Trickster and the Inscape of Paradox

Without contraries, there is no progression
W. Blake

As I have argued, Trickster is the boundary tester of culture. He is the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the semiotic orbit who works as a placeholder for contradictions, contraries, oxymorons, paradoxes, and that whole host of tensive relations that come from the capacity of human beings to construct the Not. The term I would like to suggest for this tension in one from the poet Hopkins – “Inscape.” Of course, few people understand that term, but George P. Landow of The Victorian Web puts it this way:

In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder:

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing,
though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.

The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it.

If one can ignore for a minute the religious aspects of this notion, and take it for the kind of clustering structure it is, Inscape, as the “unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things”, is clearly a description of an interpretant cluster composed of the Peircean semiotic Absolutes of Firstness and Secondness, of similarity and difference, or of potentiality and particularity. Hopkins’ dead tree is a mere slice of stuff, but to feel, think, express, and note the totality of the experience is a semiotic dance, one that is much like the trickster dance of two steps forward and one step back.

Doesy –Do, Swing your partner

Death and Trickster

For Faye, Lyndon, and Gwin

Death is often attributed to Trickster. Either his prodigious appetite and never-ending hunger for more than he has, or her seeking of powers that she does not possess, Trickster unintentionally is the cause of death coming into the world. Trickster's bargain for his desires somehow is the reason we face a world of impermanence. For the living, it is of course a bad bargain because without his foolish trade or his foolish seeking after things he did not have, we human beings and other creatures would live forever, but after that point Trickster’s legacy of mortality takes one of two tracks – horror or laughter. Trickster can morph into a skin-crawler or a soul-stalker or she can morph into the silliness of our infinite desires – particularly the one that wants to maintain the continuity ourselves or our experiences forever.

But the other side of appetite is mortification and corruption. Desire is haunted by satiation, and life will morph into death; so more life can continue, and the mystery of that relation haunts a self-constructing species like us, who spin culture, language, myth, narrative, religion and science to explain why it is that we must die. There is, of course, no answer to that why – there may be tears, sorrows, rage, refusal, or resignation, but the death will come. Perhaps sacrifice, struggle, reincarnation or resurrection will hold death’s dark away for a while, but it will still stare back at us as the one of the cold facts of our lives. And less one dwell on the horror of that image, surely we can try to morph death’s grimace into Trickster’s mysterious grin. No, death and its pain are not funny, but laughter, like hugs, helps transform that pain eventually into the loving memories of those who are gone and to whom we will be joined – because we were never separated.

Trickster and Tragedy

The scope of the Tsunami, the slaughter in Iraq and Dufar, or the death of children at the hands of those who are supposed to care for them are frightening things. They are events which cause us to question the justice of the universe or the very intentions of the godhead. “Acts of God and Nature” may satisfy insurance requirements, but the presence of suffering in our lives or the encounter with aggressive and persistent evil has long clustered around Trickster.

Although in some phases, Trickster is seen as a cultural hero, he also is often the source of death, error, and pain. There is a darkside to Trickster reminding us that all of our cultural pretensions are subject to the whims of something beyond us. The two faces of drama, comedy and tragedy, are the two sides of Trickster – too clever, too smart, too hungry, too needy for our own good, and too slow to recognize the limits of our selves and our cultures.

Now that is cold comfort to those in the midst of tragedy – pain is pain and grief is grief and some empathy may help, but to face the darkness of either a tsunami or death is something all flesh is heir to – thanks to Trickster, of course. Trickster’s darkside is the darkness of death, the pain of loss, the shock of suffering, and we will dwell with it until we can accept Trickster’s other gift -- laughter. Only time can give us the other side!

Trickster's War Club: Double Speaking

Some sign is any sign

The Orwellian sense of Doublespeak is often used to castigate some user of signs for mis-use of language. As suggested on Wikipedia:

Doublespeak is language deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning, often resulting in a "communication bypass". Such language is associated with governmental, military, and corporate institutions. Doublespeak may be in the form of bald euphemisms ("downsizing" for "firing of many employees") or deliberately ambiguous phrases ("wet work" for "assassination"). Doublespeak is distinguished from other euphemisms through its deliberate usage by governmental, military, or corporate institutions.

But I want to look at doublespeak, in a more neutral sense, as a semiotic device of interpretant shifting. It is a meme strategy, like a mis-directing iconicity that pulls one’s attention elsewhere or a truth-proof lie because it will not scan logically (according to the established set of interpretants). Parallel to evolutionary camouflage, or misdirection for purposes of predation, courtship, or pair bonding, doublespeak is a strategy of semiotic competition.

Now in the Orwellian sense, these type devices are clearly marked at deliberate uses of some institution, and I want to think of doublespeak as an area where signs struggle to give themselves Dawkins’ three markers of memetic successfulness: longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity. Without either the political moralism of Orwell or the scientific moralism of Dawkins, I want to suggest that Peirce’s triadic relations of interpretants (and signs and objects for that mater) can be used to discuss how new signs are generated. Doublespeak can be a device for torquing marginal sign from more centristic signs to move the cluster in other directions. Here I am thinking of the Blue America and the Red American and how signs become re-valued for new and different purposes by one group or another , or how –how a sign, an interpretant, can be used to shift a discourse ( to develop an new series of signs and interpretants) in a particular way for particular purposes.

Now generally when one talks in these terms, one is talking from, if not a disputatious viewpoint, at least at skeptical one. For example when PBS Frontline “the Persuaders” looked at advertising they were concerned with how advertising does or does not corrupt our culture. But such analysis can take on the political edge (pro or con) of the Republican strategist/guru Frank Lutz who substituted “death tax” for “estate tax” because “nobody knew what an estate tax was”. Of course, Orwell sees doublespeak as the corruption of political discourse, Dawkins sees the memes of faith and religion as “ruthless and selfish replicators” corrupting scientific discourse; or PBS sees advertising as corrupting civil discourse. )

What I want to suggest is that interpretant shifting need not be judged morally (although it certainly can be), but discussed as a mechanism by which semiotic competition –evolutionarily, culturally, or scientifically takes place. If one keeps the oxymoronic quality of trickster in mind and the range of potentiality in Peirce’s Firstness, then the fluidity of signs, the morphing of meanings, and the interpretant dance can be discussed more openly and more honestly than agenda carping.

Trickster's War Club: Smiotic Stone Soup

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.