Pierce and James
wood jim
jim33wood at yahoo.com
Wed Aug 1 11:44:35 CDT 2001
The semiotic theory of Charles Peirce posits a
"three-way view of the semiotic relationship, in
which a "sign" mediates between and "object" and
"interpretant", the interpreting effect that the sign
produces upon , for example, a human mind."
I have no idea what Peirce, the American pragmatist,
has to with Peirce Inverarity.
But Peirce liked to call himself a
"phaneroscopist"---one who objectively observes what
appears in the
mind. Oedipa doesn't seem to have the apparatus, the
objectivity, the scientific means to measure, to
examine, the lines of the force field. The magic that
is malignant and anonymous comes at her from out in
the world, but she has only fear, guts, female
cunning, superstition.
Another three. "the semiological doctrine of
thirds."
Is Oedipa a James/Emerson reply to Peirce?
Probably not.
Peirce, like Husserl, claimed to be a phenomenologist,
but the American, being pragmatic and all, being
American that is, is a problematic thinker.
Like James/Emerson/Oedipa, he is concerned with making
lasagna (melting pots?) even while reading reviews in
Scientific America. In other words, layering problems,
subject matter, into a pan of generic and specific,
relevant and irrelevant.
Really.
So the pot doesn't melt (an horrific American lie) or
if it does in some generational loss of cultural
plurality the whole and the parts, pragmatically,
are viewed together and treated as forms and matter of
the same holistic function.
Peirce, the philosopher, one could argue,
bequeathed the approach of Kant to the Americans---
James, Dewey, Mead, Buchler, others...an American
critique of Logistic, Associanist
theories of ideas.
But James/ Emerson Oedipa?,
The source of ontological activity lies in a personal
push and pull of our very own lives, in the here and
now and not in some far away place or time. James
advocates a "radical empiricism." That is, a
personalistic, existential, voluntaristic, view of
the world.
http://paradigm.soci.brocku.ca/~lward/James/James_03_toc.html
Why all this interest in texts? Pynchon working back
from Wittgenstein to Pierce to James/Emerson?
Driblette. Is this a critique of the literary critic?
Of the academic? I suppose it is. Driblette in the
shower, his head emerging and vanishing from the fog,
the planetarium projectionist giving life to dead
words. Personal, creative, live and spontaneous. Very
American. The book of the dead could be any book. It
doesn't seem to be The Book of the Dead just yet, but
a circuit printed. It's dead. The living man,
Driblette, gives it life, even if he blows breath into
it from his ass.
"Pure experience," James argues, is always "the
instant field of the present." It is the collective
name "for all these sensible natures" of the
empiricist universe that float and dangle, but they do
not float and dangle in any essential order. Pure
experience is rather a stream of concretes, or the
sensational stream, indefinite multivariate in
character, in which the conjunctive and the
disjunctive parts are perfectly confluent.
The self-relation seems extremely limited and does not
link two different selves together.
Prima facie, if you should liken the universe of
absolute idealism to an aquarium, a crystal globe in
which goldfish are swimming, you would have to compare
the empiricist universe to
something more like one of those dried human heads
with which the Dyaks of
Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid
nucleus; but innumerable feathers,
leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every
description float and dangle
from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem to
have nothing to do with one
another. Even so my experiences and yours float and
dangle,
terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of common
perception, but for the most part
out of sight and irrelevant and unimaginable to one
another. This imperfect
intimacy, this bare relation of withness between some
parts of the sum total of
experience and other parts, is the fact that ordinary
empiricism over-emphasizes
against rationalism, the latter always tending to
ignore it unduly. Radical empiricism,
on the contrary, is fair to both the unity and the
disconnection. It finds no reason for
treating either as illusory. It allots to each its
definite sphere of description, and
agrees that there appear to be actual forces at work
which tend, as time goes on, to
make the unity greater.
And, for James, still under the influence of the
bible, the world is a collaboration of the creator god
and the creator man. Adventures, novelties,
revelations are forever leaking out and in of those
bubble shades,as drops of water at the edge of a
table, falling all at once or not at all, and shadows
of the past are dancing with the living, and with god,
making the facts of the world a pure experience, a
lived immediacy, individual, intense, energetic,
radically pluralistic, indeterminate, and humanistic.
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