Some sign is all signs
In an earlier (on 12/22/04) I discussed Eshu, the Yorba trickster with the two colored hat, and linked him to the quarrelsome division of the United States into the Blue and Red States, and although such trickster strife is problematic despite attempts to do color blendings of the Purple America, I want to continue to look at this phenomenon in terms of memes and semiosis. I am thinking here that one can easily extend the Dawkin’s notion of cluster memes to a cluster (or as Peirce’s called them a chain) of interpretants. The “ideas,” the “cognitions,” the “meanings,” or the “interpretations” that go along with the sign-object reference-relation is certainly the playground of memes and trickster. To torque a known pattern of interpretants into something new and different is to start a new chain of Interpretants that must struggle with a more established chain. This may be a disputatious exchange, a cooperative exchange, a dialogic exchange, a competitive exchange, or a extinctual one that will call attention to the priorities of a cultural cluster and will morph in the directions that all new (and established) signs have; that is, signs (and their meme or Interpretant clusters) have a life cycle of sorts, and signs are conceived, aborted, born, midwifed, fed, nourished, and brought to fruition, and eventually die. Signs are living entities, or to be more precise, living is a matter of signs.
Now the problem is how to categorize the process of sign change, development, and generation without defaulting to either disease model that pretends it know what is a “healthy” sign relation, or to a Darwinian rift that has built-in notions of progress and convenient prioritization of some specific interpreptant cluster, or even a socio-pyscho-cultural dance that identifies those signs which are “dysfunctional.” If I may be Wittgensteinian for a moment, it really is the case, in a discussion of sign change, that the “purpose of your classification is the use you put it to.” And I am not pretending here to some posed sense of scientific, philosophical, or rational neutrality, but to some thing like semiotic openness – an embracing of Peirce’s notion that one of the absolute boundaries of semiosis is Firstness -- the potentiality, the infinitude, the eternal progression/regression of sign generation.
Dawkins, as I have said, is a little too Russellian for me and wants to beat upon the corrupting memes of faith and religion (at least these rather than political or economic ideas are his boogies of choice) and declare the un-memetic nature of Science. Trickster Wash! If the meme, if the Interpretant cluster is an evolutionary process, then all clusters are subject to the fortunes of competition. Some, of course, are more long-lived that other, some are more accidental and temporary than others, and surely some semiotic morphology follows ontology. Thus is one uses meme clusters or interpreptant clusters to examine the methods of how sign change rather than sermonizing on which change is correct or appropriate, one can make a useful contribution to the Community of Inquirers, but do remember Trickster is always there to test, invert and point to the boundaries that the Community of Inquirers wants to see as eternal and unquestionable. Trickster is the source of conversation about, and he sings in our ears to remind us of our over cleverness and our appetites.
Check the plums, taste the soup -- Trickster is there to remind us.
