Real and Replica

In the "Kaina Stoicheia" — a slow-read of this piece is going on on the Peirce list — Peirce distinguishes the replicas of representation from real things.

"In the first place, a sign is not a real thing. It is of such a nature as to exist in replicas. … A real thing does not so exist in replica. The being of a sign is merely being represented.  Now really being and being represented are very different." ["Kaina    Stoicheia," p. 303] 

But a thing like the chairs here in Starbucks are replicas as well, replicas of each other via a diagram or a design, which would seem to make the diagram the real thing and the chairs replicas.  Is this something true of commodities or mass-produced objects?  Or, is it more generally true? A kind of Hegelian reversal of what is real and what is replica?

As signs become symbols:

"I must and do admit that a symbol cannot exert any real force. Still, I maintain that every sufficiently complete symbol governs things, and that symbols alone do this.  I mean that though it is not a force, it is a law." [Ibid., p. 313]

As the symbol, with ongoing successful applications, takes on the force of law, it would seem to become the real thing.  That is, what were the "real things" would become instances of that law, replicas in terms of its applications, and the law would become the reality.

"A diagram, indeed, so far as it has a general signification, is not a pure icon but in the middle part of our reasonings we forget that abstractness in great measure, and the diagram is for us the very thing." [CP 3.362]

Same River Twice

Diagrammatic thought derives from Kant's notion of schema.  Hegel viewed Kant's triadic schema as an empty formalism and suggested instead "Notions" for science that are the "inner life and self-movement" of the existent thing.

"Science dare only organize itself by the life of the Notion itself. The determinateness, which is taken from the schema and externally attached to an existent thing, is, in Science, the self-moving soul of the realized content. The movement of a being that immediately is, consists partly in becoming an other than itself, and thus becoming its own immanent content; partly in taking back into itself this unfolding [of its content] or this existence of it, i.e. in making itself into a moment, and simplifying itself into something determinate."[§53, Phenomenology of Spirit, Translated by A. V. Miller]

This sounds a lot like Mark Twain's riverboat pilot.  The "becoming other than itself" and "taking back into itself this unfolding" certainly sounds like what the river itself does, and perhaps its not a bad description of what science, via its experimentation, does as well.  The scientist, like the riverboat pilot, seems to their theory as tightly to its object or subject matter and to then build that theory (or Notion) by experimentally reaching beyond itself and then "taking back into itself" the results.  Perhaps Kant and much of modern thought is too close to mathematics, that more abstract, non-experimental kind of diagrammatic thinking.  Peirce tried to tie the two together:

"The chemist mounts an apparatus of flasks and tubes, places certain substances in the flasks, lights a Bunsen burner underneath, and watches to see what the result will be.  The mathematician constructs a geometrical diagram according to a certain prescription which describes the relations of the parts sufficiently for the purpose, and then looks out for new relations, not thought of in the construction.'' [Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Vol. 5, p. 381]

but I'm not sure it really works.  The mathematician may draw a diagram and then construct and look for new relationships, but the validity of those relationships does not then depend upon an experimental application of the diagram.  They are, instead, constructed and validated within the formal confines of the diagram itself.

From Metaphor to Diagram

Listening to the Daniel Coffeen's lecture, "Rhetoric of the Image + Merleau-Ponty's Chiasm," and the students' discussion (in the background) regarding David Shrigley's photograph on the left , I kept waiting for someone to say "it's a soccer field."  References were made to a "desolate scene," "barrenness," "background," "this area," "some field," a "vacant lot."  One student said "this soccer field, I guess" but didn't go anywhere with it.  For me, being specific about it being a "soccer field" brings it all together.  The housing in the background becomes a place where those absent soccer players live, the coconut looks like a soccer ball that could be used as a substitute in trying to be happy, but it also looks like it is hung from the near goal as a target for shooting practice.  It becomes a way for those kids in the rundown housing to shoot their way out of that situation and perhaps be happy in another more well-to-do life.

Regardless whether my interpretation is stupid, naive, or whatever — no connoisseur of such things is going to like  what I've done — what I have done is replace the metaphor of the photograph with a more or less explicit diagrammatic understanding of it.  For me, then, the metaphor is on it's way to becoming a cliché.  In contrast to that, though, consider the photograph on the right from Shrigley's home page.  There is a "sense" in which that cute little dog is dead.  It's not that it can't think; it's not that dogs do not have emotions, live, etc.  But there is a sense in which the dog couldn't have made that sign, or know what it means, and in that sense the dog is dead.  In this case, though, I have trouble making that sense explicit.  Maybe it's that the dog is incapable of self-reflective thought?  Maybe it's like Tournier's Friday who ceases to be human when taken out of human relationships.  Still, that's not quite it.  The photograph insists on remaining a metaphor, refuses to move toward being a cliché.  If I want to get at that sense again, I have to go back to it.

Peirce laid out an iconic trichotomy of image, diagram, and metaphor.

"Hypoicons may be roughly divided according to the mode of Firstness of which they partake.  Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors." [CP2.277]

Personally, I've never been a big fan of metaphors, or at least not of thinking in metaphors.  The devil is in precisely those details a metaphor glosses over.  But when there is a sense that can only be glimpsed metaphorically, that cannot be made explicit diagrammatically, then I have to admit, we're dealing with something special.

Habits and Belief

I've been reading The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business looking at it in relation to Peirce's notion beliefs and habits.  There is a diagrammatic view of habits — as cues, routines, and rewards – and various communities, as well as faith, that can play a role too.  Of course, Duhigg looks at habits from an psychological and mass-marketing perspective, whereas Peirce's concern was with an intellectual and scientific point of view, but the two perspectives feed into each other in interesting and fruitful ways.

One thing that caught my attention was Duhigg's notion of belief.  I always understood belief as referring to the habit; that is, being a habit meant the thing was believed and there was a willingness to act on it.  However, as Duhigg discusses in his chapter on changing habits, a willingness to act is not automatic with a habit.  A new habit can function flawlessly day after day, and then in an important or tense situation, can fail (the person reverts to their old habit) from an unwillingness, a lack of belief or trust, in the new habit.  Believing seems to be something over and above, separate from, what is believed.

Maybe this should have been obvious.  After all, Pierce characterized the methods of tenacity and authority as making no reference to the content of what was believed.  But perhaps believing should be seen as something separate from what is believed even with those methods of fixing belief that do focus on content?  Perhaps the scientific community is as necessary to scientific beliefs as the community of recovering alcoholics is to undoing a habit of alcohol abuse?  Perhaps induction is a faith in science to the point of being willing to act on habits whose only guarantee is that they are part of a process toward the truth?

Diagrammatic Hegemony

David Foster Wallace in "The Host" describes the following scene:

"Ms. B. [Ms. Bertolucci, Program Director] gently chides the new host for not hitting the Greg Haidl trial harder, and for usually discussing the case in his show's second hour instead of the first. Her thrust: 'It's a big story for us. It's got sex, it's got police, class issues, kids running amok, video, the courts, and who gets away with what. And it's in Orange County.'  When Mr. Ziegler [the Program Host] … protests that both Bill Handel and John & Ken have already covered the story six ways from Sunday every day and there is no way for him to do anything fresh or stimulating with it, Ms. B. nods slowly and responds:  'If we were KIIS-FM, and we had a new Christina Aguilera song, and they played it heavy on the morning show and the afternoon show, wouldn't you still play it on the evening show?'" ["The Host," p. 10]

The Program Director is looking at this from the point of view of the business, an impersonal logical construct indifferent to either one of them as well as to all those humans that make up its audience except as the figure into its calculations. What does this diagram for making money, or perhaps more generally, being a successful radio-business require?  The Program Host has what amounts to a personal objection — be it moral, aesthetic, thoughtful — to doing this particular thing.  But this  objection carries no weight with the Program Director.  What she wants done fits the firm's formula for success, and there is no such personal objection for her for the simple reason she does not have to do it. Her argument, of course, wins.

"[O]n tonight's (i.e., May 19's) program he does lead with and spend much of the first hour on the latest Haidl developments." [Ibid.]

The subtle imbalance in this ubiquitous kind of transaction has reduced the fullness of two human beings to the status of indices in an abstract and impersonal diagram that is dictating their actions.  We like to think we can dip into these diagrammatic mechanizations of our existence without drowning our humanity in the process. Are we just kidding ourselves?

Pinning Down Irony

"And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down." [David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," p. [183]

For what Wallace calls a "malign addiction" — where the irony is in a thing, like TV or alcohol, that offers a cure or relief for problems it only makes worse — the only response possible would seem to be a 12-step program or TTDTO (turn the damn thing off). When the cure for doing nothing, the doing something of watching TV, is more of doing nothing, there is indeed no way to pin the irony down and make it productive.


But what of the Socratic irony: "All I know is that I know nothing."  Was that just a polite means of concealing his own wisdom?  Was the irony an unending (as in can never be pinned down) joke on others?  Or was it the positive basis of argument?  Of considering reasons for believing things (which he did not know) were true?  In a world of scientific explanations (beginning, as they do, from indisputable facts) and expert opinions (dispensed from above as encapsulated certainties) we forget the need for arguments, the need for reasons for what we believe is true, because, pinning down that Socratic irony, the only thing we can really know is that we know nothing.

Creating Space

"The German word for 'uncanny,' as in Freud's famous essay on the Uncanny, is unheimlich — unhomely. The tourist thrives on the uncanny, moving happily through a phenomenal world of effects without causes. This world, in which he has no experience and no memory, is presented to him as a supernatural domain: the language of travel advertising hawks the uncanny as part of the deal."

— Driving Home: An American Journey

The world of experience floods us.  Infinite combinations and permutations intoxicate us.  We see weird and wonderful things morphing from one to another.  We can pleasurably organize and describe this scene, pass our time taking pictures of it, explore it using maps and guides without really coming to a diagrammatic understanding of it ourselves.

But when Raban actually immigrated to Seattle, he could no longer remain a tourist:

"But for the newly arrived immigrant, this magic stuff is like a curse. … The immigrant needs to grow a memory, and grow it fast. Somehow or other, he must learn to convert the uncanny into the homely, in order to find a stable footing in the new land."

— Driving Home: An American Journey

 Forming a diagrammatic understanding of his new home became a priority.  I don't think this is just a matter of doing things and getting around, for a tourist can do that, and I'm not sure it is just a matter of memories either.  The axioms of that first and foremost among diagrams, Euclid's geometry, created a space, and I think any diagram, by abstractly selecting only certain relationships from experience, also creates a "space."  Consider the aerial photo and map of the same region from a previous post to this blog.  The map is creating a space that the image, and perhaps the experience itself, lacks.