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
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
______________________________________________________________________________ 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/aivakhiv http://www.uvm.edu/~aivakhiv
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