Dear Adrian,
I also have had a long term interest in materiality and Peirce.
My first book,*The Meaning of Things*, is a widely cited study of valued
possessions in Chicago area households and discussion more generally of
objects and meaning. I also continued those discussions in my book *Meaning
and Modernity*, where a described, drawing from Peirce’s ideas,
relationships with possessions as involving *critical animism*.
I realize you are attempting to use Peirce loosely, which I
understand can work for your purposes, and which I have also tried to do at
times (and which is a different, but I think valid, direction from the
intensely detailed discussions often found on this list). But in my opinion
you make some assumptions I find incorrect, so I’d like to pose alternative
interpretations.
You say, “…to have a handy triadic formula that would be useful for making
sense of the eco-arts in ways that get beyond the customary overemphasis on
*representation* in favor of* experience* (including affect) and
*materiality*. Materiality deals with the stuff that’s just there (one
element); experience involves a second — the artist, the reader or viewer,
et al. (two); and representation makes sense and meaning of the stuff and
its shapers and perceivers in real-world contexts (three); thus Peirce’s
categories loosely fit.”
To say that materiality “deals with stuff that’s just there”
assumes too little about “just there,” as I see it. Peirce’s first element
concerns varieties of the qualitative rather than such “materiality” per
se. And his semiotic holds that even the dyanamical object, “… does not
mean something out of the mind. It means something forced upon the mind in
perception, but including more than perception reveals. It is an object of
actual Experience” (Letters to Lady Welby, 1906). This might be useful for
your attempt to include experience in making sense of eco-arts.
You also separate materiality from representation, which I take
as a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” in Whitehead’s terms. This seems
to me to be both a common trend and fallacy today, the turn to materiality
(which is fine) as though it is outside of representation, probably due to
the varieties of etherealized sign theories in semiology and
post-structuralism. I commented briefly last summer on an article which
did this, perhaps it would be useful:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/comment/view/495/437/725
I also mention briefly there my transposed use of Peirce’s
three categories in Chapter 7 of *The Meaning of Things*, which may have
some analogies to what you are attempting.
Feel free to repost this on your blog if you would like to.
Gene Halton
On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Adrian Ivakhiv <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear all:
>
> I'm struggling with a way of tying Peirce's categories down to the 3 main
> elements by which we can make sense of art works: their materiality, our
> experience of them, and their meanings. Putting it that way suggests one
> ordering, but a deeper thinking through of the process (and nonlinear)
> nature of the categories suggests another. I'm interested in gauging what
> Peircians may think. I'd appreciate any comments directly on the web site
> below:
>
> http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2016/02/09/rethinking-the-3-categories/
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
> Rethinking the 3 categories
>
> February 9, 2016 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
> <http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/author/aivakhiv/>
>
> I’ve been struggling with how my triadic framework for interpreting art
> works relates to C. S. Peirce’s categories
> <http://www.textlog.de/4254.html>.
>
> When I first developed my triadism (fleshed out
> <http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2014/12/29/emis-cinematic-materialism-a-response-to-reviews/>
> in *Ecologies of the Moving Image
> <http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/ivakhiv.shtml>*) into the
> non-Peircian terms of materiality, experience, and representation
> <http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2014/03/08/rethinking-the-three-ecologies/> —
> which I did in the context of teaching a course on the environmental arts —
> I loosely considered the first of these to be analogous to Peircian
> firstness, the second to secondness, and the third to thirdness.
>
> The point, in my teaching, was not to adhere strictly to Peirce, since my
> students weren’t studying him, but just to have a handy triadic formula
> that would be useful for making sense of the eco-arts in ways that get
> beyond the customary overemphasis on *representation* in favor of
> * experience* (including affect) and*materiality*. Materiality deals with
> the stuff that’s just there (one element); experience involves a second —
> the artist, the reader or viewer, et al. (two); and representation makes
> sense and meaning of the stuff and its shapers and perceivers in real-world
> contexts (three); thus Peirce’s categories loosely fit. Whether students
> got the Peirce or not, they could follow that.
>
> But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this way of
> ordering the three may be un-Peircian. Or at least that there was a second
> way of connecting it to Peirce that was sufficiently different from the
> first and had important consequences.
>
> Let me break it down here.
>
> *To continue reading, go to *
> http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2016/02/09/rethinking-the-3-categories*/*
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________________
> Adrian J. Ivakhiv
> Professor of Environmental Studies/Environmental Thought & Culture
> Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources
> University of Vermont, Burlington VT 05405 U.S.A.
> Tel 802.656.0180 Fax 802.656.8015 Email: [email protected]
> http://vermont.academia.edu/AdrianIvakhiv
> http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhivhttp://www.uvm.edu/~aivakhiv
>
>
>
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