From: "Chris McMahon" <pharmakeus-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Have you ever seen this? (bit-parts)
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 00:52:33 GMT


Dear Mark,

I think we have hit some fascinating stuff re: Peirce here. And I am not 
really disagreeing with your analysis.

>But, Chris, that 'feeling' IS what comes first for
>Peirce.

That's what we are talking about. Yes. Does, for CP, some relation of an 
effective nature (e.g. feeling) precede any relation of a "resmeblance" 
sort? Now my feeling is that it must. But does CP see it that way? I think 
it is interesting that he lists the Symbol first. The Icon first. And then 
Sinsign first. And in the ur-series the ontology of the sign comes before 
anything, before the relation of sign to world or function of sign in the 
world. But inside the ontology of the sign (sign, object, interpretant) 
there are these relations. And they are not relations of resemblance, but 
... "feeling" (anyway, some inexplicable causal relations). It is as if the 
idea of Icon, Index & Symbol reinjects at the molecular level of the sign's 
ontology. The ontology of the sign cannot come before the sign's 
relationalities and the relationalities are only possible thanks to the 
sign's ontology. Its chick'negg time? I get the sense that CP works via the 
great tradition of the object-in-itself first and then the relations, but he 
can't talk about the object-in-itself (the sign) wihtout understanding it in 
terms of relations, and he is aware of this. But he sticks to the program, 
because what else can you do. Its the "way in" that he has inherited, and 
is, after all so typically American, not just a "Medieval" approach, but an 
"Edisonian" approach to semiotics? It's really beautiful, actually. I'm not 
really critiquing CP and saying "it can't be so, etc.", or "it is founded on 
undemonstrated premises" because the premises are "demonstrated" (or at 
least remarked upon) in the second and third tripatite series. So you can 
just work backwards, or from the middle out, and find the same utterly 
reversible (and finally inexplicable - as Kant would understand) 
consistency. Its wonderful.

>"Signs are are divisible by three trichotomies; FIRST,
>according as the sign in itself is a mere quality, is
>an actual existent, or is a general law ... A
>QUALISIGN is a quality which is a sign. It cannot
>actually act as a sign until it is embodied ... A
>SINSIGN (where the syllable 'sin' is taken as meaning
>'being only once', as in single ...) is an actual
>existent thing or event which is a sign. It can only
>be so through its qualities ... A LEGISIGN is a law
>that is a sign... It is not a single object, but a
>general type which, it has been agreed, shall be
>significant. Every legisign signifies through an
>instance of its application, which may be termed a
>*Replica* of it... The replica is a sinsign. Thus
>every legisign requires sinsigns" (from the fifth
>section of Peirce's syllabus for his 1903 Harvard
>lectures, CP 2.23-72, called "Nomenclature and
>Division of Triadic relations, as Far as They are
>Determined" in _The Essential Peirce_ vol.2
>(EP2)p.291).

I think this citation bears out what I'm saying? To paraphrase:
"In the beginning there is the thing not the word. But the thing comes to us 
only as a word. It is called, as it comes to us, "Sinsign". Now this 
thingness of the Sinsign is its substrate, in which qualities can inhere or 
become corporeal. There is no such thing, except in the abstract as a 
disembodied quality. Okay "events" make it tricky. But events are things, 
embodied in time? Okay? But qualities can be abstracted. So the name of 
these abstracted qualities is "Qualsign". You will object that a Sinsign is 
composed of Qualsigns? Fair cop. But you must remember there is no such 
thing as a disembodied quality. Like the smile of the Cheshire cat has to be 
a smile on something, otherwise its a Sinsign of itself, and not a 
diembodied quality at all. Anyway, socially speaking, though all signs order 
reality, and the order of reality appears to us via signs, some signs are 
agreed upon as more important for this ordering than others. I call them 
"Legisigns". But boiled down, Legisigns are really just Sinsigns and 
Sinsigns are only known to us as compots of Qualsigns and all Qualsigns are 
thus potential Legisigns. The main thing about Legisigns is that they are 
selected on some kind of social basis, which is ultimately like a Symbol, 
arbitrary and contingent. But there is not the same degree of arbitrariness 
and social contingency with respect to Sinsigns, which are really Icons of 
things, or in Qualsigns which are really Indexes that tell us that a certain 
kind of thing is there."

>So, I think Peirce DOES "see this progression"!

Yes. I suspect he does. But I suppose what I'm saying is there is a formal 
beginning place and a less formal one, which gets behind the formal one (and 
at the same time says: the formal beginning is not really the beginning).

>I think there's maybe a different conception of
>'image' here than the medievals had (though I'm
>inadequately informed about them).

Not really. It's just the idea of resemblance. The trick to naturalizing 
mimesis is seeing that x looks like y. Yes it REALLY does! No, you cannot 
deny it. x looks just like y.

But once it gets going mimesis can sustain and survive application to 
thingslike diagrams, etc. ... "That does not look like y!" ... "Okay, but it 
does really. Its the same relation of resemblance. Just a useful likeness 
not a good likeness". And in the end is any really good likeness useful?

Consider Deleuze's
>intriguing statement that "We do not yet know what
>relationship Peirce proposes between the sign and the
>image. It is clear that the image gives rise to the
>sign" (_Cinema 1: The Movement Image_ 69).

Dig it.

IMAGE
What was that?
Did you see that? [Index?]
What was it?
What did it look like? [Icon?]
It had the qualities of a dog. [Qualsigns!]
I think it might have been a dog.
Me too, looked like a dog. [Icon!]
No it didn't. [Indexes?]
yes. It did.
It was a dog. [Symbol!]
SINSIGN

Resemblance gets the last word. But it begins with something nonmimetic. As 
I said, I agree with this story. But that's not what's really at stake. What 
GD is remarking upon is how the SYMBOL (which is the nonmimetic sign) 
develops from the ICON (the mimetic sign). So the stroy begins when we say 
"It was a dog". yet before that story there is another, which begins with 
"What was that?". And yet the whole question, "what was that", which will 
arrive at the Icon, already presumes the Icon. The world of the Icon has 
already been formed. A similar tale can now be told of the way the question 
that is put to the Icon will presume and give rise to the Symbol (and of the 
long struggle of the Icon to free itself from the Symbol).

Dog.
SINSIGN
Dogs stink. [Index]
Dogs look like dogs. [Icon]
QUALSIGN.
I hate dogs.
Dog's perform a range of useful social functions.
LEGISIGN.

>"A sign by Firstness is an image of its object and,
>more strictly speaking, can only be an *idea*. For it
>must produce an interpretant idea: and an external
>object excites an idea by a reaction on the brain...
>First firstnesses, are images; those which represent
>the relations, mainly dyadic ... are diagrams; those
>which represent ... a parallelism in something else,
>are metaphors" (from the third section of his 1903
>syllabus on "Speculative Grammar", EP2 273-274).

I think that's consistent with the shaggy dog story?

>I don't think you're associating Peirce with "the
>medievals" (he ripped some of them, adopted others),
>but.. Once embodied one is already postlapsarian?

No. Not really. I'm just being lazy. I don't mean "postlapsarian" in the 
theorlogical sense, which does not apply to CP. But the medievals - some of 
them - longed after tha Adamic language, where every thing had a proper 
name, its real name, essential to it (though added later by Adam) because 
Adam's mind was not yet corrupted. So we can ask: How can Sartre want to say 
things precede signs? How could they not? And yet you want to be intimate 
wit things? Bypass signs? As though you are not already doing that? As 
though you could?

>I'm intrigued by Peirce's position on Leibniz:
>
>"The diety of the _Theodicee_ of Leibniz is as high an
>instinctive mind as can well be imagined; but ... by
>making its knowledge Perfect and Complete, he fails to
>see that in thus refusing it the powers of thought and
>the possibility of improvement he is in fact taking
>away something far higher than knowledge" (from the
>2nd chapter of _Minute Logic_, CP 7.380, EP2 519 note
>27).

Yeah. Cool quote. There is the Adamic language and then there is the 
"postlapsarian" or "social" degeneration/illogic/misrecognized vision which 
is also so creative/improving/developing/perfecting. Felix culpa.

>However, as Deleuze points out (sounding very much
>like the play between Peirce's qualisign and sinsign):
>"Leibniz's monads submit to two conditions, one of
>closure and the other of selection... it could be said
>that the monad, astraddle over several worlds, is kept
>half open as if by a pair of pliers... what always
>matters is folding unfolding refolding" (_The Fold_
>last page -- but, I'm pushing ahead of myself ;) Mark

Gee. I wouldn't mind you explaining how this system of selection and closure 
(which I imagine as keyholing "before and after" where each "after" creates 
a new "before") works re: CP. Are you saying that CP sees the Qualsigns as 
locking into Sinsigns, closing off possibilities, but creating new 
"openings" thereby? I think that's what you mean? In any case, its a cool 
way of doing semiotics, even if its not a very "scientific" generalized 
ontology.

By the way, when I teach CP, it is always a struggle, but ALWAYS worthwhile 
getting the students to get out of this sort of catgorical approach:
"X is an icon"
to a relational approach:
"There is an iconic relation between x and y but also an indexical relation 
between x and y, ..."

:) Chris
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