National Park in particular—as colossal multi-stable objects in their own right. From some points of view, in relation to some kinds of experience, and for some purposes, they may be recognized as discursive formations—as essentially representational, so-

Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction ■ 7

cietally constructed, “textual” objects or hermeneutic palimpsests.5 From other perspectives and for other purposes, they may be understood and experienced as geological formations, as nonhuman material realities. From still others, they may be perceived and lived as divinely inspired creations of pure light and energy, perhaps enlightening, perhaps maddening.6 The list could be extended indefinitely. A landscape will invariably come across as many things to many people, sustaining innumerable perspectives, experiences, and lines of thought simultaneously and through time. This multi-stable definition of the symbol “landscape performance” is not altogether unlike those more typically employed in ethnographic studies of landscape, although it is substantially different from them as well. Ethnographic conceptualizations of landscape tend to identify it either as the (at least partly) natural environmental context of a human cultural group or as a symbolic construct created through culturally specific practices (Bender and Winer 2001; Feld and Basso 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). In its recognition of the symbol’s inherent multiplicity of interrelated meanings, the definition of landscape performance here employed is similar to the “processual” definitions of landscape developed by Eric Hirsch (1995) and David Crouch and Charlotta Malm (2003). However, in its recognition of the virtually innumerable variations of meaning the symbol can represent, it also resonates strongly with David Crouch’s later definition of landscape as a creative and emergent spatial “pregnancy of possibility” (2010: 1) as well as with Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose’s definition of landscape as a “zone of transaction between multiple interests” that “needs to be understood in terms of what it does” (2003: 16). In this latter, doing-oriented respect, the symbol also bears a limited resemblance to Tim Ingold’s definition of landscape as the qualitative, heterogeneous, temporal and embodied, moving form of a “taskscape” (2000: 190–200). It recognizes, as does Ingold’s conceptualization, the basic relation between purposive habits of interaction (“dwelling” in Ingold’s terms) and the variability of a given landscape’s definition. However, the closest definitional parallel is evident, perhaps, with respect to Erin Manning’s “metastable” conceptualization of the plastic, virtual-real, “relationscape,” a topological milieu rhythmically unfolding through its “living coordinates”—durations that embody the convergence of movements of thought still in the process of taking form (2009: 5–11, 159, 181, 183, 197, 228). Despite the limited correspondences to all of these definitions, the variability and inclusiveness of the multi-stable definition adopted here is greater than any of these alternatives allow. It argues that no single definition individually, and no human definitions collectively, can represent all that “landscape” or “landscape performance,” understood pragmatically, can come to mean, despite the probability that any definition is likely to be valid in some limited respect and optimal for certain purposes.7 This said, landscapes and their performances are not all things to all people. They are not everything and therefore nothing in terms of their

8 ■ Choreographies of Landscape

definitional character and meaningfulness. Yosemite National Park, as this book documents, is a spectacularly elaborate case in point of a landscape that exhibits and performs the character of a highly distinctive multi-stable object. While its variability of perception is rivaled only by the intensity with which beliefs about its true character tend to become fixed, regardless, all of its various visitors, if they were inclined to agree about anything, would probably agree that there is no landscape in the world remotely like it. Its distinctive features—its threethousand-foot granite cliffs, domes, and spires; its enormous waterfalls, towering pines, and massive black oak trees; its officially “wild and scenic” Merced River— all of these elements of the landscape are instantly recognizable and unmistakable to those who have spent any significant time among them. As Rebecca Solnit, one of the park’s most astute and critical interpreters, has observed, “Yosemite is a singular place onto which are mapped myriad expectations and desires” (2005: ix). And as Leonard McKenzie, one of Yosemite’s chief naturalists during the twentieth century, once remarked, “Among the Earth’s distinctive places, this showcase occupies a distinctive niche in the human spirit” (cited in Neill and Palmer 1994: 15). It is only in conceiving of landscape in general, and of landscape performance in particular, in this multi-stable, vexed way that these concepts stand a chance of moving the study of cultural performance (one might now want to put quotations marks around the word “cultural” here) into some relatively unknown fields of meaning-making. Only in this way can the concepts lead thinking toward encounters with certain stages of performance, cultural and otherwise, that have gone relatively unnoticed in performance research, but which may be seen to bear, at times tellingly, on kinds of performance that definitely have not done so. My hope, in this regard, is that the phrase’s awkwardness is temporary. As its definition becomes more familiar, it may acquire a certain admirable quality and value in its own right, as may the somewhat unconventional kinds of performance it seeks to illuminate.

A Rhetorical Semeiotic Approach There are a number of theoretical sources employed and engaged in this book. Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the post-phenomenologists who have extended his work; Henri Bergson and the “Bergsonism” that informs Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, as well as the vitalism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—all of these figures loom large throughout the pages that follow. So do certain anthropological luminaries such as Gregory Bateson, Victor Turner, Tim Ingold, Arjun Appadurai, and Saba Mahmood. Theorists of choreographic performance André Lepecki and Erin Manning are also crucial to the mix. All assist variously in the complex project of working through diverse facets of landscape performance. However, the theorist who plays the greatest role, although not always the most visible, is the sign theorist and scien-

Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction ■ 9

Figure 0.2. Visitors performing on boulders beside the trail to Lower Yosemite Fall Viewpoint, April 2009. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

tist/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. It is through Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic that I have come to see the relevance and the value of the other approaches herein employed.8 Likewise, it is in relation to Peirce’s sign theory that I have identified some of their limitations. Although Peirce’s semeiotic and his rather formidable terminology are not always on the surface of these chapters, they are invariably there at their depths and in their collective core. They undergird the

10 ■ Choreographies of Landscape

larger, choreographic vision of cultural performance that is advanced throughout. As Umberto Eco once acknowledged with regard to his debt to Peirce, if there is anything of value in the work presented here, it is Peirce who deserves the credit, even if the connections to his writings are not always as lucid and rigorous as they ought to be. In this regard, these chapters, as a collection, are intended to advance a theory of cultural performance that contributes to Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. In so doing, they are intended to increase and enhance the theoretical diversity of research on human performance most broadly considered. However, and moreover, they seek to demonstrate that adopting Peirce’s pragmaticism does not entail abandoning other, more widely used approaches to the study of performance, be they those of critical theory or (post-)phenomenology, interpretive ethnography or some other anti-essentialist branch of constructionism, hermeneutics, or textualism, feminism, historical materialism, Actor-Network-Theory, or variations of vitalism or affect theory. Peirce’s semeiotic is not cast here as a superior substitute. To do so would be to undermine the basic spirit of its pragmaticism—the spirit that seeks always, as movement analyst Irmgard Bartenieff once urged, to “use what you find [and] go with what works” (1980). Peirce’s theory, instead, is intended to serve in an articulatory capacity. It is brought into play so as to complicate rather than to replace insights that have been gained from other approaches to performance theory.9 It does so by relating them to a relatively general, inclusive, more widely applicable theory of performance—a theory of sign performance, or semiosis in Peirce’s terms10—“sign” here being conceptualized, again, in the broadest possible terms. Human beings themselves, in Peirce’s framework, qualify as signs (EP2: 324). Human performance is itself but one variety of semiosis. Performance, for its part, is understood from this pragmaticist perspective, as one mindful way of making things lively when they might not necessarily otherwise be so—of making them matter when they otherwise might not, and of making them somehow consequential in a world whose consequences may seem always already overdetermined. The pragmaticist semeiotic is meant to function, in this regard, as a platform that expands the conceptual horizons of more well-established theoretical approaches currently employed in performance research of all kinds, better elucidating their explanatory power, granted including some constraints thereon. This pragmaticist semeiotic of performance, in its breadth of application to nonhuman processes, as well as in its focus on mindful “alivening” or “mattering,” is unlike conceptualizations of performance that can be traced to Austin’s speech-act theory, to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, to Saussurian structuralism and its post-structuralist descendants, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, and to all other theories of performance that depend on humanist models of symbolism or meaning-making. It is aligned to some degree with Victor Turner’s etymological and ethnographic understanding of performance, which foregrounds the creative

Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction ■ 11

dynamism (or “play”) evident, both along the symbolic spectrum of human performance that stretches from ritual to theater, as well as in the ludic nature of the performance environment itself (Turner, 1982). However, this semeiotic of performance also, as previously indicated, parallels somewhat Richard Bauman’s executional theory of performance, in its intent to define performance, not in terms of an array of qualified genres, but rather as an aspect evident in the full spectrum of meaning-making practices under consideration (1977). Perhaps its closest kin would be found in the respective works of Richard Schechner (1985) and Joseph Roach (1996). Schechner’s definition of “restored behavior” recognizes the fundamental character of recurrence that is also posited as basic to performance considered semeiotically (1985: 36–37). Roach’s conceptualization of performance in terms of a vexing, transgenerationally continuous process of reproduction and substitution or surrogation also parallels the understanding of performance here advanced as a kind of communication whose being necessarily transcends, even while it also depends on the lives of individual performers whose identities may be radically diverse (1996: 2–4). In attempting this semeiotic articulation, it should be noted that the kind of inquiry undertaken here belongs to a specific area of Peirce’s philosophy that is separate and fundamentally different from those more typically explored in Peirce scholarship. I situate it within what Peirce viewed as the relatively neglected “Rhetorical” branch of his pragmaticism, rather than in its Logical or Grammatical (formalist or taxonomic) branches (EP2: 327).11 In this rhetorical regard, this book makes no attempt (as does the majority of philosophical work on Peirce’s semeiotic) to preserve a focus on the general character of signs, as that may be evident in abstract, heuristic scenarios and definitions. Rather, it bases its arguments in what Peirce studies scholar Vincent Colapietro has described as “thick descriptions of actual practices”—a strategy indicative of rhetorical inquiry, as Colapietro has characterized it (2007: 19).12 This book addresses the communicative practices of specific, historically situated human agents, as well as nonhuman actants,13 who in this case are present and active in the Yosemite National Park landscape. It concerns real-life visitors and waterfalls, rangers and trails, concessionaires and even actual bears, and a great host of others, all of whom are caught up in particular interactions and performative pursuits. Rhetorical inquiry, pragmaticistically defined, is a preoccupation with “the adaptation of the forms of expression of [a piece] of writing [or other mode of symbolization] to the accomplishment of its purpose” (Peirce CN3: 180; cited in Colapietro 2007: 17). This “adaptation” entails a process of sign change or modification, a tailoring of the sign to a particular contextual purpose or application. Rhetorical analyses are intended to foreground a kind of “sign-in-motion” aspect of a given semeiotic event and to illuminate the effect of a given sign’s adaptability in relation to its intended, also-moving, also-living, also-mattering receiving sign or “Interpretant” (in Peircean terms).

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Rhetorical analyses, in other words, focus directly on the active performativity of signs. They foreground their efficacious persuasiveness—their ingenuity and innovation—as well as their ability to impart pleasure or some other comparable quality or feeling (Colapietro 2007: 35; EP2: 326). Such analyses may be as much concerned with the creation of identity as with processes of encoded communication between fully formed subjects, as several chapters in this volume seek to illustrate. Rhetorical inquiry, as Colapietro observes, is also more prone than logical or grammatical inquiry to work toward the discovery of previously unknown forms of sign performance, rather than marking the limits of meaning-making inherent in given grammars or established logics (Colapietro 2007: 19, 31, 35). As Peirce phrased it, rhetorical inquiry seeks to understand how “one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another” (CP 2.229). Several chapters, in this respect, focus on visitor experiences that involve creative, initiating processes of meaning-making, or what may be termed “semiogenetic” performances (Chandler 2012).14 Most important for the purposes at hand, the rhetorical semeiotic approach, given its focal interest in observing how signs go about “bringing forth” or “giving birth” to new signs and thoughts, illuminates the ways in which signs are inherently changing and dynamic figures. The rhetorical approach, in sum, is the approach that gives the greatest degree of attention to the processual primacy of semeiotic activity as Peirce conceived of it. It underscores Peirce’s insistence that, regardless of all else, sign phenomena must be understood as always already and continually transforming in character. It foregrounds the ways in which all signs are works-in-progress, demonstrating with especial clarity the unfolding, “passing-on-ness” or temporal “forward-ness” of semiosis as it gives shape to new kinds of sign performance and performers. This is so even when the temporal focus of rhetorical analysis may be aimed “backward” as it were, on the relationship between signs and their various sources (or “Objects”) of inspiration, as is the case in the study of Peircean symbols—which, as the discussion that follows elaborates, happens to be the case at hand. Peirce’s later work gave increasing critical attention to this rhetorical branch of his semeiotic (Colapietro 2007: 17, 30). The majority, if not the entirety, of ethnographic work on cultural performance that has employed Peirce’s semeiotic theory to date has done the same, although more in a de facto than an explicit manner.15 My present aim follows this ethnographic path as well. I seek to “trace out a trajectory,” as Colapietro has characterized the effort, of Peirce’s rhetorical branch as that trajectory may be seen to form in relation to landscape performance (Colapietro 2007: 18). It is a trajectory that requires some adaptation or modification of the standard logically and grammatically oriented terms representing Peirce’s semeiotic. This is necessary given that rhetorical inquiry entails the specialized study of certain aspects of signs—emergent, creative, evolving aspects—that are not at issue in these other branches. In general, it entails the

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study of signs as they proceed or move into human awareness and learning, via active, embodying performing—a kind of study more than a little bit familiar to choreographers the world over. In this rhetorical regard, I am concerned in all of the chapters that follow with the many ways by which the signs of the Yosemite landscape perform so as to realize a particular purpose: that of persuading visitors to bond with the park and to feel and act and think and live as though the park belongs individually and personally to them and they to it. This is no mean rhetorical feat when one considers that Yosemite is a place that currently receives over four million visitors a year, the great majority of them coming only between the warmer months of April and September. Moreover, most of these masses visit only an area known as Yosemite Valley (or just “the Valley”), which is hardly more than seven miles long and just one mile wide at its widest point. While visiting, their conduct is so strictly regulated by the policies of the National Park Service that they are allowed only a small margin for creative, individualistic, or idiosyncratic behavior—the kind of behavior that might induce a person to believe that they, in fact, have some kind of special, unique, or personal connection to the park environment, despite the huge crowds with whom they typically must share it.16 Despite these adverse circumstances, however, personal and individual connections to the landscape are regularly (though not unfailingly) forged and deeply felt. Yosemite, as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously observed upon his first view of Half Dome, is in a touristic class by itself to the extent that it “comes up to the brag and exceeds it” for more of its visitor population than its observable circumstances might lead one to expect (cited in Sargent 1971: 3). Yosemite remains one of the most attractive ecotourism landscapes in the world, as it has been for more than a century. It does so as much, if not more, for the manner in which it stages and secures “ceremonies of connection,” as Solnit has identified them, as it does for its capacity to afford encounters with pristine, untrammeled wilderness (2005: 106). In the research visits that I have made to the park since 2004, I have witnessed and documented this bonding occurring in countless cases, among visitors who vary in virtually every imaginable respect—age, ethnicity, nationality, sex, economic class, gender, religion, occupation, and on down the list. I have witnessed it occurring in the performance of both great and little traditions as Singer conceptualized them: in the playing of card games by flashlight on rainy nights and in the summiting of massive granite domes and peaks on cloudless summer days. Despite the overcrowding, the regulations, the commercialization, and the generic character of visitation practices—and sometimes even because of them—subjective connections to the landscape happen. They also endure, at times for generations, as the oral historical research on which this study is also, in part, based confirms unambiguously.17 How does the Yosemite landscape perform this persuasive feat, when so much would seem to be working against it? This is the underlying analytical question

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that motivates each of the chapters in this volume. The answers vary. Some relate to discourses of beauty, nature, desire, and nationhood. Others relate to transcendent spiritual experiences and dreams. Some connect to immediate sensations of pleasure or pain, others to embodied constructions of virtuosity or the lack thereof. Still others concern experiences—acted and imagined—of freedom, power, family, and/or community. And some relate simply to the living of life itself (or, better, it-self ). Each chapter affords a glimpse of the multi-stable variability that the Yosemite landscape sustains and proliferates in visitor performance. This rhetorical concern with the Yosemite landscape entails giving critical attention not only to the means by which the landscape achieves (or fails to realize) its purpose, but also to the purpose itself—to why it is that the landscape is capable of performing in this particularly persuasive way and to what the consequences of this are, not only for its visitors, but for all who participate in the life and in the operation of the park. There are many in the social sciences—too many to cite—who would argue that these capabilities and consequences are predominantly political and economic, de-individualizing (if not dehumanizing) and manipulative in character—and, of course, essentially human in design. They would assert that the landscape’s performativity merely reiterates meaning in an institutional, “top-down” sort of way, persuading visitors to conform to large-scale politico-economic interests and to conduct and construct themselves accordingly. However, I argue in every chapter that the situation in reality is not so simple. There is far more to the symbolic life force of the Yosemite landscape than such societally oriented theories can recognize, let alone explain or predict. To be sure, top-down perspectives on meaning-making in Yosemite demand attention. However, there are also always ways in which landscape performance initiates in its ecological relations what André Lepecki, following the work of Jacques Rancière and Steven Corcoran (2010), has identified as dissensus in visitor experience. Landscape-initiated dissensus, “the rupturing of daily habits,” short-circuits precisely the kinds of societal meaning-making to which sociological perspectives assign priority (Lepecki 2013: 153; see also 2012c). Landscape performance, in this regard, has the capacity to de-subjectify culturally constructed subjects, producing in visitors what Lepecki has argued for choreographic performances generally speaking: a kind of subjectivity “that always exceeds predetermined acts and intentions … composing … a particularly singular actualization of what really matters” (2012c: 38). What “really matters” on and in the stages of the Yosemite landscape are movements of significance more powerful and complex than human social and cultural institutions and their discourses and policies can fully command and control. The politics of landscape performance, in this regard, is a politics that holds in its balance the relation between social consensus and ecological dissensus, between institutional power and subjective freedom. This is in large part why visitors, no matter how carefully policed, regulated, crowded, and managed,

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Figure 0.3. Amna Shiekh climbing on the Columbia Boulder, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

continue to bond with the landscape in extraordinarily profound, subjectively liberating ways. In their performances of great and little traditions alike, they become signs—creatively evolving signs—of the very real freedoms as well as the controlling social discourses (not to mention the laws of nature) that together, in their own respective manners, constitute the park landscape.

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Peirce’s rhetorical branch of semeiotic is of critical value in advancing the relatively expansive interpretive agenda identified above. In the remaining sections of this introduction, I seek to clarify how and why this can be the case. The justification lies primarily in the extraordinarily broad definition accorded to the concept of semiosis and to the pragmaticist concept of the sign. These concepts, rhetorically adapted, can be understood as rooted in a kinetic and, I will argue, non-metaphorically choreographic, dance-like theory of reality.18 It is a theory that situates humankind in a universe composed of significant occurrences literally brought to life in embodied relations of performative movement. As such, the rhetorical project undertaken here is extensive, seeking to understand, in Peirce’s terms, “just what the processes are whereby an idea can be conveyed to a human mind and become embedded in its habits” (EP2: 329, 330).

Performing at the Interface of the Cultural and the Nonhuman: The Semeiotic Symbol Of all the myriad sign classifications that compose Peirce’s semeiotic, the most critical one for the study of landscape performance, and perhaps the most challenging of all, is that of the semeiotic “Symbol.” Peirce developed a precise, technical definition for the symbol that is in some respects extremely unusual. It may even seem to border on the nonsensical or the ridiculous at first pass, since its conception is so different from comparable definitions advanced in other, more widely employed sign theories.19 However, the validity of the pragmaticist symbol, unpalatable as it may seem at first, becomes increasingly compelling the deeper one ventures into the heart of Peirce’s rhetorical semeiotic. The deeper one ventures, the more clearly it manifests how radically expanded are the possibilities for human performance when its significance is comprehended not in relation to the possession or conveyance of information, but in relation to the staging of intelligent movements. Perhaps the most challenging feature of the pragmaticist definition of the symbol is that it must be understood as not being applicable exclusively to signs that have been invented and that are governed entirely by human beings and their social and cultural institutions and conventions of signification. Such a specifically human class of signs does not exist anywhere in the classifications of pragmaticist theory, as understood by any of its branches. This is a very basic feature of Peirce’s semeiotic. Its consequences for the symbol, and through it, for landscape performance, are vitally important. Pragmaticist sign theory, in brief, does not grant human minds the sole rights to the production, recognition, and employment of any category of sign performance, even those, such as the symbol, that include human language and mathematics. Peirce’s semeiotic is not “humanist” in this particular respect, as are the most influential and widely employed sign theories today. As Peirce scholar Joseph Ransdell once observed, Peirce’s semeiotic does not even formulate a con-

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cept of a specifically linguistic (and so assumedly distinctly human) sign. Ransdell elaborates in this regard: It is often thought that [Peirce’s] conception of the symbol is more or less the same as the conception of the linguistic sign. But this is not so: there are entities which we ordinarily regard as words which are not symbols, and there are symbols which can by no reasonable stretch of usage be rightly called “words.” (1997: 16) In high contrast to sign theories oriented by the concept of the linguistic sign, pragmaticist sign theory proceeds on the assumption that the relations of significance that inform every general type of semiosis are to be found both within and without human thought and human minds. If the extra “e” in the Peircean spelling of “semeiotic” could be assigned a specific encoded meaning, in this regard, it might best be read as signaling this post-humanist orientation of Peirce’s theory. Colapietro summarizes the pragmaticist perspective on this inclusive character of semiosis in relation to environments created and governed by nonhuman elements and processes as follows: At least in some cases, we are not the initiators of but the respondents to a world that is always already meaningful to some degree. The world of our experience is always already constituted as a realm of signs. If we have a sufficiently general grasp of the nature of signs, we cannot avoid concluding that at least some phenomena are signs of nature. To understand the nature of signs ultimately ought to lead us to see the signs of nature. We are in a continuous dialogue with the natural world as well as with other humans. (1989: 21) Symbols, in this respect, may be considered to inhere in reality, human as well as nonhuman. In the terms of Peirce scholar Frederik Stjernfelt, they may be considered its “natural inhabitants” (2014: 1). They may be conceived and performed by humans, but they may also be encountered in experience and discovered by human beings. They may persist in reality, whether or not they are ever so discovered. Their emergence, as well as their evolution and cultivation—their thoughtfulness—is not necessarily tied to human mental or cognitive processes. As Peirce himself observed: Thought [i.e., the development of signs] is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc. of objects are really there. (CP 4.551; cited by Colapietro 1989: 19; the bracketed insertion is from Colapietro)20

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This, in brief, is what may be called the ecological orientation of Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. It makes the symbol, as Peirce conceptualized it, exceedingly difficult to comprehend from humanist semiotic orientations. While the conventional sign productions of human social and cultural discourse may often qualify as symbolic in Peircean terms, so may the signs of nonhuman animal communications and even the semiosis of bio-semeiotic signs that plant life-forms exhibit as well. These various kinds of sign processes and the circulations of information, or in-forming-ness, they enable and facilitate are, of course, not identical in every respect. However, it may be the case, in some instances, that the general character of performativity they all exhibit—the basic processes of evolving intelligence they accomplish—form a spectrum, widely varying at its extremes, to be sure, but nonetheless a spectrum of symbolism that is continuous. The pragmaticist concept of the symbol thus rejects the assumption that human symbolic performances, even of the most sophisticated varieties, occur in a realm of meaning-making that is governed or determined only by their own uniquely human design and character. On the contrary, whether great or little, all human symbolic conventions have the capacity to interface with—literally to communicate with—nonhuman signs of symbolic varieties, to be influenced by them and to articulate with them, as well as to influence them in turn. Human beings, in pragmaticist terms, are symbol translators par excellence. They move continually between and interweave intelligently environmental, organismic, and sociocultural forms of semiosis (to name but a few), becoming constituted by and constituting them in so doing. Such coordination permeates virtually every aspect of human life, even the most culturally elaborate. Landscape performance is but one example of this kind of cross-spectrum coordination of symbolic performance. Such claims regarding the Peircean symbol and symbolic semiosis, as I have already been at some pains to acknowledge, may seem fantastically naïve or nonsensically broad from the perspective of humanist, lingui-centric semiotic theories. However, they are justifiable and productive when viewed in light of the precise, ecological definition of the pragmaticist symbol on which they are founded, and that light, I will argue, emanates most brightly from Peirce’s rhetorical branch. The relatively large, inclusive spectrum of semiosis defined by the pragmaticist symbol is conceivable because of its own relatively general, fundamentally choreographic character, the character best foregrounded in rhetorically oriented forms of semeiotic inquiry.

The Rhetorical Conceptualization of the Semeiotic Sign/Symbol In embarking on this argument, it must be noted at the outset that in its most fundamental character, the semeiotic symbol is, before all else, a kind of semeiotic “Sign.” The sign is the most basic, all-inclusive conceptual formation of the whole of Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. Whether they operate by rules, resem-

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blances, or contiguities, whether they are interpreted politically, aesthetically, economically, religiously, logically, or otherwise, whether their character be that of a diagram, a gesture, or a royal decree, all vehicles of meaning-making imaginable are still, first and foremost, signs from a semeiotic point of view. This is as true for the symbol in all its diversity as it is for any other kind of meaning-relating phenomenon. To understand the symbol, from any branch of Peirce’s semeiotic, one must first understand what it means to claim that it is, as Peirce understood it to be, a sign. The particular rhetorically adapted characterization of the pragmaticist sign that I advance here is not one that has been stated previously in the terms employed, either by Peirce himself or by any of his interpreters. Some, admittedly, might find it controversial. Peirce, however, gave many definitions of the sign concept, allowing for some latitude on the subject. The relatively underdeveloped status of the rhetorical branch of Peirce’s semeiotic, I argue, allows for considerably more. In formulating the present definition, I have “rhetoricized” two definitions that come from Peirce’s later writings, neither of which was identified by him as specifically or particularly rhetorical in character. These were formulated in 1903 and 1906 respectively. Drawing on both of them, I define a pragmaticist sign, approached rhetorically, as “an agent of intelligent, or at least intelligible, relational movement.” The 1903 definition that inspires this rhetorical conceptualization was given in part of Peirce’s Syllabus, in an essay titled “Sundry Logical Conceptions” (EP2: 267–88). This “mature” definition of the sign, as it is sometimes called (EP2: 325), is phrased in the terms of Peirce’s ceno-pythagorean Universal Categories (EP2: 272), or “Universes of Experience,” as he eventually termed them (EP2: 435; 1908). In this definition, Peirce characterizes signs as “facts of Thirdness” (EP2: 272). As such they manifest as “triadic” relations. These are relations whose being consists in “bringing about” connections between more basic (monadic and dyadic) relata that previously were unrelated in the particular way that the sign connects them (EP2: 267, 269). In that they belong to Peirce’s Universal Categories, signs are essentially relational in character. This characteristic I identify in the rhetorical definition of the sign above, specifying that the movements signs perform are “relational.” In their capacity to bring about or make manifest triadic relations, signs may be characterized as relationship instigators (logical and grammatical discourses more often characterize them as “determiners” or “informers”). In this respect, they are agentive, as the definition specifies. And, in that Peirce identified all triadic facts as “intellectual” (EP2: 171), or possessing entelechy, a concept Peirce took from Aristotle, they have the capacity, if not the demonstrated and/or recognized ability, for intelligent or at least intelligible (potentially intelligent) performance. As Peirce wrote, “Thought plays a part” in all cases of Thirdness (EP2: 269), and “wherever there is thought there is Thirdness” (EP2: 269). The 1903 Sylla-

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bus definition, in this manner, identifies three of the four characteristics specified in the rhetorical definition here conceptualized: relationality, agency, and intelligibility/intelligence. The second, even later definition, formulated in 1906, was given in a letter Peirce wrote on March 9 of that year to his English colleague Lady Victoria Welby. In this formulation, Peirce defines a sign as “any medium for the communication or extension of a Form (or feature)” (1977; EP2: 477). This definition identifies two characteristics corresponding to the 1903 definition. As a “medium,” the sign is relational, and in its embodiment or manifestation of some form or feature, it is intelligible if not intelligent. The fourth and most distinctive characteristic that the rhetorical definition above also identifies—the processual or moving character of the sign—may at first seem lacking from these 1903 and 1906 definitions. Here, it must be remembered that from a rhetorical perspective, as Peirce himself defined that point of view, any “form” involved in semiosis (or any feature or fact or thing or bit or unit or atom for that matter) is always apparent as a form in process, a form whose being is that of “bringing forth.” That is, forms, rhetorically conceived, are understood as living forms, as forms whose being is “being-born,” so to speak, or form-ing. A sign’s identity as such a “form-ing”—which is what matters most about the sign, rhetorically conceived—is what I have termed “movement” in the rhetorical definition given above.21 Peirce himself characterized such formmovement as the “essence” of semiosis, at times speaking of “thought-motion” as that which signs, particularly those of Logic, functioned to describe (1906, cited in Stjernfelt 2014: 78). The rhetorical definition of the Peircean sign here conceptualized, then, does no more than identify from a rhetorical vantage point the four fundamental distinctive features Peirce attributed to signs according to their particular categorical classification as “facts of Thirdness.” It recognizes their relationality, their agency, their form-ing-ness, and their thoughtfulness. While it may read very differently from more standard logically and grammatically oriented definitions, it is nonetheless as consistent with Peirce’s pragmaticist orientation as they are and might arguably be seen to better represent what is most foundational to his thinking—“processuality,” if there might be such a term—despite its emerging from a relatively neglected area of his semeiotic. The Peircean symbol is not, in this rhetorical regard, necessarily the transmitter of some kind of meaningful content that “it” conveys. Although many sorts of symbols, and other pragmaticist signs as well, conform to this definition, it is not their most basic identifying character. Peirce’s pragmaticist sign is even more fundamentally general in reference than such a definition would allow. Perhaps only Victor Turner’s definition of a symbol as “a positive force in an activity field” rivals Peirce’s as far as the applicability and referential inclusiveness of the conceptualization is concerned (1967: 20). From a rhetorical regard, a Peircean sign

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is basically kinetic rather than substantial. Whatever else it may be, a pragmaticist sign is always moving in a certain way. It is a “moved mover,” in Colapietro’s terms (1989: 22). Its agentive, performative character is born in movement, not in content. It emerges in activity—in transition, transformation, transmission, or translation or in some other kind of changeful process. Again, if the “e” in the Peircean spelling of “semeiotic” might be encoded with yet another meaning (multi-stably), it might also be read as signaling this kinetic performative identity of the rhetorically approached Peircean sign. A semeiotic sign, in performance, moves movingly, as it, in its turn, has been so moved. This triple moving-ness is the source of its performative identity—its energeia,22 or actualizing capability—as well as its meaningfulness and intelligence. One could say, in this regard—indeed one should say—that the pragmaticist sign’s most basic performative character is dance-like. It is so in the sense that it is its thoughtful moving-ness that enables all of its relational capabilities. All other identities—intellectual, substantive, aesthetic, executive, political, argumentative, conceptual, placial, persuasive, all of them—emerge out of and remain continuous with this most basic dance-like identification. A semeiotic sign may be a movement itself. It may be as simple as a mule-packer’s jerk on the reins of his horse, or the raising of a deer’s head at the sound of a shotgun, or a column of smoke rising into the sky above a forest fire. Signs, however, may also be inherent in material objects—in “things” of virtually any kind.23 If they are so inherent, however, they invest objects and/or the places of their being with a certain capacity to perform—to inspire or to bring about some kind of significant relational change. A giant boulder sitting in the middle of the Merced River, as it affords a means for visitors to jump into cool water on a hot summer day, plays host to a sign in this manner. The sun’s warmth, when it enables campers to get out of their sleeping bags and start their day, becomes a sign as well, as do the words of cheerful greeting that campers may employ with their neighbors while they are arising. “Beautiful day!” “Excuse me, can I heat some water on your camp stove?” “The summit will be out of the clouds by 9:30, don’t you think?” Such words and phrases inspire and move along processes of emotional, logical, imagined, and also physical significance. Linguistic speech acts, too, in this regard, are pragmaticist signs in their capacity to serve as agents of intelligent relational movements. As a consequence of their kinetic conceptualization, the rhetorical processes of semeiotic signs—the symbol included—are understood to achieve significance in a manner that is not necessarily dependent on anything they have or possess. Their intelligent life depends instead on how the movements they inspire and/ or perform bring new relationships into being. A sign is significant in that the movements it produces make relationships happen, and these relationships forge or sustain connections that matter in some intelligible way. They are relationships that “have roots and bear fruits,” as Colapietro somewhat playfully characterizes

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them, relationships that are both “grounded and growing” (1989: 22). To borrow from Gregory Bateson’s more abstract cybernetic framework, which closely parallels Peirce’s semeiotic, the signs of Peircean pragmaticism create moving “patterns that connect” (1979: 10). In so doing, they generate differences “that make a difference,” intelligently speaking (Bateson 1972: 453; 1979: 250).24 So it is that the scent of frying bacon becomes a semeiotic sign as it connects a hungry bear to a source of food. A small pile of stones becomes significant as it brings a lost hiker together with a hard-to-find section of a trail. A rocky ledge becomes vitally meaningful when it enables a precariously balanced climber to achieve a more secure position on a rock wall and avoid taking an injurious fall down a treacherous granite face. Any trail, path, road, or route in its capacity to move travelers into new relationships within an environment they seek to explore performs as a semeiotic sign. Likewise, any linguistic concept that moves a user into a new relationship to the world it references performs as a sign as well, as does any part of speech that enables its users to make connections between concepts in the language to which it belongs. The kinetic, relational conceptualization of the Peircean semeiotic sign produces a relatively large sphere of adaptability to both human and nonhuman processes in one all-important respect as far as the symbols of landscape performance in particular are concerned. It is a respect that Peirce made explicit only in his later, most rhetorically oriented work. The definition characterizes a sign’s most fundamental agency (or performative character) as being one of mediation rather than representation. While in his earlier (and more often cited) writings Peirce defined signs in general as having the capacity to “represent” or “stand for” something,25 in his later work Peirce determined that the concept of representation was itself too narrow to characterize all of the many ways that a sign, as he conceived of it, could operate and perform as such. He wrote of this transition, “I did not then know enough about language to see that to attempt to make the word representation serve for an idea so much more general than any it habitually carried was injudicious. The word mediation would be better” (CP 4.3; cited in Colapietro 1989: 18; emphasis in text).26 Mediation, as Colapietro observes, is “deeper than interpretation,” just as semiosis—the full range of sign performance—is “wider than representation” (1989: 25). Although many semeiotic signs indeed conform to the “standing for” representational definition, others achieve significance without necessarily performing in a manner that, strictly speaking, could best be characterized as representational. Mediation, rather than representation, describes, for the later Peirce, the full range of intelligent processes that the signs of pragmaticist semeiotic theory in all its branches can be understood to enable. Mediation may involve what Peirce characterized as a “quasi-mind” as opposed to a specifically human mind. A quasi-mind, minimally, is “capable of varied determination” in relation to the sign’s intelligible movement (EP2: 544n22; cited in Fuhrman 2010: 171).

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Here, again, the pragmaticist semeiotic presents a basic and challenging theoretical formulation—one that borders on the unthinkable from humanist semiotic perspectives. The shift from representation to mediation also reinforces the dance-like character of the pragmaticist sign, rhetorically conceived. It foregrounds the choreographic identity of semiosis in general by asserting that the play of relationships-in-movement in which all kinds of signs participate agentively can matter—can “bear fruits” or make differences, intelligently speaking—even when that play entails nothing that could be identified as a representational, “standing-for,” sort of process. Signs—even symbols—do not have to stand to make sense. They can move (in-)formingly as well. Such an enlargement of the conceptual spectrum of what can be conceived of as sign performance has critical consequences for landscape performance. Once the sign spectrum is so extended, it gains the capacity to define as semeiotic experiences, activities, and processes whose influence on conventional cultural performances would otherwise go unrecognized. The Merced River, for example, as it may mediate vital relationships between bodies—human and nonhuman alike—once they are caught up in its currents, can achieve significance as an actant in a nonrepresentational but meaningful process of semiosis. A mouse in Curry Village, when it leaves droppings inside the insulation of tents that bring campers into contact with the deadly Hantavirus lung disease, does the same. So does a campfire, when its light draws strangers into new relationships with one another. The Yosemite Valley landscape, in its capacity to attract people from all over the world and to move them, along with all of the landscapes and places to which they are themselves related, into new relationships with one another, performs on a monumental scale as a mediating, nonrepresentational sign. It may also function simultaneously (and multi-stably) as a representational sign in its capacity to “stand for” an ideal wild and scenic, quintessentially American image of landscape. In part, the chapters that compose this volume seek to illuminate in landscape performance just these kinds of mediating nonrepresentational sign performances in the Yosemite environment and to identify some of the ways in which they interface and integrate influentially with more conventional representational and unambiguously cultural kinds of performance processes. In this regard, this book documents some instances of the genesis and modification of representational signs as such rhetorical processes may be observed to be occurring in relation to “broader and deeper” processes of nonrepresentational mediational semiosis. These processes involve nonhuman actants in critically influential ways. A semeiotic symbol, then, simply by virtue of its definition as a Peircean sign, is conceptualized as an agent of relational movement, mediating or representational, and not necessarily of human design and inspiration. In these most basic respects, it is adaptable to the analysis of a relatively broad array of perfor-

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mative phenomena. However, the Peircean symbol, approached rhetorically, is also relatively general with regard to its own particular semeiotic character. That moving character is defined as emphasizing one main quality, and again, it is not one that humanist sign theories would foreground. It is not arbitrariness or conventionality or intelligent (human) superiority that defines the pragmaticist symbol as it compares and contrasts with other kinds of semeiotic signs. Rather, it is the symbol’s capacity for enduringly creative, intelligently relational recurrence that identifies it as such. This definition, in its own way, further enlarges the pragmaticist symbol’s conceptual adaptability, its rhetorical efficaciousness. Once again, this enlargement has critical consequences for landscape performance in Yosemite National Park.

The Performativity of the Semeiotic Symbol Peirce conceived of the symbol as nothing more and nothing less than a sign that is itself and relates specifically to a regularity, rule, law, or habit. In 1895, he wrote: The word Symbol has so many meanings that it would be an injury to the language to add a new one. I do not think that the signification I attach to it, that of a conventional sign, one depending upon habit (acquired or inborn) is so much a new meaning as a return to the original meaning. Etymologically it should mean a thing thrown together… (CP 2.297; emphasis in text)27 A symbol, rhetorically approached, is a semeiotic sign that performs as such when the habit that constitutes it becomes an agent of intelligible relational movement vis-à-vis some habitual or regularly reoccurring phenomena—some generality. In this regard, it is the kind of sign—the only kind—that can enable memory. It is the only kind of sign that can be an agent of reproduction and also of reiteration. A symbol can itself perform and embody evolutionary processes—processes 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 per-

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formance. 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.

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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

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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]” (2010: 179). This understanding aligns with Peirce’s later definition of the symbol—that it is “a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech” (EP2: 264; 1903).32 Habits of relational movement performed by a living human being, in this regard, can be understood to constitute a semeiotic symbol, according to Peirce’s definition, even if such habits are unrelated, in whole or in part, to societal conventions and rules. When nonconventional habits of performance acquire significance by accomplishing connections that matter in some way—that “make a difference” in Bateson’s terms—to otherwise unrelated regularities, human or nonhuman, they, too, qualify as Peircean symbols. In the case of the Yosemite landscape, such symbols may play pivotal roles in emergent processes of self-landscape identification and subject formation, relating visitors to nonhuman regularities in the landscape in enduring, memorable, and profoundly moving, subjectively unique ways. They may even serve to influence and redefine the meaning of societal symbols, becoming actants in processes of “conventionalization” in their own right. In this regard, nonconventional human/nonhuman symbolic mediations can be of paramount importance in the rhetorical study of landscape performance.

A Case in Point: Chewing Apricots I experienced the emergence of such a nonconventional semeiotic symbol when I was on the summit of Half Dome in June 2012. As I approached the summit, I felt a slight catch in my throat that caused me to cough. It was a very windy

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day, and there was a lot of granite dust blowing in the air. It seemed like nothing at first, but it didn’t go away. As I reached the summit, I was coughing very strongly. Susto, a student who had come along with me, gave me his hat and told me to breathe into it only through my nose and to exhale into it as well so as to create moisture. I did so and felt the cough stop worsening. However, it did not go away. We found a small cave at the rim of Half Dome’s face, where I started sipping some Emergen-C powder that Susto mixed into some of my water. We opened a package of dried apricots, and I started eating them very, very slowly. As I ate, I became aware that a new kind of chewing habit was evolving in my mouth. It was not one I had intended to perform, but one I found myself performing nonetheless. I became aware that recurring movements of my jaw, mouth, and throat were now starting to feel similar to one another as they happened, and in some ways that I did not remember in relation to previous eating habits. This was a way of chewing whose distinctive features of action—only now being felt as distinctive—seemed to relate both cumulatively and with exceptional specificity to the present condition of my throat and to what felt at the time like the life-or-death need to produce moisture so as to calm the coughing action. The chewing habit quickly became partly intentional, but it also involved processes of my organism, and of the apricots as well, processes that were not subject to conscious control. This new chewing habit was a patterned activity that related the apricots to my breathing in a way that mattered, a calming, moistening way that gradually changed my breathing’s character significantly as it diminished the severity of the cough and restored relatively normal processes of oxygen intake and exhalation. I had never chewed in quite this way before—with what I came to understand as such a careful deceleration of the jaw. I had never focused so intently on how my teeth could make the most out of the food’s soft, slightly juicy quality, squishing it in a way that produced what felt like the maximum amount of saliva in my mouth. I had never concentrated so completely on the feeling of slowly swallowing the liquid as it drained down into my parched windpipe—a windpipe that evidenced (or “indexed” as Peirce might say) the atmospheric patterns of the landscape on that day. This new habit of chewing was invented and performed largely, though not entirely, by parts of my organism that were operating on their own physiological, biosemiotic terms. It was reoccurring in relation to processes that “I”—the intending subject —did not completely govern or control. However, to the extent that that “I” could participate in the coordination process, I was fully involved in performing it as well. In this last respect especially, this partially involuntary habit that was cultivated on the summit of Half Dome was not a habit that had conventional social rules fully determining its performance, although it was, of course, not absolutely unrelated to cultural conventions of eating, speaking, clothing, and even the apricot agribusiness. All the same, there is no great or little Yosemite tradition gov-

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erning the chewing of apricots in this particular manner at this particular place for this particular purpose—or of breathing through a hat in the way that I did. I have never heard reports of Half Dome hikers developing the kind of coughing problem that I did, let alone responding to it in the way Susto advised me to do. The windy conditions on that day were highly unusual. In sum, this was not a cultural performance in the standard sense of the term. In Gilbert Ryle’s categories, made famous by Clifford Geertz, the chewing habit that had been developed was far more of a behavioral blink or involuntary twitch than it was a culturally constructed wink (Geertz 1973: 3–30). The new habit, however, was an instance of landscape performance as I here define it. It also qualifies as symbolic action of a mediational, nonrepresentational semeiotic sort. It related methodically one type of emerging regularity, my transforming throat condition, to another, the circulatory patterns of air and dust occurring repeatedly at the summit of Half Dome. The emergence of the apricot-chewing habit constitutes a semio-genetic event. It exemplifies as well Fuhrman’s concept of “interhabitation,” as all landscape performances do—a “coupling of human habits with their living context (the biosphere) as guided by mutual interaction and communication between members (instances, manifestations) of the global human bodymind” (2010: 194). The chewing technique as I continued to perfect it on that day gradually proved to be an enduring agent of meaningful and intelligible relational change. It effectively lessened my coughing enough so that I could manage to begin speaking a few words of reassurance to Susto and the other students who had come with me. Eventually, it enabled me to breathe well enough to descend safely from the summit to the Valley floor some forty-seven hundred feet below. Eventually, it gave new meaning to the act of chewing apricots altogether, as well as giving rise to a new habit of chewing them on subsequent hikes in other places in a comparable manner. Eventually, this nonconventional symbol became increasingly integrated with a variety of culturally conventional forms of sign performance. As it did, it revised somewhat my thinking about what a wool hat, a dried fruit, and a student could mean, not only in Yosemite, but in the world at large. The slow, moisture-focused apricot chewing that I—as an intentional subject—learned to coordinate on Half Dome’s summit also has come to serve as a commemorative process—a symbol that has moved some ways down the continuum toward fully conventionalized representational status in its own right. Whenever I enact it, it re-presents and re-members in and through all that can be recognized as “me”— involuntary organs included—the extraordinary relationships that were at play when and where I first found myself to be practicing it and preserving my life through its performance. It might someday achieve the status of a conventional cultural performance as well, although that certainly is not the case at present. However, the possibility of it becoming even a little, if not a great, tradition can-

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not be dismissed completely. The very character of recurrence, the intelligible regularity of any semeiotic symbol’s moved moving-ness, provides the conditions for processes of adaptation, recognition, modification, and remembrance to occur and reoccur in and by its very performance. By so doing, its performance transforms intelligibility into intelligence, and mediational continuity (standing—as in persisting—through a series of relational moves) into representational “standing for.” Any kind of symbol, in this respect, is “conventionalizable”—even one as humble as the chewing of dried apricots.

Conclusion The chapters in this volume attempt to provide more examples like the one above of various kinds of nonconventional and hybrid forms of symbolic semiosis. Landscape performance, summarily defined, is just such an interweaving, metamorphosing, and choreographic coordinating of diverse human and nonhuman symbol mediations, representational and otherwise. It is a kind of performance conceivable only in the terms of the relatively inclusive, broadly applicable, rhetorical conceptualization of the pragmaticist symbol, both as a dance-like, kinetic, semeiotic sign and also as a sign whose identity is grounded in creatively evolving recurrence. Clarence King, the eminent nineteenth-century geologist and mountaineer whose expeditions into the Sierra Nevada mountains 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

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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 Es-

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

sential 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. 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. “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. 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. Despite the similarity in terms, Colapietro makes no reference here to Geertz’s renowned conceptualization of “thick description” (1973). The phrase is used simply to refer to the kind of observational analysis that is typical of semeiotic inquiry. “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. “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

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

semio-genetic. On the political significance inherent in this capacity to initiate significant movement, see Lepecki (2012c: 34). 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). 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). 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. 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. 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. 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). 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). Lepecki, following Aristotle, has employed the term energeia as “energy that energizes,” or “movement that in moving, triggers action.” “Energeia,” Lepecki elaborates, “qualifies

34 ■ Choreographies of Landscape

23.

24.

25.

26.

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.” 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). 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). 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 be in such a relation to another that for certain purposes it is treated by some mind as if it were that other” (CP 2.273). Here the notion of “being in relation” gains prevalence over the relatively specific trope of “standing for.” Likewise, in his 1902 definition of “Sign” for the same dictionary, Peirce specified that a sign was “anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum” (CP 2.303). Here the idea of “standing for” has been completely omitted from the definition in favor of the idea of “determining”—which I modify for rhetorical purposes to the idea of “agentively moving into a relationship with.” The editors of The Essential Peirce note that “the conception of a sign as a medium of communication becomes very prominent in Peirce’s 1906 writings” (EP2: 544n22). Colapietro notes that Peirce’s comment quoted above was made in reference to his category of “Thirdness.” However, Colapietro also asserts that the comment could have been made “with equal justice” about semiosis, which is how it is interpreted here, in accordance with the categorial definition that grounds the rhetorical one here employed.

Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction ■ 35

27. In 1902, Peirce defined a Symbol similarly as a Sign whose character “consists precisely in its being a rule” and gave as examples “words, sentences, books, and other conventional signs” (CP 2.292). He elaborated, “A Symbol is a law, or regularity of the indefinite future” (CP 2.293). 28. The manuscript that contains this passage (#517) is titled “New Elements” and is dated to 1904. It is considered by some to be one of the most important statements of Peirce’s later conceptualization of his semeiotic (EP2: 300–24). 29. For an overview of the history of the Yosemite Firefall tradition, see Huell Houser’s documentary California’s Gold with Huell Howser #706:Yosemite Firefall. 30. To view images from the Yosemite in Time project, visit the website: http://www .klettandwolfe.com/2009/10/yosemite-in-time.html. In the technical terminology of Peirce’s semeiotic, the kind of symbolic process created by the photographers was one that entailed both Sumisigns—simple substitutive signs (so that a later retaken image could be recognized as substitutable for an earlier one)—and Dicisigns or quasi-propositions—informational signs (so that a later image could be appreciated as presenting contrasting information to an earlier one). See Frederik Stjernfelt’s investigations of “diagrammatology” for a more detailed discussion of the latter in relation to visual imagery more generally (2007, 2014). If the process of retaking were in actuality to be continued, and if the accumulated imagery were to show predictable patterns of change in the landscape location that was rephotographed (or a clear lack thereof ), the continuum could then be said to have a persuasive (rhetorical and rational) character that would be identifiable as that of a Suadisign, or Argument Symbol type. Given the incipient stage of the symbol formation, however, this last character is still vague. The particular orientation of the project’s rephotography, focusing as it did on the duplication of particular instances of renowned photographic performance and particular famous images, would also be characterized in semeiotic terminology as directed toward the creation of Singular Symbols, as each continuum of recurring photography was developed in relation to individual, existent photographs (EP2: 275). Singular symbols may originate, in Peirce’s observations, in “either an image of the idea signified, or a reminiscence of some individual occurrence, person, or thing, connected with its meaning, or is a metaphor” (EP2: 264). The rephotographing project originates in both the images and the occurrences of original photographic performances. 31. With regard to the Symbol’s first correlate or representamen, as well, which Peirce identified as being of the class he termed Legisigns, Peirce wrote, “Every conventional sign is a legisign [but not conversely]” (CP 2.246). 32. While it is unambiguously prominent in Peirce’s later writings, the post-humanist character of Peirce’s concept of the Symbol is not one typically recognized in research on cultural performance. Eduardo Kohn’s study of Runa semeiotics is perhaps the most recent example of a more standard cultural anthropological reading of Peirce’s theory of the symbol (2013). While Kohn identifies the Icon and Index as sign modalities operating in nonhuman environments and bases his own claims to a post-humanist approach to anthropological inquiry on that recognition, he remains humanist in his discussion of the Peircean symbol (2013: 8, 133, 168). The great majority, if not the entirety, of semiotic anthropologists to date have done so as well, at times equating Peirce’s concept of the symbol with that of the Saussurian linguistic sign. This humanist cultural anthropological treatment of Peirce’s symbol concept, which is challenged in this study, recently has

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begun to receive some critical scrutiny, even within the discipline of anthropology (see, for example, Pandian responding to Kohn, 2014). However, it remains the prevailing interpretation until the present time. In Peirce scholarship, however, Peirce’s claim that semeiotic symbols are not restricted to human sign use is receiving increasing attention. Frederik Stjernfelt’s work Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns (2014) is perhaps the most detailed and elaborate example of this interest in articulating the continuity between human and nonhuman/biological symbolic semeiotic processes. For examples of nonhuman symbolic processes, pragmaticistically defined, see Stjernfeldt (2014: 142–61).

References Bartenieff, Irmgard. 1980. Body Movement: Coping with the Environment, with Dori Lewis. New York: Gordon Breech Science Publishers. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of Himself. New York: Ballantine Books. ———. 1979. Mind in Nature: A Necessary Unity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Bauman, Richard (ed.). 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Bender, Barbara, and Margot Winer (eds). 2001. Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place. Oxford: Berg. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergon, Frank (ed.). 1994 [1980]. The Wilderness Reader. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Bergson, Henri. 2007 [1912]. Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Cosimo Classics. California’s Gold with Huell Howser #706: Yosemite Firefall. Nd. Huell Howser Productions. Chandler, Jerry. 2012. “RE: A Question of Artistic Semio-genesis.” Comments posted on the Peirce-L listserver, 15 October 2012. Colapietro, Vincent. 1989. Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2007. “C.S. Peirce’s Rhetorical Turn,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43(1): 16–52. Crouch, David. 2010. Flirting with Space. Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate. Crouch, David, and Charlotta Malm. 2003. “Landscape Practice, Landscape Research: An Essay in Gentle Politics.” In Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose (eds), Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics. London: Black Dog, pp. 253–63. Daniel, E. Valentine. 1987. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1996. Charred Lullabies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deacon, Terrence W. 2006. “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub.” In P. Clayton and P. Davies (eds), The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111–50. ———. 2012. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: Norton. De Tienne, André. 2006. “Peirce’s Logic of Information,” Seminario del Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos, Universidad de Navarra. Available online: www.unav.ed/gep/SeminariodeTi enne.html. Last accessed February 14, 2013.

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De Waal, Cornelis. 2001. On Peirce. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Dorrian, Mark, and Gillian Rose. 2003. “Introduction.” In Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose (eds), Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics. London: Black Dog, pp. 13–19. Dorrian, Mark, and Gillian Rose (eds). 2003. Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics. London: Black Dog. Downey, Greg. 2004. Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso (eds). 1996. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Fuhrman, Gary. 2010. “Rehabilitating Information,” Entropy 12: 164–96. ———. 2015. Turning Signs. Published online by www.gnusystems.ca/wp/. http://gnusystems .ca/wp/category/turning-signs/, last accessed November 9, 2015. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Hartshorne, Charles, and Paul Weiss (eds). 1931–1935. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols 1–6. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Hendrickson, Carol. 2008. “Visual Field Notes: Drawing Insights in the Yucatan,” Visual Anthropology Review 24(2): 117–32. Hewitt, Andrew. 2005. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hirsch, Eric. 1995. “Introduction: Landscape; Between Space and Place.” In Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–30. Hirsch, Eric, and Michael O’Hanlon (eds). 1995. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoffmeyer, Jesper (ed.). 2008. A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics. Berlin: Springer. Hoopes, James. 1991. Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25: 152–74. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2003. “Seeing Red and Hearing Voices in Red Rock Country.” In Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose (eds), Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics. London: Black Dog, pp. 296–308. Keane, Webb. 1997. Signs of Recognition; Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klett, Mark, Rebecca Solnit, and Byron Wolfe. 2005. Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lepecki, André. 2012a. DANCE (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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———. 2012b. “From (Choreo)policed Circulation to (Choreo)political Intensification: Dance as Critique of Freedom (or: the Task of the Dancer),” Weaving Politics International Conference, 14–16 December 2012. Stockholm, Sweden. ———. 2012c. “From Partaking to Initiating: Leading/Following as a Dance’s (A-personal) Political Singularity.” In Stefan Hölscher and Gerald Siegmund (eds), Dance, Politics and Co-immunity. Zurich: Diaphanes, pp. 21–38. ———. 2013. “Dance and Politics.” In Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein (eds), Dance [and] Theory. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, pp. 153–58. Lewis, J. Lowell. 1992. Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liszka, James J. 1996. A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Low, Setha, and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1989. “Scapeland.” In Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 212. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Medley, Steven P. 2002. The Complete Guidebook to Yosemite National Park. El Portal, CA: Yosemite Association. Mines, Diane. 2005. Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Neill, William, and Tim Palmer. 1994. Yosemite: The Promise of Wildness. El Portal, CA: Yosemite Association. Ness, Sally Ann. 1992. Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2007. “Going Back to Bateson: Toward a Semiotics of (Post-)Ritual Performance.” In Mark Franko (ed.), Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 13–30. ———. 2008a. “Bali, the Camera, and Dance: The Lost Legacy of the Mead-Bateson Collaboration,” Journal of Asian Studies 67(4): 1251–76. ———. 2008b. “The Inscription of Gesture: ‘Inward’ Migrations of Dance.” In Carrie Noland and Sally A. Ness (eds), Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–37. ———. 2012 “Presentation,” Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 32: 101–10. Pandian, Anand. 2014. “Thinking like a Mountain,” HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(2): 245–52. Parmentier, Richard. 1987. The Sacred Remains: Myth, History, and Polity in Belau. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peacock, James. 1968. Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–1958. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols 7–8 edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. ———. 1977. Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. C. Hardwick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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———. 1979. Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to the Nation, Part Three: 1901–1908, ed. Kenneth L. Ketner and James E. Cook. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press. Cited as CN3. Peirce Edition Project (eds). 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–93). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP1. ———. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP2. Rancière, Jacques and Steven Corcoran. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury. Ransdell, Joseph. 1997 [1986]. “On Peirce’s Conception of the Iconic Sign.” Version 2.0. Listed on Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway website under “Peirce-Related Papers,” http://www .iupui.edu/~arisbe/. Original version published in Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner (eds), Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, Festschrift for Thomas A. Sebeok. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg Verlag. Rappaport, Roy A. 1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms). New York: Routledge. Sargent, Shirley. 1971. “A Century Ago,” Yosemite 41(3): 3. Publication of the Yosemite Natural History Association. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schieffelin, Edward. 2005 [1976]. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Singer, Milton. 1984. Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Solnit Rebecca. 1994. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. ix–xiv. ———. 2005. “Introduction.” In Klett, Solnit and Wolfe (co-authors), Yosemite in Time; Ice Ages Tree Clocks Ghost Rivers. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. Stegner, Wallace. 1954. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Stillman, Andrea G. (ed.). 2000 [1994]. Yosemite and the High Sierra: Ansel Adams. Boston: Little, Brown. Stjernfelt, Frederik. 2007. Digrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag. ———. 2014. Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns. Boston: Docent Press. Swedo, Suzanne. 2011. Hiking Yosemite National Park: A Guide to 59 of the Park’s Greatest Adventures; A Falcon Guide, 3rd edn. Guilford CT: Globe Pequot Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1979. “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” Proceedings of the British Academy 65: 11–69. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1982 [1974]. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

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Wells, Stacey. 1998. Frommer’s Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks. New York: Macmillan/Simon and Schuster. Whitfield, Paul. 2002. The Rough Guide to Yosemite National Park. London: Rough Guides. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1967. “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” Synthese 17: 233–53.

Q

Part II

Visiting

Figure 1.1 Alan Moore preparing to climb the route Jacob’s Ladder, April 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Chapter One

q

Bouldering Movements of the Unforetold

Relation cannot be foretold; it must be experienced. —Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy

Introduction

N

o environment in the United States of America would seem to better exemplify both the national soil and territory, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has defined them, than Yosemite National Park (Appadurai 2003). Of all the varied identities that the multi-stable Yosemite landscape has staged and enabled, it is this nationally oriented one that is undoubtedly the most boldly foregrounded of them all. “National” is, quite literally, Yosemite’s middle name, and of the more than three hundred national parks in the United States, Yosemite holds a special status among them all. It is generally held to be a particularly ideal, exemplary case of how a national park landscape ought to both appear and appeal to its visitors. As one longtime librarian of the Yosemite Research Library once declared to me somewhat emphatically in 2005, as she was in the midst of dealing with a conflict of information concerning the park, “People are passionate about this place!” Historian William Deverell, similarly, when reflecting on the importance of Yosemite Valley in the development of the American environmentalist perspective, characterized Yosemite as “the representative emblem, the heart, of American nature” (2006: 10). The iconic value of the park as the emblematic “heart” of the nation-state is second to none in the United States. Yosemite, along with Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, is often referred to in this regard as one of the “crown jewels” of the American national park system. The history of this special connection between Yosemite and American national culture is actually considerably older than the park’s official designation as

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a national park itself. It was just shortly after Yosemite Valley’s Euro-American discovery in 1855—several decades before its incorporation into the fledgling national park system—that the landscape came to usurp the role Niagara Falls previously had played as the signature icon of American nature. Yosemite’s imagery was deliberately selected during this time as the focal subject matter used to promote the U.S. government’s ongoing campaign to justify westward expansion in the post–Civil War period (Starr 1973: 183; Deverell 2006: 11; Ogden 2006: 23–63). The impact of the resulting dissemination of representations of Yosemite Valley was such that by the time it was actually established as a national park in 1890, Yosemite Valley was, in art historian Amy Scott’s estimation, “one of the most recognizable landscapes in the country” (Scott 2006: 3). The rhetorical force embodied in the Yosemite landscape, in this regard, is one that became firmly linked to the political discourse of the American nation-state during the country’s greatest push for territorial expansion in the nineteenth century. Yosemite Valley has maintained its role as a defining icon of (imperial) American nature throughout the twentieth century and into the present moment. This was illustrated recently most popularly, perhaps, in the 2009 work of filmmaker Ken Burns, who singled Yosemite out as the main inspiration for his documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The series focused on the history of the national parks in the United States, which it characterized as both “uniquely” and “radically” American.1 An entire initial segment of Burns’s sixepisode series was devoted solely to the history of Yosemite. Its footage provided scenes of Yosemite Valley throughout the seasons and over the decades, shot from all of the park’s most popular vantage points. Burns’s work can be interpreted as providing a detailed survey of precisely how Yosemite’s unique geological features have been used rhetorically by the U.S. government over the course of its Euro-American history. More than anything else, the park landscape consistently has been employed to evidence tacitly how American sovereignty has and will endure and thrive, from century to century and for time immemorial. Represented as secure, unassailable, pristine, and magnificent, it is both the real and the ideal American homeland. Yosemite National Park, in this regard, would seem to be a place—perhaps one of a very few places left on the planet—where the hyphen of the nation-state it represents has not yet even begun to enter into the kind of “postnational” crisis that Appadurai has identified, not only in regard to the United States, but in relation to nation-states around the world that are currently grappling with the disintegrating influences of advanced global capitalism (2003). Yosemite’s prevailing discourse is unambiguously devoted to the imagination of a naturally vigorous, carefully managed and preserved, impregnable and unvanquished nation-state. Such a conclusion, in any case, would be very hard to avoid drawing if one were to adhere to the theoretical framework advanced by Appadurai (1990, 1993, 2003) and developed by the leading scholarship of the anthropology of globaliza-

Bouldering: Movements of the Unforetold ■ 45

tion (Edelman and Haugerud 2005; Friedman and Ekholm 2008; Inda and Rosaldo 2008; Lewellen 2002). According to this view, it is impossible to conceive of how Yosemite could engender other kinds of ideas, given the relentlessly consistent manner in which it has been symbolically “foretold,” to use Erin Manning’s terms above, and rendered “legible,” to use Appadurai’s, through virtually all conventional symbolic forms available (Appadurai 2003: 338). One can only “think” the nation, Appadurai claims (2003: 337), and one can only “think” beyond the nation as well, so as to imagine the even larger, global-scale processes and realities that traumatize the nation. From such a perspective, the significance of Yosemite Valley seems all but foreclosed. “It is the imagination that will have to carry us beyond the nation,” Appadurai argues (2003: 337)—the imagination as it is conceived within the conventionally symbolic. Two choreographically oriented questions are raised by the Yosemite landscape, in this national and postnational/global regard: (1) What actually happens when visitors go about the business of experiencing for themselves this national park environment? And (2) what, if any, forms of significance can be registered by such visitor activity other than the inscription of an ideologically saturated national landscape into personal constructions of self and world? To restate the second question in slightly more pointed terms, what would happen if a visitor subject could somehow move “the postnation,” physically acting out its rendering, as opposed to merely imagining it? What if an individual human being could “carry us beyond” the nation, originating or mediating in an unconventional manner global forms of significance in his or her embodied performance in this national park environment? In answering these questions, the main argument of this chapter seeks to both challenge and extend choreographically what is sometimes called “constructionist” theory in cultural anthropological discourse—the theoretical perspective that underlies Appadurai’s imagination-based arguments. Developed initially in anthropology by such seminal figures as Clifford Geertz (1973) and Edward Bruner (1988), constructionist theory has been the prevailing theoretical orientation in research on globalization as it might relate to cultural performances, among many other culturally marked phenomena.2 Briefly put, constructionist theory assumes that conventional forms of symbolism produced by large-scale societal institutions—be they religious, economic, or (as in this case) political— determine the meaning that may be imaginatively constructed by human subjects from their experience of an environment such as Yosemite Valley. In phenomenological terms, constructionist theories assume that the lived (pre-symbolic) experience of an environment can create meaning (if it does so at all) only in relation to intimately personal or highly local realms of experience. Without some form of conventional societal symbolism already being held in imagination, lived experience is understood to give voice only to a performing subject’s idiosyncratic character, or to its pre-vocalic organism. The scale of an individual human being’s

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bodily performance, unlike his or her imagination, has been assumed to be inherently small, even microscopic, in register—too small for the job of playing host to the emergence of large-scale, nationally or globally oriented forms of sign production and dissemination. Even the meaningful construction of such seemingly not-simply-social things as the self, the human subject’s body, and the natural environment is thus understood as governed solely by social and cultural symbolic processes. They, and they alone, are “thinkable.” The possibility of comparably thoughtful, imaginable symbolism emerging from a landscape encounter without such conventional human symbolism foretelling and determining its character is tantamount to inconceivable. This is, however, exactly what the following case of landscape performance in Yosemite seeks to illustrate. National forms of conventional symbolism are not alone in their influence on the construction processes at work in Yosemite’s visitors. Postnational and global symbols are also at play in visitor performance, complicating the landscape’s rhetoric as it is imaginatively enacted. However, it is not only a variety of established societal symbolisms that are on the move in Yosemite National Park. There are also unforetold performances happening in the landscape as well. These are initiating symbolic experiences through and in visitors choreographically. Such unforetold dance-like performances, moreover, are exerting influences on projects of symbolic construction that are at least potentially as large in scale as those of any others being staged within the landscape.

Visitor Activities in Yosemite Valley Yosemite National Park, in particular its focal Yosemite Valley landscape, affords visitors a very wide variety of possible activities by which to construct social and cultural meanings. These activities coordinate to some extent with the length of time visitors tend to spend in the park. The majority of the park’s visitors arrive and depart on tour buses that spend less than twenty-four hours inside the park. However, for those who arrive independently, generally by automobile, stays in the park usually last several days and in a few exceptional cases may last for months. The inhabitation practices of visitors vary accordingly. Visitors on day tours may inhabit only outdoor viewpoints, visitor centers, restaurants and gift shops, and short segments of the trails that proceed along the Valley floor’s eastern meadows and its main “Village” development. Self-guided visitors, however, may camp for up to a month in the park over the course of a single year. Between May and September, however, they are limited to only fourteen nights, only seven of which can be in the Valley’s campgrounds or in Wawona’s. Alternatively, overnight visitors may stay at one of several lodge or tent-cabin accommodations. They may also stay at the Ahwahnee, a five-star hotel accommodation located in the northeastern area of the Valley floor, which offers formal dining and a traditional array of elite guest services.

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The activities in which visitors may partake while inhabiting Yosemite in these diverse ways include an equivalently wide range of practices. Among the most widely performed and represented visitor activities are sightseeing tours of the Valley’s main waterfalls and panoramic viewpoints. These may be self-guided, ranger-guided, or commercially guided and may proceed on foot or by car, tram, bus, bicycle, or horse. Also popular are stationary gaze-oriented activities such as photographing, painting, bird-watching, and stargazing. Locomotive activities (backpacking, day hiking, and rock-oriented climbing practices), water sports (fishing, rafting, canoeing, and swimming), and winter sports (ice-skating and climbing, skiing, sledding, snowboarding, and snowshoeing) are also typical visitor activities.3 Despite all of this apparent diversity, however, visitor activities— from camper backpacking to Ahwahnee wine-tasting—can each be interpreted as providing an opportunity for visitors to translate the sanctioned institutional discourse of Yosemite National Park into individual, personally constructed terms. Each offers an experience of the landscape that celebrates its distinctly American version of sublime, pristine, preserved natural beauty, whether it is seen out of a magnificent glass window in the Ahwahnee dining room or felt by the dusty hand of a high-country backpacker as it is dipped into the icy running waters of the Merced River. Of all of the sanctioned park activities serving these ideological construction projects, however, perhaps none has been more prominently featured or carries greater political significance than rock climbing. Even while only a fraction of Yosemite’s visitors actually engage in this particular activity, millions more enthusiastically witness its performance. Climbing takes place on all of Yosemite’s most visible surfaces and features. While it is best viewed with the aid of binoculars or zoom lenses, climbing can also be observed from the Valley floor unaided. Climbers are ubiquitous in the Yosemite Valley landscape throughout the seasons. Even the most challenging massifs play host to several thousand climbers a year. The practice has become virtually inescapable in park imagery as well. Over the past half century, the practice of climbing has staged choreographically the most spectacular constructions of the relationship between nature and humankind that occur in the park. Given its distinctive gravity-focused orientation, the sport explores relationships of power that, as I will attempt to illustrate, carry extraordinary salience in relation to the park’s conventional identity as one of America’s “best ideas.” The following account focuses in detail on one specific performance of rock climbing, a performance of boulder climbing, or “bouldering” as it is typically called, that occurred in Yosemite Valley in the spring of 2008. It does so in order to broaden the interpretive lens addressing the question of how energetic visitor activities such as climbing may construct meanings in Yosemite, specifically in relation to the landscape’s character as a national park environment. I focus the analysis not only on the inscriptive construction of conventional forms of sym-

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bolism, which are, in fact, not national in character for the most part, but also on the emergence of nonconventional eco-symbolic processes. I track these relatively spontaneous movements of significance4 as they are generated through various scales of visitor-landscape interconnections: corporeal, ecological, national, translocal, transcontinental, and at least speculatively global. My intent is in part to expose how much greater the diversity of visitor experience can actually be in Yosemite Valley than constructionist perspectives would ordinarily allow. Even in a landscape that is as seemingly prefigured and foretold as Yosemite, this diversity of experience is readily apparent in the dance-like performances of visitor bouldering. However, my broader goal is also to speculate with as much rigor as possible about a kind of rhetorical threshold—what Charles S. Peirce famously characterized as a semeiotic “gate.” It is a gate that constructs a mediating stage between processes of culturally determined symbolic formulations, on the one hand, and other kinds of sign and experiential relations, on the other.5 Such a gate, I argue, can mediate originative performances of what I term meaning-in-the-making—a semio-genetic variation of what Sherry Ortner, from a constructionist perspective, has termed “meaning-making” (Ortner 1999a: 8–9). Meaning-in-the-making refers to the processual rendering of symbolic phenomena by real historical actors moving in concert with their respective environment. It is a creative process that carries within it the rudimentary building blocks of an entire social world—cultural foundations conceived according to the performance’s own distinctively purposeful ecological choreographics.6

The Bouldering Encounter On an overcast spring Sunday afternoon in April 2008, rock climber Alan Moore made a first attempt on a Yosemite boulder climb known as Jacob’s Ladder. The climb was located on a trailer-sized granite boulder resting in a talus-strewn, wooded area near the foot of Yosemite Valley’s northwestern rim. The attempt was witnessed by myself and a group of four climbers, two men and two women in their mid- to late twenties. This afternoon was not the first time that I had watched Alan Moore climb. However, it was the first time I had ever seen him climb on Yosemite boulders. I had met Moore several months previously, at the University of California, Riverside, where he was in his second year of graduate school in the Philosophy Ph.D. Program. My husband, Erich Reck, a professor in that department, had admitted Moore into the program in 2007 while serving as the Philosophy Department’s graduate advisor. At the time of Moore’s acceptance, Erich had informed me about Moore’s extensive climbing background. I made contact with Moore in January 2008. I gave him some of my writings on Yosemite and asked to interview him. He accepted. At the end of the interview, Moore invited me to go climbing with him. We went out to Joshua Tree National Monument in February 2008, the first of several climbing excursions we were to undertake together.7

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Moore was already a veteran climber by the time I met him. His climbing career had begun at the age of seven, under the direction of his father, Joel Moore, also a highly skilled climber. Alan Moore had risen in his teenage years into the elite ranks of American climbers, placing in the top ten repeatedly in junior national competitions.8 In his twenties, Moore began traveling internationally, camping abroad for weeks at a time, acquiring expertise in increasingly diverse climbing environments. By our first meeting in 2008, he had completed several hundred of the world’s most difficult sport climbs successfully.9 As we were visiting Yosemite Valley, Moore’s recent first ascents on climbs located in the area of Yangshuo, China, were breaking news, featured as the cover story of the latest issue of the popular climbing magazine Urban Climber. Alan Moore was no stranger to Yosemite Valley by 2008. He had done extensive traditional climbing on many of Yosemite’s “big walls” over the course of his career. Sometimes he had come with his father, but he had also visited Yosemite many times with climbing partners closer to his own age. On this weekend, Moore had come to Yosemite primarily to celebrate the twenty-eighth birthday of one of his closest climbing companions and to stay at the cabin of another, who at the time was employed as a seasonal ranger in the Valley. He was not anticipating an overly ambitious program of climbing activity. “I didn’t even bring a rope,” he commented to me on the drive up into the park. I’d offered him a ride, as I happened also to be making a research visit that weekend. However, Moore was well aware that the Valley’s boulders offered numerous opportunities for climbing without ropes. Moore and his friends would spend the weekend exploring a series of these. The boulder climbs Moore had already attempted on that day before arriving at the climb Jacob’s Ladder were of varying levels of difficulty. Several of them were advanced enough that he would later enter their successful completion into his online climbing log. There, they would contribute to his overall climbing record of achievement and be factored into his international ranking.10 While the weekend was mainly devoted to catching up with friends, a competitive dimension was nonetheless still present. As the Jacob’s Ladder attempt would evidence, this competitive dimension had a definite influence on Moore’s performance on the boulder, as well as on the sense of place his act of climbing would eventually construct. Accompanied by two of his friends that Sunday, Moore had met two other climbers in the morning who were also interested in climbing some of the same boulder climbs he and his friends were attempting. The five climbers formed an impromptu party and sought out the Jacob’s Ladder boulder after climbing for a few hours in the area of Yosemite Valley’s Camp 4. The boulder, about twenty feet in circumference, was situated on a moderately steep slope. It contacted about ten feet up on its hillside surface another boulder that lay immediately uphill from it. Below the point of contact, the boulder’s underside was exposed. It was

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along this sheltered surface that the climb, or boulder “problem,” as it is called in climbing terminology, ran its course. Joking about the likelihood of encountering a bear (which some of them recently had done), the group prepared to climb. Several thick, protective pads were placed on the ground directly below the problem in the shaded, cave-like area that was formed by the meeting of the two huge boulders. The route was “ticked” with chalk, its climbable points or holds becoming prominently visible. For several minutes, a period of close examination ensued, during which strategies for climbing were discussed. The overhanging rock face sloped upward at roughly a sixty-degree angle with the ground. The holds were at most an inch or two in width. Various possibilities suggested themselves, which the group considered, partially testing some of them where the holds were reachable from a starting position on the ground. As the climbers engaged in these activities, they moved between linguistic and other gestural forms of sign performance with a fluency that indexed their combined extensive expertise in the sport. Their interactive movements took detailed note of the specifics of the Yosemite boulder, integrating site-specific features of the rock shape, surface, composition, temperature, inclination, light, and shadow with more general understandings of a large range of boulder sites and problems gained from previous experience elsewhere. Their communications served to translate their combined knowledge into local conditions—a process that globalization research has sometimes described as glocalization (Raz 1999: 14). Yosemite-specific characters of the boulder problem’s environment were foregrounded, but at the same time they were assimilated into larger conventional symbolic registers of boulder climbing in locations around the world. It occurred to me as I observed the climbers preparing in this way that climbing Jacob’s Ladder was something close to the opposite of the scenic experience for which Yosemite National Park was most well known. The climb appeared to come right out of a dark hole in the ground. It afforded no opportunity for any engagement with any world-renowned, traditionally promoted feature of the landscape. In its entirety, Jacob’s Ladder took up less than the length of a car. Its progression would be measured in seconds. To me, who lacked any sort of boulder-climbing experience at this time, it seemed a relatively minuscule, even trivial route, situated, as it was, in unmarked woods, off any beaten path. It was not a site that signified in any of the national or commercial media with which I was familiar. Moore began his attempt on Jacob’s Ladder at a moment when the space immediately beneath the route had been vacated by the other climbers. Looking down into the dense shade from above—the only possible vantage point—I had difficulty seeing his movements clearly. That he was in progress, however, was left in no doubt when we heard him bellow a gut-wrenching scream. It roared out of the cave and carried over the surrounding area, engulfing us in a wave of sound.

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Figure 1.2. Moore climbing Jacob’s Ladder, April 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Silence fell instantly upon the other climbers and myself. The passion in the cry was unmistakable. Moore was not in danger. However, he was obviously in severe circumstances. A second or two passed in complete stillness. As we waited and listened, Moore screamed again. The rustle of a small spray of falling gravel indicated that he was still on the route, now in transition to another hold. As this second scream reverberated in the air, virtually identical in magnitude and intensity to the first, an involuntary sympathetic response lit up the muscles of my own solar plexus. The neuromuscular surge registered what I took to be the bodily origin of Moore’s screams. The feeling was a kinesthetic echo of sorts. It replicated faintly the movement evidently manifesting in Moore’s body. It was not a voluntary, intentional movement on my part, not one that I was subjectively constructing. Rather, it was a movement forced upon and into me, as it were, by the performance process and the waves of sound emanating from it. The quality of the echo itself reactivated another feeling. It was a feeling that my diaphragm registered as vaguely similar to one that had taken place in that same region years previously. These were contractions of childbirth so violent they had ripped apart connective tissue in the abdominal wall. Nothing had ever before triggered an embodied return to that experience, which had taken place

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nearly seven years previously. The screams, however, brought some awareness of it back to life. The muscles of the solar plexus, sensing this, initiated a protective response, folding themselves inward. I found myself being led into a fetal position by my own rib cage. Moore’s scream, however, was not the scream of a body writhing in uncontrollable pain. It bore a quality of purposiveness, even though it had not been done “on purpose” (Moore later confirmed this [personal communication, May 1, 2008]). The rage that was its raw material—or some singular, as-yet-unnamed feeling whose character was on the order of rage—had an assertional quality. Its sonic and expressive force was channeled back into the rock that had provoked it through the very actions of the climb. There was no doubt that Moore’s expression was composed entirely of affect—it was unquestionably a scream, not a shout. It broke from him with a thumos—a spirit or passion—all its own (Heywood 2006). Yet it was instantaneously set to work in a manner that enabled Moore to continue to cling to the boulder. He was literally screaming along the route, putting the scream to a kind of service that could only be called constructive. Stillness continued for another second or two. Then, Moore let out a third scream. It came after an interval that seemed roughly equivalent to that between the first and the second, giving the entire progression a sense of emergent rhythm. This scream, however—incredible though it seemed at the time—erupted out of the cave with significantly more power than the previous two. The quality carried by the sound was excruciating. The cry this time provoked a verbal response. I heard a woman’s voice behind me gently uttering Moore’s first name. There was no more to the utterance than the name itself. The speaker, however, drew out its two syllables so that they formed a complex sound phrase, nervously enunciating “A-a-lan” in a manner that verged tentatively on an incredulous, chuckling laugh. The tone was hushed. It seemed to express all at once mild, slightly forced amusement, profound respect, sincere affection, and the barest hint of reproach. It was a pleading, enough-is-enough sort of message, condensed down, perhaps in deference to Moore’s exceptional effort, to a single one-word phrase. It was a verbal intervention, unquestionably an intentional speech act, but one that operated on an emotive, pre-syntactic level. It was a construction that, like the climbers’ earlier gestures and comments, moved along the interface between the symbolic and the gesturally experiential, although this time heading in what might be called a post-symbolic direction. The name calling, however, proved unnecessary. Moore came off the route abruptly after his third scream, falling flat on his back onto the pads below. His attempt ended one move shy of what would have been a successful completion of the climb. While still on it, he had sustained a deep cut on his right index finger. It was bleeding as he emerged from the cave. “I’m done,” he said. He was finished climbing for the day. The entire episode had transpired in less than half a minute.

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The drama that had temporarily overtaken us dissipated quickly once Moore was out in the daylight. The climbers resumed their banter, gathering around him to inspect his wound and to discuss and analyze his attempt. One of the climbers, a professional photographer and longtime friend of Moore’s, snapped a picture of the wound. The group then moved on to focus on the next attempt.11

Meaning-in-the-Making: Inscriptive and Emergent Symbols of Place and Self As may be evident from the description above, at least two fundamentally different kinds of sign performance occurred during Alan Moore’s attempt on Jacob’s Ladder. These produced two distinctly different, although not unrelated, rhetorical experiences—two different movingly effective performances—in the Yosemite landscape. The first illustrates what may be characterized as “inwardly” moving constructions of conventional forms of symbolism. These were societally produced forms migrating into and shaping the experience of the climb’s individual participants in the manner constructionist theories would anticipate.12 The second illustrates “outwardly” moving constructions. These were relationally intelligent movements conceived in nonconventional, unintended, accidental movement processes that also occurred in the performance of the climb. The most eventful aspect of the attempt, in fact—the searing, all but intolerable screaming—exemplifies this kind of “outwardly” moving semio-genetic performance process. These latter movements are instances of what I have termed meaning-in-the-making. They coordinated movements of significance across the Peircean “gate”—the structuring stage relating conventional societal symbols to those of both reoccurring and uniquely instantiated patterns of sign action (of “moved and moving movers”)13 in the landscape. To further illuminate the choreographic character of these various inward and outward semeiotic performance processes, I digress briefly to provide additional background on the climber population and its conventional symbolic constructions. These are postnational constructions that do, in fact, serve to challenge the sanctioned symbolism of the nation-state. I then proceed to discuss how some of the actual movements that took place in Moore’s bouldering performance effected as well a hybrid experience of visiting, symbolically speaking, one that neither the park’s constructions of national cultural symbolism nor the conventions of symbolism embodied in the sport of climbing could have foretold. The Climbing Community: A Translocal Population The climbing “community,” as the climber practitioner population identifies itself, has a fluctuating membership. It can be estimated in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Its sites of practice are located on every continent, in urban, rural, and undeveloped environments. The community is composed of many distinct, sometimes contesting, constituencies. Some are feminist; some pseudo-militarist; some are ardently conservationist; some are driven largely by media and commer-

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cial interests. Some are gym oriented (climbing “inside”). Others are exclusively alpinist, operating transnationally by employing guides based in the Himalayas, the Andes, the Rockies, or the Alps (Ortner 1999b). Many climbers define themselves in occupational terms by referencing the kind of climbing that they do. Some climb only on boulders. Others climb on rock wall faces and cracks that may extend tens, hundreds, or thousands of feet off the ground. These latter climbers typically employ ropes and an elaborate array of protective gear. Some rope climbers specialize in climbing ice formations as well. There is even a constituency within the climbing community that now climbs shoreline cliffs rising over waters deep enough to allow them to scale heights “solo”—climbing without protection of any kind. The tendency to specialize in one or a small array of climbing variations is growing as the sport evolves. Moore is somewhat unusual in that he has developed competitive expertise in both boulder climbing and in a wide variety of traditional and contemporary forms of rope climbing as well. Individual practitioners of the sport of climbing may identify with one or several of the various subdivisions of the sport, simultaneously or in sequence. However, a European and Euro-diasporic male majority forms the climbing community’s mainstream and orients its conventional discourse along Western, masculinist lines. A competitive interest in conquering nature, for example, is widespread throughout the climbing community. Analysts of the sport have identified this kind of masterful relation to natural environments as an expression of Western masculinity (Ortner 1999b: 46; Robinson 2007, 2008). Moore himself acknowledged this mainstream element in the sport in several conversations, although he never expressed any identification with it individually. He repeatedly described himself instead as a “technique” climber. His climbing style was defined less by the use of brute strength to prevail over the challenges posed by a route and more by technical skills that could be employed in a manner relatively unmarked by sex or gender. Moore’s climbing skills had been developed prior to puberty, and he had learned to rely on technique years before he acquired his adult musculature. This orientation stayed with him as he developed into a mature climber. The climbing community is not governed by any single official organization, although numerous professional and recreational organizations represent it. In Yosemite National Park, the Yosemite Climbing Association, a nonprofit organization, plays a leading role in representing climbing to official park interests and visitors. The community at large, however, defines itself primarily through informal, regular acts of performance and exchange. These include acts of climbing, the sharing of transportation resources and gear, and shared experiences and representations of climbing sites and dwelling places. Membership is achieved by the witnessing and performance of climbing and verified on an individual basis by the obvious possession of essential gear (climbing shoes and a chalk bag at a minimum) and/or a climber’s physique (Kiewa 2002).

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Degrees of membership and involvement in the climbing community range from occasional workouts at a climbing gym or wall to complete adoption of climbing as orienting a way of life, a “lifestyle” commitment, as sociologists have termed it (Robinson 2008: 2). Lifestyle climbers often give up permanent residences and regular employment for months, even years, at a time.14 Moore to date has not made this kind of holistic commitment. He continues to pursue a career in academics along with his climbing. However, he remains heavily involved in the activities of the climbing community on a year-round basis, traveling internationally during the summers and climbing on a daily basis at local gyms and outdoor sites throughout the Southwest and California during the academic year. While degrees and forms of participation in the climbing community vary greatly, as do political views, income brackets, ages, and virtually every other potentially definitive feature of identity, the climbing practitioner population has been documented as having stable, widely shared constructions of status and identity relative to other sport subcultures (Wheaton 2007). It is a relatively cohesive, coherent social collective in this regard. However, given the continuous transcontinental mobility of its lifestyle practitioners and the disjunctive patterning of residential and occupational life they experience, the climbing community approximates in its organization what Arjun Appadurai has termed a “translocal ethnoscape” (Appadurai 1990, 2003).15 Its members, particularly its elite members, move continuously, both in virtual and in actual reality, between sites of practice in the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, Turkey, India, China, Ethiopia, and Patagonia among other countries. Such movement across borders of many kinds is definitive of the community’s social life. Moore, at the time he made his attempt on Jacob’s Ladder, personified this character of the climbing community to an exceptional degree. The extent to which the climbing ethnoscape can itself be considered the construct of a multinational experience economy16 is a matter of debate. Research suggests that the influence of global commercialization and Western consumerist values is growing in conjunction with some of the sport’s relatively safe, accessible variations (Kiewa 2002:147; Thrift 2000b; Robinson 2007; Heywood 2002, 2006). As the sport grows, so does the degree to which performances of climbing can be observed as embodying the sport’s industrial aspects, themselves multinational in scale. A minute but internationally acclaimed subset of climbers who have their practice financed entirely by commercial sponsors and, in this sense, are “owned” by them does exist. In a minor way, Moore aligned with this small fraction. He sometimes received climbing shoes and other equipment from manufacturers who were seeking his informal endorsement. However, he financed his travels on a shoestring budget through his own savings, participating in an informal network of exchange supported by members of the climbing community. Many lifestyle climbers actually see their way of life as a radical alternative

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to contemporary capitalist-oriented society and even to modernity itself. To some extent, Moore’s performance on Jacob’s Ladder moved both of these orientations “inward” into the Yosemite Valley landscape. Translocal Performance: Climbing Conventions in Action At least three levels of conventional symbolism can be observed to have prefigured and determined Moore’s attempt on Jacob’s Ladder and the meaning that could be constructed out of it. Each level was reiterated by Moore while he was in performance. Each level served to construct the climb, not within the preservation- and conservation-focused symbolism of Yosemite’s official and commercial media, but rather within the technically oriented athletic symbolism of the translocal climbing community. The first symbolic convention invoked in Moore’s attempt was represented by the proper name and accompanying ranking or “grading” that identified the climb and located it on the climbing community’s global map of boulder routes. Although suppressed in a few locations, route maps form a key component of the sport’s representational media (Kiewa 2002). The most well-mapped climbing areas are found in western Europe and the western United States—Yosemite being one of the single most exhaustively mapped sites. However, guidebooks and websites mapping and grading bouldering problems and climbing routes exist for areas of South America, Africa, China, and India as well. Moore himself, at the time of his visit to Yosemite, was collaborating on the development of a guidebook for the Black Mountain climbing area in Southern California that would map several hundred previously unnamed and ungraded boulder climbs. The labeling of the Yosemite boulder as “Jacob’s Ladder” and its accompanying grade—a relatively difficult v7 on the Hueco bouldering scale17—oriented the route geographically for the climbers. It signified the boulder’s position within the climbing community’s translocal topography rather than simply acknowledging its official location within Yosemite National Park. In addition to the route’s name and grade, the actual path of the climb as it progressed along the surface of the boulder—the trail-in-miniature that was marked out via words and gestures before Moore’s attempt —constituted another level of prefigured conventional symbolism. This route, unlike its proper name and grade, was emplaced materially as well as conceptually. The care and maintenance of the “holds,” or grasping places, that constituted it—the application of chalk to them in preparation for climbing, as well as the removal of lichen and moss from them (done prior to the group’s arrival by other climbers)—transformed the boulder into a climber-ready “taskscape,” in phenomenologist Tim Ingold’s terms (1993, 2000). That is, it became an environment characterized by the activity it afforded, in this case a communally understood and practiced activity. The route was not exactly a built environment in this regard, but it no longer existed in a state of wilderness either. Its material modifications reconstructed the

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boulder as a site developed and maintained by the climbing community for its own particular athletic purposes. Finally, the progression of imagined moves intended to be executed on the route, anticipated and deliberated by the climbers prior to Moore’s attempt, formed a third, kinesthetic system of conventional symbolism structuring Moore’s performance. By the time he initiated his first move on Jacob’s Ladder, Moore had articulated, both verbally and in the embodied terms of a climbing-specific action vocabulary, a strategic plan or movement script. The script foretold an action sequence for the entire progression of moves that would constitute his attempt. It determined what holds he would use along the route and how he would move himself in transition from one hold to the next. This construction of his anticipated attempt drew largely upon Moore’s individual technical expertise, although it was vetted and refined via his interactions with the other climbers as well. In the main, however, the script represented Moore’s extensive practice of climbing at sites in Europe, Asia, and North America. It conceptualized one way to move through Jacob’s Ladder according to conventionally recognized, embodied symbols of climbing practice. The significance of Moore’s consciously formulated script is critical to recognize for the purposes of landscape performance theory. His development of an action plan strongly supports a constructionist interpretation of the Jacob’s Ladder climb as the enactment of self-imposed translocal symbols. Moore’s body, in this respect, plays the role of a disciplined internalizer and executer of technical constructs-in-action, a body “to be filled with signs of society,” as geographer Nigel Thrift has characterized the perspective (2000b: 39). Such signs, in this case, were those of the climbing community: glocalized formulations of its theories of bodily technique, its gear-oriented commercialized knowledge, and its expressions of the community’s aesthetics and ethics. The action plan was a vehicle by which the community’s translocal ethnoscape moved significance across the semeiotic threshold inward, down into the somatic reaches of Moore’s organism. It was a means of inscribing its designs into his very being, as it had done so many times over the course of his life as a climber. It transformed his person into an even more representative token of its distinctive climber type, or “bodyscape” (Geller 2009). As it happened, when I made a remark to Moore sometime after the Jacob’s Ladder attempt concerning what I held to be the inadequacy of such a constructionist perspective, he reminded me, and in a manner that indicated he found my comment disaffecting, that the plan he’d developed at the site prior to climbing Jacob’s Ladder had fallen short of success in his attempted execution of it by only one move (personal communication, 30 May 2008). Moore’s response brought home to me the value that such strategic planning could acquire as a prime indicator of achievement in the sport. Planning processes evidenced the accuracy of a climber’s assessment of a route’s problem and the quality of his or her solution

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to it. The sport encouraged such constructionist understandings of climbing as techné 18—the intentional execution of movement scores staged along conventional lines of symbolic action. Having now identified in detail all of its various levels of conventional symbolism, we might well conclude that the inscription of all of these constructions of naming/mapping, route designating, and action plan formulating constituted completely the meaning-making that occurred on Moore’s Jacob’s Ladder climb. It would follow, then, that what climbers in general do when they perform on a Yosemite boulder is animate a taskscape that is structured entirely by the technical, ethical, commercial, political, and aesthetic conventions of the climbing community. What they are constructing in their performances is a glocalized iteration of the established intelligence of this imagined translocal ethnoscape. Such a perspective, interestingly, assigns a relatively marginal role to the national cultural symbolism projected onto Yosemite’s landscape by the National Park Service. This marginality was vaguely indicated in discussions I later had with Moore after his Jacob’s Ladder attempt. We were speaking on these occasions of the uniqueness of Yosemite’s boulder climbs. Moore commented in these exchanges that climbers he knew sometimes wished Yosemite’s boulders might have existed in locations outside the park and away from the Valley. These climbers would have preferred not to have to “deal with Yosemite”—its nature-seeking crowds, its rangers, its camping conditions, its various restrictive, wildernessoriented park policies—in order to climb them (personal communications, 20 April 2008, 19 October 2008). This negative view of the park location was, of course, only one of a diverse array espoused by climbers with whom I came in contact in the Valley. I also met and interviewed climbers, for example, who sought out opportunities to climb Yosemite’s boulders, even during the winter season, so as to be able to climb “in nature” as the park’s landscape exemplified it. However, Moore’s comments indicated how far removed a climber’s experience of the environment could, in fact, be from that represented in the media of the National Park Service and the Yosemite-focused ecotourism industry. Ultimately, then, with regard to the issue of how a climber’s experience in the Yosemite landscape might be socially or culturally prefigured or foretold, the meanings that oriented the Jacob’s Ladder attempt are best understood as constructed in name, design, and material qualities within the translocal social institutions of climbing. While the site certainly had the elements necessary to be constructed as a place of conserved, wild and scenic American beauty, in this case that was not the character of place that was rhetorically most persuasive. The national soil—or rock, as it were—was reconfigured through climbing practice as grounding translocal conventions of meaning-making specific to the climbing community. Visitor climbing, in this respect, was constructing a counter-rhetoric in Yosemite. Its intensely interactive, decidedly not conservation-driven, relationship to the landscape’s boulders worked somewhat against

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the prevailing official park discourse, undermining its long-established national cultural imaginary. Semio-genetic Signs: Outward Symbols of Landscape Affect Its conventional symbols of meaning-making notwithstanding, there remains the question of how the relatively unanticipated and spontaneous aspects of Moore’s attempt, in particular his screaming, contributed to the significance of his performance, and particularly to the political forms of rhetoric it motivated. The screams exemplify a sign performance process that, although it originated on the energetic non-imaginary side of Peirce’s semeiotic “gate,” did not signify as merely individual or personal. The screams’ symbolic import—their movement across the Peircean threshold—was as large in scale, at least potentially, as the transcontinental world of climbing itself and as influential as the power structure of that world and those with which it articulated. They embodied this large-scale influence because they succeeded, at least temporarily, in altering the fundamental characters or qualities of that shared experiential world. In so doing, they made persuasively “conventionalizable” previously inconceivable coordinations of environment, power, self, and community, not only for Moore and the direct witnesses to the attempt, but (albeit potentially) for all invested in the conventions of climbing practice thereafter. To elaborate on how the screams realized their emergent, unforetold significance, I draw upon a theoretical framework currently under development in the field of new cultural geography. It is manifest in the work of geographers David Crouch (2010a, 2010b), John-David Dewsbury (2000), Jessica Dubow (2001), Phil MacNaghten (2000), Derek McCormack (2003), Mitch Rose (2006), and John Wylie (2002, 2005, 2006a, 2006b). It is developed in the work of sociologists Nigil Thrift (1996, 2000a, 2000b) and John Urry (2000) and in that of anthropologist John Gray (1999). It is sometimes identified as “post-phenomenological” or “nonrepresentational” in philosophical orientation. Although it positions itself explicitly as extending the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it also aligns implicitly in certain key respects with Peirce’s semeiotic theory. It brings into high relief some of the outwardly moving processes originating on the energetic side of Peirce’s semeiotic gate. Post-phenomenological theory posits that the most basic forms of intelligent activity occurring in human experience are events and processes neither mediated by nor representative of intending human subjects. They are relational activities understood to be ontologically prior to the phenomenon of human subjectivity. A subject’s ability to recognize depth in his or her visual perceptions of a landscape, for example, is a sensory capability understood post-phenomenologically to be an outgrowth of a certain kind of “pre-subjective” but still human experience in that landscape—or in landscapes comparable to it. Such experience occurs and accumulates in unpremeditated, unself-conscious acts of habitation. They are re-

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lational acts of non-contemplative but intelligent movement or “dwelling,” as phenomenological anthropologist Tim Ingold has characterized them (2000). In semeiotic terms, they would be considered mediational symbols of a nonrepresentational variety. Prefigured by such accumulated experience, subject-hood in general and specific subject identities in particular subsequently form and evolve. The emergence of human subjectivity, in other words, is conceived as a process occurring consequently, not foundationally, in the context of an ontology of animate, intelligent sensibilities and materialities. In this regard, post-phenomenological views share with Peirce’s pragmaticism a theory of human subject emergence and formation that is basically ecological. Both challenge the idea that human subjectivity is grounded exclusively in social and cultural symbolic constructions. Aligning with such post-phenomenological perspectives, I argue that sign performance in human experience may also occur and recur in environments where fully distinguishable subjects and objects, and the conventional symbolic constructs identified with them, either have not yet developed or have not been presently recognized or remembered. Meaning-in-the-making, in this regard, emerges as an outgrowth of what Peirce identified as a logica utens, an embodiable ability to process significance intelligibly without recourse to contemplative, self-conscious theorizing (De Waal 2001: 22–23; CP 1.623). To describe such a logica utens, it is necessary to follow emergent movements of signification into and out of realms of experience that are both pre-subjective and pre-symbolic in any conventional sense.19 Such a procedure puts the accidental, unplanned, and nonconventionally enacted aspects of the Jacob’s Ladder attempt in a more relevant light. Observing them in post-phenomenological terms, Moore’s screams can be said to have generated a relational complex still itself in the process of emerging into fully cultivated, subjectively reflected objectivity. The screams constituted an affective field where human and nonhuman elements of experience were ontologically interlaced.20 In this regard, they exemplify what Thrift has termed “immersive” movements of landscape experience, movements in which energetic apprehensions21 of the performance field were made transformatively manifest (2000b). They enabled and extended, and imposed upon Moore’s witnesses, what MacNaghten and Urry have termed an “enfolded encounter” (2000: 8). In such experiences, basic qualities of being are understood to be redistributed energetically, pre-symbolically, and inclusively to the performance “participants,” that is, to all bodies performatively involved, whether organismic or inorganic, human or granite. All agents of relational movement are understood to be enlivened and animated in the performative field, albeit to different degrees and in different respects, via intelligible patterns of connecting energy. It is of first importance, in this regard, that the screams, as they came ripping through the air, seemed to come out of nowhere, as, post-phenomenologically and

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semeiotically speaking, they did. They had not come from Moore himself, Moore the actor, the individual subject, who definitely had not meant to utter them. It would be more accurate to say, again, following post-phenomenological perspectives, that Moore had assumed the figure of a pre-subjective “body-in-encounter” as far as his screaming was concerned (Thrift 2000b). He had entered into a phenomenological state in which his life-form was situated in between multiple human and nonhuman elements vitally and integrally connected to one another by the attempt. These connections produced an assemblage where hands, ears, edges, granite, chalk dust, shoe rubber, gravity, breath, abdominal muscles— all of these were inter-habitating agentively and coordinating choreographically. The specific sonic consequence of this dance-like performance ecology not only took over Moore’s entire person; it also enfolded in its manifesting character all those witnessing it as well. It temporarily displaced the group’s subject-object conceptualizing, interrupting individual and collective representational faculties. The screaming, in sum, diverted all perception—not only Moore’s, not only human—to the reception of its overwhelming quality. The collective impact of Moore’s screams, their standstill-producing character, may in large part be attributed to what Erin Manning has conceptualized as “elasticity” as it can be evident in the performance of a “technique of relation” (2009: 41). Such events take place when the character of enfolding that is manifest in a given performance process creates an extremely intense affective quality or tone. It is a quality so extraordinarily animated that it propels experience into a realm of possibility where no prior forms of understanding have any conceivable purchase on the likelihood of what may happen next. When such elastic performances occur, previously unfathomable possibilities of relation become conceivable and, consequently, representable. Moore’s attempt constituted such an event of elasticity. In Manning’s Deleuzian terms, Moore moved well beyond “what it seemed a body could do,” accessing as a consequence a realm of the almost virtual—a realm of a pure experience (Manning 2009: 42).22 Moore’s screams, in this regard, were not governed by any conventional project of cultural construction. They did not represent the technical wisdom being moved inward in his intended performance on Jacob’s Ladder. They constituted instead an intervention of nonconventional experience into Moore’s enactment, fundamentally altering any meaning his attempt might subsequently make. They forced a new, shared awareness of what could happen—without warning, despite the best laid plans—on a boulder problem such as Jacob’s Ladder. None of the witnesses present at Moore’s attempt that day was anticipating an interpersonal bonding experience, especially one involving the unlikely figure of a non-climber, middle-aged anthropologist. Nonetheless, during the seconds that passed as Moore’s screams filled the air, separate realities came to an end, and the diverse translocal collective that had established itself around the boulder was brought quite literally to a screeching halt. The screams reduced its prefigured so-

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cial character, literally without a second thought, to nothingness. In virtue of their elasticity, the screams moved a new realm of shared interrelations into being. The incredible yet absolutely unambiguous perceptual experience they afforded reconstituted the “us-ness” of the assembled party. In semeiotic terms, it redefined one quality of feeling by which the understanding of the symbol “us” might orient itself. In the classic terms of symbolic anthropology, the screaming brought into play a new and momentarily all-pervasive force within the environment’s activity field, a new Turnerian symbol through which something on the order of communitas found a minimal threshold to occur. If anyone present at the attempt was moved to a new awareness of the Yosemite landscape as a consequence of Moore’s climb, it was by way of this particular affective field of relations, discursively unmarked yet of exceptional perceptual clarity. A new membership was forged in that field. Its allegiance, integrity, and meaning-making capabilities had been neither prefigured nor predetermined by any subject or discourse, individual or collective, nationalist or global. Rather it was a membership with an open-ended identity, an identity more virtual than actual. It was an identity defined, to the extent that it had been defined at all, by the characters of feeling in which it had been born and the possibilities for future experience and self-conduct that those had made imaginable and persuasive. When asked about the screams in a conversation several days after the attempt, Moore reported that screaming was something that tended to happen when he was “trying really hard” on a climb (personal communication, 1 May 2008). Climber friends had once in a while teased him, or even expressed annoyance with him, about their volume. Screaming was not part of his technique, not something he had trained to be able to do, not something he intentionally built into his plans, but still something that tended to manifest with some consistency in routes that required relatively great effort. He reported that there were other climbers who also screamed—or, more accurately, found themselves screaming— under similar circumstances. He directed me to some examples of it on YouTube. I subsequently discovered on my own images of climbers screaming on climbs that were used in advertisements in climbing magazines as well, their significance now harnessed mutely to market-driven imagery. I never, however, encountered another example that came close to replicating the screaming I heard on Jacob’s Ladder, in terms of either the amplitude, intensity, and rawness of affect or the conveyed character of struggle. It has remained unique in my experience, belonging solely to the local environment in Yosemite Valley where it, quite literally, took place. In this regard, Moore’s screams might seem only to reinforce the assumption that the kinds of affective significance emergent in the pre-subjective realms of human life do not possess the capability to move very far beyond the semeiotic gate that Peirce identified. Their meaning-in-the-making potential would appear to be largely, if not entirely, ephemeral. This interpretation, however, grants real-

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ity only to the instantial character of the screams as individually actualized, what semeiotic theory identifies as their status as “sinsigns.”23 It ignores their character as replications,24 albeit spectacularly intensified replications, of reoccurring patternings of unplanned expression. Ironically, it misses the fact that the unique, unforgettable quality of the screams was itself an outgrowth of Moore’s accumulated experience of climbing. The screams embodied a semeiotic symbol, in this regard, though an unconventional, ecologically choreographic, and mediational one. In this latter sense, however, the screams were anything but simply local in character or significance. They were sounds that had taken decades of immersed encountering and several continents’ worth of climbing problems to reactivate. The lungs that gave them wind, the diaphragm that undergirded them, the vocal tract that set their key and gave them tone, pitch, timber, and voice—these organs had lived a lifetime of unforetold experience that informed the manifest quality produced on Jacob’s Ladder. The screams, in other words, were not one-time-only mechanistic consequences of crude sensation. They were a rather extreme example of what Manning has described as “improvising with the already-felt” (2009: 30). They did not represent a history of subjective action. They were not the outcome of any habitus that might have predisposed such a history. Their improvisational character was neither regulated nor “reasonable” in any habitus-inspired sense (Bourdieu 1972: 78). Rather, they evoked and reactivated a durationally extensive continuity of immersive experience. The Jacob’s Ladder screams, in this regard, were but the latest expressions of an ongoing perceptual war against the more unattainable strongholds—the Whiteheadian stubborn facts25—of the vertical world of climbing. It was a war that Moore had been involved in waging from place to place, from continent to continent, and from encounter to encounter since the body that had sustained him had first developed the ability to find a hold graspable and cling to it for all it was worth. Interpreted within their own continuous temporality of reproduction, the screams registered on translocal scales of significance. They were not merely Yosemite-specific. They were expressions of affect that, by lodging themselves in the experience of their witnesses, were destined to reactivate in future, analogous environments of practice. Just as it had taken a lifelong journey through the world of climbing to get Moore’s body into the shape it had to be in to animate the sonic field his act of climbing did, so too might the world of climbing, and all the worlds with which it interfaced, be eventually informed and influenced by the newly reborn movement emerging on Jacob’s Ladder. That dance-like movement made conceivable previously unimaginable, but broadly applicable, modifications of technique and perceptions of routes. It compelled new judgments determining the construction of norms relating to the use of vocalization in aesthetically and ethically charged climbing conduct. In its transcontinental applicability, Moore’s

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screaming could potentially translate itself onto global scales of convention. No other sound that might be heard coming out of the mouth of a climber in some future attempt would carry the same meaning for Moore’s witnesses or for all those to whom they might eventually relate the Jacob’s Ladder performance. The screams, in this last respect, not only staged an immersing perceptual reality. They were also integral to the creation of a fledgling line of symbolism once they were rendered technically relevant in Moore’s performance. When he literally figured them out bodily, a growth of climbing intelligence took place. What had begun as an elastic encounter quickly became a valid basis for modifying the conventional action vocabulary in the process of being employed. With a fluency achieved via decades of practice, Moore coordinated the screams, inventing in action an application of their terrific force to his attempt. He managed this not by moving his consciousness into some cerebral realm of pure theory, but in and through the logica utens his movements of climbing choreographed. His being did not remain in the state of simply feeling the screams; his body did not simply register physiologically the givens of the environment encountered through them. Instead, Moore, the subject, entered into a process of learning by way of them. His performance became a trial-and-error process, once, twice, and finally a third time. In so doing, a movement of unmediated affect crossed the threshold, potently, into the realm of methodical practice. In this regard, Moore’s screaming can be observed, in semeiotic terms, as the pragmatic coming into being of a hybrid symbol, as originary movement made relatively early on in a process of cultivating applied intelligence. From either semeiotic or post-phenomenological perspectives, the screams constituted generative first steps in the emergence of new awarenesses and identifications, new developments of climbing expertise, and new modifications of climbing conduct. These were all forged in relation to a continuity of experience that was translocal in orientation, ecologically corporeal in character, and potentially transcontinental in contextual resonance. From either perspective, the seemingly inescapable national discourse of conserved wilderness, already so intensively prefigured in the Yosemite landscape, failed to register as a significant element of the environment encountered. It was literally drowned out by the sonic force of the semeiotic gate opened and employed in Moore’s Jacob Ladder performance.

Conclusion The climbing community continues to work through its own routes, rocks, and holds around the world. It is constantly moving into new translocal environments. It does so not only by means of conventional symbolic constructs that it intentionally employs to represent itself, but also by dint of the experiential and ecological fields of symbolism that it generates, improvises, and choreographs. In every bouldering encounter, new experiences are brought into conceivability, new perceptions of the climbable are registered, and new human/nonhuman

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thresholds are interlaced. In performances that transform the unimaginable into the doable, new hybrid symbols are coordinated as well, symbols expressing all that it can mean to be immersed in spontaneity while simultaneously dwelling in national, global, or translocal imaginaries. Climbing is not unique in this respect, but, rather, exemplary of visitor activity in Yosemite Valley more generally speaking. Its performances move the national and the postnational/translocal inward and the unforetold outward, as does virtually every other form of energetic visitor activity. Climbing’s rhetorical significance, and that of visitor activity in general, exceeds considerably, in this regard, what constructionist theory would identify and interpret for it, even in a landscape as overdetermined by established forms of conventional symbolism as Yosemite National Park. Despite its exemplary character, however, the logica utens specific to the sport of climbing does have at least one distinctive rhetorical dimension. It is one that distinguishes it from virtually all other forms of visitor activity. Climbing is profoundly concerned with one basic normative ecological problem that happens, not accidentally, to be staged in the Yosemite landscape on a scale of spectacle unrivaled by any other place in the world. That general problem is how best to deal with gravity in an environment where gravity severely limits human locomotion. This is the issue that orients the arguments of climbing’s choreographic symbolism, conventional, emergent, and hybrid alike. Insofar as gravity may be considered the force that to a great extent prefigures human experiences of power, the symbolism choreographed by the climbing community bears relatively directly on virtually all politically motivated forms of symbolic construction, including those promoted by the standard representations of the National Park Service. Insofar as the sport’s performance processes are engaged in the rendering of new intelligence vis-à-vis gravity’s all-pervasive influence, the experimental and elastic aspects of climbing enlarge continuously the understanding of all that gravitas, socially and culturally, nationally and postnationally conceived, might mean. Climbing in Yosemite, in this regard, serves an ongoing corrective symbolic purpose. It continually opens up new semeiotic thresholds in the face of conventional institutional foreclosures. It enacts gates through which new possibilities for conceiving of how power might be embodied, experienced, coordinated, and, most significantly, redistributed may freely move and grow. Moreover, the extraordinarily elaborate, embodiable techné that climbing performance has evolved enables its emergent, gravity-oriented meaning-in-themaking to move across semeiotic thresholds with very high degrees of articulateness, fluency, and persuasiveness. These movements foretell of hybrid forms of learning that are both extraordinarily nuanced and widely applicable, particularly to intellectual contexts marked by high levels of complexity and sophistication. The emergent symbolism of climbing, in other words, does not appear destined

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to remain isolated in the realms of the athletic, the ephemeral, the affective, or the recreational. It is more likely to move outward in relatively far-reaching trajectories, translating its choreographic arguments into minds that are open to exploring all that it can mean, for better and for worse, to live with a transcontinental awareness of the Earth’s nonhuman fields of power, as creative instruments of its emerging significance. The translocal performance of bouldering in Yosemite, in this regard, is not simply a means of achieving relatively extreme forms of freedom from the conventional symbolic regimes of human power structures, national or postnational. It is not only a means of hiding away from reflection and contemplation inside some ephemeral “pre-” realm of unmediated, spontaneous experience. Neither, however, is bouldering only a means of constructing counter-rhetorics, which do no more than resist and react oppositionally to established large-scale discourses—something its analysts repeatedly have argued.26 Bouldering also can be observed as staging choreographically projects of meaning-in-the-making, out of which symbolism creatively evolves and influences, crossing thresholds of experience and intelligence to deepen and extend its insights, rather than simply to affect, react, or conform.

Notes Acknowledgment is due to American Anthropologist, for granting permission to reprint portions of this essay, which was published in 2011 under the title, “Bouldering in Yosemite: Emergent Signs of Place and Landscape” 113(1):71–87. 1. See for example, the summary description of Burns’s documentary at the PBS website: http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/about/. 2. Broader critiques of constructionist (and closely related “representationalist” and “constructivist”) approaches to the study of bodily experience and performance can be found in Csordas, ed. 1994, Csordas 1994, 2002; Howes 1991; Thrift 1996, 2000a; Stoller 1995; and Noland 2009. 3. For elaborations of these standard activities, see the Yosemite Association website: http:// www.yosemite.org/visitor/trip.html#todo; the Yosemite National Park website: http:// www.nps.gov/yose/nature/history.htm; Whitfield 2002: 93–163; and Medley 2002: 29– 33. 4. “Significance,” as used here, is defined in alignment with Peirce’s semeiotic theory to characterize the meaningful import of an instance of sign processing. Significance is attributed to all types of Peircean signs, not only symbols that perform according to conventional rules of representation. 5. One of the most renowned variants of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim employs this idea of the gate. It reads, “The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason” (EP2: 241; my emphasis). I read the maxim for the purposes of this essay as arguing that conventional symbols are integrally related to other kinds of semeiotic signs and even to processes and movements that may not be triadic/sign-like in character.

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6. In their unconventional, un-“foretold” character, they are somewhat similar to Erin Manning’s concept of “events-in-the-making” (2009). However, their relation to continuities of symbol generation and their non-virtual characters are fundamentally different from the kinds of performance Manning theorizes. 7. In fall 2008 I employed Moore as a research assistant, and he accompanied me on two subsequent climbing excursions to Yosemite Valley. On these trips he led a number of climbs and also provided coaching on bouldering problems. I returned to Joshua Tree National Monument to climb with him in February 2009 as well. In addition to these outdoor excursions, I met with Moore on numerous occasions at the local Threshold Climbing Gym in Riverside, CA, where I practiced climbing. 8. He placed fifth in the 1999 Junior Competitive Climbing Association Junior Nationals and fifth again at the Nationals of the American Boulder Series in 2004. 9. In climbing terminology, he had successfully “red-pointed” (finished climbs previously practiced) over two hundred of the most difficult sport climbs located throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia (climbs designated 5.13a or harder on the Yosemite Decimal Grading System, which rates climbs in difficulty as ranging from 5.1 to 5.15). “Sport” climbing is done by attaching ropes to bolts that previously have been permanently set into the rock surface. 10. In August 2009, when this manuscript was first submitted for publication to American Anthropologist, Moore was ranked thirteenth in the world in the combined category of route and boulder climbing on the 8a website, which at the time was the leading website used for ranking competitive climbers (www.8a.nu/user/Profile.aspx?UserId=4883). The Yosemite boulder climbs he completed successfully on the trip herein described were entered into his 8a record. 11. The photograph, taken by climber John Vallejo, may be viewed on the following website: http://www.climbing.com/photo/john-vallejo-photography-2008/. 12. I have analyzed such “inwardly” moving sign processes at length in Ness 2008. 13. See the definition of a sign given in the introduction. 14. See, for examples, the Dirtbag Diaries podcast series by Fitz Cahall (2007–2009). See Abramson and Fletcher’s characterization of the countercultural orientation of the climber subculture (2007). See also Wheaton (2007). 15. For culturally focused research on the social organization of climbing, see Abramson and Fletcher 2007; Donnelly and Young 1999; Heywood 2002, 2006; Kiewa 2002; Lewis 2000; Robinson, ed. 2007; and Robinson 2004, 2007, 2008. 16. See Thrift 2000b on experience economies. 17. The Hueco scale, devised by John Vermin, is the most widely used in North America. 18. See Heywood (2006: 2) for a discussion of the core role of techné in climbing. See Abramson and Fletcher (2007: 6) on willful action in climbing. Lewis (2000) documents the importance of self-determination. 19. Peirce identified two such realms or Universes of Experience: that of the First (the realm of possible experience) and that of the Second (the realm of actual experience). These two realms form the basis of all representational processes, all of which belong to the Universe of the Third (of general or continuous experience). Limitations of space do not permit further discussion of the Universes, also called the Universal Categories. (EP2: 360–70; Corrington 1993: 117–66; De Waal 2001: 12–19). See also the introduction to this volume.

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20. McCormack (2003), Pile, Harrison, and Thrift (2004), and Rose and Wylie (2006) provide comparable analyses of such events of ontological interlacing. 21. Some Peirce scholars might be more inclined to use the term “prehension” here, in order to reference the relatively immediate (in Peircean terms, “monadic”) character of the connections patterned. See Griffin (1993: 20) for a discussion of “prehension” as it relates to Peirce’s category of Secondness. The relation I am reporting on here, however, is one of Firstness as it characterizes the quality or feeling of the realm constituted in Moore’s screaming. 22. Pragmaticist philosophy would characterize this as a realm of Secondness or Actuality. 23. A sinsign is defined as an actual existent thing or event that may be taken as a sign. “Sin,” as in “single” or “simple” means “being only once” (EP2: 291). For further explication, see Corrington 1993: 150–52 and Liszka 1996: 36–52. 24. Peirce identified performances of this kind as replicas, which he observed were “peculiar” kinds of sinsigns, recurring forms that served to embody collectively the continuous being of a semeiotic symbol. 25. Cited in Manning (2009: 39), “stubborn facts”—what Whitehead called “non-beings of immediacy”—are integral to the performance of movement that reactivates past experience constituting a relatively familiar, expertise-rich way of moving. As Griffin characterizes them, they are nonsensory perceptual processes that in Peircean terms belong to the Universal Category of the Second (1993). 26. See, for example, the analyses of Abramson and Fletcher (2007); Heywood (2006); Kiewa (2002); Lewis (2000); Ortner (1999b); and Wheaton (2007).

References Abramson, Allen, and Robert Fletcher. 2007. “Recreating the Vertical: Rock-Climbing as Epic and Deep Eco-play,” Anthropology Today 23(6): 3–7. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2(2): 1–24. ———. 1993. “Patriotism and Its Futures,” Public Culture 5(3): 411–29. ———. 2003 [1996]. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography.” In Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (eds), The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, pp. 337–50. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, Edward (ed.). 1988 [1984]. Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Chicago: Waveland Press. Cahall, Fitz. 2007–2009. The Dirtbag Diaries. Podcast online: www.apple.com/search/ipodi tunes/?q=Dirtbag+Diaries. Last accessed August 26, 2009. Corrington, Robert S. 1993. An Introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Crouch, David. 2010a. Flirting with Space. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. ______. 2010b. “Flirting with Space: Thinking Landscape Relationally,” Cultural Geographies 17(1): 5–18. Csordas, Thomas J. 1994. “Introduction.” In Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–24.

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———. 2002. Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave. Csordas, Thomas J. (ed.). 1994. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. New York: Cambridge University Press. Deverell, William. 2006. “‘Niagra Magnified’: Finding Emerson, Muir, and Adams in Yosemite.” In Amy Scott (ed.), Yosemite: Art of an American Icon. Los Angeles: Autry National Center in association with University of California Press, pp. 9–22. De Waal, Cornelis. 2001. On Peirce. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Dewsbury, John-David. 2000. “Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 473–96. Donnelly, Peter, and Kevin Young. 1999. “Rock Climbers and Rugby Players: Identity Construction and Confirmation.” In Jay Coakly (ed.), Inside Sports. London: Routledge, pp. 59–68. Dubow, Jessica. 2001. “Rites of Passage; Travel and the Materiality of Vision at the Cape of Good Hope.” In Barbara Bender and Margot Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 241–56. Edelman, Marc, and Angelique Haugerud (eds). 2005. The Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Friedman, Jonathan, and Kajsa Ekholm. 2008. Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of Globalization: The Anthropology of Global Systems. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geller, Pamela. 2009. “Bodyscapes, Biology, and Heteronormativity,” American Anthropologist 111(4): 504–16. Gray, John. 1999. “Open Spaces and Dwelling Places: Being at Home on Hill Farms in the Scottish Borders,” American Ethnologist 26(2): 440–60. Griffin, David Ray. 1993. “Introduction: Constructive Postmodern Philosophy.” In David Ray Griffin et al., Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 1–42. Hartshorne, Charles, and Paul Weiss (eds). 1931–1935. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols 1–6. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Heywood, Ian. 2002 [1994]. “Urgent Dreams: Climbing, Rationalization, and Ambivalence.” In G. Ritzer (ed.), McDonaldization: The Reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, pp. 64–69. ———. 2006. “Climbing Monsters: Excess and Restraint in Contemporary Rock Climbing,” Leisure Studies 25(4): 455–67. Howes, David (ed.). 1991. Varieties of Sensory Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Inda, Jonathan X., and Renato Rosaldo (eds). 2008. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25: 152–74. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Kiewa, J. 2002. “Traditional Climbing: Metaphor of Resistance or Metanarrative of Oppression?” Leisure Studies 21: 145–61. Lewellen, Ted C. 2002. The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey.

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Lewis, Neil. 2000. “The Climbing Body, Nature and the Experience of Modernity,” Body and Society 6(3–4): 58–80. Liszka, James J. 1996. A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MacNaghten, Phil, and John Urry. 2000. “Bodies of Nature: Introduction,” Body and Society 6(3–4): 1–11. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCormack, Derek P. 2003. “An Event of Geographical Ethics in Spaces of Affect,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geography 28: 488–507. Medley, Steven P. 2002. The Complete Guidebook to Yosemite National Park. El Portal, CA: Yosemite Association. Ness, Sally Ann. 2008. “The Inscription of Gesture: ‘Inward’ Migrations of Dance.” In Carrie Noland and Sally A. Ness (eds), Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–37. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ogden, Kate N. 2006. “California as Kingdom Come.” In Yosemite: Art of an American Icon. Los Angeles: Autry National Center in association with University of California Press, pp. 23–53. Ortner, Sherry. 1999a. “Introduction.” In Sherry Ortner (ed.), The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–14. ———. 1999b. Life and Death on Mount Everest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Osborne, Mike. 2009. Granite, Water, and Light: The Waterfalls of Yosemite Valley. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Peirce Edition Project (eds). 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–93). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP1. ———. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP2. Pile, Stephan, Steve Harrison, and Nigel Thrift. 2004. Patterned Ground. London: Reaktion. Raz, Aviad E. 1999. Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, Victoria. 2004. “Taking Risks: Identity, Masculinities, and Rock Climbing.” In Belinda Wheaton (ed.), Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity, and Difference. London: Routledge, pp. 113–30. ———. 2007. “Introduction.” In “Gender and Extreme Sports: The Case of Climbing,” special issue, Sheffield Online Papers in Social Research, issue 10, http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ shop/10.html. ———. 2008. Everyday Masculinities and Extreme Sport: Male Identity and Rock Climbing. Oxford: Berg. Robinson, Victoria (ed.). 2007. “Gender and Extreme Sports: The Case of Climbing.” Special issue, Sheffield Online Papers in Social Research, issue 10, http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ shop/10.html. Rose, Mitch, and John Wylie. 2006. “Animating Landscape,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24: 475–79. Scott, Amy. 2006. “Introduction.” In Amy Scott (ed.), Yosemite: Art of an American Icon. Los Angeles: Autry National Center in association with University of California Press, pp. 1–8.

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Scott, Amy (ed.). 2006. Yosemite: Art of an American Icon. Los Angeles: Autry National Center in association with University of California Press. Starr, Kevin. 1973. Americans and the California Dream. New York: Oxford University Press. Stoller, Paul. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge. Thrift, Nigel. 1996. Spatial Formations. London: Sage. ———. 2000a. “Afterwords,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 213–55. ———. 2000b. “Still Life in Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature,” Body and Society 6(3–4): 34–57. Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. Wheaton, Belinda. 2007. “After Sport Culture: Rethinking Sport and Post-Subcultural Theory,” Journal of Sport and Sport Issues 31(3): 283–307. Wylie, John. 2002. “An Essay on Ascending Glastonbury Tor,” Geoforum 33: 441–54. ———. 2005. “A Single Day’s Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30: 234–47. ———. 2006a. “Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24: 519–35. ———. 2006b. “Smoothlands: Fragments/Landscapes/Fragments,” Cultural Geographies 13: 458–65. Whitfield, Paul. 2002. The Rough Guide to Yosemite National Park. London: Rough Guides.

Chapter Two

q

Climbing Scenic-Obscenic Movement

The space of a (social) order is hidden in the order of space. —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space Space is a hidden feature of movement and movement is a visible aspect of space. —Rudolf von Laban, Choreutics A principle is a way to make a map where no map exists. —Jonathan Burrows, A Choreographer’s Handbook

Introduction

T

he main concern of this chapter is to show how ethical subjects, subjects capable of discriminating good from bad and right from wrong, emerge and evolve in landscape performance processes in Yosemite National Park. Early on in my ethnographic work, it became clear to me that dance-like forms of visitor activity were integral to such formative processes. Cultural performances in Yosemite, as elsewhere, are deeply invested with moral obligations, judgments, and consequences. Ethical identities, I observed, can grow out of the experience of such performances. In Yosemite, the mission of the park to treat the landscape respectfully so as not to denigrate its highly valued and easily damaged character sets the stage for many kinds of ethically defined action. Literally every step a visitor might take and every gesture he or she might publicly make inside the park boundaries entail decisions that have ethical consequences. Even the tiniest movement—the accidental planting of a foot outside the boundary of a marked trail, for example— can conceivably affect the experience of other visitors seeking also to experience Yosemite’s wilderness and so be subject to ethical definition and evaluation.

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Visitors are constantly reminded by a wide variety of signs, official and otherwise, that the park receives millions and millions of people visiting each year. This population is recognized and represented as a cumulative force whose destructive potential could be devastating, even if each individual in it were to commit only the most minor of infractions. One pine cone surreptitiously taken as a souvenir, when multiplied by four million, could have a catastrophic impact on the landscape, or so the thinking goes. How one acts in the park, in this regard, and any traces that one might leave of one’s presence in the landscape can be interpreted as a demonstration of one’s ethical character. It can also be interpreted, in the case of an American visitor, as evidence of one’s patriotism or lack thereof. It can also be judged as evidence of one’s concern for future generations of visitors, regardless of nationality, both inside the park and beyond it. Yosemite, in this respect, at every turn affords visitors countless opportunities to rehearse and perform what it means to be and to become an ethical subject in relation to the standards articulated in the discourse of the National Park Service and the ecotourism industry that partners it. Of all the different kinds of visitors liable to be referenced in relation to ethically marked discourse, the visitors who repeatedly were given the spotlight, in my observation, were Yosemite’s traditional (or “trad” in climbing discourse) climbers. Horseback riders, RV-campers, river rafters, backpackers, and virtually every other type of visitor activity group came in for their share of scrutiny as well, of course. However, no group compared to climbers—particularly the archetypal “dirtbag” lifestyle climbers—as far as generating discussion on the ethics of acting like a good or bad visitor was concerned. The results, in this case, were extremely mixed. Visitor climbers were typically admired for their athletic abilities and seen to be exceptionally virtuous in this regard. However, they were often judged harshly when it came to their visitor ethics more generally. They were likely to be cited as one of the more badly behaved, “obnoxious” visitor groups, even while they were acknowledged as extraordinarily accomplished, in terms of the kinds of performances they staged in the landscape. The varied assessments of the ways that climbers could be both “good” and “bad” visitor subjects did not add up to a coherent subjective profile. One seasoned park volunteer with the Yosemite Association, for example, as we were having a conversation at our campground after hours one evening, when hearing about my recent experiences with climbing, looked at me with a wideeyed expression, leaned forward, and exclaimed with a frown that climbers, in her opinion, were “rowdy!” The comment came as something of a non sequitur, following a remark I had made about my own limits of understanding the sport. It was a surprising comment coming from this particular individual, whom I had come to regard as one of the gentler and more fun-loving members of our campground collective. On another occasion, another veteran in the park’s workforce, a naturalist, when he got on the subject of climbers with me, related that his re-

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peated interactions with them during the time he had been a ranger himself had been generally frustrating. This was due, in his experience, to what he viewed as the typically immature, rebellious, and irresponsible manner of interacting with authority figures that climbers had presented at the time. I found the naturalist’s comments strangely out of character as well. He, too, had struck me as being one of the most open-minded, tolerant individuals I had encountered on my visits to the park. He was not alone. Another park ranger, one who had had decades of continuous service in Yosemite, reported to me when the topic of climbers came up in our conversation at an evening social gathering that the slang word currently used by climbers to refer to rangers was “tool.” He looked at me in silence after he had conveyed this information, his expression making it clear that no further comment was needed to convey his opinion of people who would use this term in relation to park service personnel. These conversations, and others like them, served to convey the general impression that visitor trad climbers in the Valley were held in mildly ill repute by relatively established, senior members of Yosemite’s public service network, professionals and volunteers alike. Of course, individual exceptions to this stereotype were quickly acknowledged, whenever a contradictory case might be presented. However, the exceptions only seemed to prove the rule. As a collective, the reputation of climbing visitors was ethically transgressive as far as their overall compliance with park policies was concerned. Nonetheless, the exploits of the most daring and successful climbing mountaineers (such as Alex Honnold, who climbed the three-thousand-foot vertical face of Half Dome successfully in 2010 without a rope) were admired by all. The physical regimen to which climbers subjected themselves often was deemed the most virtuous of any visitor group. The actions of climbers in performance on their routes were more likely than not to be characterized as courageous, if not heroic. Yet, the population as a whole was also profiled to be relatively irreverent, unruly, and disrespectful. Formal statements made by park authority figures never gave any official credence to these criticisms. They emphasized instead the positive, progressive aspects of the climbing community as it had grown and matured inside the park over the years as evidenced by the emergence of the NPS Climbing Rangers personnel and the Yosemite Climber Stewards program among others.1 Yet, the negative as well as the positive ethical character of the profile was still conveyed through informal channels. It was a puzzling outcome, in my observation, until I came to participate actively in the performance processes of traditional rope climbing myself.

Cultural Performance and Ethical Subject Formation With regard to the connection between cultural performances and processes of ethical subject formation, the work of anthropologist Saba Mahmood, in particular her study of women’s ritual performances in the mosque movement of Cairo,

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Egypt, serves as a productive point of departure (2012). Mahmood has observed that cultural performances such as traditional ritual practices are integral to the formation of ethical subjects in Cairo. Key to Mahmood’s argument is the observation that rituals do not simply re-inscribe ethically defined symbolism onto passively submitting human subjects. Instead, employing Judith Butler’s performative theory of subject formation, Mahmood argues that rituals provide a means by which participants engage agentively in the mental-spiritual-physical and moral constitution of their own selfhood. “In this formulation,” writes Mahmood, “ritual is not regarded as the theater in which a performed self enacts a script of social action; rather, the space of ritual is one among a number of sites where the self comes to acquire and give expression to its proper form” (2012: 131). Any human subject, to generalize from Mahmood’s perspective, in order to become ethical, must actively incorporate discourses existent in that subject’s social and cultural context into their own constitution. Only such active partaking in incorporating performances serves to make subjects normatively “sociable” (2012: 152). Cultural performances that entail a high degree of reoccurrence in Yosemite can be seen, in this regard, as serving an incorporating purpose closely analogous to the ritual practices Mahmood analyzes in the Cairene context. Traditional activities that visitors engage in in Yosemite are a creative and necessary means by which they agentively render themselves who they are as proper subjects with respect to the park’s ethically defined landscape. Mahmood underscores the importance of embodied action as it relates to ethical subject formation in her approach. She asserts, “Different modalities of moral-ethical action contribute to the construction of particular kinds of subjects, subjects whose political anatomy cannot be grasped without applying crucial scrutiny to the precise form their embodied actions take” (2012: 24). The form of their embodied action—its choreographic design—is a key factor in Mahmood’s perspective insofar as shaping and influencing the ethical constitution of the performing subjects. Mahmood’s Butlerian theory goes some way toward explaining the positively valued side of the climber subject profile in Yosemite. In the case of climbing, as Mahmood’s theory would frame it, the assiduous agentive practice of climbing’s virtuosic physical techniques enables climbers to direct and take charge of their own process of subject formation. It provides them with a means of coordinating admirable physical behavior with conventional notions of what it takes to develop a good park-exploring self. Such a subject must be energetically attuned to the landscape and fit to explore it in the best possible way, even the most challenging features of its vertical topography. To the extent that climbers perform this discipline according to its carefully defined models of technical conduct, and to the extent that they apply themselves to such explorations successfully, they constitute themselves as respectable and admirable ethically defined visitor figures.

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The case of climbing notwithstanding, cultural performances more generally provide human subjects with such means for ethically defined self-constituting activity. In so doing, in Mahmood’s view, they underlie and make conceivable certain kinds of political formations as well. Mahmood argues, “Once we recognize that political formations presuppose not only distinct modes of reasoning, but also depend upon affective modes of assessment, then an analysis of ethical practices of self-formation takes on a new, distinctly political relevance” (2012: 33–34). The ethical self and its formation can be understood as a symbolic bridge, in this regard. It links subjectivity, particularly its affective dimensions, to collective patterns of political organization and movement, as well as to an individual’s political character, or “anatomy” as Mahmood puts it. Applied to the case at hand, the formation of ethical subjectivity is a bridge that connects landscape performance to national park politics. As Mahmood’s Butlerian approach would define it, however, this bridge can be seen to support only one part of that connection. In the case of climbing, it is the virtuously identified, admirable part.

Yosemite’s Public Discourse of Ethical Subject Formation The complexity of the trad climber’s ethical profile becomes even more perplexing when it is viewed in relation to the ethical value the National Park Service places on embodied forms of visitor activity. The National Park Service has developed a perspective on these practices that would seem to parallel that of Mahmood’s. Links between embodied action, ethical subject formation, and politics are institutionally recognized and made explicit in public forms of Yosemite National Park discourse. Park rhetoric, both official and commercial, not only sanctions but openly encourages and valorizes embodied action in visitor conduct, and for reasons that would seem to align with Mahmood’s. It is in part this institutional recognition that results in the profiling of trad climbers as both ethically exemplary and transgressive visitor subjects. That is to say, given the way embodied performances of visiting are supposed to function, climbers stand out for the ways in which they both do and do not substantiate this logic. The institutional perspective on embodied action and ethical subject formation was brought home to me one evening in May 2008, when I attended a slide lecture in Yosemite written and delivered by a National Park Service interpretive ranger. The ranger employed his own slides and narratives of his own outdoor experiences to craft a presentation about visitor activities that featured scenes of backpacking, hiking, and climbing on the trails of Yosemite National Park. After nearly an hour of the most beautiful imagery and inspired prose he could muster, the ranger closed with a series of slides illustrating “global warming” and its impact on park flora (mottled leaves indexing the damage being done to the Earth’s ozone layer). The sequence of the presentation made a direct connection between the importance of exploring the park landscape through embodied action and actively addressing environmental problems affecting the well-being of the en-

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tire planet. The presentation ended with a call for action: to conserve natural resources both in the park and in the world at large. While the slide lecture was without question the ranger’s original work, it bore a family resemblance to others that I had witnessed in Yosemite, both before and after its performance. In every case, rangers used the writings of naturalist John Muir—Yosemite’s most popular and influential early advocate—to encourage visitors to “get out” of their vehicles and experience the park’s natural features on their own two feet. Embodied action in the landscape was considered the first step in the development of a conservationist politics and activist persona. As another ranger later put it in his own slide presentation, one of the “7 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference” in the conservation movement is “Fall in Love with a Natural Place”—something that would inevitably occur, in the ranger’s perspective, if time were spent exploring the park landscape through embodied visitor practices. National Park Service personnel, in this regard, like Mahmood, typically viewed embodied forms of traditional visitor activity as integral to the formation of ethical visitor subjects. The National Park Service subscribed in its own public discourse to the opinion that embodied action in the landscape would lead to the constitution of well-behaved visitors, visitors whose political orientation would eventually align more and more with its own. Yet, with respect to the visitor subject group that arguably should have demonstrated the validity of this logic most clearly—the climbers who devoted themselves most ardently to physical activities enabling them to partake of climbing in the Valley—the results seemed only partially confirming, at best. Again, the case of climbing highlights the incompleteness of this particular theoretical view of landscape performance and ethical subject formation.

Ethical Subject Formation in Yosemite as Spatial Practice In exploring the relations between embodied action and the political anatomy of Yosemite’s various visitor groups, the case of traditional climbing demonstrates that the processes of ethical self formation that create these connections are not constituted exclusively by conventional discursive formations and the performativity characteristic of their reiteration alone. In this respect, Mahmood’s performative theory, and that of Judith Butler on which it rests (and that of Michel Foucault, on which Butler’s is based), is inadequate. These approaches address only the aspects of ethical subject formation that result from societal forms of symbolism and their determinations. The ecological character of landscape performance, however, as previous chapters have defined it, cannot be fully interpreted by such discursively limited analytical approaches. Hence the missing pieces of the climber subject profile and its ethical bridge. To address the ecological rhetorical processes of landscape performance as they may engender the formation of ethical subjects in Yosemite, sociologist Henri

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Lefebvre’s theory of spatial formations may serve as a more comprehensive organizing theoretical platform. Lefebvre’s pioneering research on social forms of space, human and nonhuman alike, is directly applicable to the study of the Yosemite National Park landscape. Yosemite exemplifies many of Lefebvre’s ideas and arguments concerning the production of social space. Moreover, Lefebvre’s spatial theory conceptualizes spatial experiences and formations that are not necessarily discursively determined. They may not even be of human design and origin. In this regard, the theoretical spectrum Lefebvre develops is comparable in its breadth to that of Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic. While Lefebvre did not reference Peirce’s semeiotic directly in his work, he did position his ideas about the emergence and evolution of social spacial formations in direct opposition to discursive semiotic theory. Lefebvre’s conceptualization of spatial practice, in particular, a concept that is of central relevance to the analysis of ethical subject formations emerging in Yosemite landscape performance, was developed in direct refutation of structuralist, discourse-based semiotic theories of social meaning-making.2 Lefebvre rejected the humanism, the idealism, and the representationalism foundational to structuralist semiotic theory. His approach to the study of social spatial formations is fundamentally ecological in this oppositional regard. To illustrate the manner in which ethical subject formation occurs ecologically through embodied action in Yosemite landscape performance, I present in the following section an account of an instance of traditional rope climbing in which I was myself the focal human participant. The example includes an obscene speech act and, in so doing, provides an illustration of the kind of behavior that contributes to the reputation of climbers in Yosemite as an inconsiderate, disrespectful visitor group. However, it also demonstrates that when viewed through the lens of Lefebvre’s spatial theory, ethical subject formation in landscape performance is never an uncomplicated process. Its symbolism, even its most seemingly unambiguous, firmly established linguistic symbolism, is itself subject to multi-stable interpretation and semio-genetic transformation. In this regard, the incident foregrounds the capacity of landscape performance to permeate and even hijack3 the discursive formations of the park’s official and commercial symbolism.

Leg Jamming on a Church Bowl Crack The incident at issue occurred when I was on a research visit to Yosemite National Park in May of 2010 with a group of three climbers I had recruited to spend a long weekend with me doing traditional rope climbing in Yosemite Valley. This was the third time I had been rock climbing in Yosemite. I had started to practice climbing in the Riverside area in April 2008. By 2010 I was able to climb, in a non-leader role, some of the easier routes that started on or near the floor of Yosemite Valley.4

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On this morning, our group was in an area called the Church Bowl, which lies at the bottom of the Valley’s northeastern rim. It is located a few minutes stroll away from the Ahwahnee hotel, a short ways off the beaten paths and roads used by day visitors. We had anchored a rope above a crack that ran in a steeply curving path up a granite face about sixty feet high (see figure 2.3). None of our climbing guidebooks had referenced this crack, although they had identified several other crack climbs nearby. It was a little disconcerting to me that this climb had been left out of the guidebook maps, descriptions, and ratings, given how detailed they tended to be. However, the crack looked like it was within my range of technical ability—I being the least accomplished of the group and so the one whose skill level determined the choice of the climb. Although we had no definite information on its difficulty, our lead climber went ahead and set up the rope for it. The width of the crack running up the face gave us an opportunity to practice a climbing technique called “fist jamming.” We had been practicing this initially on a different climb near Yosemite Falls two days before and were interested in trying it again on this climb. Fist jamming requires a crack formation large enough so that the climber’s fist can be wedged into it and serve as a brace to support the climber’s weight. It is a technique that cannot be practiced on the flat surfaces of gym climbing walls. Unless a gym has constructed a crack formation, which mine had not, the technique has to be learned “outside” in non-human-constructed landscapes. I had had only one other opportunity previously to practice fist jamming before making this trip to Yosemite. This had been in Joshua Tree National Monument, in February of 2009, with Alan Moore. It occurred on a climb called the Bong on a formation called the Blob. That climb had not gone well. My notes on the experience summarized it as “the hardest thing I have ever done” and reported general failure in executing the technique. However, crack climbs are numerous in Yosemite Valley. The Valley’s massive rock walls are full of cracks—age-old products of its glaciation and weathering patterns. The crack we had climbed in the Sunny Bench area of Lower Yosemite Fall, named Jamcrack, on our first day out (see figure 2.1) was rated in the guidebooks as being more difficult than the Bong had been (5.9 on the Yosemite scale). I had managed to complete it in short order, although I had not used any real fist-jamming moves. The experience had given me confidence, however, to try the technique again. This unnamed Church Bowl crack would be my last opportunity to do so, since we were scheduled to leave the Valley to return to Riverside right after we had finished climbing it. This crack climb, however, also did not go well. The fist-jamming technique again didn’t work for me. I found the crack somewhat too large (“off-width” in climbing jargon), at least for my attempts. I was unable to wedge my hand into the crack securely and bear weight on it, as the technique required. Regardless, the crack remained the only climbable feature on the otherwise smooth, steep

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Figure 2.1. Jamcrack’s vertical crack, a typical feature in Yosemite’s granite walls. Photo by Derick Fay, May 2010.

rock face. As I made my way up it, I continued to try to use the crack’s form as a support in any way that I could manage to do so (see figure 2.2). It was a frustrating process, during which I failed time and again to execute the fist-jamming maneuver. However, as other means of leveraging myself against the crack continued to present themselves, I continued for a time to make progress along the route. When I had reached a point about two-thirds of the way up the crack, it widened and deepened significantly, to the point of making any fist-jamming move totally out of the realm of technical possibility, at least as far as I could imagine. I began to search around inside the crack instead with my right foot while clinging to the face with both arms. My whole body was right up against the rock at this point. I tried to get a foothold inside the crack, but with no success. As I tried, I stuck my entire leg into the crack, my right thigh going into it as well. Somehow, during this process, I managed to lodge my entire thigh inside the crack. The upper leg wedged firmly into the opening and stuck there. Bracing my arms and free leg as best I could against the rock face, I tried to pull the right thigh loose but couldn’t move it. The tugging action actually felt as though I was making it worse. I tried a second time but felt no improvement whatsoever. It seemed as though the crack had somehow locked the thigh into

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Figure 2.2. Author climbing on the unnamed crack before the incident occurred. Photo by Darrell Logan, May 2010 (from the collection of Sally Ann Ness).

place. The leg was held fast at a place close to the top of the femur, just a few inches below the right hip socket. The jammed area was so high up on the leg that it completely immobilized the entire limb. I had my left leg and upper body to work with in relation to it, but I could find no firm foot- or handholds anywhere available at this place on the climb outside the crack. My torso was so close to the rock face that only a few small backwardly arching movements of my spine were possible. I had minimal range for any forward or backward postural movements—the type that I would have needed to perform in order to get the thigh out of its locked position. Try as I might, I was unable to get any dependable support whatsoever that might have allowed me to create a base from which to jerk or pull the right leg free with my full strength. Panic started to rise as I wondered if I could possibly break my femur bone, were I to leverage my weight against the jammed leg in the wrong way. I could feel the bone now as a distinct body part—a decidedly eerie sensation. Its “stuckness” in the crack had clearly now distinguished it from the rest of “me.” The bone felt as if it were floating freely in relation to the hip socket where it normally was firmly seated. In actuality, it was not the femur but the pelvis that was floating. The pelvis was hanging in midair on the rope to which the harness I

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was wearing was tied. The femur felt as though it had come unhinged from “my” pelvis. It felt, long, thin, delicate, and easily snappable. I had the sense that if I were to pull away too hard from it and suddenly lose the feeble purchase I was barely maintaining on the granite face, all of my free weight would fall into the harness and downward toward the ground below. A free fall, if it went far enough and fast enough downward, might put enough stress on the immobilized limb to break the femur or severely dislocate the bone from the hip socket. My partner below who was holding onto the rope (my “belayer”) had been giving me more slack in the rope I was on than I had wanted throughout the climb. We had not climbed much together previously, and his manner of belaying me was relatively unfamiliar. It was actually something of a compliment, the way he was doing it, as his technique conformed to a more advanced standard of climbing ability than I had as yet achieved. My regular partners, who knew my limits better, always kept the rope I was on very tight, expecting that I would take falls frequently while climbing and not wanting me to fall far when I did. This “in tight” strategy made sense for beginning climbers, who were prone to falling. However, it was not generally preferable for more skilled climbers, who sometimes wanted slack so as to have a little more freedom to maneuver when making a move. What felt to me like an excess of slack in my rope, accustomed as I was to the beginner mode, had been irritating lower down. Now, in the present situation, it became frightening. I carefully wriggled, pushed, and pulled to try to budge the thigh into moving, but to no avail. I wondered how anyone might be brought up to this place to assist me if I could not find a way to release myself from this jam on my own or if I were to break the femur bone. After I had repeatedly failed to dislodge the thigh, I finally said something like, “My leg is stuck,” out loud. Only two of my companions could hear me at this point, my belayer and our lead climber, who was perched on a ledge taking pictures. I did not say the words very loudly. The announcement, and the appeal for assistance it contained, was half-hearted. I was loath to have either of these two know that I was having trouble, especially this kind of trouble. However, there seemed nothing else to do at this point other than to ask them for advice. Neither climber, however, seemed to grasp what my situation was. Neither offered advice of any note. Feeling left entirely to my own devices, I continued to try to loosen the thigh, but with no success. It was not long after this that I lost control of my language. In a vehement exhalation, tears welling up, I burst out, “Fuck!” As far as I can remember, this was the first time I had ever shouted this word. It was definitely the first time I had ever uttered it while climbing. In my experience, it came out involuntarily, exploding. Its expression dismayed me. In that same moment, however, my jammed leg also came loose from the crack. I had no awareness of how this happened. My sense of the action was focused entirely

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on the utterance I had made. I had said a word that people in my family simply never said. That was all. That my leg was suddenly moving freely once again was something like a miracle. It was not something “I” had done. My immediate reaction to this series of events was a combination of relief, shame, and disappointment. I wished I had been able to hold out silently a little longer through to the final successful movement. I wished I had some idea of how the leg had come unstuck, which would then count at least for some gain in technical experience. I waited for some response from my climbing partners, wondering if I would have to suffer some acknowledgment of the multiple levels of disgrace I had just brought on myself. None came. Neither of them ever commented on it, then or later. It appeared to have been lost in the ongoing stream of events. In my field notes a few days later, I represented the incident as an “ugly” moment, writing, “The climb had gotten the better of me.” Nothing ever came of it, except that about a week later, when I was out driving and I realized I had forgotten something I needed at home, an echo of the speech act suddenly reoccurred. My nine-year-old daughter in the rear seat at the time, obviously puzzled, asked, “Mom, what are you shouting ‘Duck!’ for?” I stammered something about having seen a bird on the lake we happened to be driving by. After that, it never happened again.

Interpretation The incident described above bears a vague family resemblance to many incidents of swearing-while-climbing that I witnessed during my years of field research. I would characterize it as a relatively mild token of this speech act type. In its use of obscene language, it is ethically charged. Its verbal content would have been considered unambiguously offensive to a visitor seeking an experience of Yosemite’s pristine wilderness landscape. There were other visitors in the area within earshot on that day. They were other climbers, as far as I know. Given the proximity of the location to the Valley floor, however, there may have been other visitor witnesses as well. What happened during my crack-climbing incident would, from Mahmood’s performative perspective, be characterized as a failed attempt to direct a process of ethical subject formation. In seeking to master the technique of fist jamming, I was (ironically, as it happened) intending to figure out one way by which I could form myself into a particularly “good” visitor subject. I was actively working to acquire a skill that was recognized by the climbing community as necessary to explore certain features of the Yosemite landscape safely and effectively. My efforts constituted a creative exercise in self formation. I was discovering how to change myself into the kind of person who could move in a proper way when environmental circumstances indicated that it was, in fact, the right way, and a good way, in Muir’s words, to “get out,” into the park landscape.

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The obscene speech act that occurred instead constituted the opposite of what the discipline dictated. Unable to avoid the hazards inherent in the practice, the intended performance failed. The subject that formed as a consequence was a “bad” visitor self, one who had misdirected her practice, imposing foul language onto an otherwise unspoiled park scene. Interpreted along these lines, the climbing incident represents the limits of a certain ethically defined discipline as I was then able to embody it. It illustrates a relatively early stage of an individual practice of visitor subject formation and demonstrates how far from perfect that practice was in achieving visitor “good-ness.” This Butlerian interpretation, while it does begin to address a certain darker side of ethical subject formation processes, nonetheless leaves two key aspects of the climbing performance unaddressed: (1) the involuntary character of the speech act and (2) the fact that the climb itself, including this moment of it, was not a failure. The speech act played a not insignificant role in that outcome. The foul language may actually have prevented an injury. It is these two aspects of the performance that Lefebvre’s spatial theory can address relatively effectively. Monumental Representations of Space To reframe the crack-climbing performance in Lefebvre’s theoretical terms, it is necessary to recognize that the Yosemite National Park landscape in general and the climbable features of it in particular exemplify a specific kind of spatial formation that Lefebvre identifies as one of monumentality. Such a formation is designed, in Lefebvre’s perspective, to effect and condense enduringly a social consensus. This consensus is defined as a collective reflection of subjective membership in a given society (1991: 220, 225). Spaces of monumentality are designed to represent such consensus both “frontally” and “brutally”—that is to say, both overtly and with extreme forcefulness, as though it were an unchangeable, uncompromising fact of existence (1991: 33). The basic mission of a space of monumentality is to demonstrate both concretely and abstractly the signifying powers of a center of wealth, which is its producer, and which is using the space to mold and to control symbolically all of the spaces it is currently dominating (1991: 49, 115). Monumental space belongs to the more general Lefebvrian category of “representations of space,” or space as “conceived” (1991: 39–40). This general category of spatial formation serves to articulate order and knowledge as these may be evident in a society’s relations of production (1991: 33, 115). It also functions to present this knowledge in a manner that enables the societies that have given rise to it the ability to recognize themselves in it (1991: 45). Representations of space are the only kind of social spaces that Lefebvre acknowledged were produced specifically so as to be “read,” although he argued that such representations were far more complex and multiplicitous than that offered by texts (1991: 222, 288). Monumentality, nonetheless, he argued, “always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message” (1991: 143).

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In Peircean semieotic terms, monumental spaces are those that stage the most strongly deterministic types of sign performance, ones that can be enacted only via the most persuasive, habit-forming kinds of Symbols. These are termed Arguments. The arguments of monumental spaces depict the nature and logic (to the extent there is any) of the social consensus as it has been shaped and controlled by the center. They also evidence the presence (if not the validity) of the consensus in various other places that are claimed by the center as belonging to it. As public, communal spaces, monumental spaces are generally heavily regulated by agencies of power. Numerous prohibitions and demands on the conduct of individual subjects who may gain access to them are typically articulated in relation to them. Such directives guard against actions that would be considered vulgar or offensive (1991: 57). They define in their regulatory discourse how ethical subjects are supposed to form in relation to the space of monumentality. Yosemite Valley, in Lefebvre’s terms, is an American monumental space par excellence. It may seem to be a somewhat complicated example, as it purports to be a wilderness landscape, a space left untouched, as opposed to being socially produced and human-made. However, Yosemite functions as exactly the kind of spatial formation Lefebvre identified, its natural features having been appropriated, in Lefebvre’s terms, rather than completely dominated, by the American nation-state. Lefebvre defined the appropriation of a natural space by a society or group as a process of modification, not absolute transformation, “in order to serve the needs and the possibilities of the group” (1991: 165). Appropriated monumental spaces are not “emptied out” of their natural resources, as dominated spaces are, but instead are left to be as they are. Lefebvre, in fact, recognized parks in particular as examples of “absolute nature”—appropriated space serving symbolic purposes (1991: 366). Yosemite’s wilderness environment in becoming the property of the national government and being dedicated to the representation of all that its societal consensus has deemed admirable in the American landscape serves as an appropriated space of monumentality. It symbolizes the power and the majesty as well as the tranquility and collective joy that the American nation-state would like to argue is natural to all of its own spaces and to their political character in particular. It is no wonder, in this regard, that the governance of Yosemite, and of the other crown-jewel national parks, emphasizes so strongly the preservational, “leave no trace,” mission of these wilderness monuments. The invisibility of Yosemite’s material constructed-ness—the foregrounding of the park’s pristine natural character—is, perhaps, its most effective, argument-performing feature. The near-absolute absence of any visible artificial, unnatural construction in the park landscape depicts the presence of liberty. It is an absence that represents freedom from government interference and domination. It signifies iconically a freedom to grow and to reproduce without political constraint. This is the very

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freedom American national discourse asserts reigns supreme in the American landscape at large. In reality, of course, the Yosemite landscape is a product of intense and careful social control. Its flora and fauna, its rivers and waterfalls, even its fires and floods, and most especially its visitors—all are monitored, managed, and supervised by the National Park Service in its efforts to mold the park’s character as a sustainable, alpine paradise. While the landscape is not “built” in the sense that an urban monument is, it is as shaped by the roads, trails, viewpoints, and other park infrastructure that provide access to it as any built monument might be. It is only via such measures that the park succeeds in enshrining, in Lefebvre’s words, “both the illusion of transparency and the illusion of naturalness” that serve the argument of the nation-state and its concessionaires (1991: 59). Scenic and Obscenic Aspects of Monumentality While Lefebvre’s category of monumental space has several distinctive characteristics, the most relevant for the purposes at hand is that it is a spatial formation composed of two opposing characters: the scenic and the obscene. These characters, Lefebvre argues, are mutually constituting, and they inhere in all spaces of monumentality. A monument’s “frontal” scenic aspects necessarily form in relation to “clandestine” or “underground” obscene relations that require concealment (1991: 33). While, on the one hand, monumental space “says what it wishes to say,” Lefebvre also argues that “it hides a good deal more” (1991: 143). What monumentality conceals specifically are its affectively governed, unjustifiably brutal relations of enforcement (1991: 233). In Lefebvre’s words, the hidden space of any monument entraps “the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought” (1991: 143). Monumental space, in its enforced orderliness and consensus, presents both “the appearance of security and the constant threat, and indeed the occasional eruption, of violence” (1991: 57). It is this unjust and unjustifiable, ultimately fascist, political willpower that constitutes the obscene character inhering in all monumental spaces. It is most uncompromisingly embodied in the phallic symbolism of vertically oriented spatial forms. These monumental forms Lefebvre interpreted as the spatial equivalent of arrogance and masculine brutality (1991: 144, 262, 287). Signs of the obscene and of the scenic, in this Lefebvrian regard, are always co-performing in spaces of monumentality. What monumental spaces present to be seen, heard, or otherwise “read” is always accompanied covertly by what they define as obscene, disorderly, and proscribed (1991: 143). This is what they determine “may not take place,” what they assert must be banished and excluded from their premises and from all of the premises to which their arguments relate (1991: 224, 226). Lefebvre recognized this structural opposition as a “general fact” of all essentially scenic spaces of monumentality (1991: 36). In Peircean

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terms it might be considered the “anti-Proposition” that is necessarily entailed in a monumental argument’s main claims to truth and reason. The monumental spaces of Yosemite National Park, in this regard, signify a “spatial contradiction” (1991: 352–400). They simultaneously present a scenic attraction and conceal obscene spatial formations as well. Their spectacular verticality, appropriated to signify as the phallic equivalent of built monolithic constructions, hides an analogously outrageous political brutality. It is precisely these vertical formations that climbers, through their performative discipline, engage. They engage them more intimately than any other visitor group. The intensity of the ethical discourse relating to climbers may become somewhat more understandable in this monumental regard. Climbing as Representational Space While the Yosemite landscape can be classified according to Lefebvre’s spatial theory as a monumental space of representation, the act of traditional climbing in Yosemite belongs to a different category of spatial formation. It belongs to the general category of representational space. Representational space is space that is “directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (1991: 39). Representational space is experienced by its users or “inhabitants” as already symbolically defined, its meaningfulness transparently evident and fully articulated. Lefebvre elaborates, “Representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (1991: 39). The actions undertaken in representational space are prescribed by established social codes. The climbing incident recounted above can, in this regard, be interpreted as an example of representational space, one occurring within a monumental, abstract space of representation. Such a double spatial formation, in Lefebvre’s view, tends to be transformative both socially and individually. He associates it with the work of culture (1991: 43), with artistic creation, and with the transformations typical of the performing arts specifically (1991: 188).5 Such combined spatial formations may take place in the performance of ritual practices, as in the case of the Cairene mosque movement Mahmood interpreted. However, they may also manifest in “vast ceremonial unities” of a more elaborate symbolic character (1991: 224). Climbers, in this regard, “live” the symbolism of Yosemite’s monumental space when they are climbing its topographical features. Through their self-disciplined practices, they become, in its spaces of representation, living embodiments of its appropriated now animated “properties” (1991: 224). They experience its monumentality affectively in their choreographic actions and purposeful gestures. As long as the actions undertaken conform to the “frontal” or “scenic” code, the climbers experience and embody the virtuous side of the social space that, in Lefebvre’s terms, “imposes” itself upon them (1991: 43). They become

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good, even heroic visitor selves in this circumstance. However, if they err in their performance from these normatively coded gestures, they then may embody, experience, and make evident the hidden, obscene, brutally violent aspects of the monumental space that also necessarily inheres in these formations instead. This interpretation goes some additional way toward explaining the more transgressive, “obnoxious” character traits ascribed (accurately or not) to the ethical subjects formed by traditional climbing performance in Yosemite. In Lefebvre’s terms, the transformation of represented space into representational space has the capacity to expose and give voice to exactly that which the nation-state seeks to conceal, as well as that which it seeks to foreground. It may signify in performance both the scenic and the obscene assertions relating to the nation-state’s colossal power structure as individual visitor subjects may “live” and subjectify it in this landscape. Climbers’ somewhat unusual profile as double-sided visitor subjects, ethically speaking, can be attributed to this complex representational spatial formation. They are the visitor group that engages in the embodied activity that, although it is perhaps the best possible type of virtuous conduct in terms of being true to Muir’s “get out” philosophy, is also the “worst” in that it is the least subject to “molding” by the National Park Service. The routes that climbers take on the park’s monumental features are not dictated by the park service, nor is the park service able to prohibit climbers from accessing virtually any feature in the landscape that they might decide to climb. Climbers have a relatively high degree of agency in this regard. They can engage with the park’s monumental spaces in a relatively direct, unsupervised manner, taking liberties, as it were, with its (ob)scenery. They have the greatest potential for producing exposures of its hidden, brutal spatial formations of a relatively spectacular kind. This can make them particularly deviant visitor subjects if and when they fail or refuse to conform to park standards of scenic conduct. Lefebvre’s category of representational space aligns in this regard with Mahmood’s theory of ritual practice. It posits that such a space is “lived” in performance as one that is always already defined by societal symbolic constructs. However, it underscores a certain kind of passivity in its theory of representational spatial performance that Mahmood’s agentively focused performative perspective obscures (Lefebvre 1991: 43). That is, Lefebvre characterizes representational space as one in which the symbolic codes of spatial representations are afforded to subjects inhabiting that space. Inhabitants are formed as subjects in the image of those social codes. When examined closely, Mahmood’s theory does not contrast with Lefebvre’s on this point. Mahmood’s performing subjects, while they exhibit agency in their enactments of ritual practices and in the forming of their own subjectivity, are nonetheless still passive symbolically, as Lefebvre observes. They do not contest the symbolic content of the discourse their rituals enforce, nor do they seek to reinvent that content of the codes they practice or to

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replace that content with original arguments of their own design. In Mahmood’s performative perspective, as in Lefebvre’s category of representational space, the processes enacted that relate to the symbolic, subject-forming capabilities of the performances occur without the subject’s active intervention or modification. Social institutions and interests alone govern the symbolic formations. All that the human subject performs in these contexts is success or failure with regard to incorporating, reiterating, and “living” that symbolic content. They may be more or less masterful in their performance, as the crack-climbing incident illustrates, but that is the extent of their agentive range. Viewed in relation to Lefebvre’s theories of spaces of representation and representational space, then, the crack-climbing incident can be read as an instance of a general kind of spatially obscene, hence unethical, visitor subject formation. The obscene speech act uttered gave voice to brutal, violent, irrational forces meant to be concealed in one particular feature of the Yosemite landscape. The climbing performance revealed something deemed discursively vulgar and offensive hidden in the landscape’s arbitrary and inhumane relations of power. The performance was not only a failure of ethically oriented individual conduct, but also a failure of the monumental space to maintain its officially intended scenic character in the presence of a climbing visitor. The space itself and the society producing it, from this theoretical standpoint, can be seen to bear some share of agency in relation to the obscene performance occurring. Lefebvre’s theory of representational space extends the interpretive range of Mahmood’s approach with regard to the darker side of ethical visitor subject formation in monumental spaces such as Yosemite’s. However, as with the Butlerian perspective Mahmood adopts, this area of Lefebvre’s theory is limited to the interpretation of conventional societal forms of symbolism. It does not address the significance of the obscene speech act as it contributed to the success of the climb and to the visitor’s growth in embodied expertise—a growth that enabled a visitor to get better in her manner of “getting out” into the landscape. Given the institutional importance placed on visitors cultivating such expertise, this is not a minor omission. The lived experience of the monument’s encoded spatial contradiction, in other words, is not the whole of the story of the ethical bridge constituted in the performance of visitor subject formation. Spatial Ethics and Spatial Practice To get at the most fundamental ethical complication occurring in the incident described, and in innumerable others that occur in Yosemite and in monumental spaces like it, Lefebvre’s third category of spatial formation, spatial practice, must be called into play. This category alone addresses the nonconventional forms of significance generated in embodied visitor practices such as traditional climbing. Lefebvre’s theory of spatial practice focuses on formative processes that are socially and spatially (as well as semeiotically) creative in their own right. These

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processes bring new kinds of social spaces and rhetorics into being out of “nature” as Lefebvre defines that term (1991: 70). Lefebvre’s concept of nature or “biomorphic” or “organic” space, as he sometimes also referred to it (1991: 229), is defined in relation to his concept of production, a concept that evidences, perhaps more than any other, his close alignment with Marxist thought. Natural spaces are conceptualized as essentially pre-productive spatial formations. Lefebvre explains: Nature does not labour: it is even one of its defining characteristics that it creates. What it creates, namely individual “beings,” simply surges forth, simply appears. … A tree, a flower, or a fruit is not a “product”—even if it is in a garden. … Nature appears as the vast territory of births. … Nature’s space is not staged. … To say “natural” is to say spontaneous. (1991: 70) While the spontaneous, nonproductive creations of nature were, in Lefebvre’s view, rapidly being lost to human awareness, he maintained that all social space, even monumental space, was “invariably grounded in nature, in the natural conditions that are at once primordial and unique in the sense that they are always and everywhere endowed with specific characteristics (site, climate, etc.)” (1991: 110). All social spaces emerge from “rhythms of nature” that are “transformed by a social practice” (1991: 117). That is, they are transformed via the action of living beings as they become engaged in producing and reproducing first internal and eventually collective spatial productions (1991: 174, 175). While the transformations resulting in “produced” forms of space may appear absolute, Lefebvre nonetheless argued that a complete transcendence out of creative, pre-productive space was inconceivable. “Nothing disappears completely,” he observed, elaborating, “In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows” (1991: 229). This was particularly true of the category of representational spatial formations (1991: 230). However, it was also evident in monumental space and spaces of representation in general. Nature persisted as the “ultimate foundation” of all spatial formations, an “irreducible fact” of all kinds of space (1991: 230–31). Lefebvre’s theory aligns closely, in this creative regard, with Peirce’s rhetorical branch of semeiotic. It recognizes creative ecological processes as a generative, nondeterministic basis for social and cultural constructions. Spatial practice, then, in contrast to representational space, is “lived directly” and formed intelligently in the performance of purposeful movements before it is conceptualized representationally (1991: 34). It is categorized as space “perceived” by Lefebvre (1991: 40), a spatial formation generated and apprehended through the “internal rationalities” of bodily activity (1991: 174).6 It is not space socialized and recognized via discourse and then lived, as is representational space. It is space evolving in action by what Lefebvre characterized as the creation

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and re-creation of an organized, regularly reoccurring, embodiable “animating principle” (1991: 137). This animating principle, in semeiotic terms, would be characterized as a spatial habit and an emergent ecological symbol. The animating principle of Lefebvre’s third spatial formation is experienced by those who perform it as the presence and originating definition of themselves. It produces the initial awareness of an “I”—of an “own” form of spatial vitality. It is the basis of subjectivity in a moving life-form, defining an organically integrated actor. It endows such a being ecologically with qualities that can acquire ethical definition and value, whether or not the discriminatory intelligence they evolve is ever represented in conventional human societal symbols. In the specific case of spatial practices, Lefebvre’s theory would maintain that intelligent subjects can be developed and distinguished ethically by their actions alone, regardless of any conventional symbols that in any subsequent way might represent them. Lefebvre is emphatic on this point. The animating principle of a spatial practice need be “neither visible nor legible as such, nor is it the object of any discourse, for it reproduces itself within those who use the space in question, within their lived experience” (1991: 137). Spatial usage, in this regard, can lead to the experience and recognition of better and worse applications of an animating principle. Use alone can produce and grow the awareness of what counts as principled and unprincipled habits of spatial conduct. This is the ethical aspect of what Peirce defines as a logica utens. The animating principle of a Lefebvrian spatial practice is, in this regard, an “in”-formational principle, defining the movement of an emerging subject-inprocess. From a rhetorical semeiotic perspective, it would be a “per”-formational recurrence, one that effects symbolic definition mediationally. The animating principle may be apprehended and integrated initially into subjective experience via spatially patterned co-relations as basic as those of mere tension and contact, as they may be afforded by the givens of a particular environment in which a life-form comes to be moving. However, once the originating in-forming has occurred, the animating principle is reproducible and can be reactivated and remembered in other kinds of relational patterning as well. It is capable, in this respect, of eventually cultivating representational symbols along its own spatially practiced, creative lines. Seen with respect to Lefebvre’s theory of emergent spatial practice, then, what happened in the Yosemite crack-climbing incident takes on a markedly different ethical character. The speech act involuntarily uttered appears, in this regard, not simply as a failure to live scenically the represented space of the monument. It appears as well as a moment when, in that very failure of conventional enactment, unmediated exposure to the space’s pre-productive, creative “nature” was also made momentarily in-formative.7 A new performative ecology, a new animating principle, began to give birth to its own definition to a subject-inprocess. A new ethically definable figure began to develop, one whose discrim-

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inatory faculties would be grounded in the life-affirming, death-defying spatial relations that were then just coming into being. To return briefly to the details of the performance process, keeping this creative spatial formation in mind, when the crack and my right leg were jammed together, the “I” of the climbing subject ceased to signify in accordance with its standard culturally constructed objective definition. That definition, to which I normally adhered, included two lower limbs. In this performative space, however, “I” became subject to a new spatially forming definition. This emerging redefinition indicated that a novel set of spatial relations had moved into being—at least into “my” being. It was the first time, in my experience, that I had ever been caught up in such transformative relations. It was the first time I had ever had a limb taken away, rhetorically speaking, in a landscape performance.8 However, the new relations spontaneously replaced those that had been in effect before I had gotten myself stuck in the crack. In an instant, as the femur and my pelvis became somewhat un-hinged, in that moment when the crack and the thigh became one unyielding unit, standard, subjectively practiced and intended identities dissolved abruptly. Conventional sign relations instantaneously became inapplicable to what otherwise would have been one of “my own” organismic members and to the rock formation as well. I could no longer think of my leg as part of “me” while I was moving in this way. I literally could not imagine the connection. I could no longer feel the limb as part of me either, as it was not responding to “my” efforts to dislodge “it.” Basic habits of self-related-ness had been disrupted. Where, exactly, was “my leg”? Where exactly was “the crack”? I did not ask these questions, given the circumstances, but if I had, no simple answers would have been forthcoming. The symbols I would have needed to use to answer them—concepts that had been functioning normally just moments before—had now ceased abruptly to perform in their normal senses. In this new set of relations, the leg and hip bones registered in my awareness only as unpredictable though acutely sensible forms. They were vague, notnot-me figures9 in an environment that no longer had clear internal-external designations. They constituted new spatial formations, in Lefebvre’s terms, characters whose identifying qualities were felt rather than seen. They now were being perceived by an organism that had, just one long moment before, sustained a very different spatial formation of “me.” The emerging in-formations, however, composed a new self-world construct, a being living now according to a new animating principle, one born, as it were, in the performance of the climb. While this living gestural-spatial landscape was pre-productive from Lefebvre’s point of view, it was not devoid of meaning-making activity. It was still processing certain kinds of information—the qualities of the rock’s surface, for example, and the qualities of the rope. This accumulation of information was beginning to define and animate a new spatial subject-in-process who was rapidly gaining in-

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telligence about its current self ’s formation. Its identity was re-forming in direct relation to the spatial practice. There was, in other words, in this performative moment, nothing influencing the subject formation process other than sensings of texture, tension, contact, and force, as Lefebvre would characterize them, nothing other than present relations of bone and gravity, flesh and rope, granite inclinations and rubber soles, sunlight and shadow, and the vaguely defined impulsive organismic energies of pushing, urging, sinking, rising, tensing, straining, inhaling, exhaling, initiating, and increasingly, yielding. Only through experimenting with these relations was the new “I” able to learn, bit by bit, who it actually was, now that it was finding itself in this profoundly unfamiliar predicament. It would be an overstatement, in this regard, to identify this moment in the climbing performance process as anything as socially evolved and ethically defined as “rebellious” or “disrespectful” or “obnoxious.” It would be equally inaccurate, however, to identify it as “thoughtless,” “brainless,” or “unconscious.” My very awareness of the articulate feeling/form of the novel bone-rock relations was itself a creative advance in intelligence—an instance of semio-genesis. It constituted signs semeiotically classified as “Images”—signs of feeling—in my imagination. It was an affective re-presenting of the environmental relations that were in the process of defining a new subject/spatial formation. It was in relation to this incipient formation, then, that the next moment of this spatial practice occurred. It was a reactive moment, not a contemplative one. In this moment, a fledgling, three-limbed climbing figure, still only vaguely formed, both found and made a move to go on. It was a movement that rendered its emerging “self ” ethically definable, although not in relation to the monumental space and its discourses. Rather, it was a movement that could be assessed as well, arguably even more aptly, in relation to its originating animating principle. That reactive, subsequent movement that was coordinated and performed by this emergent subject/space-in-process was one that the visitor subject previously in charge of the performance would not have willingly executed. It was one that the “I” of earlier moments would have been convinced, somewhat unwisely, that she would rather have died than enact. The movement, however, in these new conditions, was meant, if that is not too strong a term, in a different way. It was performed to effect an energetic surge. While it entailed the utterance of a sound image that carried with it unspeakable monumental/conceptual baggage, in the performativity of that moment, and in that fledgling subject’s repertoire of practice, the concept was re-membered differently, as differently as the subject herself had been by the experience of the climb. It was re-membered, re-activated, and experienced as a mediating sign, a sign of creative spatial action, not discourse. It was motivated and reappropriated—hijacked, so to speak—by a new spatial center in an incipient not-yet-conventional intelligence. In that liminal instant, the

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symbol’s triple movingness, its energeia, served to energize a particular deed. It was a never-before-imagined deed, but a deed that was life-sustaining in relation to the animating principle initiating it. The deed that in fact motivated the sign performance, in this regard, was not unprincipled. The deed was not obscene. It was unrelated to any monumental spatial formation or any represented or representational formation whatsoever in this emerging spatial practice. In that emerging, reactive performance, then, the speech act played an integral role in releasing an incipient subject-in-process from a granite fissure that it had felt and lived and identified discriminatingly as unprincipled, as the wrong way to be with respect to being alive, generally speaking. The emerging figure thereby participated in the creation of a change in itself that was also a change in its world. It did so by adhering to the new space’s rules of conduct, formed as its own living conditions were unfolding. When the incident is interpreted along these lines, as an example of creative Lefebvrian spatial practice, its semeiotic as well as its ethical character becomes more complicated. The conventional linguistic symbol used in the performance takes on the identity of a multi-stable form, rather than a sign whose meaningful content is institutionally determined in a certain way. Its symbolic space appears to have been reinhabited for purposes that it had not been discursively designed to serve. This reappropriation expanded its meaning-making capabilities. An obscene term from the point of view of conventional speech-act usage became an energizing mediator in this emergent instance of landscape performance. It was set to work largely involuntarily, galvanizing a kinetic sequence that reconfigured the weight-centering capability and limb/torso coordination of the organism employing it, a creature intent on preserving a limb, if not its newly (re)formed life. What could only be understood as obscenity in one discursive universe took on principled significance in another spatially and socially incipient one. Lefebvre’s theory of spatial practice, in this regard, illuminates a fundamentally different process of ethically evolving subject formation co-occurring in this instance of landscape performance. In so doing, it provides a more comprehensive interpretation of all that this embodied visitor activity might come to mean, ethically and, eventually, politically speaking.

Conclusion Lefebvre’s theory of spatial practice illuminates the final hidden dimension of the ethical bridge of subject formation, the dimension that deals with the performance of incipient, creative, emergent subjects- and spaces-in-process. It is the dimension that makes visible the most basic motivations determining the choice of action taken on the crack climb reported. It is also the one that makes evident the extent to which the agency responsible for that particular choice was distributed ecologically. In so doing, Lefbevre’s theory of spatial practice reveals

Figure 2.3. Author at the top of the unnamed crack climb after the speech act occurred. Photo by Charlotte Tonnies Moore, May 2010.

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the aspect of the climbing performance process that is at once the most political and the most dance-like of all those considered. It is the aspect that demonstrates what André Lepecki has identified as the dissensual choreography of freedom (2012b). This kind of choreography can occur not only in acts of climbing, but in all kinds of energetic visitor performance. It is a general and distinctive feature of landscape performance, although its emergence in climbing is, perhaps, of a relatively intensified, spectacular variety. This emergent choreography, as the preceding discussion has attempted to demonstrate, cannot be recognized in relation to conventionally constructed agents and subjects of climbing performance. These agents and subjects, as Lefebvre recognized, may serve only to make meaning that is already defined by the social consensus that the monumental space produces. Dissensual choreography cannot be identified in any movement relating simply to the monumental character of space and thus controlled and defined by its regimes of command, policing, and obedience. Such movement, whether scenic or obscene, can only cause signs in performance to move along designated trajectories of interpretation. Even the most calculated, intentionally obscene expressions, if they are performed by climbing subjects solely in relation to the landscape’s established signs of monumentality, are politically passive in this choreographic respect. They admit de facto consent to the spatial logic of monumentality itself, even if they oppose the particular centers that produce it. In so doing, such conventional movements cannot effect dissensual performativity. They remain defined by the ethical coordinates of the monument and the expected behavior, whether virtuous or transgressive, that its consensus anticipates. They are not agentively engaging political forms of performance, in this regard. Lepecki has argued, in contrast, that dissensual choreography is of a more fundamentally autonomous, in Lefebvre’s terms creative, pre-productive kind. He writes, “Art partakes of the political and the political partakes of art only when both produce ontological-perceptual disjunctions and eccentric movements in language and sensation” (2012b: 24). Only when art alters the established courses of meaning-making, only when it finds a means of doing something other than moving signs of language and signs of feeling along in designated interpretive routes, can art be said to partake of the political with integrity rather than duplicity. Only when art transforms a space of policed circulation into one where signs may circulate in relative freedom does it begin to do the work that is politically choreographic, or “choreo-political” in Lepecki’s view (2012a: 13). Only when a subject is an agent of such transformation is that individual truly dancing. Lepecki writes, “The individuation that transforms spaces of circulation into spaces of freedom and of moving political possibilities has a specific name: the dancer” (2012a: 13). Such a transformation, it may be argued, was precisely the kind of movement that occurred in the spatial practice of the crack-climbing performance.

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An emergent figure caught up in an unanticipated situation came to perceive a radical disjuncture in her very being. As a consequence, a conventionally obscene linguistic sign was employed eccentrically, not according to its designated social purpose. It was used energetically, inventing the initiation of an embodied/spatial release and transformation. In this choreographic application, a “partaking of the political” occurred, not one that moved in the ways of conventional societal power structures, but instead one that gave birth to movement according to its own animating principle. The staging of this eccentric release, in Lepecki’s perspective, realized a political engagement. It effected a reinvention of subjective intelligence and a redistribution of corporeal energy that occurred in a manner uninfluenced by the monumental forces otherwise defining the space of the climb. In its uninfluenced initiating effectiveness, it constituted a political occasion, risking the taking of a movement that would need to be performed without familiarity and that would be directed, to the extent that any directionality inhered within it at all, toward a future that was all but completely lacking in definition. This creative, dangerous moment was the moment of the climbing performance that came closest to creating a dance. Interpreted in this way, it would be gratifying to claim responsibility for this otherwise obscene incident. However, as the details of the incident make all too clear, the agency initiating this choreo-political performance was not that of the climbing subject herself. Rather, it was the landscape in which she was immersed and of which she had literally become a part—too much so, in fact—that choreographed this particular political occasion. It was an act of eco-choreography, rather than a humanistic one, although that made it no less politically engaged or effective. To climb in Yosemite, in this respect, is to risk the experience of such dancelike moments of freedom, moments in which a subject’s agency, even their most human faculty of language, may be taken over in an emergent spatial practice by environmental and organismic forces and reinvented in the most eccentric dance-like ways. If climbers are cast as a transgressive visitor group in Yosemite, it is a status that must be assigned in full recognition of their mediating role in relation to a landscape that is both monumental and, still, in Lefebvre’s terms, pre-productive or natural, a landscape still capable of semio-genesis according to its own not-simply-human animating principles. If the exploits and transgressions of climbers may be spectacularly disruptive at times, the social tensions they cause might best be viewed in relation to the kind of creations in which they partake, creations that may leave them (re)formed in an instant in life-altering ways. In their pursuit of dance-like landscape performances in the most brutal spaces of a monument, climbers may be recognized as being among the most courageous freedom makers of all of Yosemite’s diverse visitor populations. The choreo-politics they initiate may at some future point come to serve the common

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good in vital ways. In the experiences of freedom they gain, in the spaces and discourses their performances reappropriate and re-member, new social productions are generated. The experiences of these new social possibilities are ones that only the partakers can share and represent, by both word and deed. In this respect, Yosemite’s traditional climbers may be considered both exemplary as well as dangerous social figures. They know firsthand how to initiate evolutionary and, so, revolutionary movement. They also arguably have the greatest potential to embody the ecological, if not the monumental, humility of a nonconventional dissensual visitor. Lefebvre argued that all three “moments” of spatial formation—spatial practice, representational space, and representations of space (the perceived, the conceived, and the lived) are never simple or stable (1991: 46, 206–7). They are constantly in rhythmic flux, overlapping, and interacting. In this regard, the triadic theory Lefebvre advanced recognizes that there is more to ethical life than discursively oriented interpretations might allow. There is greater complexity in the significance of discursively charged conduct, as such conduct may contribute not only to the maintenance but also to the creation of socializable, politically motivated subjects in diverse spatial productions. Actions, and the spaces that produce them, not only can speak louder than words in this perspective. They may also speak through and with words as well, teaching lessons with them that they were never designed to teach—lessons, nonetheless, that may go bone deep.

Notes 1. Information about the collaborative work undertaken by these groups can be found at the website of the Yosemite Climbing Association (http://www.climbingyosemite.com/ services/getinvolved/). 2. Lefebvre rejected all philosophical, sociological, and anthropological perspectives that assumed “the logical, epistemological and anthropological priority of language over space,” arguing that such theses put “prohibitions” and not productive activity at the origin of society (1991: 36). He further argued, “To underestimate, ignore, and diminish space amounts to the overestimation of texts, written matter, and writing systems, along with the readable and the visible, to the point of assigning to these a monopoly on intelligibility” (1991: 62). Such a theoretical stance sets up a false “void,” in Lefebvre’s view, between verbal and nonverbal forms of meaning-making, reducing the latter to executions of the former such that “the forbidden fruit of lived experience flees or disappears under the assaults of reductionism; and silence reigns around the fortress of knowledge” (1991: 134). Lefebvre insists, “The fact is that signifying processes (a signifying practice) occur in a space which cannot be reduced either to an everyday discourse or to a literary language of texts” (1991: 136). In this regard, Lefebvre was critical of the trope of “reading” as it might be applied to the analysis of spatial practice, claiming, “social space can in no way be compared to a blank page upon which a specific message has been inscribed” (1991: 142). While he acknowledged that some kinds of space were designed specifically to be “read” along the lines that discursive theories suggested, he adamantly rejected that such

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

reading was constitutive of spatial practice generally, claiming that social space was “produced before being read; nor was it produced in order to be read and grasped, but rather to be lived by people with bodies and lives in their own particular urban context” (1991: 143). This refutation of discursively oriented theoretical perspectives is a fundamental, if not the fundamental argument motivating Lefebvre’s spatial theory. This essay seeks to align with and to exemplify in the Yosemite context Lefebvre’s reasoning. Norma Mendoza-Denton has developed this notion of semiotic “hijacking” (2012). See also Ness 2012 for further discussion of the climbing background relating to this event. The example of “theatrical” space in particular is initially mentioned by Lefebvre in this regard (1991: 188, 224). However, his characterization of the role gestural systems of all kinds can play in making the connection between representations of space and representational spaces identifies concert dance performances as well (1991: 214–15). Lefebvre’s theory of natural space as it relates to living beings recognizes a pre-conceptual, corporeal intelligence that produces social and (in pragmaticist terms) nonrepresentational symbols of space in advance of what Lefebvre terms “thought space”—space that is perceived and represented by and for an “I,” a differentiated, socially symbolic conventional subject. He writes, “Long before space as perceived by and for the ‘I’ began to appear as split and divided … long before space emerged as a medium of far-off possibilities, as the locus of potentiality … long before the analyzing, separating intellect, long before formal knowledge, there was an intelligence of the body” (1991: 174). In the post-phenomenological terms employed in chapter 1, this would be a “pre-subjective” and, hence, pre-social experience of generative landscape immersion. Derek P. McCormack (2003) has developed this post-phenomenological line of argument in relation to what he has termed “geographical ethics.” The present analysis supports his findings regarding the spaces of affect he has documented. This was not the first time, however, that such an ontic reassignment of a bodily member had occurred in my experience of a landscape performance. Another instance of this “lost limb” phenomenon is described in Ness 2012. The concept of a “not-not-X” identity is drawn from the performance theory of Richard Schechner (1985: 110).

References Burrows, Jonathan. 2010. A Choreographer’s Handbook. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Laban, Rudolf von. 1966. Choreutics, ed. Lisa Ullmann. London: MacDonald & Evans. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lepecki, André. 2012a. “From (Choreo)policed Circulation to (Choreo)political Intensification: Dance as Critique of Freedom (or: the Task of the Dancer),” Weaving Politics International Conference, 14–16 December 2012. Stockholm, Sweden. ———. 2012b. “From Partaking to Initiating: Leading/Following as a Dance’s (A-personal) Political Singularity.” In Stefan Hölscher and Gerald Siegmund (eds), Dance, Politics and Co-immunity. Zurich: Diaphanes, pp. 21–38.

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Mahmood, Saba. 2012 [2005]. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McCormack, Derek P. 2003. “An Event of Geographical Ethics in Spaces of Affect,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geography 28: 488–507. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2012. “Hijacking Signs,” AAA Annual Meeting presentation. Ness, Sally Ann. 2012. “Talking to My Left Foot: Performative Moves In-Between Self and Landscape in Yosemite National Park,” About Performance 11: 119–41. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Chapter Three

q

Hiking Self-World Transformations

Choreography is a way of thinking … laying out the pieces, organizing the trail. Choreography is a way of seeing the world, the things that move against each other and then back into their own places. [emphasis added by author] —Liz Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer Vacations involving travel … are the modern equivalent of secular societies to the annual lifelong sequences of festivals for more traditional God-fearing societies. —Nelson H. Graburn, “Tourism: The Sacred Journey”

Introduction

O

f all the embodied forms of touristic practice that might conceivably be exemplary of tourism’s relation to conventional ritual practices, those that are constituted by elaborate forms of locomotion, such as hiking and backpacking in wilderness landscapes, are in many ways the most outstanding. Tourism anthropologist Nelson Graburn once identified these forms as “paralleling” religious rites of passage, in particular rites of pilgrimage. In his pioneering work “Tourism, the Sacred Journey” (1977), Graburn noted that the qualities of nature, health, and wilderness could effectively replace the conventional roles played by explicitly divine characters and so serve to inspire manifestations of wonder, awe, rapture, and reverence of an extraordinarily intense transformative character in tourists (1977: 9). Graburn classified touristic practices of this locomotive kind as “self-testing” in recognition of the arduous nature of the physical activity typically involved. Self-testing rituals, in the Western individualist discourses of modern tourism, served the social purpose of proving to the tourist-initiate his or her capacity to successfully make the life changes the rite of passage and its performance were

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designed to support and to symbolize (1977: 12–16). The tourist performed the rite so as to enact a redefinition of his or her own individual character, in effect mastering a new role that would identify the tourist henceforth as a different kind of social being. Graburn’s original characterization of tourism as providing opportunities for self-testing rites of passage has maintained its currency well into the present moment.1 What Graburn and other tourism anthropologists initially identified as the “sacred journeys” or “secular rituals” of tourism (Graburn 1977; MacCannell 1999; Moore and Myerhoff 1977; Turner 1982) have continued to be interpreted as such in contemporary tourism studies discourse.2 The comparative frame relating touristic practices to conventional religious rituals has enabled scholars of tourism both within and beyond the discipline of anthropology to find a productive means, arguably the most productive means, of interpreting both the enacted and the embodied aspects of touristic experience and to explain their generally extraordinary significance. They have effectively argued, in this regard, against a large and influential body of research that characterizes touristic activities and pursuits as being generally superficial, inauthentic, illusionary, and otherwise inferior with regard to their cultural and social meaningfulness.3 Following the line of argument established by Graburn, and also by Sally Falk Moore and Barbara Myerhoff in the introduction to their landmark volume Secular Ritual (1977: 19–24), proponents of this theory have demonstrated repeatedly that what it is that necessitates that the experiences of tourism and tourists be taken seriously by social scientists is their capacity to serve as secular rituals. However, while tourism is posited as being extraordinarily meaningful in the secular ritual perspective, it is nonetheless also understood to be fundamentally and necessarily different from religious forms of ritual per se. This is because tourism’s rituals are seen to be originating and evolving in social structural opposition to various modern formations of Western industrial labor.4 The ritual character of tourist activity is assumed to be a consequence of the position they are assigned in such production-oriented, modern cultural structures. In this work/leisure structural dynamic, touristic practices are conceptualized specifically as secular rituals. In Victor Turner’s often cited terms (1977, 1982), they are identified as the staged “liminoid,” counterparts of premodern liminal religious ritual traditions. The activities, pursuits, and experiences of any tourist, in this regard, are seen to be a predictable outcome of his or her identity and position within some larger sociocultural structure of labor. The generative opposition to “work” casts the rituals of tourism as being always already about play—nonserious, recuperative, and recreational. To return to the argument made in the previous chapter, the subjective identities espoused in tourism’s rituals, from this secular ritual regard, are understood to be basically reiterative and socially constructed. They exhibit little or no agentive character in and of themselves in relation to their social constitution. Likewise,

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the performance of touristic rituals is considered to be an execution of predetermined rules and conventions always already formulated in existing, well-established social and cultural discourses and other conventional symbolic processes. Ritual processes are conceptualized as the overdetermined expressions, albeit meaningful expressions, of social structures that create their defining, attractive, and secular features. The perspective of secular ritual theory, in this regard, aligns closely with that critiqued by Saba Mahmood discussed in the previous chapter. With this theory and its critique in mind, then, this chapter reports on what might be, in the specific context of North American popular culture, the most renowned of all self-testing ritual practices of the last century and a half: the hike to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. After giving a brief synopsis of the classic Half Dome hiking ritual performance process, I recount one episode that occurred at the crux of the Half Dome trail—a slip on the cables approaching Half Dome’s summit. The episode illustrates, in a manner parallel to that given in the previous chapter, one way in which a spiritual or sacred self redefinition can emerge ecologically and choreographically in landscape performances. That is, it illustrates how sacred as well as profane processes of subject formation can be understood, not simply as passive reenactments of already established social structures, identities, and discourses, but rather as the creative means by which human beings render themselves who they are—intelligent, identifiable subjects who relate movingly to given social and cultural environments and constructs as well as nonhuman landscapes.

The Half Dome Hike: A Yosemite “Classic Route” A Yosemite “classic route,”5 Half Dome is the sheerest cliff in North America. Its massive granite formation rises almost 5,000 feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley to an altitude of 8,842 feet, presenting a 2,000-foot northwest face that is only seven degrees off absolute vertical.6 Its topographical structure embodies a character that guidebooks to the park agree has become iconic of the park landscape (Medley 2002: 39; Swedo 2011: 50; Whitfield 2002: 26, 100). This is evidenced in the logos of both the park’s main concessionaire, Delaware North Companies, and its main service organization, the Yosemite Conservancy.7 Both present images of Half Dome as their central iconic figure. In Native American myth and religion, Half Dome, or Tis-se-yak, as it is named in the language of the Ahwahneechee people, has always been recognized as a sacred site. The name Tis-se-yak refers to a mythological character, a woman who drank from the waters at the base of the dome and who, as a consequence of a conflict with her husband, was turned into the stone constituting the dome. Her face is believed to be visible toward the top of the dome’s northwest face, as are her tears.8 The dome, however, is presented to park visitors, in both official and commercial discourse and imagery, in mainly secular terms. While the Tisse-yak myth is sometimes mentioned, Half Dome is generally characterized as a

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place affording spectacular views of the Valley from its summit, as well as providing a scenic wonder in its own geological right. It is this non–Native American, secular characterization that is generally understood to motivate Half Dome’s touristic self-testing rite of pilgrimage.

Figure 3.1. Half Dome seen from Glacier Point, July 2005. The face of Tis-se-yak is said to be visible in the upper right quadrant of the north face. Photo by Katie Manduca from the collection of Sally Ann Ness.

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The hike from Yosemite Valley’s floor to the summit of Half Dome is around 16 miles round trip and involves an elevation gain of 4,842 feet.9 It can only be done between late May and early October, when snow is least likely to be present. The hike is, by all published English-language accounts, “strenuous.” Guidebooks recommend allowing nine to fourteen hours for the hike if it is attempted in a single day (Medley 2002 33; Wells 1998: 50; Whitfield 2002: 100). An overnight strategy, which divides the hike into two unequal sections, is also a popular alternative—a 4.4-mile hike into the Little Yosemite Valley campground on the first day, gaining 2,100 feet, leaving the remainder of the ascent and all of the descent for the following day. The popularity of the Half Dome trail cannot be overstated as far as American ecotourism and the international visitor population it attracts is concerned. While the Yosemite landscape affords innumerably various kinds of hiking, and while it is certainly hiked and experienced in almost inconceivably many ways by its diverse visitor population, the Half Dome trail, in its contemporary manifestation, nonetheless attracts and engages a kind of “outdoors”-loving tourist that is archetypal of the contemporary American National Park visitor subject identity. As American wilderness expert Suzanne Swedo states in one of her several Yosemite guidebooks, “Half Dome is the symbol of Yosemite: its summit the goal of just about everybody who has ever donned a pair of hiking boots” (2011: 50). While the Half Dome trail is not the trail that every Yosemite visitor hikes—in fact only a minority of them actually do—it is the trail that epitomizes what the hiker role, as an admirable visitor character type, is all about. It is the hiking performance to which all other Yosemite hiking experiences, among many others, may be compared and by which they may be measured in terms of their virtuosity and the self-testing ritual they are capable of staging and enacting. In its most heavily trafficked recent years, the count of hikers on the summit of Half Dome during peak season rose to over thirteen hundred visitors a day. A series of accidents and other problems related to overuse compelled the National Park Service to institute a permit system in 2010. The number of hikers reaching the summit subsequently decreased to around four hundred a day and dropped further to just under 300 in 2013 (National Park Service 2015). The ongoing popularity of the hike is indicated both by the fact that the National Park Service resorted in 2012 to a lottery system to issue permits to the large number of applicants for them (sometimes in the thousands for a given day) and also by the severity of the penalty for hikers attempting to summit without a permit. Fines of up to $5,000 as well as a jail sentence of up to six months may be imposed.10 The popularity of the hike is also indicated by the large array of consumer goods, including T-shirts, coffee mugs, and water bottles, that are sold in the Valley’s shops. These sport the phrase “I made it to the top!” and most have an image of Half Dome emblazoned somewhere on them as well. Sales of these items number

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in the thousands each year. They are a significant source of income for the park concessionaire, Delaware North Companies. The route of the Half Dome hike, as developed and maintained by the National Park Service, divides into six distinct, but generally unrecognized, stages. Each affords the summit pilgrimage different opportunities for the performance of rites of self-testing. Collectively, the sequential stages produce a structured pilgrimage complex that has the capability to instill a deep and enduring appreciation of the grandeur and sublime beauty believed by hikers to be inherent in the park landscape. It also provides visitors the chance to cultivate and embody the moving subject of the heroic wilderness explorer to its ecological limit. Actual visitor experiences of the Half Dome hike are, of course, as diverse as the visitor population that attempts it. However, the way in which the trail is constructed and managed, the self-selected specificity of the hiking population, and the distinctive givens of the nonhuman features of the environment all combine to define as well a classic performance profile of sorts that sets a standard against which actual individual pilgrimages may be interpreted. How closely visitors approximate in their own experience this classic profile varies greatly, of course. However, since it is the profile that best symbolizes and defines the ritual’s

Figure 3.2. Vernal Fall Bridge, June 2012, taken at around 8:00 am, at the beginning of an overnight trip to the summit of Half Dome. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

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rhetorical capacities as they have been conventionally constructed, it is this classic hiking performance profile that I summarize below. Stage One: Path to Vernal Fall Bridge The first stage of the Half Dome pilgrimage is a steep, wide 0.8-mile asphalt path that leads through oak and pine forest, gaining around five hundred feet in elevation to arrive at a bridge over the Merced River. Here, the first and most easily accessible view of one of the park’s “crown jewel” waterfalls, Vernal Fall, can be obtained (Osborne 2009: 55–84). This initial section is designed and maintained so as to be used by the entire spectrum of Yosemite’s visitors: honeymooners of all shapes and sizes, families with children in strollers, ninety-something great-grandmothers, heavily racked-up climbers, as well as experienced hikers, either out for a day or heading out for weeks of backpacking, perhaps on the Pacific Crest Trail.11 At the bridge that is its end, visitors stop to rest, use bathrooms and water fountains available there, and take pictures. It is the first station of a longer pilgrimage for summiters, but the ultimate reward for many other visitors. The Vernal Fall Bridge stages a kind of gateway by which Half Dome summiters may leave and re-enter a relatively diverse social world compared to that in which they are immersed while hiking. They typically arrive at this bridge at the beginning of the day, at first light or even before, and are among the first of the day to reach it. When they return, they pass over it in the early evening, when it is far more heavily trafficked. This stage affords hikers a chance to compare and contrast the experience they have undergone while hiking in relation to those of other visitors. Stage Two: Hike to the Top of Nevada Fall Across the bridge, the second stage of the Half Dome hike will bring hikers to the top of first Vernal and then Nevada Falls, over a distance of approximately three miles, and an elevation gain of nearly fourteen hundred feet. This section can be accomplished by one of two standard trails. One route, called the Mist Trail, brings hikers up beside both falls, affording close-up views of both. It is very heavily trafficked, and its lower set of large stone steps are often slippery from the Vernal Fall’s spray. It is popular with summiters on a single-day schedule (not carrying heavy packs) and also with those who may never be able to hike the trail again, as it is a “legendary trail” in National Park Service discourse—a route designated as having extraordinary scenic value in and of itself. The other alternative is to continue on a slightly longer, less steep trail that arrives at the top of Nevada Fall by traversing an eastern corner of Yosemite Valley’s southern wall. Whether hikers take the Mist Trail or bypass it, this second stage of the Half Dome hike affords hikers their first experience of prolonged ascent. Coats, hats,

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Figure 3.3. Backpackers on the alternate route up to the top of Nevada Fall, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

and gloves are typically taken off and stowed away as hikers move from “warmed up” to “second winded” in their physical condition. Snack breaks are often taken as pictures of the falls are shot. The ending point of this stage is marked by another bridge also built over the Merced River, now at an altitude of nearly six thousand feet in elevation. This second stage of the route is still accessible to a wide variety of visitors. However, strollers are no longer evident, and both toddlers and elderly visitors are now few and far between. Specialized, “technical” outdoor gear (hiking poles, boots, packs, hats, UV-protecting shorts and shirts, sunglasses, etc.) starts to appear as the norm rather than the exception. There are still many hikers typically observable at this stage who are obviously out for nothing more than a fun morning or an afternoon’s outing. However, the trailhead has now been left thousands of feet and several hours behind. Spectacular views have been appreciated, and the physical being of the hiker following the route has been palpably altered by the ascent landscape. An experience of changing one’s own vital signs in relation to the landscape is now perceivable not only via intentional processes, but also on relatively involuntary registers of breath patterning, digestion, pulse, and body

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Figure 3.4. Bridge at the top of Nevada Fall, June 2012. Photo by Robert Finch II.

temperature regulation. Summiters may be more or less attentive to these changing indicators, but they are in evidence and occurring, regardless. Stage Three: Trail to Little Yosemite Valley This third stage of the hike affords something of an intermission in the ritual progression. It is a short, flat, mile-long walk through a wooded area paralleling the Merced River to the Little Yosemite Valley Campground, the halfway point of the ascent to the summit. This stage allows summiters the opportunity to progress along the trail with relative effortlessness, if they so choose (effort investment tends to vary at this stage, depending on how urgently hikers may be intending to approach the summit). In any case, this stage provides many places where a longer rest or lunch may be taken. The sense of relative ease that emerges on this section of the trail can serve to build confidence in summiters who are making their first ascent and, so, embodying this role for the first time. This stage ends at a ranger station/campground area, where hikers have their last opportunity to use facilities before summiting. For those on a two-day schedule, this station serves as the end of the first main backpacking phase and the place to set up camp for the night.

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Stage Four: Trail to the Valley Rim The final half of the trail to the summit of Half Dome is designed to move visitors through three distinct stages: a relatively long trek up to the Valley rim, an exposed climb up several hundred steps on a monumental feature named the Subdome, and a final four-hundred-foot ascent up cables and planks of Half Dome’s eastern surface. Each stage is constructed in a manner that affords increasingly intense experiences of having ventured into an awe-inspiring, celestial landscape, one where organic life-forms (humans included) do not naturally belong. The trek to the rim is a relatively demanding stage of Half Dome’s self-testing pilgrimage. It is a grueling three-mile stretch, gaining around eighteen hundred feet in altitude, moving through terrain that affords no breathtaking views, no riverine pleasures, and no inviting resting places. The way ahead is never discernible for more than fifty to one hundred yards. Relentlessly steep, dusty, and dry, it seems designed to torment rather than to inspire. Summiters who choose to follow it and maintain their previous pace will generally have to “dig deep” at this stage. Those with less experience or stamina may start to lose resolve and turn back. The social character of the Half Dome trail may transform markedly during this fourth stage. Social boundaries typically (though not universally) maintained during earlier phases begin to dissolve as the experience of adversity and more intense forms of suffering occur. Hikers who may have competitively passed unknown neighbors on the trail without recognition lower down may start to ask strangers descending from higher points for information about the distance left to go to the summit, the conditions of the trail, or the weather forecast. Joking behavior, which is abundantly observable at earlier stages, here becomes considerably more rare. Facial expressions may harden into masks of determination and resolve or become openly baleful and appealing of support from any quarter; breathing patterns can become easily audible and uncontrolled; limps and other abnormalities of gate may become painfully obvious. Hikers in this fourth stage are more often observed resting at spots on the trail that do not seem particularly accommodating, sometimes blocking the route partially or entirely to others trying to move along. They may often be observed taking off their shoes and getting out bandages from first aid kits to deal with minor cuts, scrapes, and blisters. The summiter population at this stage also becomes noticeably more homogeneous in certain performance-oriented respects. All but those actually capable of enacting a “strenuous” experience have generally disappeared. A younger and predominantly male majority population is now evident. Gear on average meets an even higher technical standard. This fourth stage of the hike ends with what may be experienced as a great reward. Summiters are led to reach a point on the southeastern rim of Yosemite Valley where they have their first sight of the top of Half Dome since the hike began. They may also enjoy a panoramic view of the mountains to the northeast

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Figure 3.5. View of summit from the end of the fourth stage, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

of the Valley and of the Valley floor, now several thousand feet below. For the first time since the top of Nevada Fall, they are afforded a global sense of orientation in the landscape that is magnificent in scale. For the first time, they see exactly how their journey will lead to its end. The sense of exhilaration occurring at this station can be dramatic.

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While it has no restrooms or other facilities, this fourth station, with its pine trees and exposed granite surfaces, also affords a sense of haven to summiters, who may tarry here with an extra snack while contemplating the stages still left to undertake. It is the last place where summiters will be immersed in a predominantly organic landscape. From this station on, as they themselves can now plainly see, the trail’s environment consists of mainly granite and sky. Stage Five: The Subdome The fifth stage of the hike, the Subdome, traverses a series of tight, highly exposed switchbacks hewn into a rounded shoulder of rock beside the main dome of Half Dome. While it lasts less than half a mile, this stage gains around seven hundred feet and is one of the steepest sections of the trail. The risk of injury increases markedly at this stage. What has until this point been merely strenuous activity now takes on the character of danger. The large rocky steps are strewn with gravel. A fall down them carries very serious, even fatal consequences. Wind conditions become readily apparent and can now affect balance. Signs of organic habitats become minimal. An experienced guide once commented to me that at this stage of the route hikers often start to feel the ill effects of altitude change very strongly. Toward the top of the Subdome, the trail disappears completely—a fact that may

Figure 3.6. View from the top of Subdome, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

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intensify the sense that one is no longer in a landscape inhabited or controlled in any ordinary sense by human beings. Hikers must find their own individual way over the granite by attending to piled stone cairns. At the top of the Subdome, summiters arrive in a top-of-the-world environment. They are greeted by panoramic views all around. The only obstacle blocking a 360-degree panorama is the main dome itself. It now looms at relatively close range, remaining a formidable feature even as the details of its surface become more easily visible. Stage Six: The Cables The final stage of the hike takes place on the main dome’s surface itself. Summiters ascend it with the aid of cables that are run through metal poles drilled into the granite face and wooden planks nailed into the surface at around fivefoot intervals. While the cables can be climbed in less than half an hour if conditions are optimal, summiters sometimes have had to spend as long as an hour and a half or more progressing along them when they are crowded. The incline of the rock face during this final stage is never more than around forty-five degrees. However, it is steep enough that guidebooks describe it as “scary” (Swedo 2011: 50) and adrenaline-producing (Medley 2002: 33). This stage of the hike can carry as much, if not more, nervous intensity when summiters are descending as it does in the ascent. On the way down, hikers must look down at least momentarily to find their footing. In so doing, they are compelled to register their exposed position on the dome. While it may not be as dangerous as it can look and feel, this final stage of the Half Dome hike is, in fact, life-threatening. Losing one’s hold at any point can and has resulted in a fatal free fall down the dome’s ledge-less sides. The final station of the hike, the all-but-lifeless, trail-less summit of Half Dome itself, is a relatively large area of around thirteen square acres in size. Slabs of granite afford places to sit and take photos at varying distances from the face. Some of the favorite spots for photo opportunities are right at the edge of the face. Visitors are not allowed to camp overnight on the summit, so the main activities they may be observed to engage in at this stage are eating and drinking snacks and taking pictures. The summit stage completes the ascent of the Half Dome hike. However, the performance of the hike is by no means over, as the stages now must be performed in reverse to return summiters to the social and cultural worlds they left behind at the trailhead. With the exception of the retreat down the cables, the descent back down to the Valley floor is constructed as a straightforward process that presents no new challenges. Descending, however, can be a long, painful ordeal. The repetitive strain on knee and ankle joints is greater on the way down than it is ascending. Fatigue becomes an increasingly significant factor. The propensity to slip and fall on the gravel-strewn trail is much greater. The return to the

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Figure 3.7. Cables of the final stage of the Half Dome hike, June 2012. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

trailhead can also be a period of self-testing, in this regard, adding significantly to the pilgrimage experience. The most trying, self-testing times experienced on the hike may well be experienced on the way down.

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When they reach the trail’s end on the Valley floor, summiters typically head directly for one of the Valley’s showers or swimming pools or for a swim in the Merced River. Washing activity, followed by eating a meal, is usually the first active practice of re-incorporation back into the social environment left behind on the hike. From this point onward, summiters may encounter increasing numbers of friends, family, and other familiar and unfamiliar characters, who will witness and celebrate the journey they have made, the test they have passed, and the new visitor identity they have embodied by having “made it to the top” of the Half Dome trail.

The Half Dome Hike as Ritual Performance The pilgrimage quality of the Half Dome trail should be readily apparent from the description above. Regardless of variations in style and experience, the summit is obtained only via a journey that meets the definition of the term “epic.” It is a journey that is carefully choreographed, its prescribed passage literally carved in stone in many places. The route has been undertaken by countless multitudes, a fact that imparts to individual hikers, even the most deviant, original, or dissensually minded, a sense that they are anonymously influenced by rules of action formulated by others in long-established traditions of practice. There is no achieving the journey’s end without exceptional effort, even for the most experienced and well-trained athletes. The rhetorical effect of expending this effort, in this particular environment, in this particular way, endows the hike with transformative and generative semeiotic qualities for all who seek to perform it. Viewed from the theoretical perspective Saba Mahmood has articulated, the Half Dome hike can be interpreted as a kind of “spiritual exercise”12 in a landscape where natural phenomena are endowed with ultimate meaning. Through the practice of hiking, the Half Dome pilgrim directs his or her own process of subject formation. He or she coordinates outward behaviors—steps, gazes, and so on—with conventional notions of what it takes to be an admirable summiter. In this way, the summiting visitor cultivates the habits of a particular kind of righteous self—a moving figure energetically attuned to the landscape and fit to explore its various environments, even its most challenging monumental features. Summiting Half Dome is, in this regard, a way of achieving something very much like touristic piety, if it is not precisely that. Mahmood identifies piety as resulting from “imagining the immensity of God’s power and [a practitioner’s] own insignificance,” while at the same time performing an experience of being “close to God” (2012: 130, 122). An analogous imagination, the imagination of being close to nature at one summit of its immensity and power, may be acquired on Half Dome. By putting one’s self through the activities of each stage of its route, the summiter pilgrim performs the embodiment of a new closeness to nature and its incredible powers. The hike, in this respect, can be performed as

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a series of acts that enable participants to define and form themselves as “pious” ecotouristic visitors. Mahmood’s theoretical perspective thus reinforces the interpretation of the Half Dome hike as a self-testing, self-producing rite of pilgrimage. However, the perspective does nothing to trouble the claim that the hike should be considered an example of secular pilgrimage. “Nature,” after all, is generally conceptualized as a quintessentially secular concept. In its scientific aspect, as it is articulated in the discourses of the National Park Service, as well as the conservation sciences that authorize them and the commercial Yosemite tourism industry that capitalizes upon them, the concept of nature aligns closely with the modernist atheistic discourse around which the mainstreams of the natural sciences worldwide tend to orient themselves. Visitors engaged in performing the appreciation of, and the embodied relating to, what they understand to be Yosemite’s natural environment— on Half Dome’s trail and elsewhere—are indeed nothing other than pilgrims of a liminoid, secular variety in this regard. The selves they seek to test, transform, and reinhabit through the more dramatic stages of the hike may be ethical, virtuous, and extraordinarily meaningful. However, they are not, strictly speaking, pious. They remain bound by forms of secular symbolism, symbolism that is itself the product of social institutions governed by worldly, irreligious interests and forces. Once again, however, Mahmood’s theory of ritual, as well as anthropological theories of tourism as secular ritual, stop short of recognizing the rhetorical, generative, and ecological dimensions of Half Dome’s self-testing rites. And again, it is only by including these key semeiotic dimensions that the entire story may be told of how ritual subject-hood on the Half Dome trail emerges and evolves. This dimension, again, consists in mediational relations of vitality as well as representation. With regard to its ritual symbolism, these relations on Half Dome connect nonhuman, and specifically super-human, features of the landscape to embodied, not-yet-conventional signs of human being and acting. Slipping on the Cables: Ecological Semio-genesis To substantiate the claim made above, it remains only to recount an incident that happened on the Half Dome trail on 24 June 2012. The incident was constituted by a slip—my slip—that occurred between two planks on one of the steeper intervals of the final stage of the route, around midway up on the main dome. At the time that the slip occurred, I was fully engaged in the choreographic conventions relating to this specific stage of the hike, impersonating as best I could the actions demonstrated by a commercially trained guide I was following up the face. However, once the slip happened, and while it was in progress, my own consensual secular pilgrim identity was completely disabled. I lost control not only of the performance conventions I was embodying, but of my organismic being as well. “I” literally became possessed by a landscape as it was acting on me with super-human force.

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To recount the details of the incident, I had been standing on one leg around one hundred feet up off the base of the cables, second in a line of eleven hikers that included myself, two guides, and eight other summiters. Three of the hikers (the ones directly behind me) were university students I had brought along with me. The entire group was participating in an overnight excursion that had been advertised as “Half Dome: Make It to the Top.” In my current position on the cables, I was balancing on one of the wooden planks. The wind was gusting strongly from the southwest (my left) over the back of the dome. My foot was turned lengthwise along the plank. Only the left half of it was able to find purchase on the wood. My arms were down at my sides, each hand loosely enfolding a cable. Although the wind was gusting strongly, I was not holding onto the cables. I merely had my hands encircling them, ready to grab them if need be. This pose was how we rested between movements up the planks. The strategy was to relax as completely as possible and then to climb on up onto one and then another plank in an unbroken pattern of exertion. Every two planks, we would rest until a normal breathing rhythm re-established itself. Then, it was again up two more planks and rest. This two-plank/rest patterning had come as a complete surprise to me when it was first initiated by the guide. He had given no explanation of it previously to our group. He seemed to be improvising its design himself in response to the unusual wind conditions occurring on that day. I greatly appreciated the technique, however. It produced an alternating, relatively sustainable, exertion/recuperation pacing in the ascent process that I might not otherwise have employed. Left on my own, I would have tried to climb without resting at all, thus exhausting my strength and probably panicking far below the summit. As it was, I felt secure about what I thought was going to happen next. I had the breath and the strength to reach up as high as I could with both arms, grab firmly onto the cables, plant my left foot on some bulge, crack, lip, ledge, or bump in the granite face—whatever looked like it would give the best purchase—and hoist myself up so as to step again with my right foot onto the relative safety of the next wooden plank, repeating everything then again to reach the plank after that. That was my job, as a hiking pilgrim, and I was vitally invested in performing it as well as I could. I was rested, now, breathing normally. My muscles were signaling no fatigue. The actions to be performed were familiar. I was set to push onward in what seemed like an endless series of stepping/hoisting patterns that were inching us upward toward the distant summit. I was only waiting for a sign from the guide to begin. It must be noted for the purposes at hand that even before I slipped, I was not enjoying the astounding view of the Sierra that my position on the main dome afforded me. My slip wasn’t due to wandering attention or some other leisure-associated lapse. In my commitment to the cables discipline, I had directed all my mental energy to the guide above me. It was a “monkey see; monkey do”

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relationship. When he reached, I reached. When he shifted, I shifted. When he rested, I rested. How he stood, so I stood. How he breathed, I breathed. I intended nothing other than to move as his double. I had even felt annoyance with myself rise up whenever I realized I was deviating from his example in the slightest—failing to release fully my hands’ grip on the cables, for example, or balancing only on the ball of my foot, instead of on its entire surface. The guide had climbed these cables many times without mishap, and I trusted his experience. He was, in a sense, my performative ticket to safety on the summit, and I was set on reproducing his role to the nth degree. In Peircean terms, “I”—my conscious intentional subjective self— was his iconic replica, a sign only of his moving image, faithful as his shadow, but mindfully attuned to his performance process as well (CP 2.246). This practice of following the leader, which invested me more and more deeply into a secular discipline of touristic pilgrimage, was also my way of tuning out the environmental situation I found myself to be in—high up on the dome, unprotected, lacking any cable-climbing expertise. It was my way of pushing out competing discursive formations and their associated cultural identities: thoughts about my child, who still needed her mother to be alive for a few more years, and thoughts about the National Park Service, who had engineered this particular accident-waiting-to-happen, not only to me but to the students with me and all the others who had trusted their judgment. However, my powers of concentration were not absolute. There were sensations being registered involuntarily by parts of my organism that were not governed by either will or discursive faculties. These were apprehending, in their own way, the wind, the light, the temperature, the wood, the rock, and the gravity of the scene. They were assessing them as they affected my weight center, my eyes, the skin on my face, my hair, my throat as I breathed, and the entirety of my skeleto-muscular system. Nonetheless, despite all of these persistently influential organismic relational processes, I was doing my best to concentrate only on the movements of the guide. At this stage on the hike, a feeling on the order of chagrin had been building up inside of me. Had I known how dangerous this last stage was actually going to be, had I known how steep a forty-five-degree incline actually was, had I known how slick and smooth the granite would be, I would not have undertaken this stage in the “free solo” manner I was doing—that is to say, without being roped in and led by a professional climber.13 That thought had formed itself clearly despite all efforts to focus elsewhere much earlier on. I could not escape it. It emerged out of the embodied doing of the cable ascent itself, with all of the experiential similarities its performance established to other climbs I had undertaken in Yosemite Valley. Unfortunately, in this case, I had trusted the guidebooks, with their “everybody does it” talk. I had trusted the park service, which I thought would never allow the public to get up on anything this dangerous totally unprepared and unprotected. I had attributed the previous falls off the cables I’d heard

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about to exceptionally substandard visitor conduct and overcrowding, which we had avoided by reaching the base of this stage well ahead of the main influx of hikers, around 8:00 am. Now, too late, it was clear that I had been wrong in my estimations. Negative feelings accompanied these fragmented, momentary reflections— intensely negative feelings. I was deeply certain, however, that my best chance for avoiding a catastrophe lay in committing myself to simply cloning the guide’s movements. So, I focused on this process. I formed myself into the person choreographed by the guide’s actions down to the smallest detail. I acted in this stage of the hike exactly as I would have done had the guide been a dance artist and I a student in his master class. When he moved again, I was on my way up as well. He reached, and I reached. He stepped, and I stepped. Then, he hoisted, and I slipped. I was with him, 100 percent, until that moment. Then, in less than a heartbeat, I was completely on my own. For about a heartbeat, or perhaps a little less, I was alone on the rock. My weight was centered on a foot that was sliding freely out of my control down along the polished surface of the granite. There had been no bump, no crack, no ledge, no anything to place it onto or into at this particular interval. I had had to simply set it upon the steep granite slope and hope for the best. The best, however, had not happened. The foothold had failed. My hands weren’t grabbing the cables at that moment either. They had been sliding upward over and along them seeking a higher hold. I felt the whole of myself giving way, sinking into the gravitational field that I had been resisting successfully until that moment. When the slip occurred, everything went negative in a flash of awareness. The unintended was happening. I had no foothold, and I had no handhold either. I was in an uncontrolled descent. At this instant, my entire universe consisted of the rock, myself, and gravity. We were locked in a rapidly changing set of relations of force and tension that carried my survival in the balance. Thoughts, now racing, focused first on my hiking shoe, as it was sliding smoothly over the granite. I cursed wordlessly at the absence of my climbing shoes. I’d left them at the campground, deciding they were probably not worth the trouble of bringing along. None of the other hikers had brought theirs. The climbing shoes, however, were relatively flexible and their soles gave far better traction. “I could have done this, no problem, in climbing shoes,” I had told myself lower down. I wondered why the guidebooks had not suggested this, why the supposedly safety-conscious park service information had made no mention of it. Only the wearing of gloves had been suggested. I felt something on the order of hatred lighting up the pathways of my nervous system as these thoughts occurred. However, even as this inner discourse was beginning to unfold, several other things happened simultaneously. My hands grabbed firmly and held onto the cables they had been sliding along. Initiating all at once from my torso, arms,

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legs, and head, I found myself making a slight hop off of the rock, shifting my center of gravity slightly down and inward toward the face. My left leg contracted quickly and then, just as quickly, replanted its foot on a different part of the face. The leg bore down this time at a different angle than before, so that more force was sent through a larger area of the ball of the foot, and pressure was sent upward into the granite. The kinetic energy was something like that produced by a doctor’s “knee-jerk” reflex test: it went from the top of the thigh, through the knee to the back of the calf-ankle-heel, moving forward under the arch of the foot, driving the bottom of the ball into the rock. The foot smacked against the granite, punching into the stone like the clapper on a bell rung sharply, and stuck there. My other leg contracted and rose up to serve as a second support beside the left. All of these acts took place so quickly that in about the time it would have taken to snap my fingers, I had stopped losing ground and regained a stable position on the rock. The time that elapsed wasn’t even long enough for me to fall noticeably behind the guide’s tempo. In a twinkling, as it were, I was back in sync with him. The thoughts mentioned above had no more than begun to form. The entire slip/plant episode constituted only a minor glitch in the group’s patterning of ascent. It was over literally before I could give it a second thought, or even a single, fully blown, first one. Short as the interval was, however, it had a lasting impact on my experience of summiting and on the process of subject definition and enactment in which I had been invested. The movements that had happened, although they were not to be repeated, proved unforgettable. On one level, this was simply a consequence of the fact that their existential stakes had been relatively high. An unabated downward slide at this height would more than likely have proved lethal. The significance of the slip/plant sequence was of the same caliber as a sacred act, in this regard, given the difference between life and death that it had entailed. The planting move literally had proven to be my salvation. However, the episode was also different in relation to the formation of the hiker subject that had been under way in this ritual “exercise.” The human subject living through this accidental moment was no longer acquiring its identity by means of a culturally constituted intentional performance. It was no longer conforming to the hiker persona that the park discourse and its conventions of summiting had designed. Despite its best efforts, the persona had failed to embody those consensual movements. In this unintended moment, the subject was now learning who it actually was as a figure in a performance that now entailed relatively agentive nonhuman forces and features of the landscape. It was learning what its identity as an involuntarily moving figure in this landscape was, a figure now moving outside discursively defined limits. In this moment, in other words, my cultural, secular “I” was caught up in potentially life-altering actions of which the landscape was more or less in charge.

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The bodily movements being performed were no longer “my own.” The subject who might have owned them was, in fact, busy elsewhere, generating an inner discourse about hiking shoes, trying unsuccessfully to perform other virtuous movements, and repressing undesirable emotions. Even had that subject not been so preoccupied, however, that “I” could never have conceived of the actions that were being enacted by her own self in this emergency episode. The slip/plant movements and their coordination were well beyond that subject’s capability. The midair actions, in particular, were definitely not in her movement vocabulary. In this regard, the movement performance was experienced by the hiking “me,” the intending subject, as shockingly unintentional, yet nonetheless intensely personal. The actions registered as something on the order of miraculous. They were “mine” but also emphatically not mine. They were, in Schechner’s theatrical terms, “not-not-mine” (1985: 112). “I” was now experiencing the definition of bodily members as they were living through the dynamic forces at play in the landscape and reacting pre-(or post-)subjectively to them. Mahmood might attempt to characterize this state of affairs as a moment when a “spontaneous” expression of ritual virtuosity manifested itself (2012: 129). Such expressions, in her perspective, occur regularly when the self-directed work of a devoted ritual practitioner occasionally produces a more or less automatic response to a given situation that conforms nonetheless to what conventions of thought and action might expect for an unforeseen situation or event. Ritual performances, in this regard, are theorized as working to produce subjects who create their subject-hood so well that even when caught by surprise, they still manage to conform piously to the expectations of their religion. While a similar kind of spontaneous performance might also have manifested on the Half Dome hike as well, this was not the case with the slip/plant performance process. Its movements were anything but well rehearsed. They were not the echoes of previously ingrained habits of practice. They were memorable precisely for the ways in which they did not conform to the capabilities and acquired patternings of the human subject who found herself embodied by them. The history of intentional, discursively oriented subject practice that had been under way was not called upon in this moment. The episode’s embodied character fell outside that history. It constituted part of what Mahmood’s Butlerian theories would cast as the unspeakable, unknowable, and subjectively non-signifying, repressed aspect of the human experience of the hike. Yet, the slip/plant performance bore none of these qualities. It was emphatically expressive, significant, and memorable. It contributed substantively to the formation of the summiter subjective identity being cultivated. It would be more accurate to say, in this regard, that the slip/plant movements on the Half Dome hike were generated, performed, designed, staged, enacted, and registered not by the individual human subject of this hiking process or by any exclusively human discursive formations or conventions, but rather

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by an environmental-organismic assemblage (Latour, 2005). That is, it was coproduced by a collection of moving elements in which agency, energy, and intelligence were continuously shifting and changing. The environment’s gravitational field took command of the process initially. It motivated and gave form to the slip as it began to occur. The surface character of the rock and the sole of the hiking shoe also played agentive roles in the slipping movement process, defining the character of the pathway that was pursued. These nonhuman movers changed the figure of the hiker’s being immediately, integrating it into a set of circumstances that were atypical of those normatively sought out in summiting exercises. When this change occurred, a liminal being emerged, a “slipper” figure, acutely attuned and related to the dynamics of the dome environment. The previously in-charge summiter “I” was consumed, absorbed, and transformed in this slipper being—this gravitationally governed, vitally moving integration. Previous subjective intentions became relatively meaningless and insignificant. All that mattered—all that signified—to this slipping assemblage was the force of gravity, the incline and slickness of the rock, and the smoothness of the hiking shoe. After the slipper’s initiating moment, however, in the knee-jerk response that constituted the planting movement, the human character of the slipper again became active in the landscape performance process. Its being reacted in a way that subjective thinking had neither conceived nor governed, yet which resulted in a life-saving action that no discursive formation had ever prefigured or foretold. The slipper, in essence inter-acted, not randomly, not brainlessly, but adaptively, organismically, and creatively. Its movement was born out of intelligence that had been growing as it had lived through the moment of practice taking place before it and the energetic past contained in that moment as well. It became the being initiating and coordinating a viable “Plan B” to the hiking pilgrim’s failed “Plan A.” It was this pre-(post-)subjective, slipping figure that choreographed and performed what the hiking subject came to understand as a salvational act. In so doing, the slipper managed to operate in what might best be characterized as a state of ecological, though not subjective, meta-human grace. One might say, with regard to the slipper’s intelligent relating of land, gravity, and being, that in that knee-jerk reaction, a self and a landscape had a meeting of the minds, halfway up on the side of Half Dome. Better, perhaps, would be to say that they performed a novel exchange of material in-formation in a relationship that had been ongoing for quite some time. From that exchange, a new sustaining capability of the hiker subject in this topographical context began to emerge. A new means of enduring or “standing-under” the given environmental circumstances came to be embodied. From that experience, a new conceptualizable understanding and a new conceptual formation based upon it began to develop as well. The remembering, recognizing, hiker subject had now lived through a new relation of vitality. The relation had manifested its design in the patterning of my nervous system. “I” was now a living, representative feature of the landscape in a

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new way. My consciousness had registered something of its super-human forces; my organism survived as a symptom of its integrative tendencies. “Nature,” in this regard, both the concept and its material referents, would never mean the same thing to me or mean it in the same way, again. Our symbolic relationship had been altered and recalibrated ecologically by the semeiotic consequences of the slip/plant landscape performance process.

Conclusion The slip/plant episode is meant to illustrate how inadequate the modifier “secular” can come to be when applied to embodied ecotouristic rituals such as the Half Dome hike. When life-saving or life-taking consequences are immediately forthcoming in such landscape-immersed performance processes, the idea of secularity seems overly developed and inept as a characterization of the incidents unfolding. The concept obscures the presence and agency of ecological factors that may assemble and become incarnate in a living being as a consequence of the hiking experience. It ignores the transformations visitor identities may undergo at existential levels of awareness and significance. And, it fails to bring out the incipient status of the super-human creative processes at work in hiking pilgrimages. The ecological dimensions of performativity inherent in the Half Dome hiking tradition, in this regard, might better be identified as capable of staging a kind of “proto-religious” ritual process, rather than an always already secular one. Their enactments serve to bring about kinds of understanding and awareness out of which collective, social and cultural conventions and discourses of religious practice and identity might potentially be seen to evolve, even while they are not themselves religious in nature. Native American understandings of the spiritual character of the Yosemite landscape cited earlier would seem to bear out this interpretation as well. However, the touristic enactments occurring on Half Dome also clearly refute the idea that such proto-religious creative processes necessarily follow an evolutionary path toward conventionally religious types of cultural performance. Half Dome’s thriving secular discourses and conventions provide ample evidence that self-testing acts of pilgrimage, even those in which human subject-hood is transformed and reinvented from the existential grounds of its being on up, can serve to generate and evolve unambiguously secular conventions of identity enactment as well as religious ones. What seems forthcoming from this examination of the performance profile of Half Dome summiting, in this regard, is that ecotouristic landscape rituals, particularly in their most transformative dimensions, are as likely to lead in secular directions as they are in religious ones. Such performances might also conceivably lead in fundamentally new social and cultural directions as well. In their incipient relations of vitality, embodied touristic landscape performances stage protean forms of self-understanding and re-presentation. They

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produce growing manifestations of subject-hood and ecologically assembled identifications of human being and living. In this regard, the touristic story of the pilgrimage up Half Dome must remain, in social and cultural terms, an everunfinishable one. It is an open-ended narrative, not only because the symbolic performance processes of human subject formation are fundamentally creative, but because the vital forces of the Yosemite landscape are constantly creative as well. They constitute dynamic stages for the genesis and definition of new kinds of symbols and movers, via eco-choreographic events whose experience and understanding may serve to transform established conventions and discourses. The Half Dome hiking pilgrimage demonstrates, in this final regard, that there is much more to the ritual life of a visitor than conventional human symbolism and its social and cultural discourses and structures can fully explain or determine. As in the case of the ethical and political subject formations of climbing, the spiritual and religious subjects of hiking (or lack thereof ) must be interpreted as they are both found and made in the diverse semeiotics of landscape performance.

Notes Grateful acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press, which published an earlier version of this essay under the title “A Slip on the Cables: Touristic Rituals and Landscape Performance in Yosemite National Park,” in Nadine George-Graves (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, 2015: 452–79. 1. See, for example, Sharpley and Sundaram’s recent characterization of the tourism-aspilgrimage literature in “Tourism: A Sacred Journey? The Case of Ashram Tourism, India” (2005: 161–72). See also Smith (1992) and Brown (1998). 2. For example, Nelson Graburn’s recent revision of his essay “Tourism: the Sacred Journey,” which appears in Sharon Gmelch’s widely used introductory reader, Tourists and Tourism, is titled “Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism” (2010). The contemporary value of Graburn’s argument is indicated by its placement in the reader as the first essay after Gmelch’s introduction. Examples of contemporary work contributing to the tourism/ ritual discourse include Badone and Roseman (2004); Banu Gokariksel (2009); Bar and Cohen-Hattab (2003); Dora (2009); Finney, Orwig, and Spake (2009); and Timothy and Olsen (2006). 3. Edward Bruner has argued that this negative view of tourism is related to French post-modernism and its concept of the simulacrum (1994: 397–415). 4. See in particular MacCannell’s highly influential discussion of tourism as “modern ritual” (1999: 13). 5. This phrase is used in one of Yosemite’s most widely employed guidebooks, Steven Medley’s, The Complete Guidebook to Yosemite National Park (2002: 33). 6. These statistics are reported in The Rough Guide to Yosemite National Park (Whitfield 2002: 26–27) and in Frommer’s Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks (Wells 1998: 144). 7. To view the Delaware North Companies’ Yosemite logo, visit: http://www.yosemitepark .com/?ic_campid=4&ic_pkw=GH_Ahwahnee_Fall_Pref_Email-Sept11. The logo is used

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

as a link to the Yosemite reservations website. The Yosemite Conservancy logo may be viewed at the website: http://www.yosemiteconservancy.org/. The Tis-se-yak myth is summarized in The Rough Guide to Yosemite National Park (Whitfield 2002: 27) and in Peter Browning’s Yosemite Place Names: The Historic Background of Geographic Names in Yosemite National Park (2005). These particular statistics are found in Swedo (2011: 50). They vary slightly among guidebooks. Swedo’s statistics are cited here due to the fact that she is one of the most experienced, knowledgeable, and widely read guidebook authors writing on Yosemite. Information on the Half Dome permit system can be found at the National Park Service website: http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/hdfaq.htm. The Pacific Crest Trail runs from the Mexican to the Canadian border a distance of 2,650 miles. It was established by Congress in 1968 as a National Scenic Trail and is an even more extreme example of an American ecotouristic pilgrimage. The Pacific Crest Trail runs through Yosemite National Park and can be reached from Yosemite Valley via the John Muir Trail, which forms one segment of the Half Dome Trail as well. Mahmood cites Pierre Hadot in relation to this phrase (2012: 122). “Free solo” in climbing jargon refers to climbing without using any protection—no ropes securing the climber to the rock (Huber and Zak 2002: 174). It is sometimes considered an ethically transgressive style of climbing, as it incurs unnecessary and excessive risk to the climber. It is also generally admired when it is performed successfully.

References Badone, Ellen, and Sharon R. Roseman (eds). 2004. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bar, Doron, and Kobi Cohen-Hattab. 2003. “A New Kind of Pilgrimage: The Modern Tourist Pilgrim of Nineteenth Century-Twentieth Century Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 39(2): 131–48. Brown, Mick. 1998. The Spiritual Tourist: A Personal Odyssey through the Outer Reaches of Belief. London: Bloomsburg. Browning, Peter. 2005. Yosemite Place Names: The Historic Background of Geographic Names in Yosemite National Park, 2nd edn. Lafayette, CA: Great West Books. Bruner, Edward. 1994. “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism,” American Anthropologist 96(2): 397–415. Dora, Veronica Della. 2009. “Taking Sacred Space out of Place: From Mount Sinai to Mount Getty through Travelling Icons,” Mobilities 4(2): 225–48. Finney, R. Zachary, Robert Orwig, and Deborah Spake. 2009. “Lotus-Eaters, Pilgrims, Seekers, and Accidental Tourists: How Different Travelers Consume the Sacred and the Profane,” Services Marketing Quarterly 30(2): 148–73. George-Graves, Nadine (ed.). 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gokariksel, Banu. 2009. “Beyond the Officially Sacred: Religion, Secularism, and the Body in the Production of Subjectivity,” Social & Cultural Geography 10(6): 657–74. Graburn, Nelson. 1977. “Tourism: The Sacred Journey.” In Valene Smith (ed.), Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 17–31.

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———. 2010. “Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism.” In Sharon B. Gmelch (ed.), Tourists and Tourism: A Reader, 2nd edn. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, pp. 25–36. Hartshorne, Charles, and Paul Weiss (eds). 1931–1935. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–6. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Huber, Alexander, and Heinz Zak. 2002. Yosemite: Half a Century of Dynamic Rock Climbing. London: Baton Wicks. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lerman, Liz. 2011. Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. MacCannell, Dean. 1999 [1976]. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2012 [2005]. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Medley, Steven P. 2002. The Complete Guidebook to Yosemite National Park. El Portal, CA: Yosemite Association. Moore, Sally Falk, and Barbara Myerhoff. 1977. “Introduction: Secular Ritual: Forms and Meanings.” In Sally F. Moore and Barbara Myerhoff (eds), Secular Ritual. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, pp. 3–24. National Park Service. 2015. “Half Dome Permit Lottery Statistics.” Webpage. http://www .nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/hdpermitsapps.htm. Last accessed November 5, 2015. Osborne, Mike. 2009. Granite, Water, and Light: The Waterfalls of Yosemite Valley. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sharpley, Richard and Priya Sundaram. 2005. “Tourism: A Sacred Journey? The Case of Ashram Tourism, India,” International Journal of Tourism Research 7: 161–72. Smith, Valene. 1992. “Introduction: The Quest in the Guest.” In Valene Smith (guest ed.), “Pilgrimage and Tourism,” special issue, Annals of Tourism Research 19: 1–17. Swedo, Suzanne. 2011. Hiking Yosemite National Park: A Guide to 59 of the Park’s Greatest Adventures; A Falcon Guide, 3rd edn. Guilford CT: Globe Pequot Press. Timothy, Dallen J., and Daniel H. Olsen (eds). 2006. Tourism, Religion, and Spiritual Journeys. London: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1977. “Variations on a Theme of Liminality.” In Sally F. Moore and Barbara Myerhoff (eds), Secular Ritual. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, pp. 24–41. ———. 1982 [1974]. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Wells, Stacey. 1998. Frommer’s Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks. New York: Macmillan/Simon and Schuster. Whitfield, Paul. 2002. The Rough Guide to Yosemite National Park. London: Rough Guides.

Q

Part III

Moving On

Chapter Four

q

Unwinding and Changing Course

Our cerebral state contains more or less of our mental state in the measure that we reel off our psychic life into action or wind it up into pure knowledge. … Our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. … Habits formed in action find their way up to the sphere of speculation, where they create fictitious problems. —Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory Novelty, as empirically found, doesn’t arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datum being both a coming and a going, and even numerical distinctness being realized effectively only after a concrete interval has passed. The intervals also deflect us from the original paths of direction, and all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut. Just so, in a curve, the same direction is never followed, and the conception of it as a myriad-sided polygon falsifies it by supposing it to do so for however short a time. —William James, A Pluralistic Universe The endless variety in the world has not been created by law. It is not of the nature of uniformity to originate variation, nor of law to beget circumstance. When we gaze upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face of living spontaneity. A day’s ramble in the country ought to bring that home to us. —Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers

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Introduction

T

he time has come, in closing, to return to the broader question of the rhetorical force embodied and sustained in Yosemite’s landscape performances and to assess the influential character of the symbolism their choreographic processes initiate and grow. Wallace Stegner once testified with particular eloquence on this topic in relation to American wilderness landscapes in general. He called attention to their capacity for “renewal” (1994: 330–31). In what became his most famous contribution to the conservation literature—a letter written to the University of California Wildland Research Center in 1960 that has since been entitled the “Wilderness Letter”—Stegner argued that the subjective renewal experienced by domestic visitors to wilderness areas throughout the United States was of fundamental value to the formation of the American cultural character. Nowhere else in the country, in no other kind of place, Stegner insisted, was this revitalizing transformative experience likely to occur. The capacity for renewal, he argued, was what made the national parks valuable to American society, as valuable as were their various natural resources. “Something will have gone out of us as a people,” Stegner insisted, “if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed” (1994: 328). Interviewees for the Yosemite Visitors Project reported experiences in relation to a wide variety of park activities that could be seen as supporting Stegner’s argument. One interviewee, for example, told of bringing a portable electric piano keyboard with headphones with her on visits into the park. This enabled her to play her favorite classical music while she was sitting out in the park meadows without disturbing other visitors. Another interviewee described a game she and her family invented called “Capture the Bucket,” which they played in the campgrounds at night with the aid of flashlights. Another visited a spot where a relative’s ashes had been scattered years previously. Another went fishing at a favorite water hole. The list of renewing activities was as long as the list of interviewees. No particular tradition of practice in the park, great or small, seemed to prevail over any others in terms of this general recuperative effect. Regardless of the diversity of visitor activities, what they shared in common was their capacity to enable visitors to let go and leave behind the strains they encountered and embodied in other environments and landscapes. Whether they were the consequences of scaling peaks or painting flowers, these renewing effects were identified as one of the main reasons that interviewees kept returning to the park year after year, and even generation after generation, despite the crowds and hassles of visiting. The landscape’s rhetorical character, in this general regard, was one that might best be interpreted as staging and facilitating—in Peirce’s terms, “giving birth” to—various processes of unwinding. These processes, as previous chapters have sought to illustrate, have occurred in Yosemite not only on skeletal-neuro-muscular and psychological or affective levels of individual visitor experience; they have occurred on discursive and sym-

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bolic levels as well. It is the main argument of this chapter that the cultural salience of Yosemite’s landscape rhetoric may be most apparent in this latter symbolic respect. In this latter respect, landscape performance might appear, following the ritual performance theory of Victor Turner (1982), to be serving the cultural function of providing in general a kind of liminoid antidote, in its moments of ecological communitas, to the various kinds of global, national, and otherwise social forms of societas with which it can be observed to interface. It might be seen to be serving as a recuperative balancing mechanism for maintaining established social structures and discourses. That, however, is precisely the argument I have sought throughout this text to move beyond. Such a system-in-equilibrium interpretation, as previous chapters have attempted to demonstrate, fails to take into account both the creative and the continuous recurring influence on cultural forms of symbolism that Yosemite’s landscape performances have been shown to be capable of exerting, move by creative move, sign by evolving sign, and visitor by unwinding visitor. The rhetorical impact of Yosemite’s visitor activities is not limited to the staging of cultural and/or global forms of stasis or circularity, choreographically speaking. It is serving as a force for social, cultural, and even global change and growth as well. To appreciate fully the cultural import of landscape performance in Yosemite, particularly the performativity of its symbolic processes of unwinding, it remains to bring out one final aspect of the dynamic character of the semeiotic symbol as it has been observed to be operating in these performance processes. I undertake this task with repeated reference to the work of philosopher Henri Bergson whose theories of matter, perception, and memory align closely with Peirce’s semeiotic in many key respects. Bergson’s work, which was of foundational importance to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, also serves here to illuminate parallels between Peirce’s semeiotic and vitalist or affect-oriented approaches to interpreting cultural performance as well. The aspect of the symbol that is here at issue is yet another aspect that differentiates the Peircean symbol from more widely employed conceptualizations of symbolic forms and processes. It is, again, an aspect that relates the symbol, even conventional linguistic symbols, to other kinds of signs and sign processes, rather than separating it from them. In particular, it presents a definition of the symbol as a sign that interfuses with and is even partially composed by iconic sign performance. It is, in this regard, a monist definition of the symbol. However, it is also a synechistic definition, a twisting, moving form of monism that admits of both alterity and continuously evolving creative change. The composite, twisting character of the pragmaticist symbol, when it is unwound in landscape performance, enables visitors to “dismount,” in Bergson’s terms—or “twist free” in Vincent Colapietro’s—of previously understood symbolic constructions and rhetorics.1 Its kinetic energy serves to move visitors from imagined realms of relatively disembodied, culturally determined, cerebral sign

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performance to stages of sign performance that are nothing other than embodied and energetically lived. It enables visitors to transition out of their established, socially constructed roles, to “get out,” in John Muir’s terms, of their conventional identities as thinkers who are removed, intellectually speaking, from their immediate life circumstances and contiguous environmental conditions. The composite character of the symbol, in choreographic terms, affords visitors the opportunity to be performers who are not removed from but rather re-moved in and by and with their present circumstances and conditions, human and nonhuman alike. In so doing, it enables modifications to the sequencing of representational habits of thought that otherwise may constrain, obscure, dissociate, and come between their thinkers and the environments that, in actuality, they vitally “interhabit” (Fuhrman 2010). The composite character of symbols affords further stages of unwinding, stages that transition from re-moving sign performance to simply moving the aliveness of given self-world relations, a more purely monist stage that may approach in its perceptual experience what E.V. Daniel has termed “at-one-ment” (1987). It performs the antithesis, in this regard, of what might be characterized as an obstructional kind of sign—a sign that performs by intervening in an interpreter’s otherwise immediate perception of whatever it is that the sign is employed to represent. Equally critical, however, the semeiotic symbol is also composed so as to ensure that performances of unwinding, even those that reach relatively absolute monist stages, are not necessarily irreversible and destined to degenerate into completely unintelligible forms of chaos or insanity. On the contrary, unwinding movements may themselves move to initiate new processes of re-movement, re-presentation, mediation, recurrent symbol-making and reconstruction, not necessarily along established, conventionally cultural lines, but in fundamentally creative and intelligent relationships to them. It is this twisting, winding, unwinding, rewinding, releasing, regularizing synechistic and dance-like composition of semeiotic symbols that affords visitors a means of relating the vital movements of landscape performance as simply lived to those of life re-moved, and even to those of life generally and distantly removed and displaced and differentiated in conventional symbolic terms. It is also what affords visitors the possibility of living and of finding new life emerging even in sign performances occurring on the imagined stages of conventional, representational symbolic action. The moving character of semeiotic symbols is inherent and motivating in all forms of sign performance. To explicate the twisting, composite monism of the semeiotic symbol, I draw in what follows upon the work of Peirce scholars Joseph Ransdell and Fernando Andacht as well as on Bergson. Both Ransdell and Andacht, in various ways, illuminate the monist vitality of the Peircean symbol’s composite character, a vitality that has both political and cultural consequences. The pragmaticist view developed seeks to trace out the trajectories initiated by their writings, arguing

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for an understanding of the virtual as well as the actual stages of choreographic sign performance as being inherent in and as prefiguring the growth of fallible yet sustainably intelligible symbols, conventional, representational, and otherwise. When the performativity of these stages is factored into the definition of the symbol, it becomes apparent how symbols and the cultural performances animating them may serve to open and redefine gradually, though enduringly, rather than close and isolate arbitrarily, societal and cultural discourses and structures. In this regard, the semeiotic rhetoric of the Yosemite landscape can be seen as one that moves freely, as well as consensually, the selves that embody its symbols. It moves them in new as well as old directions of living, acting, and learning, by turns differentiating and reintegrating them into changing, diversifying, constantly creative yet continuous social, cultural, and global worlds.

Semeiotic Monism Monism, in contrast to dualism, pluralism, and particularly nihilism, is a philosophical claim that reality, in reality, is basically all of one kind. Jane Bennett, in discussing the monism evident in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, characterizes monism as the “same-stuff” claim (2010: xi). A monist perspective is one that argues that the universe is not composed of absolutely different kinds of substances. Ultimately, no absolute differentiation can be made in and among its various kinds of “stuff,” even between human and nonhuman kinds or between kinds that are organic and kinds that are not. Peirce, for example, expressed such a view in his claim that “all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular” (CP 7.570). Peirce endorses monism most explicitly in writings from the later period of his work, although he does so in a somewhat reluctant manner. In 1891, for example, he writes, “The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders today. Rejecting this, we are driven to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism” (CP 6.24; W8: 105; EP1: 292; “The Architecture of Theories”). Peirce is “driven” to monism in his acceptance of hylopathy, which, as Peirce scholar Robert Lane relates, is the doctrine that “matter is sentient” (2012: 243n11). Matter, however infinitesimal in its performative movements, is nonetheless “vibrant,” as Bennett observes, and, therefore, not absolutely different from the living spontaneity of mind. Peirce argues similarly in another writing from the same period: I am bound to maintain that an idea can only be affected by an idea in continuous connection with it. By anything but an idea, it cannot be affected at all. This obliges me to say, as I do say, on other grounds, that what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits. It still retains the element of diversification; and in that diversifi-

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cation there is life. (CP 6.158; W8: 155; EP1: 331; lecture “The Law of Mind” delivered to the Harvard Philosophical Club, 24 May 1892) Again, in this passage, Peirce’s monism is of a somewhat reluctant form. He is “bound” or “obliged” to maintain it. Nonetheless, he attributes to all matter a certain kind of “mind” or “life.” Henri Bergson termed this aspect “spirit,” claiming, as did Peirce, that it was a reality inherent in all matter (2007: 78, 80). The reluctance of Peirce’s move to monism is, perhaps, explained by his deeper and wholehearted commitment to synechism. Peirce’s doctrine of synechism, argues, in brief, that “all that exists is continuous” (CP 1.172; 1897). Synechism, as Lane observes, was also explicitly opposed by Peirce to dualism, and in terms that, again, forced him to arrive at a monistic conclusion (2012: 244). Peirce wrote in this regard: Synechism, even in its less stalwart forms, can never abide dualism, properly so called. It does not wish to exterminate the conception of twoness. … But dualism in its broadest meaning as the philosophy which performs its analyses with an axe, leaving, as the ultimate elements, unrelated chunks of being, this is most hostile to synechism. In particular, the synechist will not admit that physical and psychical phenomena are entirely distinct,—whether as belonging to different categories of substance, or as entirely separate sides of one shield,—but will insist that all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular. Still all alike present that mixture of freedom and constraint, which allows them to be, nay, makes them to be teleological, or purposive. (EP2: 2; CP 7.565; 1893) Pragmaticist monism, then, in this synechistic regard, focuses on the relatedness or continuity, rather than on the simple oneness, of mind and matter. From a rhetorical perspective, synechism foregrounds not what is (obviously) different from the standpoint of “substance,” but what is comparable in terms of movement, or, as Lane phrases it, “not what [sort of stuff] it is, but how it behaves” (2009: 15). In this regard, Peirce’s monism admits, synechistically, that matter, all matter, also embodies intelligence—albeit sometimes of a hardened or “hidebound” or “effete” sort (EP1: 293; CP 6.7–34; “The Architecture of Theories”; 1891, The Monist). It arrives at monism, compulsively, through its synechism. Again, as Peirce elaborated: Now, in obedience to the principle, or maxim, of continuity, that we ought to assume things to be continuous as far as we can, it has been urged that we ought to suppose a continuity between the characters of mind and matter, so that matter would be nothing but mind that had

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such indurated [hardened, unfeeling, stubborn] habits as to cause it to act with a peculiarly high degree of mechanical regularity, or routine. Supposing this to be the case, the reaction between mind and matter would be of no essentially different kind from the action between parts of mind that are in continuous union. (CP 6.277; cited also in Romanini 2011) In sum, in Peirce’s perspective, the ways in which mind and matter differ are relative, not absolute (Lane 2012: 243). Matter exhibits “a peculiarly high degree” of regularity but is not “essentially different” from mind. This is the basis, in Lane’s observation, of what Peirce sometimes referred to as his “objective idealism” (EP1: 293; Lane 2009: 15; 2012: 241). Peirce’s monism, albeit somewhat involuntarily, boils down to the claim that, in his words, “All matter is really mind” (CP 6.301). Synechistic monism is reflected in innumerable ways throughout Peirce’s semeiotic. It informs the claim that nonhuman and even inorganic movements can generate symbols. It supports the argument that meaning inheres in nonhuman, even nonliving forms and processes as well as in human ones, and also the view that all sign performance is staged through movements that forge positive connections, even those many-times-removed performances that serve to produce representations of difference. However, Peirce’s brand of monism is, perhaps, most evident in the priority he assigned to the sign category of the icon, the sign type that stages oneness with all that relates to it.2 The icon is the quintessential sign of monism as it orients Peirce’s semeiotic. To understand the specific and distinctive monist character of pragmaticist sign performance, then, as it bears on the argument made here for landscape performance and its cultural and choreographic significance in Yosemite National Park, it is necessary to examine closely the role played by icons and by the phenomenon of iconicity, both in sign performance generally and in the symbols of landscape performance specifically. As Joseph Ransdell once noted, iconicity is conceptualized in Peirce’s semeiotic as being of an unusual synthetic kind, one that enables it to bring about real and direct, in Bergsonian terms pre-subjective, purely perceptual connections between sign performers and the realities they mediate and in some cases also represent (Ransdell 1997: 45; 2005: 33). Icons, semeiotically conceived, are signs that come to life in the presence of unrelated but potentially identical characters, becoming wound up in them and unwinding them into each other as well. In so doing, icons realize or “trans-animate,” as André Lepecki might conceptualize the process (2013), communion between always already animate beings, human and otherwise.3

Pragmaticist Iconicity The icon, as Peirce defined it, is the sign that moves movingly a relationship of same-ness. Peirce’s original label for the icon, according to Ransdell (2005: ¶ 12), was “likeness” (CP 1.558; 1867). Icons, in representational terms, are simply like

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whatever it is they represent. The whole of their sign-like identity is based on this characteristic. They are, as Andacht has noted, “the simplest of signs” (2013: 2). In their simple identicality lies their vitality as well as their significance. In nonrepresentational variants, iconic signs perform likeness mediationally by re-moving the very moving-ness of their motivating sources. They “re-live,” in Ransdell’s terms, the “such and such” of their own semeiotic wellspring (2005: ¶28). The choreographic character of the icon, in this respect, is that of intelligibly moving energies performing in unison, the “how-ness” manifest in any movement process sharing that how-ness with some other. It is, for example, the significance of the energy quality of heaviness manifest in two tired backpackers’ “thunks” when they gratefully set down two fully loaded packs simultaneously after a long first day on the trail and then look at each other in amused surprise at their having done so at precisely the same moment and in the same manner. It is the excited “Spriiiiing!” quality felt as significant in the leaps of a child and her mother as they ambitiously jump together across a muddy gully that is just a bit too wide to be easily negotiated. The icon is the sign of patterned connections in energy quality that matter in moments of simultaneity, synchronicity, and energization. Its significance lies in its freedom from any but this most basic form of relational connectivity and in the unconstrainable imaginative potential that ultimately may flow from its moving source. The semeiotic potency of the icon stems from the idea that any connection made in this manner, any connection in like-ness, is potentially a monist connection made as well to “______-nesses” in any form whatsoever—indeed, to “every-ness” itself, and even to “all-ness.” In this regard, as Frederik Stjernfelt has argued, the power of the icon lies in its capacity to enable those who interpret it to learn more than lies contained within the design of its semeiotic construction (2014: 208). Peirce describes the performance of iconic signs vividly when discussing the contemplation of a painting—a kind of gazing performance that occurs in many forms of touristic activity as well and is certainly comparable in some respects to gaze traditions practiced by virtually all of Yosemite’s visitors. Employing logical, object-oriented terminology, Peirce writes: Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them. … So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream—not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon. (CP 3.362) This description foregrounds the potential or virtual character of icons. Ontologically speaking, icons in pragmaticist sign theory are signs of “pure” possibility. Their performance is, in and of itself, dream-like, not in the literal sense of the

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term (i.e., that they would occur only during sleep) but in what Andacht has identified as a “cosmological” and theoretical, even “quasi-technical” sense (2013: 6). In this sense, “dream” is identified with the infinitely distant, originary moment of the cosmos, the moment before it exhibits the characteristic of existence, the moment when it is merely potential, before it persists in reality and becomes real in any regular sense (Peirce, CP 1.175; Andacht 2013: 6). The oneiric character of the icon defines its performance as purely potential energy.4 As Peirce stipulates, “A possibility alone is an Icon purely by virtue of its quality” (CP 2.276; EP2: 273; 1903). In the rhetoric of landscape performance and its unwindings, iconic signs in performance serve to “loosen” or release the movement of a visiting subject’s mind to the point that the mind may lose itself entirely in the qualitative energy of iconic movements. What is removed, displaced, and/or represented deterministically in symbolic sign performance comes to matter less and less as the influence of the icon’s energy may come to matter more and more. For example, the moving quality of gravity’s downward pulling quality typically comes to matter more and more in the process of a hiker ascending a long, steep trail. As it grows in its influence on the hiker’s movements, it may become the hiker’s only awareness. The hiker may come to feel its influence giving definition to the present and possible future breathing- and muscle-functioning. All other awarenesses may be temporarily forgone in order to continue the movements of hiking in this relation to the qualty of gravity and its potential to change the hiking performance process, bringing it to a rest, perhaps, if it becomes an overwhelming presence. Hikers at times may sense the future of their movement through their attunement to such energy qualities and their potential influence, letting go of other sign performances in so doing, even those that may represent these very qualities linguistically. It is with regard to their purely potential mode of being that icons are conceptualized as inherently freewheeling signs, at least as far as their interpreters’ destinies are concerned. Although the icon is the type of sign capable of performing unity and oneness—a condition closely associated with the politics of totalitarianism—it is also the sign type that is incapable of determinism. Icons cannot persuade, let alone coerce. In and of themselves they can only suggest. They are possibilities, and as such, they cannot be causes. They cannot act. They can only perform aliveness. They cannot be habits. They cannot control other signs that may live apart from them and which may re-move (or remove) them. They cannot regulate, manipulate, or otherwise ensure their own significance or its consequences. An icon, as a sign of pure play, “bloweth where it listeth” as Peirce famously observed (EP2: 436; 1908). The monist connections that icons pattern can only happen spontaneously without the icon having “done” anything to produce them. The politics of the icon, in this regard, if such a characterization could be made, are those of complete and total liberation.

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So it is that when a camper, hearing a birdsong, whistles its melody in such a way as to join in the song’s sonic patterning—something campers do in Yosemite from time to time—the camper enters into an iconic manner of performance. It is a manner that unites the camper’s living energy with that of the bird, exemplifying a phenomenon that historian Benedict Anderson has described in relation to nationalist song practices as “unisonance” (cited in Bohlman 2002: 93). This manner of performance is not contemplative in the sense Peirce describes in relation to the conventional representational painting sign. Rather, it is a mediational performance of nonrepresentational, literally “con-templative” (temporally identical) presences, a restaging intelligibly and energetically of the song’s sonic unfolding in the camper’s own moving being. This iconic at-one-ment, however, can occur only to the extent that the camper turns into a being that is simply involved in living the whistling echo of the song’s inherent character, turning over his or her powers of attention and awareness to the song’s sonic quality. The camper must let go of competing interests or concerns so as to attune energetically to the performance of sounding the same sounds made by the bird, allowing his or her faculties of intelligence in this way to “come nearer to action,” in Bergson’s terms (2007: xiv). If, and only if, this turn of events happens, and only to the extent that it happens, is the camper performing as an iconic sign, however fallibly. Only to the extent that the camper succeeds in fully living the aliveness of the song, riding confluently upon its waves of forthcoming energy, is he or she relating in a monist manner to it. When such an iconic performance is in process, it is, in reality, all that is happening for those involved in its performance, to the degree that they are involved in it. The camper, in this case, enters into a relationship motivated entirely by the qualities of the birdsong, as did the bird itself, to the extent that the bird was also performing the song’s icon. The iconic significance of the performance, in this regard, is entirely undetermined by the particular bird that was in fact previously giving voice to the song. Like the bird, the camper becomes a moving character, whose movements are defined by the song’s unfolding energy patterning. The camper’s aliveness becomes that of the song’s energy “signature,” a signature the camper is already capable of performing given his or her own sound-generating character. To the degree that the camper becomes the icon, to the degree that the song’s energy qualities come to resonate within the camper’s being, as that being is already inherently capable of such resonation, the capacity to do anything other than live the aliveness of the song’s energy qualities is foregone. Such is the iconic trade-off. Real communion may be performed, but at the price of controlling any consequences of that energetically shared identity—not only for the camper, but for all those, before and since, whose energy may have been enlivened, however imperfectly, by the icon’s performance. Icons simply cannot make themselves be performed. They cannot force themselves upon others. They cannot impose. They cannot control consequences because they are

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inherently inconsequential, at least in actuality. Yet, they live, and they even already live, potentially, within all. And their liveliness, their suggestiveness, can be extremely appealing and attractive. Their performance, from a pragmaticist perspective, realizes the monism potentially inherent in the cosmos in its infinite oneiric suggestiveness. Despite this definitively virtual, pure-and-simple, uncontrolling character, icons also, as Andacht has noted, and as the examples of the painting and the whistling camper illustrate, exhibit the enigmatic capacity to become incorporated (2013: 1). While icons are in and of themselves entirely potential, Peirce also stipulates that they are “capable of being completely embodied” (CP 1.536; 1903). That is to say, they may move in integral coordination with other kinds of actual and general signs. They may become wound up in other characters of being, animating them as well. Herein lies the first critical, and critically political, twist of semeiotic monism. When the icon is embodied, it becomes involved (or in-volved mediationally speaking) with a sign that is an existent individual. This sign performer, as an actual singular individual, differs from all others, and even, in time, from him-, her-, or itself. In its embodiment in such a performer, the icon becomes wound up in a play of difference, even though it remains, in its own energy qualities, iconic. It is no longer simply simple. To adapt Gary Fuhrman’s semeiotic concept to this particular circumstance, it now becomes “simplex” (2015). Peirce termed such embodied, likeness-moving signs hypoicons or “iconic signs” (CP 2.276). As with the pure icon, the relationship between a hypoicon and its motivating source is one of sameness or shared character. This is the primary condition of the hypoicon’s performativity, such that if the icon it embodies fails, in whole or in part, the iconic aspect of the hypoicon also fails. Ransdell, in his discussion of the embodied iconic sign (the term he preferred to hypoicon), gives another gaze-oriented example illustrating it—also an example commonly recurring with visitors in the Yosemite landscape—that of a map as it represents some territory to an interpreter. The map, Ransdell explains, is not a pure icon, but rather an individual, actually existing material object. However, it is an object “that can function as an iconic sign for a given territory in virtue of the fact that it embodies a form or icon proper (exhibited by the lines drawn on it) which is identical with the form (structural features) exhibited by or embodied in that territory” (2005: ¶15; emphasis in text). The rhetorical capacity of the iconic sign to enable the icon it embodies to perform in an identity-forging manner becomes evident in Ransdell’s discussion as he elaborates its usage. Not coincidentally, the terms of this elaboration are strikingly close to choreographic in character, if they are not precisely that. Ransdell writes: There is nothing counterintuitive in recognizing a real identity here [between a map user’s imagination and the real territory they imagine]: on

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the contrary, it is surely just what we ordinarily take for granted when we point to a map and say something like “You go from here to here, and then you turn this way, continuing in this direction until you come to here and …” It is surely far more commonsensical—and theoretically felicitous—to hold that the demonstrative pronouns being used are directly designating the territory itself, when they are used to designate the points on the map representing those places on the territory, assuming the map truly is iconic of the territory in the relevant respects. (1997: ¶47; emphasis in text) Once the map’s interpreters start to relate to the map choreographically and to be moved by its signifying relationships—if only in their imaginations—they begin to unwind or return to the movement qualities that Ransdell characterized as made representationally “transparent” in the map’s semeiotic composition. The qualities represented in the map’s material aspects are re-presented as living relations that share the same definitional energies as the territory itself. The signs are trans-created as the interpreters contemplate moving energetically through the identified movements of the map’s embodied icon, mediating—moving toward re-presenting rather than representing—its significant relations. The performativity of the hypoicon/iconic sign is in this way nothing other than that of the icon embodied. Like the pure icon, the hypoicon stages the movement, a removed kind of re-movement process, to be sure, but nonetheless an iconic movement of shared character or virtual co-action.5 In human experience, icons proper and iconic signs more generally are never performed and interpreted with absolute accuracy. They are subject to human fallibility, which may occur to varying extents but which is always a factor in performance. However, this lack of perfection does not negate the basic character or performativity of the icon, pure or embodied. As far as they do to any extent succeed, icons succeed in moving shared virtual, but embodiable movement processes into communal liveliness, not through processes of actively “making” connections happen, but through the affordance of creative synergies always already potentially ready to happen inherently. This relational sameness performed by icons is particularly evident, Ransdell notes, in cases of self-representation, where the icon and that which moves it movingly, as well as that which is moved by it, are all three embodied in one and the same living character (1997: ¶48, 49). It may only be the passing of time, in such cases, that affords a semeiotic relationality to emerge between what may be construed as an otherwise simple, though singular, embodied being. This is the case, for example, in movements or gestures practiced repeatedly in the same way by an individual for the purpose of clarifying for that same person the present energetic potential inherent in a moving part or member of his or her own body. The repeated movement, echoing itself iconically, presents and re-presents the

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same energetic character or quality inhering in that member of the person to that very person. For example, when a climber in Yosemite tests the strength inherent in his or her own fingers by grasping repeatedly the same handhold on a climbing route in the same way, sensing the energy quality of the fingers’ movements and checking thereby to assess if they are indeed going to be capable of using those fingers effectively on their next move upward, that climber is engaging in such an act of iconic self-representation. This self-checking behavior occurs frequently in Yosemite climbing (and elsewhere), given the risks potentially entailed in its actions. It is an integral part of climbing landscape performance. In such a case, the gestural sign mediates a self-self relationship, enabling a climber to gain a current awareness of his or her own present performative condition in preparation for a coming action. Such performance does not intervene in the sense of interfering or intruding between the climber and the climber’s perception of his or her fingers, such as they really are. Neither does it make or impose upon the climbers’ fingers anything that they were not inherently potentially capable of performing already. Rather, the movement “intra-venes” mediationally and nonrepresentationally. It “comes,” connectingly, to life, its energy qualities bridging a past moment of self-awareness with one in the process of unfolding. In so doing, its performance enables the climber to perceive and register the continuously energetic yet constantly fluctuating identity of his or her own self, temporally re-creating the character of his or her own fingers in movement while existentially remaining one and the same proprioceptive character. Perceptual and mediational movements become one and the same in this kind of sign performance. It is in this regard that Ransdell understands the icon as defined in Peirce’s semeiotic to be “synthetic” (2005: ¶33).6 This is not to say, as Ransdell has noted, that an iconic sign, an embodied hypoicon, is absolutely indistinguishable in every way from that which motivates its performance. It is to say that insofar as an icon is performing movingly in such an embodied sign, that icon does so only by virtue of what it shares in common with its motivating source (Ransdell 1997: ¶37). To the extent that it does so, however, Ransdell argues, a sign embodying an icon enables those being moved by it communion with what it represents, or with what it re-presents mediationally. As Ransdell elaborates, using object-oriented terminology: There is a real sense in which even the other object—for example the territory represented by the map—can be said to be immediately perceived, namely, in the sense that if the representation is a true one, the relevant properties of the represented object are just as immediately present in consciousness as are the properties of the representing object since they are, ex hypothesi, the same properties. (1997: ¶56)

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The iconic sign and the object are undifferentiated, in Ransdell’s view, and therefore identical (2005: ¶16). In Peirce’s words, “Whatever it [the icon] is like, it in so far is” (CP 5.74 1903). It is, not because it has been caused to be so. It is because its potential for being so already has simply been realized in its behavior.7 In sum, and phrased rhetorically, the performance of icons serves to bring to life, and to animate in oneness, those relating to them. They move their interpreting agents into the same identical moving characters that have initiated and characterized their own signifying energy. The idea of an unknowable Ding an sich, in this regard, becomes inconceivable as either the representational “object” or as the nonrepresentational motivator of an icon. Icons provide “access without intervention,” in Ransdell’s terms (2005: abstract added to the online version of the paper). This is what Ransdell characterizes as their “epistemic function” (2005). Their performativity is one of patterning “transparently” and making “immediately available” living energy, patterning connections between characters that, though they may previously have been unrelated, are nonetheless always already potentially alike (Ransdell 1997: ¶50). In so doing, icons and iconic signs inspire belief rather than skepticism in the reality of what they mediate or represent, even though they will always perform fallibly to some degree in human experience (Ransdell 2005: ¶6). In performing movements of communion, in realizing, however tentatively, monist connections-in-sameness, they continuously infuse the signs relating to them—even signs that have been moved and re-moved, and moved re-movedly ad infinitum—with vital qualities and creative energy, and with the potential for giving birth yet again to new signs in novel equally suggestive and uncontrolling ways.

The Icon within the Semeiotic Symbol Now that I have described the distinctive monist performativity of the moving icon, and of iconic signs embodying them, it remains to set forth their role in relation to the semeiotic symbol as that relationship bears upon Yosemite landscape performance. In its recurringly “wound up” and re-moved composition, the symbol exhibits its own distinctive character—that of persuasiveness, as has been discussed throughout this volume. The performativity of the symbol is not simply monist. In fact, it is the most “un-simple” of all semeiotic sign movements, as Andacht has observed (2013: 2). If an icon were embodied in the single mobilizing weight shift of a tiny ant, a symbol would be the significance of that weight-shifting energy quality as performed by its entire colony. If an icon were a single dynamic molecule of quartz, a symbol would be a crystal growing millions upon millions of them. Complex though it may become, the symbol, nonetheless, embodies recurringly iconic movements. It is these iconic sign performances that enable the symbol’s own complex signifying capabilities. Just as the movement of a waterfall depends upon the quality of falling embodied and actualized in each individual drop of water, so a symbol, every symbol, depends

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upon iconic signs in its own performance. In its nonrepresentational variants it may literally in-volve or en-dure them, as a pebble thrown along a diagonal trajectory so as to skip repeatedly along a river’s surface can be observed to involve multiple dimensional qualities of spatial tension that persist throughout its flight.8 Even in its most abstractly removed, cerebral representational variants, as Peirce recognized, the symbol is composed so as to perform the “living influence” of an icon (CP 7.467). It is critical for understanding the politics enabled by the semeiotic symbol to recognize that it is always simultaneously symbolic and iconic in the manner described above.9 As Andacht has argued, “Any attempt to isolate iconic and symbolic signs is doomed, because in life as in its mediated representation these signs (together with indexes) function cooperatively, as a ‘tri-relative influence’ (CP 5.484)” (2013: 4–5). Andacht credits Ransdell with having illuminated this composite character of the semeiotic symbol, ensuring in so doing that the symbol would not be misconstrued as a kind of semeiotic “animal,” entirely separate from iconic “vegetables” (2013: 10). Symbols are, in Peirce’s terms, “organically attached,” to icons, vitally dependent on their presence as living members of their own performance processes (CP 5.119; cited in Ransdell 1997: ¶64). Viewed rhetorically, the precise role played by icons in symbolic sign performance is one of initiating qualitative characterization. Icons serve to energize or animate in some distinguishable, intelligible, and moving way the multiple actual, existent bodies, what Peirce called the “replicas,” on which a symbol depends in its own performance (CP 2.246). The taste of the apricots and the feeling of the moisture produced in my habit of chewing of them, which moved me to continue chewing them; the intensely energized quality of Alan Moore’s screaming attachment to the boulder route, which moved him to continue screaming; and the balanced upward moves of the Half Dome climbing guide—these characters of moving energy embodied in the landscape performances described in previous chapters served to give animate definition to the movement processes occurring. Without them, the patterns of recurrence being enacted would have no energy. Their bodies would lack living definition, and they would have nothing to connect with or to convey—nothing to move or to be moved by. Peirce emphasized this iconic role in relation to representational symbols through the notion of the “idea.” He argued, “The only way of directly communicating an idea is by means of an icon; and every indirect method of communicating an idea must depend for its establishment upon the use of an icon” (CP 2.278). Understood in isolation from its iconic aspect, a representational symbol lacks ideational, imaginable, definable content. The symbol becomes “blind,” as Andacht has observed (2013: 2). That which endows it with representable movingness is missing. Andacht quotes Joseph Ransdell in this regard, who observed, “If there were no icon there would be nothing for the symbol to do, and it would be mere ‘empty verbiage’” (cited in Andacht 2003: 228). A symbol, An-

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dacht argues, could not grow without its iconic life source. Its iconic movements animate and fuel its continuity and, in its representational variants, form the imaginary “substance” of its sign performance. Symbols may even be seen to be “subservient,” in this regard, to the icons they embody (Andacht 2013: 7). They might better be characterized, again in Gary Fuhrman’s terms, as simplexly rather than complexly wound-up signs, given their inherent debt to their iconic sources (2015: chapter 11). The iconic aspect of the semeiotic symbol, in sum, is what brings it to life, both ontologically and epistemologically speaking. It is what gives it vitality and affords it its connecting, communing potential—its not-yet-wound moving as opposed to its wound-up removed character. It is what enables the symbol, rhetorically conceived, in the words of the philosopher of pragmatism Thomas Alexander, not only to “clarify meaning in terms of action,” but, even more vitally, to develop this clarification without losing awareness of the action’s oneiric, generative, and creative sources and potential turns. What is distinctive of the semeiotic symbol, in this regard, is that its meaningfulness must be interpreted with the understanding that its actual performance can only be staged, or reconstructed, as Alexander phrases it, “in the light of the possible” (1990: 325). Without the light of the icon and its ever-suggestive, uncontrolling powers, the symbol, metaphorically speaking, would be dead in the water. A symbol cannot fabricate an icon, nor can it live without it. The composite icon-symbol relation creates a predicament, as far as the inherent politics of the symbol and its performativity are concerned. The symbol is by definition the sign type, the only sign type, capable of moving its interpreters deterministically. It is the sign capable of persuasion, of controlling thought, and of habit formation. Mediationally speaking, it is the sign that performs “durational rhythms,” as Bergson identified them—the rhythms of “re-_____-ing” or recognized “not-new-ness.” These rhythms, in Bergson’s observation, were the foundation of memory (2007: 75). As such, the symbol is the only sign that recruits bodies and turns them into replicas defined in terms of its own accumulated intelligence, because it is an intelligence that can associate consequences with movements in process when they are likened to remembered movements with remembered consequences. The symbol is the sign whose performativity “imports the past into the present,” in Bergson’s terms (2007: 80). It slips its intelligence into the body of a hypoicon and informs it of a future that is more likely than not to actually occur, a future to which actual facts of remembered experience lend credence. In this way, the symbol is the only sign that can influence the actions of real-life individuals, arguing them into or out of doing things that may have material, lasting consequences in their lives and worlds, presenting them with remembered, relevant, now-absent performances in point. Yet, despite this deterministic power, the symbol, human or nonhuman, cannot, in and of itself, make

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a move if it were to become detached from its freewheeling iconic energy sources. Even while a symbol may be employed to serve a totalitarian purpose, it can never inherently be simply totalitarian in character, because it can never command completely the unity—energetic or ideational—that its own icons bring to life. The symbol can do no more than determine the staging of this oneness. It cannot determine the real being of oneness. The pragmaticist symbol, in this regard, can only determine enactments that are, in reality, not purely iconic, enactments that differ from one another and whose differences are also inherently significant, however infinitesimally so. In this regard, the very sign, and the only sign, that may embody and serve agentively the politics of totalitarianism and all its less extreme but comparably controlling variants—the symbol—depends for its suchness upon the very kind of sign that can only perform as a sign, but does undoubtedly perform as a sign, in freedom. The symbol can stage the icon, but it cannot be the icon. The icon can perform movingly, but it cannot determine the consequences of its performance. Such is the compromising, simplex character of the icon-symbol relation. The symbols that carry the greatest rhetorical force, from this Peircean standpoint—the symbols that stand to make the most compelling, persuasive, and enduringly influential arguments and to recruit replicas most effectively and continuously—are those that serve, rather than command, the energies inherent in the icons whose qualities they would make a habit out of staging. If there were to be one general political character that the pragmaticist symbol, in theory, might tend toward exhibiting, it would be one that argued for the relative sustainability, in reality, of those movements that make lively the relationship between freedom and control, between determination and liberation, serving the cause of neither to the exclusion of the other. The pragmaticist politics of the symbol, in this regard, would be one arguing for the critical cultivation of realist consensus (a process understood to be virtually endless) such as may best serve to sustain the most profoundly moving movements of pure freedom in a world of diversifying, creative change. The actual human uses of symbols, of course, have been as variable as the icons to which they have become attached and as fallible as is humanity in general. They have served the causes of all forms of human tyranny. They have served as well as the basis for political movements of diversification, even the most extremely anarchistic ones, given their fundamentally (r)evolutionary composite character. They have performed over the course of human history (and before it) the entire spectrum of power-oriented movement conceivable to human minds. Their organic iconic aspects have been no panacea for human failings in the arenas of politics. It might well be argued that they have even been the root of all evil as well as all good. However, what these aspects have not been is in total control of the courses their energies have been used to pursue or to change. That governing

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intelligence, which can never do without them but can also never create them, is of a different order of composition.

The Symbolic Composition of Yosemite National Park Given the composite, temporally and energetically wound-up character of the semeiotic symbol described above, what, then, remains to be said about the significance of landscape performance in the specific cultural, national, global, and planetary/ecological context of Yosemite National Park? As has already been discussed, when visitors engage in landscape performance in Yosemite, they are presented with the possibility of unwinding and recomposing their culturally constructed selves in myriad choreographic ways. In iconic forms of meaning-making, they find freedom from convention in so doing. They discover, remake, and enliven their individuality and their “ecologicality” in ways that may change the course of their lives permanently. What is added to these observations by the recognition of iconicity’s distinctive epistemic function and its ever-present monist influence on symbolic sign performance? What is to be gained from the resulting proposition that visitor activities in Yosemite, particularly those that are the most markedly choreographic in their embodied manner, must be interpreted “in the light of the possible” as it connects them to nonhuman forms of sign performance? What it is that is added is the recognition that Yosemite’s vastly variable, diversifying processes of meaning-making do not begin in some social or cultural or discursive national or global order.10 Neither, however, do they begin in some biological nonhuman order. Rather, meaning-making in visitor experience begins in the relatively “wild” stages of iconic potential as they may be humanly or nonhumanly conceived. What is added is the recognition that oneiric freedom is the initial stage of all that is and becomes and continues as symbolic in landscape performance. This recognition provides reasonable grounds for the expectation that new, more broadly intelligible, more deeply and diversely performed emergences of meaning-making will likely take place in the activities of all visitors, conventionally and unconventionally minded alike. Understanding the composite, simplex character of the Peircean symbol, in this regard, is crucial for understanding how Yosemite’s visitors may embody life-altering processes of meaning-making, not only in nonconventional, dissensual, and unforetold ecological stages of landscape performance, but also in the performance of its most firmly fixed, conventional, and traditional stages as well. As the composite theory of the symbol specifies, novel signs are not born only by accident or by some other departure from conventional execution. They occur potentially within every form of symbolism, as every form of symbolism is one that is brought to life iconically. This intrinsic iconic aspect of all sign performance is what enables Yosemite’s visitors to move and to be moved as nobody has ever been moved before, in and with the presence of the living landscape, even when they re-enact conventional traditions of visiting as consensually as hu-

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manly possible. In the embodiment of the icon that every symbol depends upon, visitors, even the most consensual ones, may in-volve themselves in unforetold possibilities, twisting free of representational (re-)constructions and determinations. Even in the most conservative, culturally determined replications, they are continuously presented with the opportunity to “dismount” and unwind onto the stages of at-one-ment and infuse themselves perceptually with the landscape’s nonhuman energies, to explore its oneiric potentials, and to re-move themselves creatively and even, perhaps, memorably in dance-like ways. The cultural performances of the Yosemite landscape, in this regard, even the most conventional and imperialistically nationalistic human ones, do not preclude or forestall this kind of iconic freedom. On the contrary, they stage it, or at least the potential for it. A visitor, any visitor, in this regard, can perform conventionally without necessarily giving up on living, or embodying, or learning something new. They may, perhaps, even figure out a means of conventionalizing it, eventually learning and representing culturally revolutionary lessons in the process. All of Yosemite’s visitors, in this regard, have the potential to play a role as creative, evolutionary agents contributing performatively to the freedom and vitality of the courses governing the patterning of the landscape’s symbolism, cultural and otherwise. This is a role that, in its all-inclusive character, inspires acceptance and tolerance for the diversity of human conduct evident in the park. It fosters the awareness that no visitor can take the place of any other with respect to how meaning-making processes of potentially vital significance might unfold and persist. All visitors, regardless of pre-existing symbolic affiliations, identities, and hierarchies, may contribute in critically important, evolutionary ways to the epistemic functioning of the landscape. This capacity, however, is only as sustainable in the Yosemite landscape as is the capacity for critical error finding, which may also be embodied by the park’s visitors as they move, not simply in unity—or even in uniformity—but in de-/re-composing continuity. What the pragmaticist theory of the simplex symbol adds, in this regard, to the analysis of Yosemite’s rhetorical influence is the assurance that visitors in performance in the landscape are not destined to move as the overdetermined replicas of culturally conceived symbols—even when that might actually be their choice. Rather, in landscape performance, conventional or not, Yosemite’s visitors may move with initiative at the vital interfaces between human and nonhuman variants of potential, actual, and determined sign performance. If they move choreographically—that is, in ways that intelligibly change the course of the symbolic patterning in process—they may come to share compositional agency in relation to the trans-creative processes under way. They may become connected to the larger ecological realm they inter-habit, not only within the boundaries of the park, but beyond them; not only for purposes serving their own specific lives, nations, or societies, but for all sentient creatures, and all perceiving, experiencing forms of life—for “all-ness,” monistically speaking. They may contribute

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their own interests, habits, intelligence, and life energies into its ever-changing, diversifying, ecological, and sociocultural mix. This, of course, is not a guaranteed consequence of their performance. However, it is a kind of performance that the landscape’s existing ecological features make attractive at pre-subjective levels of sensuality and perception.11 This, then, is the hope manifest in the rhetorical force of the Yosemite landscape, pragmaticistically conceived. It is a “contributionist” hope for every individual visitor, no matter how many, no matter what their pre-existing cultural or social identity.12 It is a hope that is manifest with especial “big-ness” in relation to the colossal scale of Yosemite’s unique topographical design. However, it is a hope that is nonetheless generalizable to other landscapes as well, for it is not a romantic hope based in a false image of untouched pristine “Nature”—not a vain hope that somehow, in the exposure to pure wilderness, some kind of mystical “good-ness” will infect and possess the souls of visitors and magically transform them. It is not a hope that rests solely in the landscape’s nonhuman dimensions of uncontrollability alone. Rather, it is the hope that in the wildest oneiric stages of human and nonhuman symbol creation alike, movements may happen that will energize visitors to live and to relive and, perhaps, even to enact and to conventionalize an intelligence that they, and the societal and cultural institutions and discourses with which they have identified, previously may have found inconceivable and unimaginable. It is hope derived from the assumption that there are forms of understanding that are embodiable in the landscape that may result in the growth of new forms of human thought, reason, and even sanity, both in visitors individually and in humankind collectively. In a word, then, the main answer forthcoming from these extended theoretical arguments and what they add concerning the question of Yosemite’s visitor landscape performances is hope. It is hope inspired by the experiences of surviving and persisting, not only in the chaotic face of “living spontaneity,” as Peirce identified it, but in the face of monumental degrees of symbolic determinism as well. The icon-symbol connection justifies the inclusion of Yosemite National Park, humanly governed though it is, as part of what Wallace Stegner characterized as “the geography of hope” (1994: 333), the hope of sanity through the growth of new intelligence as it can always be (re)gained in the choreographies of landscape performance.

The Final Move (in theory) This pragmaticist view of Yosemite’s cultural performance, while it may hold some commonsense appeal for visitors who have actually experienced the landscape, when it is considered in relation to current prevailing trends in performance and cultural theory, may seem difficult to accept, difficult to maintain, and difficult to defend. The key to the positive conceptual expansion it affords is the awareness that its validity rests entirely on the ability to think in and through

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and by the performance of movement. It is only via thinking that is moving that these pragmaticist extensions, very literally speaking, make any sense at all. Only choreographic thinking recognizes how moving, in time, becomes removing, and how the awareness of the “re-ing” quality of re-moving is, in and of itself, significant. Only choreographic thinking is capable of registering how the movement processes of bodily differentiation and coordination (“member-ing”), in time, can become re-membering—the significant mediational precursor of imagined remembering. Most crucial, only moving thinking comprehends how time’s durational reality when embodied (and so “presented”) in a living form, in time, with no additional “content” or “substance,” becomes re-presentational— the mediational stage that precedes and makes possible forms of representational signification. It is only via these choreographic forms of awareness that cumulative processes of creative movement become understandable as the primary staging grounds for emergent performances of generality—of the re-acting, with awareness, of “actions superficially different,” to use Bergson’s terms. From this recognition comes the understanding that cumulatively general movement performances are nothing other than the emergent stages of conventional (imagined, conceptualized, contemplative) symbolic forms of sign performance. The continuity, in other words, between the general idea of genus on the one hand—the idea upon which the whole of human language and mathematical symbolism is based and (r)evolves—and the vital signs of the earth’s simplest living forms on the other is a relational complex that can only be contemplated without paradox, contradiction, or some other dualistic fallacy by choreographic thinking. Without the awareness of (re-)moving as the process that connects living to acting to learning, there is no reasonable justification for enlarging the spectrum of sign performance in the manner pragmaticist sign theory proposes and the Yosemite case is intended to illustrate. One might ask: are the symbols of human language simply, or simplexly, nothing other than stages of dance-like intelligence, many times removed? The answer at this point, from the perspective here developed, should be transparent. If there is anything that makes us distinctly human, it is the choreographic character that animates and composes the sign performances of our faculty of language. Human semeiotic capabilities may bear in mind a few more twists and turns, a few more stages of removal and representation than those of other life-forms. However, choreographic intelligence is accessible as well in ecologies whose assembled symbolism is far older and more elaborately evolved than human movements and figures have until now been able to represent. As we create and discover the means to relate more and more intelligently and sustainably to these eco-symbolic forms, our connection to, as well as our differences from, other forms of life may become clearer as well. This is the choreography of hope that the landscape performances of visitors in Yosemite National Park symbolize so persuasively.

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Notes 1. Colapietro has used the expression “twisting free” metaphorically to characterize Derridean deconstruction, as it may be seen to align with projects of reconstruction, pragmatically conceived (2008). I do not attempt here to make any explicit connections to theories of deconstruction, although the coincidental usage both here and in later sections of this essay indicates that critical inquiry along these lines might well be generative. I use the phrase “twisting free” here non-metaphorically to diagram the general character of sign performances that transition from representational into nonrepresentational, mediational stages. In so doing, I draw primarily not on Peirce, but on Henri Bergson’s arguments concerning what he characterized as the “threefold problem of matter, consciousness, and their relation”—a triadic conceptualization that aligns closely in some, though by no means all, respects with Peirce’s semeiotic (2007: 17). In particular, I base my claims regarding the character and performativity of semeiotic types of un-, re-, and simply “winding” on Bergson’s development of the rotating conic diagram of the movements of memory as they served to relate past and present images and their intelligence in both perception and in action. Employing this model, presentational, “re-presentational,” and representational sign performances can be identified as movements of a continuous curve spiraling through time, transforming, in so doing, new moving-ness into not-new, not-not-new, and infinitely not-new kinds of movingness, presence, embodiment, and signification. As Bergson argues, “The distance between these two terms, presence and representation, seems just to measure the interval between matter itself and our conscious perception of matter” (2007: 27). Conscious perception, here, is conceptualized as a “matter” of mediated iconicity that is not merely cerebral but rather “immensely wider” in its “psychical state” than an individual embodied brain (2007: xiii). Being and being consciously perceived for Bergson, as for Peirce’s icon, are “merely a difference in degree, and not of kind” (2007: 30). 2. “Firstness,” rather than “oneness,” would be the pragmaticist term employed here, referencing Peirce’s doctrine of Universal Categories. 3. The idea of trans-animation is inspired by the concept of trans-creation developed by André Lepecki in his study of Brazilian concrete poetry (see Lepecki 2013). Regarding the use of the term “communion,” this corresponds to Peirce’s earliest definition of iconic signs, which defines them as likenesses “whose relation to their objects is a mere community in some quality” (CP 1.558; 1867). 4. Andacht explores the political and ethical ramifications of this character of the icon as it relates to hypoicons constructed in the virtual realities of mass media (2013). 5. Here the example illuminates an alignment between Bergson’s and Peirce’s understanding of consciousness. Bergson claimed, “Consciousness means virtual action,” which is exactly what the contemplation of the Icon as Ransdell describes it produces (2007: 48). 6. The example here given, and the rhetorical characterization of sign performance it entails, again affords an opportunity to see a close alignment of the Peircean theory of perception Ransdell develops with the theory of image perception developed by Henri Bergson. Perception, in Bergson’s perspective, was not a process contained in an individual nervous system isolated or disconnected from that which it sensed. As with Ransdell’s theory, perception for Bergson is truly “where it appears to be” (2007: 43), that is, wherever the icon is performing, be it in the Hypoicon (“image” in Bergson’s terms) or in the icon it

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7.

8. 9.

10.

embodies (self- or other-presented) or in some replicant or substitute for it. For Bergson, processes of perception included a sensing nervous system in a continuity of movement that also included that which was sensed. This meta-sensory understanding of perception was made conceivable in Bergson’s case as well by a movement-based or “choreographic” theory of intelligence and its embodiment. As Bergson argues, “We may therefore say that while the detail of perception is moulded exactly upon that of the nerves termed sensory, perception as a whole has its true and final explanation in the tendency of the body to movement,” and “the actuality of our perception thus lies in its activity in the movements which prolong it” (2007: 41, 74). Here again, a convergence with Bergson’s theory of “pure” perception is clearly apparent. Rejecting theories of perception that characterize it as the extension or exteriorization of internally originated sensations or ideas onto external reality, Bergson argued, “Perception, in its pure state, is then, in very truth, a part of things” (2007: 68). It is “part and parcel with reality” (2007: 71). The importance Bergson places on recognizing “pure” perception, as it must be distinguished from the actual perceptual experiences of humans, which are never, in fact, completely “pure,” because they are “interlaced” with processes of memory that are of a fundamentally different character, is closely analogous to the distinction Ransdell sees Peirce making between the icon in its “pure” potential state and the hypoicon, as well as other kinds of sign performance, particularly those of symbols with which the icon, in the course of human life, also inevitably becomes involved (Bergson 2007: 71, 72). As Bergson, in terms nearly identical to Ransdell’s, observes, “Perception coincides with the object perceived; and which is, in fact, externality itself ” (2007: 71). Perception, for Bergson, as with iconic sign performance for Peirce, is what places humans “in the very heart of things” enabling intelligible connections to them “in themselves, from within and not from without” (Bergson 2007: 73, 75; emphasis in text). In pure perception, Bergson argued, “we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition” (2007: 84). In both perspectives this connection occurs nonrepresentationally, or perhaps more to the point, pre-symbolically, and it does so in reality. Bergson defined pure perception in this latter respect as “a system of nascent acts which plunges roots deep into the real … the reality of things is no more constructed or reconstructed, but touched, penetrated, lived” (Bergson 2007: 74–75). Peirce used the term “involve” to characterize the relationships that link the icon to the symbol (CP 2.248–2.249). He also used the idea of “organic attachment” (CP 5.119; cited in Ransdell 1997: ¶64, and Andacht 2013: 19n4). It is equally crucial to recognize that a symbol is always indexical as well, to bring in the other member of the sign trichotomy to which the symbol belongs. For the purposes at hand, however, the iconic properties of the symbol are the primary focus of this discussion. On its indexical properties, Daniel (1987), Keane (1997), Mines (2005), and Parmentier (1987) provide helpful discussions in relation to comparable kinds of cultural performance. The definitive anthropological work on indexicality as it relates to linguistic sign performance is Silverstein (1976). Philosopher David Ray Griffin has termed these “axiomatic certainties,” characterizing pragmaticism as “antifoundationalist” in contrast (1993: 24). Griffin refers to this as the “antifoundationalism” that is inherent in Peirce’s pragmaticism, a philosophical orientation that asserts, “There are no precisely axiomatic certainties from which to start” (1993: 24). This antifoundationalism, Griffin argues, while it might be seen to provide a ba-

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sic alignment of Peirce’s thought with that of others, such as Neitzsche, Derrida, and Deleuze, who also opposed foundationalism (such as that of Descartes, among others), differs from these more “extreme” forms of antifoundationalism in its assertion that some forms of thought, those held as “common sense” most especially, despite their origins in uncertainty, nonetheless accumulate certainty in ways that inspire relatively deep though diverse forms of justifiable belief (1993: 30). In this regard, it is possible to be antifoundational without giving up on learning and gaining wisdom (1993: 26). 11. This argument is elaborated in relation to a specific case of climbing landscape performance in Ness 2012. 12. “Contributionism,” as Griffin notes, is a term coined by Charles Hartshorne to characterize the pragmaticist’s ethically engaged stance toward life in general (1993: 30).

References Alexander, Thomas M. 1990. “Pragmatic Imagination,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26(3): 325–48. Andacht, Fernando. 2003. “Iconicity Revisited: An Interview with Joseph Ransdell,” Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 23(1–3): 221–40. ———. 2013. “The Lure of the Powerful, Freewheeling Icon: On Ransdell’s Analysis of Iconicity,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49(4): 509–32. Anderson, Douglas R. 1987. Creativity and the Philosophy of C.S. Peirce. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergson, Henri. 2007 [1912]. Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Cosimo Classics. Bohlman, Philip. 2002. World Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colapietro, Vincent. 2008. “Colapietro #2: Re/de/constructions.” Video interview. Dewey Center, University of Cologne website, http://www.hf.uni-koeln.de/dewey/31777video 1232#videoplayer. Last accessed December 24, 2014. Daniel, E. Valentine. 1987. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fuhrman, Gary. 2010. “Rehabilitating Information,” Entropy 12: 164–96. ———. 2015. Turning Signs. Published online at www.gnusystems.ca, http://gnusystems.ca/ wp/category/turning-signs/. Last accessed November 19, 2015. Griffin, David Ray. 1993. “Introduction: Constructive Postmodern Philosophy.” In Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 1–42. Griffin, David Ray, et al. 1993. Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hartshorne, Charles, and Paul Weiss (eds). 1931–1935. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols 1–6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. James, William. 1909. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. Auckland, New Zealand: Floating Press. Keane, Webb. 1997. Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Lane, Robert. 2009. “Persons, Signs, Animals: A Peircean Account of Personhood,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45(1): 1–26. ———. 2011. Post made on Peirce listserve under the subject heading “Slow Read: “The Use and Abuse of the Immediate/Dynamical Object Distinction,” February 26, 2011, 2:07 pm. ———. 2012. “The Final Incapacity: Peirce on Intuition and the Continuity of Mind and Matter (Part II),” Cognitio 12(2): 237–56. Lepecki, André. 2013. “Dancing through the Visual and Back.” Lecture presented at the Tanz Kongress, Bewegungen übersetzen-Performing Translations conference, Düsseldorf, Germany, June 8, 2013. Mines, Diane. 2005. Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ness, Sally Ann. 2012. “Talking to My Left Foot: Performative Moves In-Between Self and Landscape in Yosemite National Park,” About Performance 11: 119–41. Parmentier, Richard. 1987. The Sacred Remains: Myth, History, and Polity in Belau. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–1958. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols 7–8 edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce Edition Project (eds). 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–93). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP1. ———. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP2. ———. 2010. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 8 (1890–92). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as W8. Ransdell, Joseph. 1997 [1986]. “On Peirce’s Conception of the Iconic Sign.” Version 2.0. Listed on Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway website under “Peirce-Related Papers,” http://www .iupui.edu/~arisbe/. Original version published in Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner (eds), Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, Festschrift for Thomas A. Sebeok. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg Verlag. ———. 2005 [1979]. “The Epistemic Function of Iconicity in Perception.” Version 2.0. Listed on Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway website under “Peirce-Related Papers,” http://www .iupui.edu/~arisbe/. Original version published in Peirce Studies 1: 51–66. Romanini, Vinicius. 2011. “Perception Grounds Communication.” Paper delivered to Biosemeiotics Conference in New York City, June 2011. Accessed by website: http://www .minutesemeiotic.org/?p=29. Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” In Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby (eds), Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 11–55. Stegner, Wallace. 1994 [1960]. “Wilderness Letter.” In Frank Bergon (ed.), The Wilderness Reader. Reno: University of Nevada Press, pp. 327–33. Stjernfelt, Frederik. 2007. Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag. ———. 2014. Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns. Boston: Docent Press. Turner, Victor. 1982 [1974]. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Figure 5.1. Yosemite Valley’s eastern end, October 2008. Half Dome is to the right. Royal Arches and Washington Column are in the center. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Chapter Five

q

The Spartanburg Coincidence

Yosemite … is not outside history … the place becomes a mirror reflecting back a whole nation’s wrestlings with time and place and race. … Yosemite is often regarded as a refuge from the world, but it can also be a vantage point from which to look at the world. —Rebecca Solnit, Yosemite in Time

Introduction

A

coincidence occurred at the end of November 2009.1 It made me understand Yosemite in a way different from those so far presented in this volume. The coincidence is not only testimony to the diversity of experience the park can afford to its individual visitors as they engage the nonhuman aspects of its landscape. It also illustrates one main aspect of the park’s character not yet foregrounded—that is, how Yosemite, as a living landscape, has an extraordinary capacity to move people as they interact with and relate to one another, not only within but also beyond its own borders. I report the coincidence here as it unfolded. It may seem far-fetched in some ways, and in truth, it is. That, however, is part of its point. One of the first things people will tell you, if they know anything at all about Yosemite, is that it is a nature preserve. It is a place set aside by the government because it is such a special landscape. The park acquires meaning, in this regard, as a place removed from other places. Interviewees who spoke to me for the Yosemite Visitors Project about visiting the park repeatedly characterized Yosemite in this sort of way, describing it as a sanctuary, a cherished getaway, a place that was an escape from the ordinary places of their lives and from their everyday homes. They experienced the landscape as a “refuge,” in the terms Rebecca Solnit has employed, quoted above.

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Of course, they were right about that. However, Yosemite is also much more than that. It is not merely a place set apart. It is a place that has the power to change lives, and through those changing lives, it has the power as well to change other places. Yosemite has the power to act on those very places from which it is believed to be set apart. On occasion, it has the power to create entirely new places, and these may be located virtually anywhere in the world. In this regard, Yosemite is more than a vantage point, as Solnit has conceived of it. It is also a magnet and a catalyst that may alter even the most seemingly unalterable realities. I began to get in touch with this formative power of the Yosemite landscape through the Spartanburg coincidence, as I will now refer to it, although only vaguely so and to a considerable extent through my own imagination. However, what I imagined in this case is actualized in countless others still to be documented. Of that, I have no doubt. Regardless, the Spartanburg coincidence itself was real.

The Coincidence Although it occurred in November, the Spartanburg coincidence actually had been in the making since early October 2009, which was when I bought the novel Gloryland, by Shelton Johnson, at the Fall Forum of the Yosemite Association.2 I’d bought it from a friendly cashier sitting down behind the outdoor bookstand that had been set up in front of the barn at the Pioneer History Center in Wawona. The cashier had squinted up at me with a smile. The day was changing in what seemed like two seconds from chilly to hot. She patiently agreed with my comment that, yes, there were a lot of great books coming out on Yosemite at the moment. Yes, 2009 was a watershed year for park literature. Yes, definitely, yes … yes. She knew I was stalling. “Stop it, Ness,” an inner voice said, somewhat sharply. “Pay the lady.” I was more than a little annoyed with my reticence. Eventually, I did. That is how Gloryland finally came into my hands. That was how the Spartanburg coincidence began. Well, not exactly. Shelton Johnson was already an author I knew I should know by October 2009. He was one I’d had plenty of opportunities to hear at Yosemite Valley evening programs since I’d started visiting the park in 2004. He was the ranger who gave lectures and performances on the Buffalo Soldiers—the African American soldiers who had patrolled Yosemite National Park during the nineteenth century.3 I had never quite managed to track him down and listen to what he had to say, however. I was always too busy climbing or hiking or doing some other activity, or I was too tired after having done so to attend an evening program. Earlier in 2009, however, I’d come across Johnson’s voice while I was surfing on the Internet. A journalist reporting on Ken Burns’s soon-to-be-aired documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea had picked him out and interviewed him. In the podcast, Johnson wasn’t focused on African American

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Yosemite history, the subject matter that had made him a park celebrity. In this interview, he was simply talking about the park. His voice was riveting. It was that Internet encounter that had brought me to a standstill at the Wawona bookstand over Gloryland. I was late to Johnson’s party, to be sure, but by the Fall Forum of the Yosemite Association, I had made it. That was the beginning of October 2009. It was Thanksgiving holiday, however, before I finally got around to starting in on Gloryland. By 30 November, I was deeply immersed in it. Somewhat to my surprise, however, I was not immersed in Yosemite. I was immersed, instead, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Spartanburg is the town where Johnson’s Gloryland protagonist Elijah Yancy is born in 1863. It is the place where he grows up and the site of his formative experiences of racism. Spartanburg is Elijah’s hell. However, it is also his home. For a Yosemite enthusiast, eager to dive into a turn-of-the-century experience of the High Sierra—an experience made all the more distinctive by the African American identity of its hero, Elijah—one is asked, in reading Gloryland, to spend an awful lot of time in Spartanburg. One must plow through chapter, after chapter, after chapter—ten chapters in all—before finally getting to move on to the “real” material set in the still not-yet-national, though already wondrous park. You don’t actually get to Yosemite until page 159. More than a quarter of the book dwells in Spartanburg. On page 159, you do, at last, reach Wawona. However, you have to get there the hard way, and that way lies through Spartanburg. One can hardly beat the history of racism in the American South when it comes to horrific subject matter. Relative to what is out there on comparable topics, Johnson actually goes pretty easy on Spartanburg. Nonetheless, what he presents of local life is grim. Spartanburg comes across as a dreadful place. Disgusting, contemptible incidents of extreme injustice and incivility occur daily. Basic human rights are denied as a matter of course. Forces of oppression and evil seem to make the atmosphere itself too dark and dense to sustain living things. Johnson narrates, for example, Elijah Yancy deciding to celebrate his eighteenth birthday by taking a stroll down Spartanburg’s only sidewalk. It is just an ordinary sidewalk, but in Spartanburg’s racist climate, it becomes the stage for an act of extreme transgression. Johnson writes: I lifted that foot and put it down squarely on the sidewalk. I leaned forward, pushed off, and brought my left foot up right next to it. Then I was standing on the sidewalk where no colored person was supposed to stand. … I felt giddy, but I didn’t know if it was fear or being up so high. It was just a few inches, the distance between where I’d been and where I was, but it could have been a mountain. … I looked up and saw Spartanburg like it had just come out of the air. Then fear hit me again

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and made my head too heavy to keep up. The trees whispered as I began to walk, head bowed. In front of me and behind me were white people, but they were just bright pieces moving in a fog of perfume, branches, shadows, and light. (2009: 54) Elijah literally takes his life in his hands just to move along on top of the wooden boards that his friends and neighbors, although they had built and maintained them over the years, had always been forbidden to tread. For this act, he is pushed and shoved, stared at, and condemned. When he finally steps off the sidewalk, he finds himself a free man, but one whose life is now in danger. All this from a Spartanburg sidewalk. No one could read the opening chapters of Gloryland and come away liking Spartanburg. That was crystal clear to me. To be honest, until the coincidence, I actually thought that “Spartanburg” was a made-up name. I assumed it was no closer to reality than was Johnson’s fictional figure of Elijah Yancy. I thought it must have been invented as a composite made up of many factual places. Johnson appeared to be using the name to boil down the racism of the region into one concrete, graspable location. The Spartans, after all, were the ancients that Westerners loved to hate most of all, the great cultural losers. For a place that was as deeply marked by wrongdoing as the hometown of Elijah Yancy to actually have been a real town, really named Spartanburg—that was unbelievable. I took it as an act of authorial mercy. Kind of Johnson, I thought, to mask the actual location(s) in this way. It certainly wouldn’t have been to any town’s credit to have had its name published and its character illuminated in the way that Gloryland had portrayed it. However, on the day after I read Johnson’s account of Elijah Yancy’s fateful walk down Spartanburg’s sidewalk, I did an interview for the Yosemite Visitors Project that brought me up against a more complicated reality. The interview was with a climber whose experience on El Capitan I had been intending to document for the better part of a year. He wasn’t African American. I sat down at home that evening to review his recording, and I found myself, to my amazement, listening to his voice reporting that he’d grown up in Spartanburg, South Carolina: “I was born in North Carolina, I spent a short time there until I was four. I basically wound up in South Carolina, grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and wound up joining the Navy when I was twenty years old” (30 November 2009). Somehow, I’d missed the detail during the interview itself. I had made an error at the beginning of the recording, forgetting to find out what the family name of the interviewee was before we’d started. I’d had to ask for it while we were recording. The gaffe had left me off-balance, too many mental balls in the air, struggling to keep the questions coming smoothly. As it turned out, it had been a lucky break. I hadn’t caught the information given about the interviewee’s background at the time he stated it. If I had, I was certain that I could not

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have stopped myself from letting a shocked expression come across my face that would have conveyed the equivalent of saying with no small amount of dismay, “Spartanburg?” It’s not good form to let an interviewee know they have just said something you find appalling. This one, in particular, would have noticed. By lucky accident, however, I had missed the detail. The blunder had certainly had a silver lining. I sat in my study at home as I first heard this news. I sat there for a few moments, digesting it, thinking about how it changed my thinking, not only about this interviewee, but about Elijah Yancy, about Shelton Johnson, and about Yosemite. This was the Spartanburg coincidence. I’d caught the trace of my interviewee’s southern accent months ago. It would have been impossible to miss. I had ancestral connections of my own to the South. Voices I’d loved as a child, and voices who had loved me, had borne similar accents. Missouri accents, Texas accents, Virginia accents. I could not but be attuned to this Carolina accent. I had felt it, more than heard it. The accent hadn’t steered me in Spartanburg’s direction, however. It had just brought me a vague, “oh good,” positive charge—a mild, knee-jerk surge of relief. I had an inherited feel for the language games of southern dialects. That sense of comfort, however, vanished utterly with the mental registration of the word “Spartanburg.” Elijah Yancy’s home, and his hell. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt such a jolt had my interviewee been a relative stranger. He wasn’t. He was what they call a “setter” from a climbing gym where I was a member. He was a professional climber who designed and “put up” routes, as climbers say, on artificial rock walls studded with removable hand- and footholds. I often climbed routes at the gym that had been set by my interviewee. I admired his work. Beginner though I was, I had enough experience to be able to perceive differences between the routes I climbed. My interviewee’s climbs were remarkable. They made you feel like you were outside, even at the gym. This meant a lot to me, as I’d joined the gym to prepare for climbing in Yosemite Valley. There is a special bond that develops between setters and those who climb their routes. It tends to be almost completely one-sided, like the bonds authors have with their readers. Gym climbers literally follow in their setters’ footsteps. You grasp their holds; you put yourself through their moves. It is their logic, their understanding, that frames your experience. You acquire a visceral as well as a thoughtful likeness of them. They put you through their paces, and when you succeed, you have them to thank for what you have mastered. When you learn something, it is by their lesson plan. When you fail, it is their work that humbles you. It is their route that challenges you to try again. Chris,4 my setter, was a role model, if not something of a hero to me. I did not want to see him coming out of Spartanburg, South Carolina.

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Well, at least he had come out of it, I quickly told myself. He left when he was about Elijah Yancy’s age, nearly as soon as he could. Like Yancy, the military had offered Chris a way out. Like Yancy, it was a way that had led west, eventually to San Francisco, and then to Yosemite. Like Yancy, it was a way Chris had taken and never returned. Irrationally, I hoped it was because he’d hated Spartanburg. However, Chris’s life history would not let me rest for long in this fantasy of resemblance. He had not left Spartanburg behind, any more than Elijah Yancy had. Johnson, by the way, makes sure his readers take this point about Elijah. When, at last, Elijah finally does reach Yosemite, and when he seems, at last, to be a world away from the South, Johnson writes of Elijah as nonetheless still living with his native home from day to day, no matter where he travels. He narrates Elijah writing to his parents: “When I sleep and dream at night I’m with you. When I’m riding on some high trail or lying by a fire or sitting in the Big Trees, I’m with you. You’re in my blood and every time I take a breath, you’re moving in my heart” (2009: 265). Elijah finds himself at home in Yosemite by way of, not away from, Spartanburg, whether it is through a Sunday song from his childhood that he hears and sings or through memories of his family he recalls in the meadows and woods of the high country he patrols. He never disconnects from it. Yosemite represents no escape into paradise in Gloryland. It is no refuge, in this regard. Johnson doesn’t invest in that particular Euro-American myth. Spartanburg is always there for Elijah Yancy, even in Yosemite. It is there as hell, and it is there as home. As with Elijah, Spartanburg also followed my setter, Chris, to Yosemite as well, albeit in a different way. My head sank into my hands when I heard how, as I re-listened to the interview. It was not at all the way I would have wanted it to be. It was actually the woods around Spartanburg that had followed Chris to Yosemite. It was the Spartanburg woods that had stayed with him and remained a moving presence in his Yosemite experience. Just as Elijah had maintained a living connection to his parents in Johnson’s writing, Chris had maintained a vital relationship to the Spartanburg woods. It was in these very woods—these very same Spartanburg woods—that Johnson, on his side, had decided to set the most hideous and tragic spectacle of all those he narrates in Gloryland. He does so with good reason. Let me stop, at this juncture, and introduce Johnson’s Spartanburg woods. They come to life via the murder of one of Elijah Yancy’s neighbors, Mr. Washington—Mr. George Washington. The gruesome account is told in Elijah’s voice: I watched one man reach down and jerk Mr. Washington up. Since his feet were tied, he couldn’t get up very well so he kinda slumped back to the ground, and this angered the man who was yanking on him. … An-

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other Ku Klux hooked his elbow round Mr. Washington’s left arm. He seemed unwilling to be freed from the ground, like he’d lost the use of his legs while he was lying there. But finally they had him up, sort of, and he stood there breathing deep and fast, and soon they had a rope round his neck … he turned his head side to side, trying to move away from it, but he could only move so much, and then they brought it down hard round his neck. (2009: 47) Johnson then describes Elijah watching Mr. Washington being hung from a big oak tree. He watches the man’s life end, watches his body burn, watches as the tree itself is set on fire and destroyed: “I could smell the wood burning and I could smell him, both were in my eyes and my lungs, and smoke was going up into the black sky, moving between the stars till it blacked out the stars and the only light was from the burning sky” (2009: 49). Those were the woods of which my setter had spoken. They were the same Spartanburg woods. They were present in Chris’s Yosemite account. They came up when he was talking about his first climb on the monumental feature Royal Arches. It was the first really big climb Chris ever attempted in the Valley. He did it sometime around 1990. Chris had been stationed at a naval base in Alameda, California, along with his climbing partner at the time. The two had taken to visiting Yosemite whenever they could get time to go up. Both were intent on gaining as much climbing experience as they could so that they could apply it to their ultimate challenge: climbing El Capitan. Climbing Royal Arches was a big step in that direction. Chris and his friend had learned a lot on Royal Arches. Among other things, they’d learned that just like everywhere else in the Valley, there was a lot of traffic on Yosemite’s “big wall” climbing routes. They had learned that just like everywhere else, traffic could cause major delays. This they had learned the hard way, getting stranded at the top of Royal Arches, after dark, without flashlights. They had no idea about how to get down, having expected to be done long before sunset. As it was, they had only moonlight to guide them through an area known as the Death Slabs—aptly named, in Chris’s view, given all of the fatal falls over the rim that had occurred in that area. More than one hiker caught in exactly the same circumstances in which Chris and his friend had found themselves had ended up dead. The two had nearly met the same fate on that night. They were following one of the climbers in their party who had been up on the Arches before and who supposedly knew his way back to the descending trail. He had led them instead to the brink of catastrophe. Chris had taken matters into his own hands at that point, deciding to trust his instincts. Even though he was completely unfamiliar with the area, he had guided himself and his companions safely to the trail that led them back down to the Valley.

Figure 5.2. A frontal view of Royal Arches, September 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

Figure 5.3. El Capitan, October 2005. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

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Hearing this, I had asked Chris in the interview if he’d had any previous experience with off-trail hiking. He’d quickly answered in the affirmative: I was in the outdoors all my life as a kid. Growing up I loved the outdoors. … I was a hunter. … I spent a lot of time in the woods in terrain that was brand-new to me, and not knowing, you know, where I was at, and how to pay attention to landmarks so I could find my way back out. I enjoy that, actually. I think I have a knack for it. (30 November 2009) Chris had spent time in the outdoors, a lot of time in the woods around Spartanburg. Chris’s experience in those Spartanburg woods had served to guide him through the Death Slabs on that night above the Valley. When he was performing that lifesaving path-finding act, his movements were a sign of the Spartanburg woods. It was sobering to learn that Chris had grown to love the outdoors in the same woods where Johnson had written of Elijah Yancy crawling like an alligator a century earlier through brush that tore at his skin, cut him, and made him bleed as he’d bushwhacked his way to witness Mr. Washington’s hanging. The woods that had meant brutality, terror, and death for Johnson’s Elijah had been a training ground for Chris as well. The same woods that had afforded Johnson’s rendition of the killing of Elijah’s neighbor had rescued Chris from a fatal mistake. In the woods of Spartanburg, Chris the hunter and Elijah Yancy the sharecropper seemed divided in my mind only by time. True, it was a considerable span of time. They had inhabited those woods one hundred years apart, as Johnson had composed it. But how much could a place really change in the passing of century? Anthropologically speaking, it wasn’t a very long span of time. Chris hadn’t mentioned what it was that he had hunted in these woods. However, the idea that he had learned such skills in them was the last thing I wanted to hear. I reflected on the injustice embodied in the Spartanburg woods. Johnson also had brought this out in his narrative. He writes of Elijah watching the branch of the oak tree that was used for the hanging, wanting desperately to see it break, hoping that it would somehow refuse to fulfill its role as the instrument of Mr. Washington’s murder. It fails to do so, and Elijah is angered by its mercilessness: The branch didn’t budge as they pulled tight, pulled harder. I wanted the branch to break or at least bend a little, but it was an oak and it was strong, and the weight of Mr. Washington was no weight at all to the oak. It didn’t care about a little rope biting into it. It had survived fire and wind, and nothing moved it at all, even when Mr. Washington was off the ground and his body was shaking and his legs dancing round trying to find the earth again, stabbing down, searching for something

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solid. Even then the oak was still and calm, and I was mad that it would do such a thing. (2009: 48) Chris and Elijah now appeared to me as figures about as opposed to one another as two human beings could be. The woods that had provided Chris with orienting intelligence had also enabled the murder of Elijah’s neighbor. I did not want to dwell on this difference. However, there it was. And, then, I could not help but wonder what might have happened if Chris and Elijah had somehow met in Spartanburg, across time, and across the realms of fact and fiction. What would their encounter have been like had they crossed paths on Spartanburg’s sidewalk on the day of Elijah’s birthday walk? What could even a best-case scenario have been for this meeting? Johnson had given me virtually no margin for error on this, no matter how I tried to make it work. At best, at best, they’d approach from opposite directions, draw close, and pass by. Elijah would see Chris’s feet, Chris would see Elijah’s body. They would pass by. There was no more than this that I could construct for the two men’s meeting in Spartanburg, divided as they were by the seemingly omnipotent force of American racism. This impossible scenario itself sparked another question, and it was one that hit with quite a jolt. Could Shelton Johnson and Chris actually have met in Yosemite? Could they possibly have crossed paths in the Valley? I did the math. Articles mentioning his career history noted that Johnson had been working in the park since 1994. Chris had climbed El Cap in 1993— his first major climb. He’d continued to climb in Yosemite throughout the 1990s. The possibility was real. Johnson had been a ranger during the years Chris had been visiting and climbing in the Valley most frequently. It gave me pause to think that Spartanburg’s two representatives might have gazed upon Half Dome, or El Cap, or Royal Arches, or Yosemite Falls on the same day, even at the same moment. They might have walked the same trail, seen the same sunset, or bought coffee at the same deli on the same evening. I wondered what the chances were that they might actually have come face-to-face on some occasion. Perhaps Johnson had looked up and seen Chris’s lamp blinking on Half Dome on one of the nights when Chris had made one of his several attempts. It was conceivable. It was not impossible. In fact, it was more than likely that the same rain that had occasionally fallen on Chris and his climbing partners had also fallen on Johnson as well. It was at this point that I began to think about Yosemite in a new way. I began to think of it as a meeting ground rather than a refuge or preserve, and as an active rather than a passive geographical feature in the larger world to which it belonged. I began to see it as a place not for humans and nature to encounter one another, as the guidebooks always emphasized, but rather as a place for people, and the landscapes they came from, to encounter each other, and to do so in oth-

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erwise unthinkable ways. Whether or not Chris had indeed crossed paths with Johnson, the woods of Spartanburg had definitely met those of Yosemite Valley, and not without consequences. Speculating further, I reflected at length on what it might mean for Johnson and Chris to meet in the Valley and how different that might be from any meeting they might ever have in Spartanburg. In the Valley, the two men would be immersed in a landscape for which they had both expressed a profound, enduring reverence. I knew this firsthand from both of them. Johnson, again through Elijah, writes: [Yosemite] was a place, a home, a heaven to me. Some folks pray for a sweet hereafter, but it’s already everywhere round us, the air we take in, the light that fills us, and the darkness. It’s where we hope to go at the end, and maybe where we come from at the beginning. It’s the dusty trail winding down to El Capitan, into the cool shadows of black oaks, the wet meadows their roots embrace, and a river, cold and bright that never stops singing. (2009: 269) Chris, when looking back over his years of experience climbing in Yosemite, expressed a comparable sense of place near the end of his interview: I can drive into the Valley now. I can have climbing equipment and everything in the car, and I can be quite content with just, not even climbing. It’s such a beautiful place. It has such deep, you know, connected memories with me that I don’t even have to climb and I can still enjoy myself for the most part. I can go hang out in El Cap Meadow and just kick back in a camp chair or whatever and just watch other climbers up there and really just enjoy spending time in the Valley. It’s such a majestical place. (30 November 2009) What might it have meant for these two men to meet not in Spartanburg’s woods, or on its sidewalks, but in Yosemite Valley? To meet not in the characters of the hunter and the hunted, but as visitor and ranger? The possibility took hold of me, and the scene that is described in the following section unfolded in my mind.

The Dream [It is very early morning, spring 1996, Camp 4—the climbers’ preferred campground.] The still recently arrived Johnson, in the spirit of Elijah, is patrolling through the tent-populated campground on horseback. Johnson is in a spotless uniform. His horse is perfectly groomed. However, the horse ambles a shade too close to some tents at the very moment Chris is coming out of his. Hungry, in need of coffee, and with a full day of climbing ahead of him, Chris is in no mood for

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Figure 5.4. Ranger in Camp 4, Yosemite Valley, October 2008. Photo by Sally Ann Ness.

salutations to a passing official. Delays of any length chip away at his margin for safety. The timing of Johnson’s horse, however, makes greeting unavoidable. Chris has emerged at exactly the wrong moment. Words have to be exchanged. Johnson speaks first: “Good morning.” The words come out in a mellow, good-natured tone. At their ending, however, is a silent test. It is a test that may be failed without consequence. However, it is there. Elijah’s spirit, alive within him, makes sure of it. A silent test is there. How does Chris respond? Like the navy man he is, I imagine. He looks up, a little sharply, since the greeting comes from higher off the ground than usual. He takes the horse and rider in at a glance. He recognizes the official manner; he hears the gentle test of authority. He registers the mildly deliberate cheerfulness. He responds: “Mornin.” There is no cheerfulness in Chris’s tone. There is no good-natured invitation for more communication. He does not give an inch on affect. Neither is there any suggestion of his being overly impressed by the relatively grand figure of the rider requesting his attention. However, Chris hides every trace of annoyance at the interruption. (Chris, I should say, is an absolute master of the deadpan expression). His response is delivered in a tone utterly free of disrespect. It is given

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back as called for, no more, no less, with a searching glance that for a split second meets the ranger’s eyes. That split second is long enough to allow the ranger to read Chris’s intent, to witness the lack of retaliatory spirit and the measured, fair acceptance of authority. It is no more than a one-word, bare-bones expression of compliance. However, it passes the test. A lot would happen in that split second, I imagine. Johnson, in the spirit of Elijah, recognizes exactly what he has been given. How does he intend to take it? Will he settle down in his saddle and ride on by? He would feel the evenness of the exchange, the lack of hatred, arrogance, and provocation in this visitor. But does it disappoint him, nonetheless? Would he want more? Whatever Johnson’s first reaction might be, it is overridden by a second. That one is a double take. This, I imagine, would be the moment when Chris’s accent registers in Johnson’s mind. Chris’s South Carolina drawl would not fail to ring true to this writer’s poet-trained ears. Johnson recognizes it as he starts to ride a few steps further on. On impulse, he reins in his horse. He turns in his saddle. In all the richness of Elijah’s voice, he asks, “Excuse me, but I just can’t help askin’— hearin’ that accent you have. Would you by any chance happen to be from one of the Carolinas? Maybe some place around Spartanburg, perhaps?” This question would stop Chris dead in his tracks. He would hear everything it held. He would hear the benign curiosity and the faint trace of homesickness. He would hear the gesture it made and the risk it took. He would even hear the spirit of Elijah in it—the history, the culture, the brutality. He would hear it all. And, then, it would happen. At exactly that moment, Yosemite would happen. A grin would flash across Chris’s face. The cares of the morning would cease to occupy his thoughts. He would respond, then, in the only way that someone raised with southern manners could decently respond. He would produce an expression formed purely and serenely by the interest in being hospitable. “Spartanburg? Why, it is Spartanburg ’xactly. That’s right where I’m from.” Pause. Smiling. “Well, imagine that,” Johnson says. Then, taking a bit of authorial liberty, he adds, “Me too.” The two men’s eyes would now meet a second time. This time there would be no hurry on either’s part. They would stay silent a moment, letting time relax in the glories of the Valley morning, the way time relaxes in the South. A bird would sing. The Falls would roar dimly in the background. Both men would be aware of everything. Both would be a part of everything. And, just like that, in the glories of the Valley morning, Spartanburg would become a slightly different place. The centuries-old vice of racism would lessen ever so slightly its grip. Something like freedom would weaken its hold. Freedom to smile. Freedom to exchange a civil word. Freedom to act in good faith. Of course, it would be for only a moment, but it would happen. It would have to happen, if all of this were happening in Yosemite.

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Then, Johnson would give his horse a nudge and say, “Well, have a good visit. Sorry to interrupt you.” “No problem.” With a wave of his hand, Johnson would pass on down the trail, and Chris would go on with his morning.

Conclusion When I imagined this scenario, I was lying sleepless in bed on the night of the Spartanburg coincidence. Eventually, hours after midnight, I got up and wrote it down in an effort to get it out of my head. A sharp inner voice rebuked me as I thought more about it afterward. “Dream on, Ness.” The voice has done so many times since then. The construction of such a miracle-cure story is embarrassing. So is the knowledge that the narrative takes its own authorial liberties with two individuals who are anything but naïve. However, it was, in truth, the imagined sequence that unfolded. It was another consequence that the Spartanburg coincidence and the Yosemite landscape produced. Perhaps the best that can be said of this imagined process is that it revealed to me how the park can hold meaning for its visitors not simply in its pristine apartness as a wilderness preserve and also not simply in relation to other landscapes and their histories. The Yosemite landscape also holds meaning in relation to the possibilities it opens up for its visitors, for the dreams that it enables them to dream and the lives it allows them to imagine living. In so doing, the landscape can bring new life to old characters, altering and influencing, even at times recreating them, giving them futures that otherwise would be not only improbable but unimaginable. I still can’t help but wonder, inner voices notwithstanding, how different a place Spartanburg might someday be, for Johnson, and for Chris, and for all those to whom they are connected, should the two men actually somehow chance to meet each other in Spartanburg after meeting each other in Yosemite. I wonder how different a place America might be if all of its people were to meet first in a place like Yosemite—or at least in a place like the place that Yosemite has been for Johnson and for Chris. Perhaps, in some spirit, by some dream, or in some vaguely imaginable way, they do.

Notes 1. This chapter, although never published previously, was initially conceived as a means of illustrating the general character of the research I conducted in Yosemite for a non-academic journal put out by the membership of the Yosemite Association (YA). Until its merger in 2010 into a larger organizational complex called the Yosemite Conservancy, YA, at the time the chapter was written, was a long-established, privately-run, service organization dedicated to supporting the mission of Yosemite National Park. The chapter,

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given its intended audience, employs no theoretical references. Its use of ordinary language sets it apart from the other chapters included in this volume. Nonetheless it gives another detailed example of the semio-genesis of a sign of qualitative possibility, a daydream. In Peircean technical terms, a sign of this kind is termed a “Rheme.” In Peirce’s later work (ca1903) a Rheme is defined as, “a sign which, for its interpretant, is a Sign of qualitative Possibility, that is, is understood as representing such and such a kind of possible object” (CP 2.250). As Peirce scholar, Jeffrey DiLeo, has elaborated, “a rheme is a sign which is interpreted by its final interpretant as representing some quality which might be found in a possibly existing object” (1997:579). The rheme is to the sign-interpretant relation as the icon is to the sign-object relation. Viewed rhetorically, it might be considered the birthing of an Icon—an initial movement of significance into a new receiving sign. The virtual sign reported in this chapter, although motivated in large part by factual events and characters, bore no factual relation to any of its sources of inspiration. Its being consisted entirely in its having been actually imagined. In this respect, the sign illustrates a relatively early, generative phase of a kind of rhetorical process often identified with the Yosemite landscape, the kind of process that keeps its symbolism growing and moving in new directions. 2. Among the regular activities of the Yosemite Association (see Note 1.) were Spring and Fall “Forums” organized for its membership inside the park boundaries over the course of weekends in March and September, respectively. During these gatherings, members would receive park updates from senior officials in the park administration, and they would partake in lectures, workshops, and guided tours focusing on various aspects of the park’s history and nature. 3. Johnson’s portrayal of the Buffalo Soldier Elijah Yancy can be seen on a video clip at the Yosemite National Park website: http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/buffalo-video .htm (last accessed 26 February 2013). 4. “Chris” is a pseudonym.

References “Buffalo Soldiers.” National Park Service Yosemite National Park website, http://www.nps .gov/yose/historyculture/buffalo-soldiers.htm. Last accessed 26 February 2013. DiLeo, Jeffrey. 1997. “Charles Peirce’s Theory of Proper Names.” In Nathan Houser, Don D. Roberts, and James Van Evra (eds), Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 574–94. Johnson, Shelton. 2009. Gloryland: A Novel. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–1958. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols 7–8 edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Solnit Rebecca. 1994. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Index

A Actor-Network-Theory, 34n23, 133, 139, 142–43 Ahwahnee, 46, 47, 79 Ahwahneechee, 103, 123 Alexander, Thomas, 144 Andacht, Fernando, 132–33, 136–37, 143–44 Appadurai, Arjun, 43, 44–45, 56 B Bauman, Richard, 4, 11 Bennett, Jane, 133 Bergson, Henri, 131, 134, 135, 138, 144, 149 bouldering, 47–53 choreography, 61, 64–66, 87–88, 94–98, 103, 115–17 community, 54–56, 73–74 cultural symbolism of, 56–66 fist-jamming, 79–81 as performance, 92, 96–98, 140–41 as pilgrimage, 123–24 as representational space, 87–90 Buffalo Soldiers, 156 Burns, Ken, 44, 156 Butler, Judith, 75 C Chandler, Jerry, 32n14 choreographies of awareness, 148–49, 150–51n6 in climbing, 61, 64–66, 87–88, 94–98, 103, 115–17 ecological, 18, 48, 63, 97, 123, 124 in ethical formation, 75

q political, 96–98 of sign performance, 30, 53–54, 132–33 subjectivity in, 14–15, 45–46 Yosemite visitors, 4–5, 45–48, 146–48 Church Bowl, 78–82 climbing, 47–53 choreography, 61, 64–66, 87–88, 94–98, 103, 115–17 community, 54–56, 73–74 cultural symbolism of, 56v66 fist-jamming, 79–81 as performance, 92, 96–98, 140–41 as pilgrimage, 123–24 as representational space, 87–90 Colapietro, Vincent, 11–12, 17, 21, 131 cultural performance. See performance, cultural D Delaware North Companies, 103, 106 Deleuze, Gilles, 131 E El Capitan, 158, 161, 166 ethics in climbing, 57–58, 63–64, 83–85 in landscape performance, 72–74, 77–78, 115, 125n13 of spatial practice, 91–98 in subject formation, 74–78, 83–85, 87–89 F Firefall, 25 Fist-jamming, 79–81 Fuhrman, Gary, 27, 29, 139, 144

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G globalization, 44–46, 48, 50, 55 globalness of bouldering, 47–48, 56 and Yosemite, 65, 76, 131, 133, 146 glocalization, 50, 58 Gloryland (Johnson), 156–58, 160 Graburn, Nelson, 101–2 H Half Dome, 13, 27–29, 103–22, 154 hypoicon, 139–41, 144 I icon Peircean, 118, 131, 135–48, 151n1, 169–70n1 Yosemite as, 43–44, 85–86 interhabitation, 29, 132, 147 J Jacob’s Ladder, 42, 48–53, 55–58 Jamcrack, 79, 81 Johnson, Shelton, 156–61, 164–69 Joshua Tree National Monument, 48 K kinesis, 51, 57, 61 in landscape performance, 94, 131–32 in semiosis, 16, 20–22, 30 King, Clarence, 30 Klett, Mark, 26 Kohn, Eduardo, 35–36n32 L landscape and climbers, 58–59, 64–65, 106, 111 cultural perception of, 23–24, 85–86 definition, 6–8, 11 and ethics, 73, 75–77, 115 as formative power, 130, 148, 155–56, 169 individual bonding with, 13–15, 115, 130 as meeting ground, 165–66, 169 post-phenomenological theory of, 59–60 landscape performance. See performance, landscape

Lane, Robert, 133–34 Latour, Bruno, 133 Lefebvre, Henri, 77–78, 84–96 Lepecki, André, 14, 34n23, 96–97, 135 M Mahmood, Saba, 74–76, 88–89, 115–16, 121 Manning, Erin, 7, 61 map, 56, 58, 139–42, 148 mediation in choreographic thinking, 148–49 and climbers, 97–98 and continuity, 30 in performance, 22–23, 47–48, 93–94, 138, 141 symbolic, 27, 29, 59–60, 63, 91 Merced River, 21, 22, 23 monism, 132–39, 142, 146, 147–48 monumental space, 23, 84–90, 93–98 Moore, Alan, 48–64 Moore, Sally Falk, 102 Muir, John, 77, 83, 88, 132 Myerhoff, Barbara, 102 N National Park Service and climbers, 58–59, 73–74, 88 discourse, 107–08, 115 and ethics, 73, 76–77 and visitor conduct, 13, 46–47, 85–86, 105–06 National Parks, The (Burns), 44, 156 nature and climbing, 54, 115–16, 122v23 as refuge, 155–56, 160 and signs, 17–18 and spatial formation, 90–91 and Yosemite, 43–44, 47–48,130, 148 Nevada Fall, 107–9 P Peirce, Charles Sanders hypoicon, 139–41, 144 icon, 118, 131, 135–48, 151n1, 169–70n1 monism, 132–39, 142, 146, 147–48 rhetorical inquiry, 8–13, 16, 18–21 semeiotic gate, 48, 53, 58–59

Index ■ 173

sign, 18–23 symbol, 16–20, 24–30, 85, 131, 142–47 synechism, 131, 132, 134–35 performance, cultural and ethics, 72–76 and globalization, 45–46 and landscape, 8, 23, 28–30 and Peirce, 9–10, 12–13 politics of, 46–47, 58–59, 65, 74–76, 85–87, 96–97 and ritual, 123–24 and the semeiotic symbol, 16–19, 25 and Yosemite, 4–6, 146–48 performance, landscape 46, 92 choreographic, 14, 30, 46–47, 53, 64, 96 cultural impact of, 130–31 definition, 6–8 ecological, 18, 27, 29, 48, 61, 77–78, 90–91, 103, 123–24, 146–48 ethics in, 72–74, 77–78, 115, 125n13 icon in, 135–42 individual bonding in, 12–16 interhabitation, 29, 132, 147 and Peirce, 12–13, 16–18, 22–24, 27 and politics, 14–15, 45–46, 76, 86–87, 95–98, 144–45 rhetorical aspect, 44–48, 53, 65–66, 77–78, 115–16, 137, 147–48 and subject formation, 115–16, 118–24 symbol in, 4–7, 29–30, 45–46, 94, 130–33, 142–49 See also climbing; performance, Yosemite visitor performance, nonhuman and climbing, 64–65 and ethics, 77–78 in landscape experience, 60–61, 64–66 and monism, 135 and the semeiotic symbol, 16–18, 23, 25–27, 30, 35-36n32 and signs, 146–48 and Yosemite, 155 performance profile, 106–7 performance, sign and climbing, 50, 53 kinetic properties of, 20–22, 131–33, 137–38, 150n1 and monumental space, 85

Peircean, 10–13, 20–26 post-phenomenological perspective, 59–61 performance theory, 8–13, 45–46, 57, 148–49 performance, Yosemite visitor, 4–6, 45–48 conventional/unconventional, 25–30, 45–46, 53, 55–56, 59, 146 as creative agent, 146–48 cultural import of, 130–31 ethics of, 72–74, 115–16 Half Dome, 103–22 iconic, 138–39 ritual in, 101–6, 115–16, 121, 123–24 semio-genetic, 12, 48, 53, 59–64, 117–24 translocal, 48, 53–58, 62–66 See also bouldering; screaming; tourism pilgrimage, 101, 104, 106–7, 110, 114–18, 122–24 Powell, John Wesley, 30–31 R racism, 157–58, 164–65, 168 Ransdell, Joseph, 16–17, 27, 132–33, 135–36, 139–44 replicas, 51, 62–63, 68n24, 118, 143–47 Roach, Joseph, 11 rock climbing. See climbing Royal Arches, 154, 161, 162, 165 S Secular Ritual (Moore and Myerhoff), 102 Schechner, Richard, 11 Schieffelin, Edward, 4 screaming, 50–53, 63, 43 semeiotic and climbing, 64–66 and landscape performance, 115–16, 124, 131–33 and performance theory, 8–13, 16–18, 20–27 and spatial practice, 89–94 and Yosemite, 146–49 semeiotic gate, 48, 53, 58–59 semiosis, 10, 18, 20, 23, 26, 30 Sierra Nevada, 30, 117, 157 Singer, Milton, 4, 25, 31n2 Solnit, Rebecca, 8, 13, 26, 31, 155

174 ■ Index

space, monumental, 23, 84–90, 93–98 space, representational, 87–91, 98 space, social, 75, 78, 89–91 Stegner, Wallace, 31, 130, 148 Stjernfelt, Frederik, 17, 35n30, 136 Subdome, 110, 112–13 subject formation, 27, 60 ethical, 74–78, 83–85, 88–89 and landscape performance, 118–24 ritual in, 103, 115–16 spatial practice in, 91–98 Syllabus (Peirce), 19–20 symbol and climbing, 56–66 ecological, 48, 90–91, 124, 135, 149 politics of, 132–22, 143–45 semeiotic, 16–20, 24–30, 85, 131, 142–47 and Yosemite, 4, 130–35 synechism, 131, 132, 134–35 T Tis-se-yak, 103–4 tourism, 13, 30, 58–59, 73 and piety, 115–16 pilgrimage, 101, 104, 106–07, 110, 114–18, 122–24 and ritual, 87, 88–89, 101–06, 115–16, 120–21, 123–24 and social identity, 101–03, 107, 110, 123 See also performance, visitor Tourism, the Sacred Journey (Graburn), 101–02 Turner, Victor, 10–11, 20, 102, 131 U Urban Climber, 49

V Vernal Fall Bridge, 107 visitor activities. See under Yosemite National Park W Wawona, 46, 156, 157 Welby, Lady Victoria, 20 Wilderness Letter (Stegner), 130 Wildland Research Center, University of California, 130 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6 Wolfe, Byron, 26 Y Yancy, Elijah, 157–61, 164–68 Yosemite Association, 156–57, 169–70nn1–2 Yosemite National Park African-American history, 156–57 cultural significance of, 3–5, 23, 30, 43–45, 155–56 history of, 4, 43–45 landscape performance, 13–16, 46, 77–78 as meeting ground, 155–56, 164–65 as monumental space, 84–87 as multi-stable object, 6–8, 13–14, 43–44 as symbol, 146–48 visitor activities, 13, 25, 45–47, 72–74 visitor ethics, 72–74 See also performance, visitor; bouldering Yosemite Climbing Association, 54 Yosemite Conservancy, 103, 125–26n7, 169–70n1 Yosemite in Time (Klett, Solnit, Wolfe), 26, 35n30 Yosemite Visitors Project, 33n17, 130, 155, 158