Peirce's semiosis.

From Vincent Colapietro's _Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity_: "The body itself is, in its own way, a medium. In 'Some Consequences,' Peirce claims that 'the organism is only an instrument of thought.' But since thought is essentially a process of semiosis, the kind of instrument that the organism provides is that of a medium. The person is not 'shut up in a box of flesh and blood.' The body is not principally something in which the self is located; rather it is the most immediate medium through which the self expresses." Peirce's genius was in recognizing that the self is always a virtual and communal entity: the product of an ecology of signs coming through and out of the self. What we call the self or the subject is actually a network, locatable in and through a series of other permeable and permeating networks: total semiosis. Thus, the semiotic ecology of things exists on a continua, from nature to persons, and from minds to concrete things and back.

Key passages from _Nature_

From "Discipline"

Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. 


 All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, — it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all organizations are radically alike.
  
Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature, — the unity in variety, — which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.
 

From "Experience"

"The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Parka coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us."

Richard Shusterman's _Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art_.

In a chapter on organic unity--both in terms of its romanticist inception and its new critical appropriations-- Shusterman uses the frame analogy to illustrate poststructuralism's deconstruction of organic unity aesthetics. He describes it brilliantly like this: a work of art is that which is framed. The organic unity concept of aesthetics--that a work of art has essential constitutive qualities--posits that what's inside the frame is what's essential to the work, thus the work possess organic unity. However, deconstructionists such as Derrida and De Mann note that what's outside of the frame makes possible what's inside of the frame. Put another way, literary criticism consists of hermeneutically distinguishing between the essential and the inessential. But this is fundamentally flawed because it presupposes two things: one, that a work has an inside and an outside, and two, that there is an essential constitutive meaning and a margin of meaning--things in the text that one shouldn't pay much attention to. Deconstruction, then, collapses the (false) distinction between inside-outside, inessential-essential by dehierarchicalizing that which has been prioritized.

I'm sure for many of you this is just a review of postructuralist critiques on aesthetics. This is where it gets interesting. Shusterman argues that deconstructionism has a blind spot. Its blind spot is that in its attempt to deconstruct and dereify organicist aesthetic unity, which Shusterman claims to originate from Hegelian idealism, they have in fact only relied on a kind of Hegelian structure of logic.

Here is what Shusterman says: "The essential sameness of difference [Derrida's 'difference'] and the radical concept of organic unity should now appear obvious, especially if we take the notion of whole as representing the (perhaps not fully totalizable) system of structure of linguistic differences" (71-72). In other words, poststructuralism, though critiquing Hegelian totalities, operates on an understanding of mutually constitutive difference based on a kind of radicalized totalization.

The critique against new criticisms still stands intact. New Critical approaches separate inside from outside and deem elements of textuality marginal according to privileged biases--that which didn't support the normative values of literary and academic establishments before the linguistic turn. However, what doesn't remain fully intact in Shusterman's critique of postructuralism is the idea that organicist unity is always already exclusionary. If thought of as a totalizing system it can still be one that is constituted by inescapable difference because in order to to posses unity it must contain difference. 

Shusterman then argues that pragmatism forms an intervention into this debate in the following way. Pragmatism posits that there are valuable uses to seeing a text in terms of organic unity, and, in fact, that which posits itself as a heterogeneous reading is most often, under exegetical inspection, the opposite. In addition, to claim a delineative division between a unified reading of a text and a marginal reading of a text assumes that these fundamental differences can occur on a fully coherent basis (my thought). I wonder: do deconstructionist methods become unitary lens from which to pin down a text? Derrida's aesthetics certainly resist that.

I bring all this up because I find Shusterman's complication of organic unity extremely compelling and totally fresh, even though this book was written over a decade ago.   

"James and the Metaphorics of Transition"

Pertaining to William James's phenomenology of felt relations, James uses a rather straightforward metaphor--that of the stream of consciousness. As Jonathon Levin puts it in _The Poetics of Transition_: "James is responding to two dominant conceptions of mind...the sensationalist account...and the intellectualist account" (46). The former emphasizes the individuated quality of discreet experience, often disjointed from preceding moments of experience. The latter emphasizes abstractions that govern all experience. James's pragmatism often presents a binary system of social sects loosely within broadly historicized philosophical discourse, and then performs a kind of hybridization or middle-grounding of those opposing formations. "Though logic holds that concepts are unchanging" writes Levin "in experience the same concept if subtly different every time it is evoked," thus, thoughts "are always thoughts-in-relation, and no abstract form of those thoughts underlies or secures their shifting relations" (46). James does not deny the sensationalist or the intellectualist position, but instead falsifies the division that separates them to be "as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades" (46). This falsification away from actual experience occurs due to our "habit of confusing a mental process with its end product" (Levin 47). "Since we keep talking about a table, or justice, or the color blue, we imagine a permanent mental or ideal form that we think of as Table, or Justice, or Blueness" (Levin 47). Jamesian psychology collapses the distinction between transcendental mental objects and their spatio-temporal contingencies. To separate any object for discreet contemplation is to imagine it out of its context and to betray the nature of thought itself. This is so because "Consciousness is never reducible to any immediate perception or sensation" (Levin 47). But James is not just attempting to sketch out a theory of the phenomenology of thought. Such a venture would be worthy in itself. But we can see James's early interest in making an intervention into the history of competing philosophical discourses. That intervention, which becomes an elaboration on and integration of _The Principles of Psychology_, is the pragmatist notion of the middle ground between historical philosophical dualisms: mind-body conflicts, empiricisms vs. idealisms, skepticism vs. optimism, because for James, all these dualities and binaries are only opposite ends on the continuum of human thought-experience and its many contingent and yet extending temporalities.  

The Snow-Storm

 Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

From "Method of Nature"

"Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. There is somewhat indigent and tedious about them. They are poorly tied to one thought. If they are prophets, they are egoists; if polite and various, they are shallow. How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical strata as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically."