Dear all:
Many thanks for the rich, insightful, and helpful replies to my
question. I received about 16 responses all told (not all shared on the
list), have read all of them now (though not all the supplementary
material that was shared along with them), and have some preliminary
thoughts I'd like to share in response. To keep the thread from
continuing indefinitely, and to make it easier for those not interested
in the conversation to ignore it, I'm responding in this single message
to all of them. I'll mention names to make it easier to trace the
conversations backwards. Off-list comments by Kelly Parker and Cary
Campbell will be added to the list of on-list comments by Halton,
Chandler, Taborsky, Van Breemen, Rhee (1&2), Fuhrman (i.e. Gary F. 1&2),
Awbrey (1&2), Raulien (1&2), Guerri, and Leri (did I miss anyone?).
By far the most frequent comment has concerned the way in which my
question seemed to ignore the basic principle by which Peirce's
phaneroscopic categories mutually imply each other and are therefore
inseparable (Halton, Taborsky, Campbell, Rhee). It appeared to several
of you that I was attempting to separate firstness from secondness from
thirdness, and to assign each to one of my three terms: experience,
materiality, and representation. While it's quite true that I was
seeking to assign the categories each to one of my three terms, or at
least to ask whether it's possible and useful to do that, I was not
intending to separate the categories from each other. Just as thirds
imply seconds and firsts (and the other ways around), so does
representation (in my account) imply materiality and experience, and
vice versa (vices versae?). Materiality is never something in and of
itself; it is experienced and represented (or conceived), and its
identification as "materiality" is itself an idea. And so on. That said,
I'd say that the general tenor of the responses was close to a consensus
that "no," the three categories cannot be easily assigned (individually)
to materiality, experience, and representation, and that in fact each of
my terms could be examined with reference to each of Peirce's categories
(Campbell, Raulien, Parker).
I agree with the criticism that my EMR/MER triads are not semiosic or
"genuine" triads (Taborsky, Guerri). They are intended as heuristic
organizing devices--pragmatic metaphors, if you will--informed by
Peirce's categories. To Edwina's question "Since you are not analyzing
the art-experience as a semiosic-experience, then why use them?," I
would reply as follows: (1) because I find Peircian/triadic thinking to
be useful in and of itself and I believe that a triad such as this
(EMR/MER) can be helpful to teach that kind of thinking; and (2) because
I have found that teaching about the environmental arts (loosely
speaking) requires taking each of these three dimensions--materiality,
experience, and representation--seriously, in a way that *resembles* the
"irreducibility" of the Peircean categories. In much writing about
environmental literature, for instance, representation is
overemphasized; experience and especially materiality are
underemphasized. When one shifts to eco-art, eco-theatre, ecomusic, or
ecocinema, the other two (experience and materiality) become more
prominent. Seeing them as equal in significance is, for me, a useful
step to take. I find myself unable to reduce any of them (experience,
materiality, representation) to the others; and my hunch was that this
makes them similar to Peirce's categories. So I tried to connect the two
triads. That's where I am now.
I should note that the framework developed in my book on cinema,
Ecologies of the Moving Image, is rather different and more complex from
what I presented in my question to the list. My use of Peirce there is
both more conservative (elucidating his notions of signs, categories,
normative sciences, and more) and more liberal (in its efforts to find
correspondences with Whiteheadian metaphysics and Guattari's "three
ecologies," and in my revision of previous applications of Peirce to
cinema studies, for instance by Deleuze, Cubitt, and others). To Jon,
who advises starting "with the three normative sciences of aesthetics,
ethics, and logic" (Awbrey 1), I can report that I indeed "start with"
the normative sciences there when I approach the matter of film
viewership: i.e., how we as viewers can cultivate habits of viewership
consistent with a Peircian understanding of cinema. (I refer to that as
an "eco-ethico-aesthetics" of film viewership, taking logic to be more
or less coterminous with "eco-logic," since my object of study was
ecological thinking and representation; cf. pp. 294-299 in the book.
This also seems to resonate with Leri's comments.) I summarized that
approach (along with another) in the paper I presented at the Peirce
Centennial Congress a couple of summers ago ("Peirce and the Film
Viewer: Toward a Logio-Ethico-Aesthetics of the Cinema Event"), which
I'd be happy to share with anyone interested off-list.
I find all of the suggestions for pursuing triadic interpretation of the
arts helpful and insightful, and by and large confirming of some of what
I've tried to do in my work thus far. Campbell's suggestion to "proceed
backwards" from thirdness to the "physical corporeality of secondness"
and the "sensory /terminus a quo/ of firstness" feels to me very close
to the way I've interpreted films in my cinema book. I find Helmut
Raulien's articulation of three triads particularly helpful:
"From the point of view of the picture, better: Regarding the picture as
a thing, I would say, that firstness is the possibility of application,
that is the fact, that the thing may be experienced as a picture.
Secondness is the form, the shapes of colours, that is a result of
representation. Thirdness is the structure of the thing, that is
materaility: Pigments, binder, canvas, frame. So, from the picture as a
thing it is: ERM.
"Now, from the artist's perspective it is: Firstness is a representation
of something the artist has in her/his mind, secondness is the material
he/she is using to depict it, and thirdness is the experience of a
result: A successful work accomplished. This is RME.
"From the perspective of the viewer it is the material picture working
as a representamen (first), the viewers experience connecting it with an
object (second), and seeing it represent some thoughts and feelings
(thirdness), so it is MER. If one does not agree with these proposals,
at least it may be possible to agree with that easy assignment of
ontological elements to categories or sign elements is not possible."
Rather similarly, Kelly Parker wrote to me that each of my three
categories (materiality, experience, and representation) can be treated
in terms of firstness, secondness, and thirdness (e.g., materiality as
"mere unencountered... stuff," secondness "as physically present stuff,"
and thirdness as "the physical sign vehicle", etc.). All of this makes
perfect sense to me and, in one way or another I think, is related to
some way in which I've tried to think the "fullness" of cinema--as
object and material product, as world encountered by viewer and
emotional/intellectual experience, as set of discourses, etc. That said,
there is much more work I could have done, even sticking to the very
core semiotic triad of object, representamen, and interpretant.
(Parker's article on "Normative Judgment in Jazz" is a particularly
lucid and helpful example of the application of that triad to a single
piece of music, which I would now recommend to students as a wonderful
starting point in this "field.")
A few commenters (esp. Fuhrman) note that firstness is more a matter of
quality than of experience, with experience being closer to Peircian
secondness, since it is dyadic (a matter of "outward clash"). A few
others (e.g., Campbell, Guerri) seemed to lean closer to my "EMR" triad,
where materiality is directly related to "a concrete actualization of an
artwork," while experience is ambiguous at worst and closer to firstness
(the "sensory /terminus a quo/") at best. I am still trying to
understanding Raulien's "supplementary" suggestion of an "ERM"
triad--which is a good thing, as the "inversion" has gotten me thinking!
Taken together, the comments might appear to suggests that any of "my"
triads (EMR, MER, REM, et al.) could be usefully correlated with
Peirce's categories. If I was looking for a clear winner between the two
I proposed--EMR and MER--I am left with no such prize.
Finally, with respect to Jon's observation that "the discussion of
Peirce's categories... has undergone such debasement that it now borders
on a style of philosophical astrology," I suspect that, at least with
this effort to align the categories with my independently-derived triad
of experience-materiality-representation, I must plead guilty as
charged. ;-)
Thanks again for all your insightful comments, as well as the
supplementary readings. I've benefited from all of them (and welcome any
further thoughts, either on the list or off).
Best,
Adrian
______________________________________________________________________________
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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