semiotics and the sacred

FALL, 2013CONTENTS

Introduction 187Deborah Eicher-Catt

The Always Already “Almost” of Democracy and the Sacred 190

Jay Brower

Listening into the Air: Notes on the Sacred Nature of Communication 203

Igor E. Klyukanov

Sacred Praxis: Kerygma in Continuum 213Terry J. Prewitt

Signs of Sacred Play: Musings on the Semiotics of Rainbows 224Deborah Eicher-Catt

POETRY

Psalm of Days 240Thomas P. Pickett

Contributors 243

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INTRODUCTION

The sacred is an existential encounter with Otherness that is a touchstone ofour humanity. It is a touchstone because it defines us by what we are not—bywhat is beyond our limits, or what touches us precisely at our limits.

— Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self 1

This issue, entitled Semiotics and the Sacred, unpacks the dimensions ofthe sacred from a semiotic point of view. Philosophers and religious thinkersalike have long pondered the dimensions of the sacred. This is no surprisegiven that, from the beginnings of magical-mythical thinking, humankind hassought to demarcate the world of everyday mundane experience from the spir-itual or idealized world of the holy.2 After all, at the mythical level of con-sciousness one of the most fundamental distinctions made in human existenceis between the sacred and the profane. This distinction emerges because eachaspect of existence (the sacred or the profane) and the representational mean-ings that seek to describe it are necessarily interwoven within the symbolicrealm. As a consequence, understandings are thoroughly dependent upon theoppositional relationship each aspect has to the other within a given represen-tational system of meaning. So, for example, the sacred represents all of thosethings and/or ideas that stand in stark relation or contrast to the profane andvice versa. Thus, we can see that our experience of the sacred always institutesa phenomenological (embodied) boundary relation or, as Csordas indicatesabove, tests our very “limits” of understanding existence. By extension, itbecomes easy to conclude that all comprehension of the world is accomplishedas a result of learning and instituting definitional boundaries, representing ideasand/or things as “this” and not “that” and embodying those cultural represen-tations as our own.

Important to consider is the fact that it is at this boundary or limit that ouressential nature as humans is exercised and made known to us. Indeed, as weshall see in the articles that follow, the representational boundaries we create inexperience are, most definitely, sacred enactments. The ancient Greeks under-stood this condition well. They likened this process of setting boundary condi-

tions or the “cutting” of human experience into meaningful distinctions as thesacred. In addition, for those who study our experiences of the world throughthe representational mechanisms we use to understand them, the sacred is bestviewed as a “sign” or signifying process. Hence, semiotics, or the study of ourexperience of these sign relations in the world, becomes an insightful method-ology to use to unpack how the meanings of the sacred are instituted withincommunicative practices and how the sacred signifies an accomplishment ofthese very sign actions.3

The articles included in this issue thus all seek to explore this complex sig-nifying relation—between our experience and understanding of the profane ormundane aspects of existence and their distinction from what we identify as the“other worldly” or the sacred.4 Each article asks reflexive questions about thenature of the sacred and the power it has to shape human relations and viceversa. Jay Brower, for example, in his article, “The Always Already ‘Almost’ ofDemocracy and the Sacred,” explores the complex relation between the sacredand the democratic practice of voting. Referring us to the civil rights activistJohn Lewis’s address to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Browerfleshes out the tension between our individual sense of the sacred and its ful-fillment in the collective actions of a society. Igor Klyukanov writes in his arti-cle, “Listening into the Air: Notes on the Sacred Nature of Communication,”that our theorizing on communication can benefit greatly from a renewed focuson listening. As he claims, we can learn much about communication “when welisten to listening.” Describing various forms of listening, Klyukanov contendsthat it is in the enactment of listening as obedience that the sacred nature ofcommunication is found. Terry Prewitt, in his piece, “Sacred Praxis: Kerygmain Continuum,” interrogates the religious concept of kerygma, meaning“proclamation” or “announcement.” Prewitt is interested in unpacking thesemiotic conditions under which ordinary (or mundane) experiences andactions can become representative of extraordinary “religious” revelations orpronouncements about our being (both personal and cultural). His thoughtfuldiscussion is timely, given our declared “War on Terror” and the subsequentbrutal actions of those involved, all righteously condoned in some form oranother. Following semiotician Charles S. Peirce’s concept of “musement,”5 Ioffer personal reflections on the appearance of rainbows in the sky. As a sourceof natural beauty and wonder, I interpret rainbows as signs of what I call “sacredplay.” I draw parallels between how rainbows appear to us as phenomenologi-cal sign conditions and how all signs in the universe are constituted as sacredenactments of embodied sign relations.

We discover, through our reading of these articles that, whatever we deemto be sacred (be it an enactment of torture, the right to vote, listening, or per-ceiving natural wonders), the sacred is very much a part of the semiotic andphenomenological webs of meanings we, ourselves, constitute as culturalbeings. The sacred is, indeed, an important and powerful boundary condition

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that we (individually and collectively) instantiate and in response to which weframe our actions. Ironically, however, once that boundary condition of thesacred is established, it can only be sustained by remaining elusive—by remain-ing wholly other. It must remain something set apart, distanced, and difficult tograsp fully. In this sense, we discover that the sacred is both a necessary and suf-ficient condition for shaping our humanity through reflexive communicationpractices that must continually be embodied and enacted.

I would like to express my gratitude to Janie Harden Fritz, Listening’s ded-icated editor, for inviting me to guest edit this special issue on the semiotics andthe sacred. Without Janie’s encouragement and support, this issue would havenot been possible. I also want to thank my contributors, Jay Brower, IgorKlyukanov, and Terry Prewitt, for making the editing process both personallyenjoyable and professionally rewarding. And as always, thank you, Isaac, forreminding me of the things that matter most in life.

Deborah Eicher-CattGuest Editor

NOTES

1 Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1994).2 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Vol. 2 Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manhein (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1955).3 Charles S. Pierce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. JustusBuchler (New York: Dover, 1940): 98-119.4 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1959): 9-10.5 Charles S. Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” in The Essential Peirce, SelectedPhilosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893-1913), eds. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: IndianiaUniversity Press, 1998): 434-450.

THE ALWAYS ALREADY “ALMOST” OF DEMOCRACY AND THE SACRED

Jay Brower

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, congressman and civilrights activist John Lewis delivered an address in which he compares the votersuppression tactics enacted during the most recent presidential election cyclewith the discriminatory policies of “Jim Crow.” Woven into his examination ofthe struggle for equal voting rights, to which his life and work are intimatelybound, are two moments that capture the spirit of, and imperative for, contin-ued vigilance. He says, “My dear friends, your vote is precious, almost sacred.It is the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfectunion,” and then later on, “We must march to the polls like never before. Wemust come together and exercise our sacred right.”1 If his speech as a whole isread as an exhortation to exercise the right to vote, these lines furnish an expla-nation of the duty that enjoins that right. To name the right to vote as “sacred”suggests consecration, protection from harm, and devotion, which hinge on theperformance of conduct animated by the sacrosanct. Complicating this con-nection, and forming a key element of Lewis’s construction, is his use of“almost” to qualify the character of an individual’s vote, which stands in contrastto the “properly” sacred nature of collective activity that he subsequentlyinvokes. The tension between the “almost” and the “properly” sacred that hecalls forward supposes both a similarity in feeling and a discrepancy betweenindividual and collective political action.

In this article, I argue that Lewis’s invocation of the sacred as an aspect ofthe right and activity of voting opens us up to the essence of the sacred. The dif-ference that he identifies between individual and collective political actionaddresses a fundamental struggle of the “always already almost” and its redemp-tion in the highest experience of a shared world. The sacred thrusts us mostimmediately into a world of individual experience where one’s relation with the

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divine takes precedence. But both behind and in front of this dimension ofexperience is a desire to transcend the limitations of the particular in the clari-ty and wholeness of the general revealed in the struggle for the absolute.

I draw on Charles Sanders Peirce’s conceptualization of semeiotic2 to the-orize the movement from raw feeling to synthesis that community under-standing brings forward to consciousness. Peirce names this experience as thatof “Thirdness,” which is reflected in “sympathy, flesh and blood, that by whichI feel my neighbor’s feelings.”3 The continuity of feeling and meaningachieved in this mode of experience suggests a path for understanding thestruggle for the sacred that finds fulfillment in collective activity. Lewis’s nam-ing of the political as sacred gives us insight into this process and also tells usabout the ethics that enjoin our conduct when acting in concert within a worldof imperfect materiality.

WHAT IS SACRED FEELING?

The concept of “the sacred” contains within it a broad range of meanings,which speaks to its status as a fundamental mode of human experience. For anynumber of reasons, attention to, and explanation of, the sacred most closelyrevolves around religious experience. But at yet another level, the sacreddescribes a more general horizon that extends beyond the boundaries of faithtraditions and towards an understanding of the whole in terms of collectivityand interconnection. The sacred most certainly has a role and function at anindividual level, but it finds its condition of possibility in community.

Mircea Eliade, in his cross-cultural examination of the sacred, proposesthat latent in the concept are notions of power, enduringness, and efficacy.Meaning derived from associated experience supports a movement out of theprofane and into a previously obfuscated world where truth appears. In thisworld, the limitations and obstacles of the mundane disappear through faithand devotion, which replace the meaningless struggles of the profane. Thesacred shows itself, in this sense, as wholly other, but also wholly other from theindividual; not merely an extension of the individual, but that which stands indistinction from the individual. Particularity, instead, becomes immersed in thegenerality of a force more powerful than that of the individual will. In otherwords, the sacred has the character of an immersive force that puts the partic-ular individual in contact with the generality of the universe.

Eliade draws on the work of Rudolph Otto, whose germinal investigationof the idea of “the holy” proposes that the sacred presents itself as somethingoutside of the world experienced by the individual at any given moment.4 Thisis to say that the sacred appears as the discovery of a source of meaning that cir-cumscribes the particular, which, by virtue of its essence, is beyond the imme-diacy of rational comprehension. Otto’s description of the “wholly other” (ganzandere) supports the idea that the sacred constitutes access to another horizon


of experience, which Eliade takes a step further in arguing that the “manifesta-tion of the sacred ontologically founds the world.”5 By this he means that thesacred is more than an experience; it is, rather, the way the world comes intobeing through the formation and stabilization of the ground on which thedevout travel. This coming into being is accomplished through a transmutationof the chaos and relativity of the profane into existential stability marked by the“revelation of a sacred space [that] makes it possible to obtain a fixed point andhence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity.”6 Provision of an ori-entation is in “fact equivalent to his7 desire to take up his abode in objectivereality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purelysubjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illu-sion.”8 The particular individual is thus brought into a constellation that trans-forms the present into an experience of fact and reality previously inaccessible.Gained in this process is a newfound sense of interconnection that onceescaped the believer’s perceptual field, but upon contact with the sacred, con-stitutes an understanding of the universe.

From this overview of Eliade’s conceptualization of the sacred, two centralaspects of the scared begins to emerge. There is a notion that the sacred oper-ates as an a priori category. The Kantian category of the a priori contains with-in it four characteristics: necessity, non-derivability, it cannot be interpreted oth-erwise, and is ideal.9 A consideration of the sacred as a priori supports thenotion that it is a fundamental experience, rather than an amalgam made up ofdifferential experiences brought together synthetically.

The second aspect is the act and process of striving for transcendence. AsEliade notes, it is the desire to make meaningful contact with a reality obfus-cated by the profane that animates participation in associated activities. Onereaches for the sacred, then, through mediating processes, rather than simply inthe immediate experience of intrinsic ends. Transcendence is both aboutescaping the particular and also entering another reality within the general expe-rience of pure openness and exposure to grace, but it is the process of achiev-ing these ends that sustains the endeavor.

What is revealing about these two aspects of the sacred in the work ofEliade is that they may be read equally in support of religious or secular expe-riences. To find meaning in a preeminent experience of transcendence in thecompany of others describes a broader range of practices than those of wor-ship narrowly construed. Within a range of experiences from the “integrative”and “quest” to “collectivity” and “counter-culture,” sacred experience showsitself as that which supports the endeavor to experience the whole unboundfrom the limitations of the particular.10 In all of these notions sacrednessappears as a grounding point upon which human undertaking is situated forthe purpose of finding connection beyond the individual by reaching out tothe universe.

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THE SACRED AND THE SEMIOTIC

Owing to the conceptual openness of the sacred, a broad range of practicesaccompany the manifestation of divine experience. Semiotics, as a theory andmethodological orientation, has a natural connection with the study of thesacred, given that the latter is sustained by the appearance of meaningfulsigns.11And although semiotics functions as a general term, under which abroad range of ideas have been categorized, it is by no means reducible to a sin-gular set of ideas.

The work of C. S. Pierce stands in distinction as a founding contributionto the study of “semeiotic.”12 His approach is rooted in the notion that theworld in its entirety is open to interpretation through a formal system of signs,and that “reasoning is the art of marshalling such signs, and of finding out thetruth.”13 Across Peirce’s development of semeiotic, there are multiple series oftripartite relations that form interrelations between and amongst varied modesof experience. The process of semiosis, as he describes it, involves three ele-ments, which are the representamen, interpretant, and object. The first ofthese, the representamen,14 is “something which stands to somebody for some-thing in some respect or capacity.”15 The representamen is the thing thataddresses consciousness with an awareness of a phenomenon, and, in turn, ulti-mately creates a sign in the mind. This sign, the interpretant, mediates betweenthe representamen and the thing it stands for, namely, the object. Semiosisaccordingly consists of a representative element that has a directedness towardan object, an interpretative mediation of that representation that participates inan endless series of representations that have come before and after, and theobject that is represented.16

Peirce presents a related trichotomy of experience that, while not entirelyreducible, aids in understanding his semeiotic. He conceives of Firstness,Secondness, and Thirdness as universal categories of being. Firstness is thepure presentness of a phenomenon in feeling, which is an “instance of that sortof element of consciousness which is all that it is positively, in itself, regardlessof anything else.”17 In this sense, Firstness “involves no analysis, comparison,or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by whichone stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another.”18 This is the “raw”mode of experience in which we encounter the world.

Secondness arises in the feeling of struggle, Peirce says, which is the“mutual action between two things regardless of any sort of third or medium,and in particular regardless of any law of action.”19 This is the experience ofconfronting the singularity of a thing that by virtue of its thingness is irreducibleto any other thing. He provides an explanatory example in which one tries tocreate a world where nothing changes, where there is a steadiness of imagina-tion. This is indeed a feat that one can accomplish, but in doing so we mustmentally manipulate this imaginary universe to resist change. In such resistance


Peirce finds the notion of Secondness, expressed in struggle, as we work toconfront the singularity of every stimulus that weighs on consciousness andbring it into understanding.20

Thirdness occupies a paradoxical relation to Firstness and Secondness inthat the third resides as a “connecting bond between the absolute first and thelast. The beginning is first, the end second, the middle third.”21 Peircedescribes the relation of Secondness and Thirdness in saying that “A fork in aroad is a third, it supposes three ways; a straight road, considered merely a con-nection between two places is second, but so far as it implies passing throughintermediate places it is third.”22 This metaphor is designed to show Thirdnessas a kind of mediated synthesis or assimilation of phenomena in conscious-ness; “Law as an active force is second, but order and legislation are third.Sympathy, flesh and blood, that by which I feel my neighbor’s feelings, isthird.”23 Thirdness is where we encounter the communal, given that the mean-ing that resides behind the interpretant, and thus the interpretant itself,emerges from a shared history of meanings. Without this prehistory that is pro-vided to us by culture, communication, and by extension understanding in gen-eral, would be impossible.

So we must now ask what are the practical consequences of Peirce’s tri-chomoties, and how do they relate? One place where they come together is inhis understanding of the formal conditions of community. Peirce conceives ofhis semeiotic project as part and parcel of logical inquiry, which by its verynature is dependent on a universal system of shared meaning. His accounts ofsemiosis provide a basis for understanding the ways in which inquiry takes placevis a vis the representations that are created to form the basis of any logical sys-tem. He argues that

The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning wouldfinally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me andyou. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this concep-tion essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite lim-its, and capable of a definite increase in knowledge.24

Community, thus conceived, is the basis for reality in the sense that practi-cal agreement is necessary in order to achieve, and also to maintain, knowledgeof any sort. Semeiotic is central to that task because it provides a method forconceptualizing the development of thought and how the participation andshared understanding of others is central to that process. The consequences ofthis view may be summarized as follows: “The first formal condition of havinga community is that its members are capable of meditative or sign-interpretingcapacity to some degree. Second there must be some connection or relation,especially a communicative one, between such sign users. Third, this passagesuggests that this connection or relation must be established as “ours” in some

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sense; that is, there must be some identification with this relation on the part ofthose so related.”25 These conditions for the formation of community demon-strate three primary ways in which Peirce’s semeiotic is instrumental in con-ceptualizing the basis of community, but to what ends?

APPEARANCE IN THE POLITICAL

Peirce’s semeiotic proposes that community rises out of the developmentof shared meaning, which brings individuals in contact with a world of signify-ing others. He shows this point by demonstrating the way relations form semei-otic all the way down: relations between thing and word, sign-users and theworld, as well as amongst themselves, and it is those relations that constitute theconditions for the possibility of meaningful contact with others.26 To under-stand how this condition holds, it is necessary to consider, at least in a generalsense, how signs are actualized in the social field in a way beyond their formalconditions. An area of human activity that demonstrates the development ofprocesses of relationality in a way that parallels the sacred activity is politics, byvirtue of the fact that both found their raison d’être in similar ways around con-nection with others.

Hannah Arendt argues that “nothing and nobody exists in this worldwhose very being does not presuppose a spectator.”27 In keeping with Peirce,the presupposition of a spectator speaks to the presentation of a thing in con-sciousness as an expression of Secondness (this process relates to both thingsand people), which is a manifestation of the birth of the sign to consciousness.We are always already working from the subjective experience of relations ofappearance. The perceptual mode of “Seeming—the it seems-to-me, dokeimoi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing worldis acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others,and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of thespectators.”28 Politics fundamentally engages in interpretation of this sort asrelations present themselves, and understanding evolves in concert with others,and it is the structured acknowledgement of this fact that enables the persistentdevelopment of meaning.

Semeiotic representation, as an expression of Thirdness, recursivelydraws on this on-going development of meaning-in-appearance. The move-ment of appearance is one in which “when the philosopher takes leave of theworld given to our senses and does a turnabout. . .to the life of the mind, hetakes his clue from the former, looking for something to be revealed to himthat would explain its underlying truth. This truth—a-lethia, that which is dis-closed (Heidegger)—can be conceived only as another ‘appearance,’ anotherphenomenon originally hidden but of a supposedly higher order, thus signify-ing the lasting predominance of appearance.”29 In a fashion congruent with


Peirce, Arendt acknowledges not just the perpetual reliance on appearance,but also the functioning of appearance both within and outside of the world ofconcrete praxis. This understanding speaks to the dimensional character ofexperience in that a focus on appearance reveals the becoming of the sign asthat which is inextricably linked to the flux of semiotic relations. Both in theworld of political affairs and in the world of Platonic ideals, there is no respitefrom this reality.

These appearances are actualized in the field of the political, according toArendt, in concrete form as part of the evolution of the polis as a space of free-dom, which speaks directly to an interest in creating a stable field of relation-ality. She argues that there are two ways of understanding the experiences ofthe Homeric epics in this process. The first, “negative,” rationale suggests thatan abode of greater stability than the poem is necessary to secure the“grandeur of human deeds and speech.”30 The second, “positive,” rationalecomes from Plato, who proposes that the polis arose from the “great events inwar or other deeds—that is, from political activity in its inherent greatness.”31

Both explanations of the origin of the polis, however, sustain the assumptionthat the “Homeric army never disbanded but upon its return to the homelandreassembled, established the polis, and thus founded a space where it couldstay permanently intact.”32

Arendt’s argument shows the growth of freedom as the meaning of politicsthat opposes itself to the ends of circumscribed action. Alongside the rise of thepolis as the preservation of speech and deeds (Homer) and political activity ingeneral (Plato), freedom as the meaning of politics expresses the character ofthe polis not just as an abode of things, but as an abode of relations. Accordingto Arendt, the meaning of freedom begins to shift as the

point of enterprise and of adventure fades more and more, and whereas whatbefore was, so to speak, only a necessary adjunct to such adventures, the con-stant presence of others, dealing with others in the public space of the agora,the isegoria as Herodotus puts it, now becomes the real substance of a freelife. At the same time, the most important activity of a free life moves fromaction to speech, from free deed to free words.33

Politics is thus founded in and by semeiotic relationality in the sense thatthe relational, the being with others in the everydayness of free words, consti-tutes the meaning of politics as freedom. Once merely an “adjunct” to the expe-rience of freedom, relationality, for Arendt, coalesces as something very closeto a woven fabric constituted in and by political subjects who form its warp andwoof. Grasping the mutuality of political existence in this way shows subjects asessentially related to a larger whole in and through their formation of a patternand texture of relatedness.

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VOTER’S RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS

Having considered the ontological character of the sacred and the mani-festation of community in the appearance of semeiotic relationality, these ideas,once applied to Lewis’s speech, provide a vantage point from which to recasthis insights. Lewis’s status as a congressman is an important contextual factor,but more so is his history as a civil rights advocate. Provoking Lewis’s com-ments about the sacred character of voting with which I began are so-called“voter ID” laws that several states sought to enact in the run-up to the 2012presidential election cycle. The stated purpose of these laws is to guard againstvoter fraud by ensuring that all registered voters present a valid government IDwhen they receive a ballot. The disproportionate effects of such laws, however,are felt by those without access to the kinds of resources necessary to obtainsuch documentation with reasonable ease, despite being legally entitled tothem. Lewis speaks specifically about the public announcement made by theRepublican leader of the Pennsylvania House that the state’s recent passage ofsuch a law would enable Mitt Romney to win electoral votes. For Lewis, thesetactics smack of racist attitudes that have historically supported states’ imple-mentation of poll taxes and reading tests designed to disenfranchise minority,and especially African-American, voters.

Lewis’s focus on this issue evokes particularly personal themes given hiswork as a civil rights advocate. He describes in the speech, for instance, one ofmany encounters with racist violence as one of the original Freedom Riders. Inan attempt to enter a “whites only” waiting room at a bus stop in Rock Hill,South Carolina, in 1961, Lewis and a fellow African-American rider wereseverely beaten. The purpose of their trip was to test recent court rulings thatbanned discrimination on buses crossing state lines. In 1965 during anotherimportant moment of nonviolent resistance, Lewis marched at the front of aprocession of protestors who sought to walk from Selma to Montgomery toprotest inequitable access to voting. After the marchers crossed the EdmundPettus Bridge, Alabama State Police savagely beat Lewis and others to denytheir display of resistance.

These two events—amongst many others—situate Lewis’s claims about theinjustice of voter ID laws. They also provide a moment to investigate what it isthat Lewis might mean when he invokes the sacred character of the right tovote. First, we see in his experience a focus on a right that is consecrated by sac-rifice. From Lewis’s own experience and the experiences of others, the right tovote is enshrined in a history of struggle against violence. When he tells hisaudience to vote, it is not simply an exhortation to engage in a purely symbol-ic activity, but rather to perform a duty for which others have risked and lostlife in the direct service of providing. The dynamic between right and duty thatemerges shows the sacred by demonstrating the relationship between the strug-gle for rights and ensuring the endurance of what is achieved by that struggle,


with the latter serving as an infinite rejoinder to the former. Sacredness flowsfrom the shared sense of connection brought about in the act of giving oneselffreely for the sake of others. Lewis’s invocation of the incident in Rock Hill,South Carolina, reminds us that the material world of struggle also entails exer-cising those rights. This theme comes out near the end of the speech when hesays, “We must march to the polls like never before” to ensure that voters’voices are heard.

Along with activating the audience’s sense of importance related to voting,Lewis is also careful to name the consequences of injustice. After invoking thenames of the states in which current voter ID laws were sought, Lewis calls usback to a recognition of familiarity: “I’ve seen this before. I’ve lived this before.Too many people struggled, suffered and died to make it possible for everyAmerican to exercise their right to vote.” He is reminding the audience aboutthose who suffered through not just the attack dogs, water cannons, clubs, andracist mobs, but also the organized violence of indifference. When we do notstand up in the face of violence that seeks to undo the very tenets of the strug-gle for equality and justice, we, too, in some ways participate in the same kindsof violence that those who seek to do volitional harm enact. In naming the rightto vote as sacred, he brings us in contact with the notion that selflessness onbehalf of others, sacrifice, and civil rights constitute a subsumption of the indi-vidual by an enlarged world of responsibility and meaning.

A final moment of note in Lewis’s speech with regard to grasping what hemight mean when he refers to the right to vote as sacred occurs when he says,“We must not be silent. We must stand up, speak up and speak out.” Here heis tying the right to vote to the necessity of participating in democratic delibera-tion. This point is significant because it shows a connection between rights andthe appearance of citizens in public as a central component of democratic citi-zenship. When we talk about how we appear to one another, we acknowledgethat democracy is tied to action through word and deed, and the process of vot-ing is one very important way in which that happens. When the right to speakout against injustice is not exercised, silence is registered as indifference and thesanctity of the sacred is lost.

DEMOCRACY AS SACRED ACTIVITY

Approaching the meaning of Lewis’s use of the sacred in the context of thespecific concerns he raises in his speech is instructive. What is, perhaps, ofgreater value, though, is thinking through the tension that I began this essaywith; namely, the “almost sacred” character of the individual right to vote andthe “properly sacred” character of the collective enterprise. In this tension thereis a marked sense of fulfillment in collective activity where meaning and com-munity are constituted by the word and deed of the individual.

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When we turn back to Lewis’s speech to consider the “almost” sacred andthe more “properly” sacred, we are presented with a range of possible inter-pretations. In keeping with his biography and the most direct reading of thesacred, the speech manifests themes of consecration and devotion to the pro-ject of equal political rights. Lewis’s speech is a recognition that societal strug-gle, individual loss, and collective action have played a role in securing rights forall citizens, and that this effort necessitates the highest recognition.34 Testifyingto that history is Lewis himself who, as I have discussed, endured a great dealof harm in taking nonviolent, direct action in support of civil rights alongsidehis fellow advocates.

To be sure, Lewis’s invocation of the sacred is also about more than themechanics of voting that we are entitled to participate in. It is also about ashared experience of free appearance amongst free others. When we considerArendt’s analysis of appearance and representation as the fundamental modal-ity in which we experience the world and place that insight alongside her analy-sis of freedom, we see voting as a semeiotic presentation of this experience.More specifically, and by way of returning to Peirce, this semeiotic presentationoccurs in the mode of Thirdness, where community understanding is present.Integral to that feeling is the presence of sympathy, which implies shared sup-port and understanding. When Arendt invokes seeming as the primary modeof experiencing the world, she does so against a backdrop captured by Peirce’ssemeiotic in which the “seeming” perception engages with the history of mean-ings invoked and evoked in the varied application of signs.

The collective act of voting also calls our attention to the desire to escapethe distorted world of experience. Although politics will never be confused fora pure state of grace, the notion of participating in a collective practice thatserves ends beyond those of the individual, and in which we place “faith,”speaks to an opportunity to transform the limitations of circumscribed experi-ence in the practical application of democratic principles. Sacred activity is onlypossible within a horizon of shared signs where citizens experience the sense ofthe whole, even if only in fleeting moments. Where appearance is made senseof in meaningful ways, political community exists, and voting is a primary expe-rience of that very semiotic. Lewis’s exhortation is a reminder also of a sharedand problematic history, one that is imperfect, and requires improvement as anongoing task precisely at the point where such improvement eludes our grasp.

Lewis, in support of this view, invokes in his speech the words of Lincolnwhen he calls on us to continue the work of creating a “more perfect union.”These words also carry the resonances of then candidate Barack Obama who,in a March 2008 speech, used these same words to construct the centerpiece ofan influential statement on race on America. Heard in these voices is the ideaof a more perfect arrangement of power, which asserts that perfection is a qual-ity intrinsic to democracy. And although politics is a specifically human-madething, this theme pulls on a connection with the sacred. There is a sense of indi-


vidual participation and also a demand to engage the whole for the purpose ofachieving the desired ends of a given age.

To continue the project of that which strives for the “more perfect”assumes that such a thing is not only without peer, but also that it exists beyondthe threshold that distinguishes the imperfect from the perfect. Nonetheless,democracy and the sacred possess the quality of the always already almost asthe core feature of their being. Both strive for a world of the highest sharedexperience, and yet equally fail in that desired end, even if only to renew thestruggle for pure connection with the ideal other of meaning. In a perhaps sim-plistic inversion of the formula established by Lincoln, it is of value to consid-er what might be revealed if we were instead to see the task of democracy as themaking of a “less imperfect” union. In one sense, there is a change in perspec-tive that acknowledges the struggle over the orientation toward failure. InLincoln’s formulation, there is always already a distance separating the present,past, and future that serves as the imperative for movement. The aim to createa more perfect union suggests that the past is, however incrementally, inferiorto the present, and that the present will be overtaken by developments of afuture time.

Residing at the center of this teleology is a problem equally attributable tothe sacred, which is the linguistic challenge of constructing difference within theconcept. In English usage it is considered generally acceptable to use theexpressions “most holy” or “most sacred,” but what these expressions elide isthe notion of perfection at the heart of the sacred, which suggests no “more orless” holy thing, only the holy in its pure essence. The sacred is, at least in prin-ciple, absolute in this regard. The temporal relations of the present, past, andfuture call us to an understanding parallel to those latent in the symbolic coreof democracy, of the ways in which meaning is always in front of the presentmoment. Recalling Peirce’s category of Thirdness, and in particular the circu-lation of meaning that is implied in this mode of experience, the always alreadyalmost of democracy and the sacred demonstrates the semeiotic motor ofmeaning in that relations between subjects and their worlds constantly strive forgreater interconnection. The outcome of this struggle for meaning, however, isa reactivation of the very same process; the “almost” precedes the “always” andthe “already” by virtue of structuring the relations of the latter two. It is, thus,the “almost,” but “never quite,” that sustains the desire to reach beyond our-selves in those moments of shared activity to search for meaningful contact thatexpands horizons of understanding.

By extending an analysis of the sacred to a consideration of political expe-rience in the context of Lewis’s speech, an understanding of the role of semei-otic in constituting community shows itself as the need for shared worlds. Atone level, understanding within a community of inquiry is a prerequisite for act-ing in concert. However, when the meaning of collective action is directedbeyond individual comprehension and toward a subsumption of the particular

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in a general meaning that expands across a diverse range of particulars, there isan experience of faith at work. To have faith is to trust in a future, to believethat an event will occur without the guarantee of a specified outcome. Thesacred incorporates this element as it is applied to that beyond an individual’scontrol, but to which the individual is inextricably bound. Lewis’s identificationof the individual’s right to vote as “almost sacred” finds fulfillment in the cast-ing of one’s vote amongst others, in the course of which it becomes “properlysacred.” It is the participation of the individual in collective, democratic prac-tice that makes the activity of voting sacred. Peirce’s contribution lies in pro-viding a way of understanding not just how semeiotic constitutes relations incommunities, but also the ways in which our activation of Thirdness emerges inthe mutual understanding of such acts.

As one thinks about participation in democratic politics, one sees that partof the landscape includes imperfection, which typically stands in contradistinc-tion to the idea of the sacred. However, at the center of the meaning of thesacred there is a persistent need more perfectly (or less imperfectly) to com-port one’s self, just as there is a need in democracy to create more equitablearrangements of power. A consideration of the sacred as a field of experiencein which human beings participate reveals that the always already almost is arequirement of the sacred to the extent that it provides a counterpoint againstwhich the latter is constituted. In a world of imperfect materiality, the ethicsthat enjoin the right of participation, of which voting is central, calls for con-certed action to constitute novel interpretations that expand the possibilities ofhuman relationality.

NOTES

1 John Lewis, “Speech to the 2012 Democratic National Convention” National Journal, 6:00. September 6, 2012.http://www.nationaljournal.com/conventions-speeches/john-lewis-s-speech-full-text-from-the-democratic-national-convention-20120906.2 From here on I have chosen to use Peirce’s spelling of “semeiotic” when referencing his work as a way to dis-tinguish his contributions from a more general discussion of related contributions to semiotics. 3 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss,vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1965), 171.4 Cf. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine andits Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928).5 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. William R. Trask (New York:Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1959), 21.6 Ibid., 23.7 For ease of reading I have retained without modification the gender exclusive language of the original text, andalso acknowledge the sexist assumptions latent in these constructions. 8 Ibid., 28.9 For further discussion of the a priori cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman KempSmith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1929/1965). For specific discussion of the Kantian a priori in the contextof the sacred, cf. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of theDivine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928);Thomas Ryba, “The Idea of the Sacred in Twentieth Century Thought: Four Views (Otto, Scheler, Nygren,Tymieniecka),” in From the Sacred to the Divine: A New Phenomenological Approach, ed. Anna-Teresa


Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 1994) 21-42; Thomas A. Idinopulos, “Understanding and Teaching RudolphOtto’s The Idea of the Holy,” in The Sacred and its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study ofPrimary Religious Data, eds. Thomas A. Idinopulos & Edward A Yonan (Leiden: Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1996)139-155.10 Cf. N.J. Demerath, III “Varieties of Sacred Experience: Finding the Sacred in a Secular Grove.” Journal forthe Scientific Study of Religion 39, no. 1 (2000): 1–11.11 See, for instance, recent studies: Carl Rashcke, Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory:Toward a Semiotics of the Event (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).; Robert A. Yell, Semioticsof Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).12 Although beyond the scope of the present work, it is relevant to note that there are important distinctionsbetween Peirce’s tripartite semeiotic and Ferdinand de Saussure dyadic semiology, both of which represent inde-pendent intellectual developments. 13 Charles Sanders Peirce, “What is a Sign?” In The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings(1893-1913), eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 10.14 It is relevant to note a minor instability in Peirce’s work in the meaning of “representamen.” The term at timesboth stands for the “sign” as a whole, and also the aspect of firstness that initiates the semiotic process.15 Charles Sanders Peirce, “The criterion of validity in reasoning,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. JustusBuchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 99.16 Liszka argues for a four part understanding of this process. Cf. James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction ofthe Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1996) 18-19.17 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss,vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1965), 152.18 Ibid.19 Ibid., 161.20 Cf. Ibid., 161.21 Ibid., 170.22 Ibid., 170.23 Ibid., 171.24 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed.Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 247. Capitalization in original.25 Liszka, Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, 83.26 For further discussion on the nature of semiotic relations, see Paul Bains, The primacy of Semiosis: AnOntology of Relations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).27 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 19.28 Ibid., 21.29 Ibid., 24.30 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 124.31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.33 Ibid.34 It is important and necessary to acknowledge the temporal instability of any moment of deliverance from harm.The 2013 United States Supreme Court verdict in Shelby County, AL v. Holder, which rolls back provisions cen-tral to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, shows that the work of challenging power is a recursive task.

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LISTENING INTO THE AIR: NOTES ON THE SACREDNATURE OF COMMUNICATION

Igor E. Klyukanov

HEARING A CALL

Out of the four traditionally identified forms of communication—speaking,reading, writing, and listening—the latter has received less academic attentionthan the other three. However, it is still an exaggeration to say that “listening hasbeen neglected.”1 And, it is difficult to agree with those who claim that, in the“list of disciplines and fields that have contributed to listening studies, we findnoticeably absent philosophy, ethics, and politics.”2 Already seen by Aristotleas a sensual medium of pure movement, and considered critical for idealdemocracy as a matter of immediacy when everybody can hear everybody else’svoice, the “auditory-sonorous” has been identified throughout centuries withthe forces of life and even the “living Word of God.”3 Today, the InternationalListening Association (ILA) is an active organization that promotes the study,development and teaching of listening. ILA’s publications include InternationalJournal of Listening, Listening Education, Listening Professional, and TheListening Post. The ILA held its 34th annual convention in Montréal, Québec,Canada, on 20-23 June, 2013. Many scholarly books have been published onlistening and its role in human communication, such as Roland Barthes’Listening: Critical Essays, Gemma Fiumara’s The Other Side of Language: APhilosophy of Listening; Don Ihde’s Listening and Voice; Jean-Luc Nancy’sListening, and Listening and Human Communication in the 21st Century, edit-ed by Andrew Wolvin.4 Thus, while it may not be given as much attention asspeaking, reading, and writing, listening can hardly be viewed as a poor cousinin the study of communication.

It is true, however, that the research focusing on voice and sound often“elides sustained theorizing about listening.”5 The result is a lose-lose outcome:

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not only does the nature of listening fail to be adequately analyzed, but ourunderstanding of communication is impoverished. As Lisbeth Lipari writes,“Listening being is a philosophical challenge that invites communication theo-rists to rethink communication through the lens of listening.”6 She notes that“we have not only forgotten how to listen but also how to connect listening withthought itself.”7 The present paper is a response to that call: it contains a num-ber of notes showing what we can hear about communication when we listen tolistening. We discover that it is through listening as obedience that the sacrednature of communication is revealed.

LISTENING TO HEAR

There are a number of differences commonly identified between listeningand hearing. First, listening is presented as an active process while hearing isviewed as a default mechanism equated with the faculty of simply perceivingsound vibrations. Second, because listening is an active process, it requiresfocus and emphasizes the attention that one gives to another; hearing, on theother hand, is easy as a default and is thus a passive process: one simply cannotnot hear. Third, and related to the previous point, (active) listening is difficultwhile (passive) hearing is easy. And, fourth, because listening is such a difficultprocess that requires attention, it is seen as an important skill that must bedeveloped and continuously honed; hearing, in its turn, seems to be a built-inmechanism, and we should not worry about improving, let alone losing it. It islistening as a skill that we are said to be in danger of losing in this world of dig-ital distraction and information.8

And yet, it must be remembered that to listen means to make an effort tohear something. When we listen, we attend closely for the purpose of hearing:in a way, we do not truly listen unless we hear. It is noted that listening sticks tothe voice and is therefore sensual, while hearing is after meaning and under-standing.9 All of a sudden, hearing appears to take the spotlight, in spite ofbeing a passive and easy process. It can be recalled, in this connection, thatHeidegger was sympathetic to hearing rather than listening: we can be trapped“in listening to the ‘they.’ This listening must be stopped; that is, the possibilityof another kind of hearing that interrupts that listening must be given by Da-sein itself.”10 Heidegger never viewed hearing as a passive mechanism identi-fied with the faculty of simply perceiving sound vibrations. He wrote: “Ofcourse we hear a Bach fugue with our ears, but if we leave what is heard only atthis, with what strikes the tympanum as sound waves, then we can never hear aBach fugue. We hear, not the ear.”11 In fact, the essence of the word and theworld can only be hearkened, which is the deepest form of hearing. “To hear-ken is to be aware of a center of touchstone of absolute silence within ourselveswhen we hear nothing. It is by guarding this original silence that we guard ourcapacity to respond to what calls to us in this silence.”12

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Thus, listening and hearing are inseparable, and both lead to hearkening.“To hearken” means both “to listen, to lend the ear” and “to hear by listen-ing,”13 emphasizing the common ground of listening and hearing. That theyare so close in meaning can be seen, for example, in the Bible translations suchas Luke 10:16: “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one whorejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.”14

And: “The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejectsme, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”15 How close listen-ing and hearing are in meaning can also be seen in the Russian language wherethese two words sound almost the same, with the difference in but one letter:“slushat” (to listen) and “slyshat” (to hear). The semantic distinction betweenthese two words is made through the category of aspect: “slushat” (to listen) isexpressed by the imperfective voice, denoting the actions still in progress(hence not completed) or repeated (hence not carried out once), while“slyshat” (to hear) is expressed by the perfective voice, denoting the actions suc-cessfully completed. The latter thus appears to be more a form of praxis ratherthan a skill. So, when a call is made to “explore what theoretical transforma-tions emerge when listening is conceptualized as phronesis itself,”16 perhapsemphasis should be shifted on to hearing. Maybe, in today’s world of digitaldistraction and information, we should be concerned about not only the dan-ger of losing listening as an important skill, but also hearing as a critical formof praxis. And maybe, it is hear(ken)ing that should be seen as the alpha andomega of communication.

DECENTERING RADICAL ALTERITy

Listening is conceptualized as “an encounter with radical alterity.”17

Listening, therefore, is always listening to the Other; this view highlights the eth-ical underpinnings of communication; see for example, the ideas of EmmanuelLevinas, for whom to communicate is to recognize the Other, to give and beaccountable to the Other. In this light, the so-called ‘active listening’ betrayssomewhat oxymoronic overtones: it is ‘active’ insofar as it is (passively) posi-tioned in relation to alterity: as mentioned above, one listens to the Other.

However, the ‘auditory-sonorous’ is an existential call for subjectivity, andwe should not overlook “the role of listening, broadly conceived, in the con-stitution of the subject.”18 When we listen, we (must) hear; when we hear (notthe ear), we hear ourselves. And, when we hear ourselves, we hearken to theessence of Being. Parallels can be drawn, therefore, between listening and theOther, and hearing and the Self. The former, as was mentioned earlier, evokethe ideas of Levinas; by the same token, the latter can be seen as evoking theideas of Martin Buber. “Thus, unlike Buber, Levinas’s primary aim was tolocate subjectivity in its relation to alterity. His emphasis was on transcen-dence of being, not, as with Buber, on being’s praxis in the world.”19 In this


respect, as stated earlier, listening (to the Other) is more of a skill, while hear-ing (oneself) is more of an act, a form of phrónêsis. Thus, Self and the Otherare entwined in sonorous communication, which is not transmission butmethexis, i.e. participating in making a world that does not preexist but arisesfrom sound.20

TEMP-ORALITy

It is common to emphasize the spatial nature of listening. Listening is wide-ly treated as a dwelling place from which human beings can both be andbecome, and this place as an encounter with alterity is said to exist “beyondtemporality.”21 This view clearly follows Heidegger’s ideas, and that is not sur-prising. Heidegger’s analysis of Da-sein, which involves hearkening to theessence of being as the deepest form of hearing, is said to betray the predomi-nance of spatial metaphors, as demonstrated by Luce Irigary;22 see, for exam-ple, her meditations upon ‘place.’ However, Heidegger was very much aware ofthe role of time and followed Husserl, who spoke of ‘time-consciousness’ astime in the primordial sense. It is such primordial time as the transcendentalhorizon of being that Heidegger reconfigures as Dasein’s temporality.23

It must be remembered that communication is a spatiotemporal process.24

When time and space are treated separately for analytical purposes, time is eas-ier to ‘forget’ because it is more elusive than space and more bound with intro-spective experience and the constitution of Self.25 And yet, precisely becausehearing goes more hand-in-hand with Self (just as listening does with theOther), it is important to emphasize that “hearing exists in a temporal continu-um.”26 Hearing/auditory experience as temporal-affective is contrasted withsight/visual experience as essentially spatial-objective: the argument on this fun-damental difference “is perhaps most familiar from certain representatives ofthe phenomenological tradition.”27 The relationship between sounds and timeis very intimate and crucial: “…we reach a clearer sense of limit characterized asa horizon, but in the case of the auditory field that horizon appears most strik-ingly as temporal. Sound reveals time.”28

The ‘auditory-sonorous’ only seems to be immediate: in reality, “soundencapsulates unpredictable change.”29 In communication, therefore, it takestime to hear. Hearing, as mentioned earlier, is not simply a matter of perceiv-ing sound vibrations, but an act of communication in which the energy ofthought is generated. In fact, it may be possible to use Albert Einstein’s famousformula in conceptualizing the nature of hearing by following Mikhail Epstein,who sees the energy of thought (E) equaling the mass of knowledge (m) multi-plied by the speed of conceptual dissociations and associations (c) squared byreflexivity (1).30 This way, just as it takes mass to make sounds, it takes time toanalyze that mass of sounds bringing it back to the meta-level of self-reflexivity.Hence, hearing as the energy of thought (E) equals mass of sound (m) times

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(sic!) the speed of dissociations and associations (the speed of ‘Light’, C)squared. The energy of thought generated as a result of a communication actcan thus be quite different: for instance, to hear an utterance is not the same asto hear a lecture. Hearing/auditory, therefore, is not simply a form of orality,but also an act of temporality.

The temporality of hearing is grounded in socio-cultural human experi-ences and can be best understood as kairos, not chronos. According to JohnSmith, it must be remembered that

kairos presupposes chronos, which is thus a necessary condition underlyingqualitative times, but that, by itself, the chronos aspect does not suffice forunderstanding either specifically historical interpretations or those processesof . . human experience where the chronos aspect reaches certain criticalpoints at which a qualitative character begins to emerge.31

It is at such critical points or moments in time that the energy of thought is gen-erated: not for nothing kairos is said to have “profound connotations of gener-ation.”32 Also, every critical point or moment in time brings within itself aresponsibility for the deed; in that respect, the kairotic temporality of hearing isalways a form of praxis; see, for example, Heidegger’s words about “how thebeing which is kairos constitutes itself in phrónêsis.”33

VIVA SILENTIUM

It is noted that “listening being makes possible the impossibilities of free-dom.”34 Indeed, the ‘dwelling place’ of listening that exists between Self and theOther can be viewed as the space within which the free play of communicationoccurs; see, for example, Gadamer’s Spiel.35 At the same time, the connectionbetween freedom and obedience must be noted: based on the ideas of SemioticSquare, as articulated by Algirdas Greimas and Joseph Courtes,36 this relation-ship is one of complementarity (implication). The etymology of the word “ob,”meaning “to,” + “audire,” meaning “to hear,” makes it clear that obedience is aform of listening. Consistent with how the nature of listening is viewed, listen-ing as obedience is usually identified with “a listening toward the other.”37

However, obedience is also a self-reflexive process in which one listens to theOther insofar as one listens to/hears oneself. This side of obedience is clearlypresent in the Russian equivalent for “to obey” (‘slushat’sya’), which literallymeans “to listen to oneself.” It is interesting to note that this self-reflexivenature of obedience is found in listening but not in the other forms of com-munication: for example, such words as *govorit’sya (to speak oneself),*pisat’sya (to write oneself) and *chitat’sya (to read oneself). Thus, it is possi-ble to say that we become ourselves through listening/hearing more than any-thing else (and yet, communication is seldom defined as a process of listen-


ing/hearing). Deep down, communication is a process in which, through listen-ing/hearing, cultural self emerges: listening as obedience is where/when intrap-ersonal and cultural levels of communication connect. In other words, “webecome one when we listen together.”38

It is through listening as obedience that the sacred nature of communica-tion is revealed. Sacredness is first of all identified with special spaces or places,e.g. burial sites, shrines, temples, etc. However, such spaces or places are con-secrated through communicative practices in the form of rituals that are carriedout time and time again: the sacred thus has a spatiotemporal nature.

Not surprisingly, “the voice is ultimately linked with the dimension of thesacred and ritual in intricately structured social situations where using the voicemakes it possible to perform a certain act.”39 However, the sacred can also beviewed as a momentary connection between semiotic relations as the gaps in thepatterns of experience are bridged not through speaking but listening—in theform of silence.40 Silence is indeed golden,41 and “listening, clearly, is amoment of silence that makes possible the constitution of the self,”42 as well asthe constitution of that which the self obeys or listens to—“a discursive and non-discursive, communicative whole.”43

We can recall in this respect Ludwig Wittgenstein’s well-known proposi-tion number seven, which states: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof onemust be silent.” Silence, which here is clearly opposed to speech, can some-times be more eloquent and useful than speech; for example, consider theSpanish saying: “Uno es dueño de su silencio y esclavo de sus palabras” (“Oneis the owner of his silence and the slave of his words”). And yet, silence is stilla semiotic code and so is characterized by intentionality just as is speech: whatone can speak of/about, one can be silent of/about.

ACTIVE LISTENING

Just as silence can be more eloquent and welcome than speech, it can alsohaunt humans. When Anna Akhmatova wrote, “And I am willing to listen toanything but silence” (“I ya vse soglsana slushat’/ Krome tishiny”), it was clearshe found that silence unbearable.44 But again: even silence, while lackingsound, still is often full of fury (and other emotions), and always signifyingsomething. In the case of silence, just as in any siutation of listening to speech,“we never hear anything but the already coded, which we decode.”45

Silence, without a doubt, can be terrifying. In fact, Bakhtin wrote about“the Fascist torture chamber or hell in Thomas Mann as absolute lack ofbeing heard.”46 But what about absolute lack of hearing anything? What abouttrying to listen to anything—and hearing nothing? It is said that, for Westernthinking, “the silence of cosmic space strikes terror.”47 When we face thesilence of ‘the already coded,’ in spite of all the hellish experiences it canbring, communication still appears to us a spatiotemporal continuum. When

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we face cosmic space and hear nothing, it is as if time itself is gone, and wefeel true terror.

In Franz Kafka’z story The Burrow, the main character (a beast of somekind) is unable to escape from the ever-present noise that cannot be localized.It must be noted that noise is something that cannot be heard clearly and,unlike sound, defies control: one can’t increase or decrease noise. However, nonoise whatsoever is a more terrifying scenario. What one can, or in fact must,do in such situations is just listen—not to but into space—in order to hear some-thing, anything. In a way, we have to deal with a paradox similar to the learningparadox first posited by Socrates and elaborated in Plato’s Meno. According tothat paradox, we either learn what we always already knew, or we can never rec-ognize new knowledge even as we are trying to learn something new: in bothcases, the concept of learning appears meaningless. Similarly, it appears that weeither hear what has already been coded, or we can never hear anything as weare trying to hear something: in both cases, the role of listening seems mean-ingless. This paradox can be solved by employing Peirce’s concept of abduc-tion as a spontaneous leap from the known to the unknown;48 in this case, fromsomething heard to something unheard. Thus, instead of treating it as a processof creating space to receive the alterity of the other, listening is conceptualizedas a process of receiving space to create the alterity of the other.49 Listening canbe understood this way only if we accept that “all sounds are in a broad sense‘voices’, the voices of things, of others, of the world.”50

The ear allows us to hear only so much (or, rather, so little): humans’ hear-ing threshold does not make it possible for them to hear all sounds. It is wellknown, for instance, that sound waves travel much faster in wood and waterthan air. And yet, we cannot hear what whales are saying. Or, if we could hearwhat the earth tells us, we perhaps could be as good at predicting and avoidingearthquakes as we are at looking and interpreting the seismic data collected dur-ing the earthquake.

And so we develop new and newer technologies to help us listen. Ofcourse, as we do so, we can hear only what such technologies will allow: in otherwords, “we probe, at best, the limits of our instruments.”51 All such instrumentsare nothing but our ‘hearing aids.’ We do not need such aids within theLebenswelt (lifeworld) made possible by our hearing threshold in which we canhear sounds naturally, with our ear. Beyond that, the world is inaudible,unhearable. It is known that “in science, the invisible world is the world of smallquantities and, strange though it is, also the world of large quantities. The visi-bility of the world is determined by the scale.”52 The same is true of the inaudi-ble and unhearable world. Science, including communication science, tries toexplain and understand the universe on a very large scale (for example, gener-al theory of relativity) and on a very small scale (for example, quantum mechan-ics). And so huge satellites’ ‘ears’ are listening into outer space, trying to hearthe sound of the Big Bang, while nanoparticles are trying to detect tiny acoustic


vibrations. For example, physi cists at the Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM)have managed for the first time to detect sound waves caused by motile bacte-ria. The new method realized by the Munich physicists is said to open a newworld to scientists because, for the first time, otherwise imperceptibly weakmotions—minuscule sound waves—can be visualized.53 However, herein liesone serious communication problem: just as such weak motions are visualized,the light waves and radio waves from space cannot be heard directly and mustbe digitally reconstructed (‘interpreted’). In other words, we do not really hearsuch sounds analogically—the way we hear what other people tell us or the waywe hear the sounds made by other creatures. Here is, for instance, how DonIhde describes his experience of hearing the recorded sounds of the humpbackwhale: “For the first moment, the marvelous range and pattern of the whalevoice presented the unique, never-before-heard. But too soon I began to bringthis ‘song’ into the familiarity, first of metaphor, then of name. I analogized thewhale’s voice such that its low notes were ‘like’ those of a bellowing bull, its highnotes ‘like’ the shrill of a bird, and so on.”54 When sound cannot be perceiveddirectly (naturally) and must be digitally reconstructed, it is more difficult toaccept the Other —be it a star or a bacteria—as Self. And only time will tellwhen, or if, we can treat anyone or anything making sound the way we treat our-selves—like ourselves, without any quotes.

We cannot not listen into space, hoping that time comes to hear some-thing, i.e. understand and accept the Other. John Peters writes: “Dolphins canperhaps hear many of their fellows speaking at once; they would not be torn bythe unfortunate mismatch between hearing and speaking, which makes democ-racy ever subject to constraints of scale.”55 In a way, for such full transhumandemocracy as a matter of immediacy when everybody can hear everybody else’svoice, we must be able to listen to everyone and everything, and hear them nat-urally, analogically. Then, we can hear being itself—being others, being our-selves. And so we continue to listen. As Nancy puts it, “perhaps we never listento anything but the non-coded, what is not yet framed in a system of signifyingreferences.”56 In other words, perhaps we never listen to, only into.

NOTES

1 Krista Ratcliffe, “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-CulturalConduct’,” College Composition and Communication 51, no. 2 (1999): 196.2 Pat Gehrke, “Introduction to Listening, Ethics and Dialogue: Between the Ear and the Eye: A SynaestheticIntroduction to Listening Ethics,” The International Journal of Listening 23 (2009): 2.3 Lauri Siisiäinen, Foucault and the Politics of Hearing. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 1.4 Roland Barthes, Listening: Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1972); Gemma Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (London: RoutledgeChapman & Hall, 1995); Don Idhe, Listening and Voice (Albany: State University of New york, 1976/2007);Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New york: Fordham University Press, 2007); AndrewWolvin, ed., Listening and Human Communication in the 21st Century (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell,2011).

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5 Ratcliffe, “Rhetorical Listening,” 196.6 Lisbeth Lipari, “Listening, Thinking, Being,” Communication Theory 20 (2010): 348.7 Lipari, “Listening, Thinking, Being,” 354.8 Seth Horowitz, “The Science and Art of Listening.” The New york Times, November 9, 2012.9 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. (Albany, Ny: State University of Newyork Press, 1996), 250.11 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 47.12 Peter Wilberg, The Therapist as Listener: Martin Heidegger and the Missing Dimension of Counseling andPsychotherapy Training (Eastbourne, Sussex: New Gnosis Publications, 2004), 23.13 Websters Dictionary, 192814 New American Standard Bible (Anaheim, CA: Foundation Publications, 1995).15 English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, 2011).16 Lisbeth Lipari, “Listening, Thinking, Being,” Communication Theory 20 (2010): 359.17 Lipari, “Listening, Thinking, Being,” 350.18 David Beard, “A Broader Understanding of the Ethics of Listening: Philosophy, Cultural Studies, MediaStudies and the Ethical Listening Subject,” The International Journal of Listening 23 (2009): 9.19 Lisbeth Lipari, “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of the Buber-Levinas Encounter,”Communication Theory 14, no. 2 (2004): 127.20 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.)21 Lipari, “Listening, Thinking, Being,” 359.22 Joanne Faulkner, “Amnesia at the Beginning of Time: Irigaray’s Reading of Heidegger in The Forgetting ofAir,” Contretemps 2 (2001).23 Philip Tonner, Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being (New york: Continuum, 2010).24 Igor Klyukanov, A Communication Universe: Manifestations of Meaning, Stagings of Significance (Lanham,Md.: Lexington Books, 2010).25 Milic Capek, “The Concepts of Space and Time,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (1976).26 Jacoby Russel, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for An Anti-Utopian Age (New york: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2005), 136.27 Siisiäinen, Foucault and the Politics of Hearing, 2.28 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), 102.29 Russel, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, 137.30 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (New york: Bloomsbury, 2012).31 John Smith, Time and Qualitative Time (Albany, New york: State University of New york Press, 2002), 48.32 Michael Carter, “Stasis and Kairos: Principles of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review7, no. 1 (1988): 102.33 Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 381.34 Lipari, “Listening, Thinking, Being,” 360.35 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (New york: Crossroad,1989).36 Algirdas Greimas and Joseph Courtes, Semiotics and Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,1982).37 Lipari, “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of the Buber-Levinas Encounter,” 137.38 Lipari, “Listening, Thinking, Being,” 350.39 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 107.40 Deborah Eicher-Catt. “Bateson, Peirce and the Sign of the Sacred,” in A Legacy for Living Systems: GregoryBateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics, ed. Josper Hoffmeyer (New york: Springer, 2008).41 Deborah Eicher-Catt, Ibid., 267.42 Beard, “A Broader Understanding.”43 Eicher-Catt, “Bateson, Peirce and the Sign of the Sacred,” 272-273.44 See Anna Akhmatova, http://akhmatova.org/verses/verses/782.htm45 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New york: Fordham University Press, 2007), 36.46 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 126.47 George Steiner, Language and Science. (Atheneum: 1977), 13.48 Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic,” in The Essential Peirce: SelectedPhilosophical Writings, Vol 2, 1893-1913 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 299.49 Lipari, “Listening for the Other: Ethical Implications of the Buber-Levinas Encounter.”50 Don Lipari, Listening and Voice (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), 147.51 John Peters, “Space, Time and Communication Theory,” Canadian Journal of Communication 28(2003): 409.52 Peter Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe (New york: Vintage Books, 1971), 62.


53 A Nanoear to Listen into the Silence, accessed June 21, 2013, http://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2012/2012_feldmann.html.54 Ihde, Listening and Voice, 186.55 John Peters, Speaking into the Air. A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1999), 261.56 Nancy, Listening, 36.

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SACRED PRAXIS: KERYGMA IN CONTINUUM

Terry J. Prewitt

On the surface, the idea of “sacred action” ought to be clear-cut: a praxisthat links fundamental ideas with intentional behavior, for many of us the con-nection of theology with performance, ritual or ordinary, which moves ideasfrom the individual mind into the world at large. What might satisfy the requi-sites of sacred action at the junctures of thought and behavior, however,remains quite complex. The “praxis” of sacred action comprises a broad fami-ly of acts or achievements considered holy or righteous in diverse cultures,amenable to specific treatment relative to particular historical moments as wellas to connections running across cultures in space and time. For example, themonotheisms of Western cultures define righteousness or sin variously throughboth prescription and proscription, and typically judge everyday behavior interms of explicit rules and values. In scripture, righteous action is often pre-sented in precise parables and stories, as with the account of the “goodSamaritan” (Luke 10: 25-37), where righteousness is seen in deeds, not in theassessed condition of the actor.

A semiotic treatment of such systems engages not only the propositionsconcerning what is sacred in any system, but also the larger symbolic argu-ments that emerge in each case. What is sanctified in one system of culturemay be considered anathema in another, leaving us to question whether thereis any underlying or universal human meaning belying such differences.Approaching this subject from a semiotic perspective, I specifically employ theterms of Charles Sanders Peirce for three symbolic categories, operating essen-tially as logical type (rheme), proposition (dicent), and argument within the sys-tems of expression we call “language.”1 However, since I am concerned withsacred “action,” I want to leave room for the “action of signs” operative at amore fundamental level of indices and icons,2 which may also carry categori-cal or propositional sign functions through non-linguistic behaviors. Simply

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consider, for example, the “indexical” power of meditative silence in a groupcontext, or the “iconic” power exercised in the “flash mobs” that have emergedin our new media age. My approach here should become clearer to those unfa-miliar with the work of Peirce as my arguments unfold. For the moment, sim-ply keep in mind that symbols are not carried by speech alone. Althoughspeech is behavior, sacred action is not exclusively or even primarily aboutmeanings we may express directly in speech, but rather about how one inter-prets particular behavioral signs “here and now.” Indeed, the context ofspeech, alongside the features associated with its delivery, carries a large partof the communicative information in any message. Thus, for the intendedaction of a sacred sign, the overall context and form of the message and mes-senger must enter into the interpretation.

Much of my argument taps into the technical idea of “information”—thesense of import we gain from the improbability of any particular event in itsbackground of common, redundant, or ordinary events.3 Thus, something thatis highly expected, like a green light turning red as we approach it, carries mod-erate “information” with respect to its probability of occurrence. In most socialsituations we know what to expect, and so we assess what actually happens interms of those expectations. And those expectations and interpretations arebased on individual experience. When something is unexpected or unfamiliar,however, an event may carry a high information content, which may in turnmake interpretation difficult or speculative. An outsider attending their firstcharismatic church service will react very differently than a regular worshipperto someone breaking out in “tongues.”

When an event is unexpected, unusual, or truly extraordinary in everydayexperience, its impact is felt on many levels of human interpretation. Birth anddeath, rites of passage, or in the larger social continuum, conflict with a friend,combat, festivals or rituals, falling in love, or even getting a speeding ticket candisrupt the ordinary with a sudden change in the conditions of interpretation.Ordinary experience is a procession of small informative events, punctuatedwith powerful and often unexpected moments of challenge, realization, andintellectual or emotional consequence. We are always occupied with signs, butwe may consider some sign processes to be so extraordinary that they surpassthe ordinary, even to the point of manifesting something we take as “purely”informative about our being. The extraordinary realization, however, like dis-covering a new dimension we never knew existed,4 sometimes becomes both amatter of experience and testimony—an announcement with deep implications,a proclamation.

KERYGMA

The notion of “kerygma” in Christian religious circles has undergone a sig-nificant evolution over the past century, but I use the term in a fairly basic sense

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of “proclamation” or “announcement” manifest in the whole of a complex sign,in this case the semiotic argument presented through either the person or teach-ings of Jesus (i.e. something like “the life of Jesus,” or “a gospel of Jesus” in oneform or another).5 Such a usage also qualifies as a body of sacred action or writ-ings, according to Christian belief in “Jesus as sign” or “the Word as Sign,” andso offers a strategic entry into a discussion of sacredness. I realize that takingthis approach is rather like jumping into an ocean to elucidate the basic prop-erties of water, but I prefer to keep this approach explicit rather than leavingChristian or monotheistic belief as an unstated background. In any event, thekerygma will become a useful concept for expansion on sacred action general-ly, even with all of the specific baggage the term entails.

One aspect of the life of Jesus that is sometimes unstressed today is hissense of righteous opposition to the worldly powers of his day. Recent analysesby Dominic Crossan6 and Bart Ehrman7 and my own explorations8 haveattempted to restore some of this sense of “historical Jesus,” allowing for verydifferent interpretations of some events within the canon gospels. We are famil-iar in many contemporary contexts with “passive resistance” as properly sacredaction; but what about violent action? In fact, the idea of conflict and potentialviolent action as an aspect of the sacred path of Jesus, though de-emphasized inthe canon, are not entirely lost. Most famously, perhaps, Jesus drove the moneychangers from the Temple, and we are not led to believe this impulsion wassimply by exhortation or assertion of authority. This raises a question, unpop-ular among many contemporary Christians, concerning how Jesus related to thetotal political context of his time—to the contests between the TempleSadducees and Pharisees, and somewhat more radical Zaddokites and zealotsof the biblical and Qumran texts. Thus, pertinent to this discussion, we shouldconsider whether, and in what contexts, violent action might be construed assacred action.

I like to note a political parallel from our time, the position of Sayyidmuqtada al-Sadr in contemporary Iraq as a relatively young political leaderwith a strong religious heritage, modest personal religious rank, and charis-matic influence operating stridently in the context of factional Islamic partiesdealing with a foreign dominating power—in short, a zealot leader. In fact, allof the kinds of actors and institutions we are familiar with from the gospelswere active in Iraq prior to withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011: accommoda-tionists, zealots, insurgents, opposed religious parties with political intention,an occupying “foreign” army, and foreign political controls. Though al-Sadrwas in opposition to the U.S. and many other factions in occupied Iraq, he hasnow taken a legitimized political role in the new government. The parallel withthe Judaea of the gospels may give us a stronger metaphor of the reality under-lying the scriptures. But we do not usually think of the gospel world in suchpolitical terms, especially with respect to violent contest; to do so changes tosome extent how we interpret the idea of righteous action. It seems to me that


we need to keep these parallels in mind as we approach the question of oblig-ations of sacred action.

And what about killing? From the technical perspective of information the-ory, an action carries meaning to the extent it stands out from the probablebackground in which it occurs. Clearly, acts of killing carry “information,” butbeyond that they must also be considered in terms of how they are interpret-ed—how and what they communicate. Does this mean that in some contextshuman killing can be considered a sacred act—a true act of sacrifice? For exam-ple, we have the martyrdom of diverse Christian saints over the years. Theseevents are typically understood today as acts of self-sacrifice, though from someperspectives at the time they were considered simply as executions. Some ofthese events did involve Christians giving themselves up to death without strug-gle, while others were symbolically “owned” by some group after the fact of anexecution. Early Christian writing also emphasizes the impact of these martyr-doms in creating conversions—they communicated beyond the inner circles ofthe faith. And among all the righteous deaths in Christianity, the crucifixionstands as a core example, though it is only one of many points in the life of Jesusthat, taken together, constitute the “announcement” of the Christ in life, or atleast within the gospel account of the life. The ideas of killing, death, sanctity,and even salvation are inextricably linked in the tradition.

Now, what of actions taking life paired with arguments of justice or neces-sity, and falling beyond the institutional killing we allow with our capital pun-ishment laws? After all, we do send chaplains to the battlefield in war; are theythere to support, or absolve, or sanctify the obligatory killing in battle? To killanother for righteous purpose, or even for necessity, is quite a different actionand intention than self-sacrifice. Torah recognizes that an evil actor can be theinstrument of God’s purpose, as with Joseph’s brothers intention to rid them-selves of him (Genesis 20:50). But when does killing for justice or revenge,which we seem to recognize in our capital punishment process, qualify as“sacred” or “righteous” action? And if there is such a thing as “righteouskilling,” then are there also situations where such killing becomes an obliga-tion? In the amoral familism of the Western monotheisms, some stop short ofdemanding revenge killings, while others take revenge for wrongs as a familialobligation. There is no consensus position on this matter, much less onwhether such killing is in any way “righteous” or “sacred.” However, we maysuspect, given events of our time that the continuum of opinion on the questionis very broad.

I want to approach this question from within American culture first, ratherthan opening it out to a wider range of possibilities. Let us consider two extra-ordinary situations which might be taken by some as carrying “appropriate”meaning on some broad argument for justice or revenge.

First, in 1963, when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald during a live tele-vision broadcast, the impact of the act was intensified by the context in which it

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occurred, post-assassination of President Kennedy and while Oswald was inpolice custody. There was already an expectation desiring justice surroundingthe events of Oswald’s capture, but in this case Ruby’s action thwarted any elu-cidation of questions or even of justice as culturally defined; the “announce-ment” ran counter to the values of society. Thus, while there was a desire tohold Oswald (and potential others) accountable for the death of the President,there was no wellspring of support for Ruby’s action. That killing, clearly, fallsoutside the realm of the sacred.

Compare this to Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Senator Robert Kennedyin 1968, the immediate situation widely viewed on television, which also violat-ed cultural values and disrupted the presidential election process. In this case,the kind of elucidation denied with the Oswald shooting was ultimately broughtto full analysis. Sirhan’s Christian and pro-Palestinian status offer only partialand unsatisfying sense to his action, while his inconsistent statements and back-ground take his action out of any interpretation of his behavior as committedor righteous. Instead, we understand Sirhan’s killing as impulsive and misguid-ed, even in his claims concerning Kennedy and his supposed involvement inthe Palestinian question. We see clearly that “honor” killing or revenge in thisexample do not overlap with sacred opposition.

Are there examples from our own society of righteous killings, or at leastof killings intended as sacred, or perhaps obligatory as much as honorable, andwhich also have generated some cultural support? Consider the case in 1994 ofPaul Hill’s shotgun slaying of Dr. John Britton and Lt. Col. James Barrett atThe Ladies’ Center, an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. This killing endeda long period of peaceful demonstrations by Hill in the public space outside theclinic, and is part of a much longer series of demonstrations at the clinic.9 Hillsurrendered immediately and was subsequently tried for murder and executedin 2003 by the State of Florida. But what differs in this case is the overall con-text of the violent opposition, the place of that opposition in Hill’s life, his unre-pentant defense of his actions, and the presence of a small but sympathetic fol-lowing for his motivation and action. In the plainest terms, there were somewho said, “I am very sorry people were killed, but on the other hand somebabies were saved by that action.”

While it is clear that Paul Hill’s assassinations did not prompt a wave ofadditional violence, strong support at his trial, or acclaim from most people inthe anti-abortion movement, it is also clear that Hill believed his action wouldstand both as a “righteous sign” for others, and as a synecdoche of his ministry,an announcement of truth in some kerygmatic sense. And for a few individu-als he may have accomplished just that. We can recognize that the actions ofthe “public face” of a confronting and potentially violent movement can beviewed by some as “righteous,” even to the point of motivating others to jointhe cause or take action themselves. And on this ground we can at least logi-cally understand the motivations, support, and acclaim afforded suicide


bombers and other terrorists within otherwise civil society. In a world whereone sees no innocents, extreme violence may be tolerated as necessary to jus-tice—and such a view is sometimes taken as an institutional justification as muchas an individual one.

Hence, American culture bears the irony of Guantanamo, a prison outsideour normal legal process where prisoners are maintained outside the institu-tional standards of our penal system. In the “War on Terror”—not a war in theU.S. Constitutional sense10—the idea of “just” and “necessary” action has beenopened to a broader interpretation within the American version of amoralfamilism, a vision more like that of those with whom we find ourselves in con-test. We may now condone torture because of the “good” it produces, andthough we may have limited the use of water-boarding and other forms ofenhanced interrogation, we will still justify forced feeding as “not torture” inresponse to what others involved call righteous self-sacrifice. We condone theterror of drone-implemented surveillance and assassinations, celebrate thedeaths of those we consider terrorists, and accept remarkably high levels of“collateral damage.” This is not to say that all U.S. citizens agree with orembrace this state of affairs, but only that the “announcement” produced bythe September 11 attacks has had an impact on what is acceptable Christianconsciousness. We will consider September 11 again in the next section. Forthe moment, let us merely recognize that media have had much to do with ourideological transformation.

THE CONTEXTS OF SACRED CONTESTS

Our common sense notions of what is sacred or righteous often appeal tospecial places or moments. We distinguish what is sacred and profane in spaceand action by constructing dedicated places for worship and ritual processes.And we think of such dedicated elements of our existence as “signs” to a greaterextent than we do of ordinary places and actions. Even so, we might also thinkof signs so constructed as offering synecdoche of all places and all action. Inthat way of thinking, then all spaces are potentially sacred (a gift from God) andthe question of behavior becomes one of fitting right-action to the context inwhich it is to occur. Something like this logic enters into the formula of “right-eous killing” that represents a violent opposition to something consideredunrighteous or blighting of the world, as with Paul Hill’s action at an abortionclinic. In an earlier attack on three abortion clinics in Pensacola, the bomberssaw themselves as crusaders, but at least made an effort to have their devices gooff at a time when there would be no immediate human casualties.11 In thatcase, the view was that a profaned place, a part of the community dedicated toan unrighteous activity, was being “sanctified.”

In the contemporary abortion debate, both sides attempt to find a highground. Thus, the Pensacola bombers justified their act much in the same

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sense as Jesus did in his driving of the money changers from the Temple. Andwithin a broader range of strategies aimed at closing abortion clinics, both legaland illegal, the anti-abortion emphasis follows a similar logic. On the other side,after the Pensacola bombings the pro-choice advocates argued that manywomen and some babies were harmed by having their medical recordsdestroyed and the procedures for which they were scheduled—not only obstet-rical procedures but also oncology treatments—postponed or stopped.

From a semiotic perspective, there is a dissonance created by these anti-abortion actions. The multiple meanings here and now (what Peirce called“interpretants”) from an intentional killing that stands as a sign may be con-strued in exactly opposite ways, as “sacred” or “terrorist.” And similar disso-nance is experienced for any number of suicide attacks, self-immolations, andother acts of martyrdom common in history and culture. Let us not forget thatpersonal sacrificial actions, though horrifying in the moment, helped drawsome Roman citizens to Christianity, changed the course of the Vietnam War,and launched our post-911 discussions about heroics, justice, and terror in ourworld. Precisely because some actions generate both revulsion and sympathy indifferent populations, they also create both angst and relief in the cultural warsof our time. In this sense, “terror” is merely the flip side of “sacred” action ininterpretation, and neither is the exclusive property of any side.

We might suggest, then, that any action or place might be consideredsacred, a sign with kerygmatic power, as long as the action or place is consistentwith the life of some actor, it generates some level of sympathy, response, orsupport, and it produces the desired synecdoche of association between act andsome particular cultural perspective. The Jewish zealot contest against Romeand the earliest history of Christianity are certainly examples consistent with thisidea. While there are differences between the final stand of Zaddokites atMassada and a Christian mob assassinating Hypathia on the streets ofAlexandria, the basic conflict between popular and minority cultures of thetime are much the same, within the respective traditions. This similarity shouldgive us pause, as contemporary fundamentalisms become progressively isolatedby more secular monotheisms and the re-emergence of earth-based religions.12

The battle over who will own the metaphor of God rages still, together withrenewed acts of violent announcement, which have the effect of steering thedevout on all fronts into more rigid and strident positions. And the semiotics ofthese contests shows us that actions often have strong meaning through the lensof large-scale cultural agreement. In ordinary consciousness, we may ignore theodd or idiosyncratic interpretant while deferring to the received view of thecrowd. But when the event is extraordinary and the crowd has a central figureor council—a congressman or president or pope or ayatollah, or beloved dicta-tor—then political action can also become sacred action.

An example of violence, consensus, and political interplay entering into“sacred contest” comes out of the attack on the World Trade Center towers


and all the aftermath of that event. From one perspective, the act of terroristdestruction was intended as a kind of cleansing chastisement, and alongside thehorror of the event and the parallel attacks of September 11 there even camesome celebrations of the outcomes. What is symbolically telling is the sense inwhich, countering the myth of the slaying of a behemoth, first the internationalcommunity and, more specifically, the United States and New York City,moved to “own” the event by controlling its interpretation and, eventually, turn-ing the Twin Towers site into a sacred space. Unlike the Vietnam Memorial inWashington D.C., or even the Wall South in Pensacola, the “sacredness” ofground zero in New York derives from the unrecovered lost still buried there.

The September 11 attacks constituted an “announcement” that capturedthe attention of the world in an immediate way, bringing about a weaving of cul-tural themes into a mythos of resilience, bravery, and strength in the face ofadversity. The falling towers constituted, indeed, an unintended cataclysm farbeyond the expectations of its perpetrators, and one that unleashed a responsefar more dangerous and enduring than anyone might have projected—a mis-guided war in Iraq and the continuing tragedy of Afghanistan. And from thesewars also came economic drains contributing to the growing world fiscal crisesover the first decade of the new millennium. One might also suggest that theArab Spring and aftermath of general disruption in North Africa and theMiddle East are merely the continuing aftermath of the September 11 attacks.For the “sacred” cause identified with the specific time and place of crisis andresponse not only serves as a balm for wounds, but also a political weapon todrive many other kinds of national initiatives and global events. Admittedly,perhaps there is nothing intrinsically sacred about the Twin Towers, the attacks,or the memorial of place, but as signs—specifically as symbols on the Peirceanlevels of rheme, proposition, and argument—the Twin Towers constitute thekerygmatic event of our time. Interestingly, in their absence, they present some-thing akin to what linguists might call a zero-sign—a nothing that conveystremendous informational power. For not only does the absence of the TwinTowers symbolize loss more than any monument set in the same space, but formost of our generation the absence calls forth the whole narrative experienceof those days and much of what has transpired since. To evoke the “TwinTowers” in imagination is rather like evoking the idea of the risen Christ—a har-rowing of hell, a triumph out of the sacrifice of innocents.

Yet, though the attacks of September 11 involved other places and direct-ly touched people representing many nations, “America” (as those in theUnited States say), and more specifically New York, have come to “own” thesymbolic power of the event. Like the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier,the ongoing semiosis of “that day” galvanized a chain of actions that is stillexpanding in waves of interpretation, and consequence, and reinterpretation.Today, the U.S. flags have been largely removed from personal vehicles, andlife for the most part remains unremarkably ordinary, but the intensity of the

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sign still reinforces a national mythos of “power.” In a world where individualshave little impact, people want to take charge, to act boldly, and to find heroes.We celebrate “the firemen” because they are a ready emblem of bravery andaction, of self-sacrifice, of sacred contest. And little thought is given to how thisideological transformation impacts people in the rest of the world.

Christianity, or specifically “the Christ” as kerygmatic figure, came out ofno such cataclysmic moment. The story of the Christ emerged after the fact ofthe officially undocumented execution of Jesus and developed from a traditionof minority scriptural propositions channeled through the waning cultural andsocial fabric of Roman society after Augustus. What became consensusChristianity, responsive to the announcement embodied in the life of Jesus, wasarticulated through reconstructed logic rather than the mass rejection of a sin-gle terrorist action. “The Christ” is a sign of messianic nationalism filteredthrough the ethnic and gender discontents of the Greco-Roman world. “TheChrist” has been revitalized as a sign in myriad movements and desires andneeds over two millennia, moving on a continuum of cultures. In the currentpopular and “practical” conceptualization of Christian values, outside of acade-mic theologies, “The Christ” wants justice and action to preserve Americanhegemony, and perhaps secondarily European hegemony.

Nor is the modern establishment of Israel, with its ideological attachmentto ancient Jewish nationalism that died at Massada, viewed in American con-sciousness as a logical alternative to Christian hegemony. Though at Massadathe symbols of nationalism, ethnicity, and religion converged, their ideologicalinsertion into modern Zionism remains regional and counter to the long termdevelopment of the Middle East. Such observations should warn the powers ofour time, for on a very large scale, the cultural war being waged between con-servative Islam and Western hegemony offers a ready parallel. I am not sug-gesting that Islamist sensibilities will replace a Christian world with anything likea religious state, but rather that the solution to contemporary ideological con-tests may produce, over the long haul of the next millennium, a world farremoved from the Capitalist System and its foundations in Christian monothe-ism. Our society, far from reminding us of the minority of oppressed Jewishzealots within the province of Judaea or within the Jewish Wars, looks far morelike the Roman state after Constantine—a state whose leaders come increasing-ly from outside the core population of its founding fathers, and whose interestsand principles are removed from the interests and principles of that core.

CONCLUSION

If the United States, Europe, or modern Israel are not the rightful inheri-tors of “right” or “truth” in the world, drawing from either the kerygma of “theChrist,” “Masada,” or “911,” neither is “radical Islam” more than an instrumentof the reconstruction that will follow our time. Indeed, it may seem that


monotheism, if not theism generally, is dead, as Nietzsche suggested at thefoundation of the post-modern era. Perhaps what will follow will involve asacred story far removed from any time or place interpreted through themonotheistic lens. But the “announcement” as a prompt for action is not a pur-poseless sign, instigating a purposeless process of cultural responses. And evenif September 11, the founding announcement of the coming time, is a portentof change, not the realization of truth on the part of any side in the contest theattack represents, that does not mean that all the current actors in the responsecannot have a positive impact on where the interpretations lead. I began thisessay questioning whether “sacred action” involves any particular kind of“meaning production.” But in fact, I believe strongly that righteous action mustinvolve values about justice, fairness, and the potential of human “good.”Further, I think we can tell well enough when we have allowed our pride tocarry us too far. A responsible and “other-oriented” humanity is still possible,one may hope, following principles of moral afamilism that seem to underpinmajor communities within most world religions. This possibility becomes amatter of knowing in what sense we want to be “right” in our action.

If history does repeat itself (and that seems a very likely outcome), then inorder to have an impact on the direction of events we should be attending tosocial patterns and not cultural substance. That direction may lead us to verydifferent interpretations than any of the current cultural constructions of theworld. The only certainty in the broad view of humanity is the shifting symbol-ic ground surrounding events construed as “related” in some way. In our world,with its complex media, instant communication, weapons of mass destruction,and all too human actors, the pattern does not belie the potential consequencesof power and hubris, for those elements are magnified. And so, in my semioticview, nothing is sacred forever, while by no means exhausted is the humancapacity to create momentous truths out of difference, or contest, or violence,or even nothing.

NOTES

1 The Peircean conception of “semiotic” involved a changing system presented over a lifetime, more accessibletoday as a result of the Peirce Editions Project publications: Writings of Charles S. Peirce: AChronologicalEdition, multiple vols., Peirce Edition Project, 1982-2000 (Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana UniversityPress). For a direct introduction to sign classification, one may find the following essays by Peirce helpful: C. S.Peirce, “On the Natural Classification of Arguments,” in Writings, Volume 2, 1867-1871 (1867 [1984]), EdwardMoore, et al. (eds.), 23-48; “On a New List of Categories,” in Writings, Volume 2, 1867-1871 (1867a [1984]),Edward Moore, et al. (eds.), 49-59. The key element on sign classification that requires notice here is that the“symbol” comprises three distinct manifestations: (1) the “rheme” or logical type, a sign that essentially names itsobject: (2) the “dicent symbol,” a sign which links more than one rheme to form a proposition; and (3) the “argu-ment” comprising larger constructions that model situations and processes. For Peirce, semiotic categories wereat the heart of logic, with symbols forming the basis of formal logic in our species.2 Together with the “symbols,” “icons” and “indices” form a triad of categories that identifies the relationship ofa “sign vehicle” to the object it represents. The index essentially “points” to the object, while the icon bears a sys-tematic similarity to its object, as with a drawing or diagram. The symbol has a purely conventional relationship

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to its object, but in the symbolic argument may form complex icons or indices through metaphor or syntacticplacement. For the purposes of this essay, we should understand that signs are very dynamic, interconnectingmany levels of signification with great flexibility. The notion of the “action of signs” refers to this dynamic ofunfolding meaning.3 Technical information theory was introduced in the late 1940s as part of the cybernetic movement. See, as akey source, Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana:Universtiy of Illinois Press, 1949). Here, I use the notion of “information” to underscore the high impact of unex-pected or improbable events. Beyond that “surprise” impact, however, there is always interpretation.4 My readers will probably be familiar with E. A. Abbot, Flatland (New York: Dover [1884] 1992), the excep-tional allegory of both Christian faith and testimony and 19th Century British culture. If not, it will no doubt behighly relevant reading as background for this essay.5 See Rudolph Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner, 1958), for a foundational view ofkerygma. My interest in the term focuses mainly on the idea of the “extraordinary announcement,” which, takenas a proposition for change, results in fundamental and far-reaching cultural changes.6 John D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: Harper, 1994); The Historical Jesus: The Lifeof a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: Harper, 1993); and other works. Also see God and Empire: JesusAgainst Rome, Then and Now, Harper San Francisco, 2007).7 Among the many works by Bart Ehrman, note simply: The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture andthe Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2003).8 My “retelling” of in the form of “a gospel,” A Gospel for James: An Historical Critical Retelling (Ottawa: Legas,2011), comprises what I call “critical fiction,” written somewhat before the public release of the Qumran texts,but informed partly by the available secondary treatments of the Dead Sea collections. However, subsequentrelease of Qumran texts did not much change the way I approach the material.9 For a view of earlier anti-abortion violence in Pensacola and nationally, see Dallas Blanchard and Terry Prewitt,Religious Violence and Abortion: The Gideon Project (University Presses of Florida, 1993). The book came outthe week Dr. David Gunn was murdered by Michael Griffin at the Ladies’ Clinic in Pensacola. Religious Violenceand Abortion actually predicted escalated violence at clinics in the cultural climate of the early 1990s. ThoughMichael Griffin was a secondary figure in the anti-abortion movement in Pensacola, Paul Hill was a major actorin the movement and was motivated by Gunn’s assassination to justify such violence in the defense of the unborn,and ultimately to take violent action himself.10 That is, there is no Congressional declaration of war, and the diverse populations against which the “War onTerror” is directed are not considered legitimate institutional entities. Yet some of the institutional responses bythe U.S. in its “War on Terror” are rhetorically justified as “wartime measures.” Interestingly, these measureshave touched not only enemy combatants, but also have impacted the civil liberties and privacy of citizens.11 Ibid, Blanchard and Prewitt.12 There is a vast literature developed on neo-paganism and other earth-based religions. Nonetheless, for anadmirable history of American neo-pagan movements, see Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches,Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (New York: Penguin, revised and expand-ed edititon, 1997); see also Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) for an excellent history of modern British paganism.

SIGNS OF SACRED PLAY:MUSINGS ON THE SEMIOTICS OF RAINBOWS1

Deborah Eicher-Catt

“My heart leaps up when I behold/ A rainbow in the sky ...So was it when my life began/ So is it now I am a man,So be it when I shall grow old/ Or let me die!”2

—William Wordsworth

INTRODUCTION

I have always been fascinated by the beauty of rainbows. Their suddenappearance on the horizon seems miraculous and “other-worldly,” truly uncan-ny. I know I am not alone in my momentary rapture. What is it about rainbowsthat so delights our sense of wonder and imagination? Is it their seemingly mag-ical appearance on the horizon? After all, it is not after every rain that theyappear. Or is it their vividness of color that disrupts our taken-for-granted per-ceptions of the sky—in its typical patterned blue and/or grey? Although we arequite familiar with the spectrum of color they exhibit, when it is boldly castupon the horizon as a vast arc that seems to climb to the heavens, it can trulytake our breath away—especially if it manifests as full, complete, or in its dou-ble configuration. At the very least, I suspect that our admiration is promptedby the feeling of awe a rainbow engenders as we gaze upon the world, an imme-diate return to the affective, perhaps even mystical state of human experience.

Since the dawn of time people have marveled at the beauty of rainbowsand sought to find explanations for how and why they suddenly appear. Aroundthe world, various cultures have perceived them as a supernatural sign—that is,as a representation of something beyond the physicality of existence.Consequently, numerous cultures have constructed various belief systemsabout what they represent and incorporated their cultural value into their

On the Semiotics of Rainbows/224

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indigenous lore. Not surprisingly then, most ancient mythologies include therainbow in their conceptions of the world and the afterlife, thoroughly embed-ding them within the grand narratives of good and evil, the sacred and the pro-fane. In Australian Aborginal mythology, the rainbow is a serpent that inhabitsthe sky and ground and is the creator of the world and all things in it. In Greekmythology, the rainbow is seen as a path used by the goddess and messengerIris between earth and heaven. The Chinese believed that the rainbow was a slitin the sky sealed by Goddess Nuwa using stones of five different colors. For theIncas, the rainbow is a gift from the sun god.3 Any Christian familiar with theOld Testament knows the religious significance of rainbows. In Genesis, chap-ter nine, rainbows are described as a gesture of mercy from God to humankindafter the Great Flood. Rainbows are described as God’s promise or covenantthat no more shall the earth be ravished and destroyed by the unruly waters. Asit is written, “God said, ‘Here is the sign of the Covenant I make betweenmyself and you and every living creature with you for all generations; I set myrainbow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the Covenant between me andthe earth.”4 Important to Christian understanding, the rainbow is a reflexivecommunicative gesture; that is, it is meant to represent both the promise tohumankind and a reminder to God that such a promise had been made.

Of course, mythologies and religious appropriations have long since beensupplemented by rigorous scientific investigations on the constitutive elementsof rainbows. As far back as ancient Greece, for example, Aristotle studied rain-bows. He quite accurately theorized the important causal connections betweenwater and light inherent in their very composition. According to Aydin M.Sayili, Aristotle’s scientific investigations and writings prompted further studyduring the medieval period, by Moslem and Christian writers alike.5 Nowadays,science has thoroughly unraveled the apparent mystery concerning their ori-gins. Few of us would dispute the common sense fact that a rainbow is a natur-al occurring optical phenomenon that is caused by reflection of light in waterdroplets. We see them when our back is to the sun. At a 42 degree angle, theseunique mediations of physical elements produce the spectrum of light in an arcwe see in the sky.6 And yet, many philosophers and writers over the years, suchas John Keats, for example, have lamented the consequence of this very scien-tific discovery. Keats suggests that Isaac Newton’s earlier reduction of the rain-bow to its prismatic colors diminished the aesthetic qualities it holds for itsobservers.7 If the physics of rainbows are exposed, it is thought, their mystical,aesthetic, or sacred dimensions are automatically reduced.

However, it seems to me that our continued curiosity about them, or atleast our aesthetic response to them, appears to be no less diminished by thefact that we now understand their underlying physics.8 Within the last couple ofdecades, some scientists, like Richard Dawkins, for example, have argued thatthe rainbow’s aesthetic or artistic appeal does not have to be sacrificed at thescientific altar of knowledge.9 By suggesting that any good science is also poet-


ic in nature, Dawkins claims that good science (even about rainbows) should be“inspired by a poetic sense of wonder.”10 Duly acknowledging that our scientif-ic advancements have certainly “anaesthetized” the now familiar, taken-for-granted world of nature (of which rainbows are a part), Dawkins advocates fora renewed sense of wonder when it comes to satisfying our curiosities and sub-sequent research endeavors. On this point, I think he would find agreement,especially with twentieth-century systems theorist and ecologist GregoryBateson. In addition, the founder of American Pragmatism and semiotician,Charles Sanders Peirce, writing and theorizing in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century, would concur as well. As will become apparent as my dis-cussion proceeds, both men sought to reconcile scientific endeavors with anaesthetic (or religious) appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things,detailing how both Mind and nature function in tandem to produce the evolv-ing world we come to know and experience.11 Both theorists, in other words,contend that there is an inherent sacred logic that operates at the interface ofMind and nature that reveals an underlying creative potential at the heart of ourever-evolving cosmos that we understand as “reality.”

With both Bateson and Peirce in mind, I tend to agree with Dawkins’assertion about the necessity of wonder. While we may now know the circum-stances under which rainbows are physically formed, that knowledge does nothave to negate our personal experience of them as manifestations of nature’sbeauty. Nor does that knowledge have to negate the fact that they may “speak”to us affectively, nonetheless, at an embodied or phenomenological level ofexistence that we may describe at times as almost sacred.12 In other words, rain-bows can still produce intense “significant effects” upon our lived experience,as Peirce would claim. I certainly understand that part of my enthrallment withrainbows is based upon the personal, significant associations I have made withtheir infrequent occurrences in my life. For example, a rainbow appeared onthe afternoon I was hired for my first tenure-track teaching position. I took it asa sign of good things to come. Another full rainbow appeared on the horizonthe day I had traveled three thousand miles to see my first grandchild for thevery first time. Its appearance represented the very wonder and amazement Iwas personally feeling at the prospect of setting eyes on little Maxim Kyle forthe first time. I am sure many of my readers have similar narratives to share.

So, although we now know the science of rainbows, we can still pursue ourquest for understanding their effects, especially since they remain a powerfulsign upon the horizon of not only our physical world but our socio-culturalexperience as well. Other than their physical manifestation as a “play” of bothwater and light upon the sky, what might they represent as a sign, if we allowourselves to “muse” about their potential sacred qualities? Herein, I use theterm musing in the sense Peirce describes. For Peirce, the practice of muse-ment is playful inquiry or contemplation. Peirce credits philosopher FriedrichSchiller’s earlier analysis of the “play impulse” within aesthetic experience as a

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major influence on his ideas.13 In his essay on the “Neglected Argument for theReality of God,” Peirce suggests that musement is “pure play” or meditation asit emphasizes a spontaneous freedom and movement between thought andpure feeling. Especially suited to contemplating “some wonder” in our universeof experience, Peirce claims that musings often lead us to the idea (or hypoth-esis as Peirce notes) of the reality of God as an “attractive fancy.”14 Hence, theact of musing is often shaped by a humble attitude toward the object of con-templation. On the subject of musement, Peirce contends “there is an attitudeof spirit that is separated only by a sword blade from fun, and yet is in full har-mony with all that is spiritual and even hungers for that which is devotional.”15

Framed by way of a boat metaphor, Peirce offers some prescriptive advice aswe begin our musings on rainbows, “Enter your skiff of Musement, push offinto the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. Withyour eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversationwith yourself; for such is all meditation.”16

So, we begin our musement on rainbows by asking: what is their pragmat-ic value in our lives as a source of aesthetic inspiration? If we accept them as,indeed, a natural-occurring communicative gesture of God (as Christian doc-trine proposes), or at the very least a gesture of the living Mind of nature andculture (as we will learn Bateson and Peirce might suggest), what do they indi-cate about the universe’s communicative capacities, including, of course, ourown? If Peirce is correct in positing that all reality is of the nature of living Mindwhich manifests ideally in nature, then we should attend to nature’s many dis-plays as potential communicative gestures. You see, I am reluctant to let go ofthe possibility that there is more to rainbows than literally meets the eye.Unpacking their signifying contours through a semiotic perspective is warrant-ed, because of their ability to elicit an intense, affectual bodily response. So,exploring these signs from a phenomenological or embodied perspective is alsofitting. Thus, I muse on rainbows through a semiotic phenomenological lensthat may help us to capture their communicative dimensions as images ofsacred play.

A SEMIOTICS OF RAINBOW EXPERIENCE

To understand a rainbow as a sign (and its possible sacred entailments), Iturn to the theoretical work of Peirce on semiotics or the science of signs.Peirce offers a way to understand how reality is based upon phenomenologicaland semiotic mediations of conscious experience, which are relational or com-municative events. Let us unpack this perspective.

According to Peirce, our experience of the world is mediated by signs.Here, we are not referring to our common sense understanding of signs (forexample, traffic signs). For Peirce, a sign “is something which stands to some-body, for something in some respect or capacity.”17 In other words, something


(like a rainbow) can act as a sign if we perceive it as standing for (or represent-ing) something else (an action or an idea, for example). If a rainbow represents“beauty, the magical, or an omen of good tidings” to us, then our perception ofthat particular rainbow constitutes that “something” as a sign.18 At once, webegin to see that our phenomenological (or bodily) perceptions and expres-sions underlie the constitution of any sign. More importantly, we see that theconstitution of a sign is altogether an evolving relational process. In otherwords, semiotics (understood by way of Peirce’s phenomenological lens) high-lights the fact that there is never any separation between the knower and theknown.19 We are very much an influential part of the reality we come to con-struct and know through this sign process. Furthermore, as Peirce would haveit, there is continuity to the life world in this relational process that evolvesthrough time and space in an ever-expanding creative flow.20 Accordingly, allthings in the universe are interconnected and interdependent as a “livingMind.” Now, Bateson characterizes this communicative process of intercon-nection/relationality or continuity as an “ecology of mind,” which produces avast “communicative fabric.” He names his work in this regard a “science of themind.”21 Similar to Peirce, Bateson is convinced “that the communicative fab-ric of the living world is ordered, pervasive, and determinate even to the pointwhere one might say of it, that is what men have meant by God.”22

Thus every sign’s constitution is part of an evolving process within thewhole communicative fabric of the world. Furthermore, for Peirce, every sign’sevolving constitution in our awareness (including a rainbow) is triadic in nature,and the three structural elements that comprise a perceived sign are called sign(or representamen), object, and interpretant.23 While the representamen con-stitutes our initial encounter with a potential sign (manifested as a vague feeling),the object of perception or consciousness which subsequently appears is basedupon comparisons and differentiation within our field of perceptual/culturalexperience. For example, we come to a realization that the object we encounter(such as a rainbow) is not a plant but something physical, although moreephemeral. The interpretant (not to be confused with interpreter) is the medi-ating function or action of the sign and the semiotic point at which the poten-tial sign of “rainbow” is meaningfully comprehensible. This meaning is, how-ever, based upon the available linguistic designations circulating within a givencultural milieu.24 The interpretant is a result of the necessary interactionbetween our initial vague feelings (representamen) and its object (the evolvingthought of “this is not a plant”). In other words, the apparent ephemeral thingbecomes to our way of thinking a “rainbow,” based upon what we have learnedthrough our experience as a member of a cultural community. Through thesymbolic function of language we name it as such.

Thus, these three relational elements constitute the semiotic process bywhich all of us come to grasp and know the world around us as a phenomeno-logical logic.25 Peirce describes this “interaction” with signs as semiosis.

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Accordingly, everything we find meaningful in the world is a result (or conse-quence) of embodied sign actions. These sign actions in turn create, at greaterand greater levels of abstraction, interconnected cultural systems of signs—cre-ating the “habits” of attitudes, beliefs, and values we come to hold dear withina given community. Because Peirce advocated a phenomenological perspectiveon sign constitution, that is, he interprets sign actions (or semiosis) by way of anexperiencing person, he also identifies three relational “modes of being.”26

These modes or categories of being are Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness,and they correlate, respectively, to the sign, object, and interpretant process Ijust outlined. So our experiences of the world (including rainbows) are inher-ently an evolutionary process, as we move through the relations of Firstness,Secondness, and Thirdness.

Firstness is the originary aspect of any developing form or sign thatappears before consciousness in its unique beingness or qualitative wholeness.Firstness appears as an undifferentiated unity that creates the necessary groundfrom which semiosis transpires. Peirce says Firstness manifests as pure possi-bility. Firstness, as undifferentiated wholeness, therefore, presents an ontologi-cal question to the perceiver—an “irritation of doubt” within the continuousflow of experience. This spawns further wonder or inquiry about the particularphenomenon at hand.27 Firstness is a kind of mysterious unknown, a “vague-ness” that prompts subsequent reflection and thought (actualized in the move-ment of thought from Secondness to Thirdness). In the split second that webehold the colorful arc in the sky after a rain, and before we come to the real-ization that it is a “rainbow,” that pure feeling of initial awe marks our experi-ence at the level of Firstness. Firstness is thus always textured by pure feelingand typically awakens our aesthetic appreciation for a developing object to con-sciousness. As a result, not only is Peirce recognizing the affectability of everyevolving sign, but also the relevancy and value characteristics (aesthetic quali-ties) inherent in all semiosis.

As Peirce specifies, Secondness is marked by distinctions or discretenessand—because of its structural quality of opposition—depends upon an either/orlogic of recognition by the perceiver. In other words, an object is distinguished(as a difference) within the perceptual scheme as it appears before conscious-ness in its semiotic relation to the wholeness of Firstness. Thus, upon the expe-rience of Secondness, any developing sign becomes “real” to a perceiving sub-ject as an object of possible or evolving meaning. In the case of a rainbow, afterour initial awe and before we arrive at the realization of “rainbow” in represen-tational language, we processed its image as other than, say, a “fish” or a “porchswing.” The accomplishment of Secondness moves primarily from a pre-reflec-tive process to an imaginative reflective one. In other words, initially we are notconsciously aware of our processing of the developing image, but we do so justthe same. As a result, it is at this juncture in the evolution of the sign that Peircerecognizes volition and will of the perceiving person. For example, finding a fish


or a porch swing in the clouds is not altogether an impossible action, especial-ly if we “will” them into our perceptual awareness. Secondness, therefore, sig-nifies an action of discontinuity or diversification (variety) within the realm ofour pure continuous experience of wholeness in Firstness.28

For Peirce, Thirdness serves primarily as the mediating (symbolic) func-tion that links Firstness (representamen) and Secondness (object) in the semi-otic production of meaning or interpretation. This mediating function he callsthe interpretant, because it characterizes how meaning is actualized withinsemiosis by perceiving persons. Thirdness is thus the point in the humanworld where the accomplishment of thought/action and interpretation as asemiotic phenomenology is temporarily realized as a symbolic product of theexpressive/perceptive dialectic of Firstness and Secondness. When we say toanother person in language, “look—it’s a rainbow,” we are already at the levelof Thirdness. Of course, because representation occurs in the language pro-vided by our culture, at this level we have also simultaneously linked theimmediate, physical experience of a phenomenon (like the rainbow) with thepossible cultural expressions/perceptions of it. This is the “necessary unity” ofmind and nature of which Bateson speaks.29 Interestingly, Peirce acknowl-edges, in his understanding of beliefs as “habits of mind,” that our ultimateperceptions are framed by our prior habits of processing the world. In addi-tion, his theory of semiotics highlights how our perceptions are inherent with-in our subsequent expressions.30

To summarize briefly, in the phenomenological semiotic process, Firstnessis a feeling of quality, not even yet a percept, which can only be inferred fromSecondness. Secondness is the brute force of contact with otherness in the dis-continuous flow of the sign (such as the appearance of a rainbow in the sky).We might think about Secondness as the initial signifier or expression thatgrabs our attention as a figure to ground relation. Thus, in the process of thebecoming of any sign, a necessary boundary condition is instantiated. In thesephenomenological acts, ground becomes figure and vice versa by its very defi-nition. Thirdness becomes the consequential mediation of Firstness andSecondness that results in a sign’s “significant effects” or meaning.31 We canthink about this as the perceptual aspect of the sign, what semioticians like tolabel as the signified. Thus the becoming of any sign is indicative of a commu-nicative logic—a dialectical, reflexive movement of expression and perceptionmediated by an experiencing agent, in the process of striving to make sense ormeaning out of the continuous flow of conscious experience.32

While we now understand how rainbows, like any sign we mightencounter, come to exist for us as an existential (phenomenological) sign con-dition, we have yet to unpack their possible sacred dimensions as well as how“play” figures into their constitution. These qualities require a deeper under-standing of the sacred aspects activated within the semiotic and phenomeno-logical (communicative) process I just described. So, we must first ask: how is

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the process discussed above possibly reflective of what we identify as thesacred? Second, we can then inquire as to why rainbows signify or representsacred aspects of this very “playful” process. To accomplish this task, I appealagain to Bateson and particularly his theory concerning the “sacred unity” orinterconnection of all living things. I believe reading Bateson alongside Peirceproves productive in fleshing out why rainbows can have particular significativeeffects as a communicative gesture of the cosmos. Although Peirce was a reli-gious man and his views on God and religion seem to penetrate his philosoph-ical and scientific investigations of the world,33 Bateson arrived at his “episte-mology of the sacred” only after an extended career investigating phenomenain the interdisciplinary fields of biology, cybernetics/systems theory, anthropol-ogy, and communication.34 And yet, as I will argue below, by describing thesacred as the communicative “pattern which connects,”35 Bateson’s ideas com-plement Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology of the sign and the reality of the uni-verse our sign systems ultimately create. We discover, musing with Bateson andPeirce, the iconic value of rainbows when taken as signs of the sacred play thatinheres within all living systems.

THE SACRED DIMENSIONS OF COMMUNICATIVE EXPERIENCE

The rainbow is at once a manifestation both of the sun and the rain.— Charles Sanders Peirce

The topic of the sacred has, of course, challenged philosophers and reli-gious thinkers alike over the course of history. Acknowledged as an essentialcharacteristic of human experience, it remains, at the same time, an elusive con-cept. Defined typically in opposition to the profane, the sacred is identified withthe recognition of something that is “wholly other, something basically andtotally different” that appears to our conscious awareness.36 It is that whichappears separate and apart from daily existence and, more importantly, repre-sentative of that which is divine. Such an encounter is always a humbling expe-rience. We realize our “profound nothingness” as only creatures upon a vastearth we can only partially grasp within a given particularity. Religious scholarMircea Eliade says that the sacred is always an act of manifestation and calls thisact of the sacred “showing itself to us” a hierophany.37 Hierophanies create con-nections with the “other worldly” or aspects of our reality that typically remainvague, mysterious or ineffable (what was described above as Firstness).Furthermore, any sacred manifestation, according to Eliade, always entails para-dox.38 That is, what appears in the world as immanent is at the same time a rep-resentation of what we take to be the transcendent. Or, in Peirce’s words above,a rainbow is paradoxically at once a manifestation of both the sun and the rain.Now these ideas alone make it easy for us to conclude that rainbows could beconstrued as sacred. Their manifestation upon the skyline appears “other-


worldly” at the same time that we know the science of their existence as natu-rally-occurring phenomenon. The more Christian our faith, the more inclinedwe are to conclude that they are, in fact, sacred gestures of the divine.

However, I think we can go even further in our musings about their pos-sible sacred dimensions. To my way of thinking, Eliade’s claim implies that thesacred is at once an act of the dialectical movement of expression and percep-tion—thus thoroughly steeped within communicative experience—between aself and other (in this case a rainbow). After all, a “showing” (expression) ismeaningless without a perception and subsequent interpretation. Thus, I advo-cate elsewhere that it behooves us first to understand the contours of the sacredas a communicative accomplishment, activated through a particular logic orpatterning of ideas, as Bateson would say.39 However, we must not assume thatthe idea or content of what we take to be sacred is merely expressed or per-ceived in language and discourse.40 Instead, I suggest we entertain the idea that,under certain conditions (which I will elaborate upon below), the very act ofcommunion between self and others (rainbows included) is itself a sacredprocess. This process is called by the fitting name, communication. Batesondescribes this sacred process as simply the “pattern which connects” mind (cul-ture) and nature in a vast and quite elaborate communication system.41 Fromthis vantage point, the sacred is an accomplishment of communication—inother words, a particular phenomenological act of semiosis. The sacred mani-fests as a function of phenomenological sign relations in particular contexts oflanguage and discourse. The sacred announces the importance of sign relationswithin our phenomenal horizon of experience. Interestingly, while the inher-ent aspects of the communication process can be seen as potentially sacred, atthe same time our conscious experience of this sacred semiotic process is typ-ically a rare phenomenological (or embodied) event. Said differently, most ofthe time we are bodily unaware of the sacred elements functioning in the lan-guage we employ and the discourse we generate. This is because we seldompay enough “scrupulous attention” (religio) to this process and appreciate itssacred qualities. In a taken-for-granted reaction to the appearance of a rainbowin the sky, for example, we may easily dismiss the magnitude and importanceof this cosmological gesture.

We must ask: under what conditions is the communication process mosteasily recognizable as manifesting the dimensions of the sacred? I contend thatthe semiotic and phenomenological accomplishment of communication issacred when it is contributes to change, the “characteriological growth,”42 andevolutionary potential of the whole of which it is always a continuous part.43

For Bateson and Peirce, the universe (as God’s continual developing idea orlaw of Mind) is never completely perfected. Instead, as active participants inthe communication fabric of the world, we strive toward the ideal. We seek toshape, positively, the contours of evolutionary thought and action. Importantto this discussion, both theorists connect the sacred and the ideal through aes-

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thetic appreciation. Both suggest, in other words, that it is through our affectu-al experience that we encounter the ideal and thus manifest the sacred as wemove toward it.

It is now time to focus on our second question posed above: that is, whydo rainbows signify or represent the sacredness of the “communication fabric”of the world? I think it is because rainbows are an ideal, iconic representationof the very sacred nature potentially inherent within all phenomenological signrelations as communicative gesture. Rainbows are an ideal image of this sacredcommunicative potential that we all possess, the ability to embody the creative,evolutionary flow of the Absolute Mind (or God) to which both Peirce andBateson refer. Let us contemplate this idea a bit further.

THE RAINBOW AS A SIGN OF SACRED PLAY

Rainbows are an ideal iconic representation of what Eliade describes as thesacred or paradoxical “wholly other.” In terms of the “wholly” aspect, rainbowssignify a sense of aesthetic wholeness (Firstness) as part of the magnificententirety we describe as the natural beauty of the physical realm. The rainbow’sappearance in the sky reminds us that we are part of a much larger whole of lifeon this planet—with its complex web of interconnected organisms and systems.Our perception of this web of interconnection immediately conjures imagesand feelings of endless possibilities the vast world represents. I do not think itis at all surprising that part of the lore of rainbows, especially in Ireland, entailsa “pot of gold” at its apparent end. This image symbolizes abundant prosperityand the potential positive outcomes inherent in its manifestation. The pot ofgold not only symbolizes the ideal of plentiful subsistence, but also prompts asupposed quest to find it. The notion of the quest harkens to Peirce’s theory ofthe becoming of any sign (even rainbows). As Peirce explains, the constitutionof a sign entails an initial “irritation of doubt” that prompts the quest for thesign’s fulfillment or signification. The appearance of a rainbow thus symbolizesour originary quest for meaning instigated in Firstness.44 On the level ofFirstness, the arc of the rainbow itself announces a continuous whole that is per-ceived in its entirety—whether sweeping upward to the apparent heavens or arc-ing back to earth. Rainbows remind us of the analogical qualities of mind andnature in their ever-evolving relational flow. Ironically, at the same time, rain-bows stand for differentiated Otherness (Secondness) in their very distinctionin comparison to the rest of the sky. Although a naturally-occurring phenome-non, they are different from what we typically see. Their Secondness is alsoexhibited internally in their very composition; within the bow we can make dig-ital distinctions among the primary colors refracted.

Taken as a communicative gesture within nature’s interconnected web ofelements, we experience the rainbow’s paradoxical or sacred nature first-hand.That is, we respond affectively (Firstness) to it, perhaps enraptured by its affec-


tual beauty. At the same time its natural dramatic otherness in the sky elicits adistinct reaction to or, at the very least, temporarily orients us in the world ofspace and time (Secondness). We typically remember its manifestation in rela-tion to our own particular surroundings, as my earlier personal examples attest.Ironically, rainbows appear to ground experience (phenomenologically) at thesame time that they prompt our gaze to move upward (semiotically). Our expe-rience of rainbows reflects the sacred—manifesting paradoxically as both “whol-ly and other,” as Eliade suggests. When we see them in the sky, we are wit-nessing this very paradoxical manifestation through the dramatic image beforeus. We experience an immanence and transcendence simultaneously. We areone with nature in our viewing of the rainbow at the same time that it appearswholly separate, above and beyond our grasp. As mere reflection, rainbows arequite literally beyond our grasp, truly ephemeral.

Perhaps even more significant in our attempts to flesh out their sacredqualities, however, is the fact that when they appear they actually “cut” our typ-ical perceptual field or horizon. True to the character of the sacred as definedby Greek culture, rainbows also figuratively cut our taken-for-granted land-scape. The etymology of the Greek word for sacred, templum, is particularlyuseful here. The word templum means “to cut,” or delimit the whole and inter-nally differentiate.45 The sacred is thus always something set apart or distancedfrom the rest of typical experience and so is often described in its transcendentfunction.46 We might even argue that the rainbow’s element of surprise in thesky serves that same sacred purpose—cutting the mundane reality of existencein everyday life into something possibly much more meaningful—if only tem-porarily. Recall that in Chinese mythology the rainbow is characterized, indeed,as a “slit” in the sky.

Of course, the idea that the rainbow’s appearance cuts or delimits the skyin a sacred way also emphasizes its semiotic dimensions. As semiotics informsus, every sign cuts into the seemingly undifferentiated wholeness of experience,creating a boundary or “seam” in the very act of constituting the relations inher-ent within it.47 After all, when we bring some thing into relation with anotherthing, the process implies an apriori perceived gap or discontinuity between thetwo that necessitated their connection. It is no coincidence, therefore, that theword “seam” (which paradoxically implies both a connection and the very con-stitution of a line/boundary) and the Greek word for sign, “semeion,” or in itsshortened derivative, “seme,” (pronounced “seam”) are similar. “Seme” istranslated in a number of ways, the most relevant being a sign, boundary, ordivine message. Communication theorist Anthony Wilden develops the latteridea when he suggests that “seme” is akin to the “signs and tokens of the Godof the Old Testament, such as the rainbow.”48

Not only does the rainbow represent the sacred as it spontaneously cuts thehorizon of our experience in its manifestation, the process also accentuates thediscontinuities or gaps that Bateson thinks are necessary elements in all mental

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processes of the world. By their very nature as elements of surprise, rainbowscreate such gaps in our experience. We are momentarily “taken back” by theaesthetic image. As Bateson theorizes, without the notion of gaps in the com-munication fabric of the universal Mind, any mental process would not main-tain its creative flexibility or recursive capabilities, its movement of thought andaction. Bateson thinks that such flexibility or creative potential is required forany system (biological or human) not only to maintain a healthy or balancedecology but also to contribute to its evolving growth and development.49 Thereis a law of requisite variety, after all, that helps to create complexity and ensuresuccessful change, adaptation, and growth within a system/environment inter-change.50 Furthermore, it is through this creative flexibility that more gaps with-in the system/environment interchange are possibilized. This possibility ulti-mately nurtures the creative potential inherent within the whole fabric of theuniverse in its continual evolutionary arc toward the ideal.

The creative flexibility within any healthy or balanced sign constitutionmay be conceived as a form of semiotic and phenomenological “sacred play.”51

Play not only fosters freedom of thought and action within the communicationfabric of mind and nature, but “is in fact freedom.”52 Peirce even goes so faras to suggest that the creation of the world itself is the “exercise of the WorldSpirit’s Spieltrieb” (play), “done for no ulterior aim, but for ‘mere amusement,’like the performance of a symphony.”53 In his conception of the universe as anAbsolute Mind (with God as its Creator), Raposa contends that for Peirce,“insofar as it is a mind characterized by spontaneous feeling, it is a sportingconsciousness, indeed, a mind at play.”54 I am reminded that, for Peirce, theplayful actions of musers (like us) actually may imitate this cosmological phe-nomenon.55 There is, therefore, an imaginative quality to the sacred demon-strated in its play.

In addition, these ideas align with those of sociologist Johan Huizinga, whodescribes play as essentially a sacred activity in part because it contributes to thewell being of the individual or group. Play enables further creative thought andaction, thus operating according to an abductive logic, as Peirce suggests.Abduction, for Peirce, is a form of inference based upon the hypothesis gener-ation activity itself—the source of imaginative power. Abduction is the creativeprocess of bringing disparate ideas together in apposition in order to generatea “new” idea. Abduction entails, therefore, metaphorical thinking. Bateson alsobelieves that abductive comparisons or appositions (Secondness) found intropes of speech (such as metaphors and parables) help to foster imaginativepotential in Thirdness.56 Following Schiller’s lead on the “creative impulse”that play manifests, Peirce comes to believe that “pure play” (like musement)links us to the aesthetic dimension of reality. In other words, through our actsof aesthetic appreciation, our creative play impulse is activated which, in turn,possibilizes the sacred. From a communication perspective, play thus createspotentially productive, aesthetic, or creative gaps in our existential experience


of the world. These gaps of conscious experience open us up to other rumina-tions and actions perhaps not yet fully imagined. It seems to me that the veryplayful display of the rainbow colors before our eyes actually suggests ourpotentially playful constitution of signs as sacred phenomenological events.Thinking abductively, we can see how the rainbow before us images that sacredplay—bringing us to a momentary stasis point (gap) within the world of contin-uous flux. Indicative of its sacred dimensions, however, such a stasis also para-doxically activates further movements of thought and action. Imagination, play,and creativity beget more of the same in the arc of evolutionary potential with-in sacred phenomenological sign functions.

As an aesthetic process and event, the appearance of a rainbow on ourhorizon is a sacred manifestation exhibiting the very “pattern which connects”us to the ever-evolving nature of the material world. As outlined above, a rain-bow is sacred in its inherent composition but also qualifies in its purpose or sig-nificative effects. Similar to Peirce’s characterization of a painting, a rainbow“tends to evoke a certain mood, to invite a certain typical response.”57 As Peircedescribes, “in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose theconsciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy dis-appears, and it is for the moment a pure dream—not any particular existence,and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon.”58

Our musings on the iconic nature of the rainbow lead us to the conclusionthat they are an ideal image of the inherent sacred play within all living systems.It is a play that may prompt mischievous thoughts and deeds, as the associationof the symbolic leprechaun in folklore might suggest. However, I think the rain-bow’s display upon our horizon can remind us of the quest for the ideal wemust continue playfully to pursue. That ideal may come for some of us in theimage of God, or for others, at the very least, as the continual striving for thegood of the common.59 In either case, because the evolution of the universe isthe very act of creation, as both Peirce and Bateson attest, it behooves us to findourselves in the rainbow’s continual enthrallment. In this way, we might beactive participants in life’s progression even as we humble ourselves before itsmagnificence. Following Peirce, perhaps we need to develop more “habits” thatnurture our natural and cultural environments, fueled by our evolving aesthet-ic appreciation for the planet upon which we all live. As Michael Raposa con-tends, for Peirce, “all of reality is of the nature of living mind. Against the back-ground of such a principle, he [Peirce] attempted to develop a cosmology thatwould account both for the variety of phenomena in the universe and for thegrowth of ideas as objective habits or laws of nature.”60

As our musings on rainbows have revealed, they are instructive iconic ges-tures about the communication process as a whole, especially understoodthrough a semiotic and phenomenological lens. Paradoxically, rainbows exhib-it both the cutting (sacred) and connection (unity) within existence. Batesonapparently had it correct when he advocated that we should pay more “scrupu-

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lous attention” (as religio) to life’s interconnectedness as just such a sacredunity. By returning us—even if only momentarily—to the primordial, aestheticwholeness and beauty of the world in a playful way, rainbows can serve toinstruct us how we ought to feel, think, and act toward one another and all liv-ing things. Perhaps we are fascinated by rainbows because they are beautifulgrand gestures within the communicative fabric of the world. They may inspireus to think grand thoughts and do “good deeds” for all humanity and the world.Locating both variety and growth within a primordial state of pure Firstness, ofspontaneous feeling as pure play, Peirce’s semiotic ideas have pointed us to the“zero point” or sacred mark where we always begin.61 Rainbows are but onerepresentative example of such a mark. They are a visual, dramatic image of the“seam” or sign that reminds us of our function in the creative evolutionary arcof existence that binds us all (no matter the race, creed, or ethnic diversity) in a“sacred unity” (Bateson). Within a Christian frame, perhaps this latter idea wasGod’s “promise.”

Interestingly, during the writing of this paper, I witnessed a complete rain-bow off the back porch of my home. I take this as a playful sign (response, per-haps?) that our musings may indeed imitate the cosmological Absolute Mind ofwhich Peirce refers—a Mind, ultimately, “at play” in the universe. Rainbows canremind us of our capacity to participate in weaving the communicative fabric ofthe world in a positive way—weaving the sacred, in other words, into our com-municative gestures in hopes of creating a better world. I will continue to won-der at the magnificence of rainbows and marvel at the sacred possibilities theyplayfully represent upon the horizon. As a reflexive gesture, I am brought backto Wordsworth’s sentiments so eloquently expressed above that prompted mymusings at the outset. I hope their beauty never grows old for me. I hope theycontinually remind me that through aesthetic appreciation, we may find thesacred dimensions inherent within unique forms of communicative experience.

NOTES

1 I dedicate this piece to my grandson, Maxim Kyle Yurkovic. I hope that the sacred play of existence that we seereflected in rainbows always engenders his appetite for wonder.2 William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold,” in The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs andLyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. Francis T. Palgrave (London: MacMillan, 1875).3 For more information on cultural beliefs about rainbows, see Raymond L. Lee & Alistair B. Fraser, TheRainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,2001).4 Genesis 9: 12-13.5 Aydin M. Sayili,“The Aristotelian Explanation of the Rainbow,” Isis, 30, no.1 (1939): 65–83.6 This is a typical explanation. See http://sci.odu.edu/sci/Scire/05Edition/rainbow.html, for an example.7 See, for example, Richard Dawkins’ discussion in, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetitefor Wonder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 8 A recent search on Amazon.com for “rainbows” resulted in over 27,000 titles listed. Of course, many are chil-dren’s books. And yet, this result speaks to their imaginative nature to spark curiosity, wonder, play, and possi-bility—a point I develop herein.


9 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow.10 Ibid., xii. 11 For a more thorough explication of the correlating ideas of Gregory Bateson and Charles S. Peirce, seeDeborah Eicher-Catt, “The Logic of the Sacred in Bateson and Peirce,” The American Journal of Semiotics 19,no.1-4 (2003): 95–126.12 Phenomenology is the study of human experience. Phenomenologists attempt to explicate how we “take-in” orembody the experiences we have in the world as forms of originary consciousness. In this way, phenomenologyacknowledges that thought and feeling (or mind and body) should be understood as always correlative.13 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinsonand L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).14 For a more thorough discussion of musement see Charles S. Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality ofGod,” in The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893-1913), eds. The Peirce EditionProject (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998): 434–450. 15 Peirce, MS 280.23, cited in Michael L. Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1989): 168, n. 13.16 Peirce, “A Neglected Argument,” 437.17 Charles S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. JustusBuchler (New York: Dover, 1940): 98–119.18 If something we encounter in the world does not represent or stand for something else to us, it is not a sign, inPeirce’s nomenclature.19 Peirce’s own name for this phenomenological process is phaneroscopy. See “The Principles ofPhenomenology,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1940): 74–97.20 This sense of continuity is known as Peirce’s principle of synechism and creates one of the major foun-dations of his evolutionary cosmology. For more information, see Raposa’s Peirce’s Philosophy ofReligion, 41–43.21 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballentine, 1972), xv.22 Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred (NewYork: Bantam, 1987), 151.23 Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 98–119.24 For example, saying the word “ipad” twenty years ago would have been meaningless.25 Here I am using the word “logic” to mean any rule-governed process by which we arrive at reasonable con-clusions about the world and the events in it.26 Peirce, “The Principles of Phenomenology.”27 Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings Vol. 1 (1867-1893,) eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992): 109–123. 28 As we shall see, this discontinuity or “gap” that is activated in the differentiation of Secondness is paramountto the entire sacred knowing process, as Bateson suggests.29 See Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979). 30 See Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief.” 31 Peirce, “Principles of Phenomenology,” 74–97.32 Andrew Robinson and Christopher Southgate contend that these categories of being (Firstness, Secondness,and Thirdness) for Peirce are highly correlative to the Christian doctrine of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.See Robinson and Southgate, “Semiotics as a Metaphysical Framework for Christian Theology,” Zygon 45, no.3 (2010): 689-712.33 See Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion. 34 For a more thorough discussion of Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred, see Gregory Bateson and MaryCatherine Bateson, Angels Fear. Bateson began as a biologist (much in line with his father, William’s, profes-sional trajectory) only to switch to anthropological studies. It was during his study in anthropology that he metand married the famed anthropologist, Margaret Mead. He came to communication studies through his inves-tigations in cybernetics and mental health. In mental health, he is best known for his theory of the double bind.35 Bateson, Mind and Nature. See also Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind,ed. Rodney Donaldson (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).36 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1959): 9–10.37 Ibid., 11.38 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 12.39 Deborah Eicher-Catt, “The Logic of the Sacred,” 95–126.40 Such a limited perspective would reflect only an information theoretic approach; that is, the sacred is viewedas just another bit of information or message that is shared among a community of interpreters. While the con-tent of the sacred can be classified as merely a message, that message means nothing without a correspondinginterpretive response. So it is the process of meaning constitution or interpretation that is at issue here.

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41 Bateson, Mind and Nature.42 Bateson, Steps.43 This is Peirce’s evolutionary principle of synechism. See Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion.44 Of course, as anthropologists rightly inform us, the quest for meaning of the universe announces the verybirth of culture as a semiotic sphere of human existence. 45 For an insightful discussion on the etymology of the sacred, see Steve G. Lofts, Ernst Cassirer: A ‘Repetition’of Modernity (Albany, New York: State University of New York, 2000), 103.46 This aspect of the sacred is easily seen in the practice of holding something sacred (say a favorite photographof a loved one); it is the act of separating out from the typicality of our existence that creates an object’s sacredcharacter.47 The appearance of any sign marks a semiotic and phenomenological boundary, primarily because the consti-tution of relations (within Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness) in and of themselves produces a boundary ofexpression/perception.48 Anthony Wilden, The Rules are No Game: The Strategy of Communication (New York: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1987): 142–143.49 As Bateson claims in Angels Fear, “A loss of flexibility….is lethal to the total process.” See page 92. 50 Bateson is referring to W. Ross Ashby’s principle of requisite variety. For a discussion of this principle seeAnthony Wilden, The Rules are No Game, 189.51 My rendition here is consistent with semiotician Roman Jakobson’s model of communication, particularlythe “poetic function” that he claims is an inherent element (although inconsistently activated) within all discur-sive practices. See Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A.Sebeok (New York: Wiley, 1960): 350–377.52 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture (Oxon: Routledge, 1949), 8.53 Cited in Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, 168, n. 14.54 Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, 127. 55 On this point, see Raposa’s discussion, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, 127.56 Bateson was fond of framing his discussions about the necessary unity of mind and nature with the use of“meta-logues,” a direct application of metaphorical or abductive thinking. See, for example, Steps.57 Cited in Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, 108. 58 Peirce, Collected Papers 3.362, cited in Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, 108. 59 For an explication of the “good of the common” see Deborah Eicher-Catt, “A Semiotic Interpretation ofAuthentic Civility: Preserving the Ineffable for the Good of the Common,” Communication Quarterly 61,no. 1 (2013): 1–17. 60 Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, 126.61 As philosopher Ernst Cassirer describes, “the sacred functions as the zero point from which the whole worldis hallowed,” cited in Steve G. Lofts, Ernst Cassirer: A Repetition, 103.

Last Hunt/240

LAST HUNT ...for father

Thomas P. Pickett

I. stunning the infinite An otter breaks holes under ice,stunning the infinite.

My bullet holes through a snow bank and on. The storm incessantly sleeps. A circle of sky breaks upon my back.

Someone else pulls the trigger. The still wings of trees hide in vision. The dove dies on the wing, as all doves should.

The gray white feathers explode and settle.

Far off the new city percolates slow death through pipes.The crowds, though not at their games roar! One thinks of buffalo tongues drying by the thousands on rail ties,

of fear, the coiled state, itself a kind of springing.

II. the game Coins magnetized in pockets pull their lovers toward machines, as all the unloved turn forever in their chairsThese days under its breath the whole city shudders,

the stadium’s tongues and each insisting second —

241/PICkeTT

a great roulette of faces. Outside the storm windowed house,

the city’s veneer cracks, the wind courses up,shaking the dust off its back. But patience gnaws through even death,

and if we say yes, if something in us says yes!

III. at the grave And they gather like flocks of wingless, plumed birds; and they bring a future in their hands;and they shake those hands; and bareheaded in the rain with others, I will take this with me and remember:

the ducks that flew over, each wing beating inside the earth, his soft eyes kneeling in the dawn, his pipe pulling air through fire.

And now motionless beyond those trees, what —

the shadow of a deer, or a grave digger waiting, or a time that will not wait— endlessly not wait?

IV. for all this Where the quail coil and spring with venomless whirring of wings, where the hunter’s sons are thrashing toward the sweat chilled lair, for the dog’s stiff eyed watching, for the exploding of spirit filled air, for the breath of feathers suspended — for the arc of the heart’s bending... for all this the moment still is.

V. the unceasing The host has gone.From out of the dark lifts the face of the water

Last Hunt/242

to meet the light. Suffer to come unto me,the answer to an entreaty, an urging from some region;

In the dawn rimmed distance their beat can still be sensed through the pulsing of sunlight as it slants off hurrying wings.

its path narrow its heart a windillumined from within;

They will return.these harbingers from another world, to entreat and urge and, finally, suffer to come,

our pain a reminderthis urging will never end,

to rest upon the face of the water, to wheel down the spinning sun -

a suffering can be an urging, a word a wind.

243/LISTENING

CONTRIBUTORS

JAY BROWER (Ph.D from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in2009) is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the Department ofCommunication and Media Arts at Western Connecticut State University. Hisresearch focuses on rhetoric and the philosophy of communication inAmerican and European intellectual traditions, with particular focus on theo-rizing the ethical dimensions of a process metaphysics conceptualization ofcommunication. The current trajectory of this work is devoted to giving anaccount of the restoration of political relationality in the aftermath of crimesagainst humanity. Contact information: [email protected]

DEBORAH EICHER-CATT (Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University atCarbondale in 1996) is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator ofCommunication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, York.She is Fellow of the International Communicology Institute and co-editor ofCommunicology: The New Science of Embodied Discourse (2010). She hasauthored numerous book chapters and her articles appear in such journals asThe American Journal of Semiotics, Review of Communication,Communication Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and theInternational Journal of Communication. She is the 2012 recipient of theDonald Ecroyd Research/Scholarship Award from the PennsylvaniaCommunication Association. Contact information: [email protected]

IGOR KLYUKANOV is Professor of Communication Studies at EasternWashington University. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and CommunicationTheory from Saratov State University, Russia. He is an elected Fellow of theInternational Communicology Institute. He is an active scholar in many orga-nizations including: Semiotic Society of America, International Academy forIntercultural Research, National Communication Association, and the RussianCommunication Association. He is Founding Editor of the Russian Journal ofCommunication. Dr. Klyukanov has published widely in many journals on lan-guage, semiotics, and intercultural communication and has served as Editor ofmore than one. He authored Principles of Intercultural Communication (2004)and A Communication Universe: Manifestations of Meaning, Stagings ofSignificance, (2010). Contact information: [email protected]

THOMAS P. PICKETT (MFA from the University of North Carolina atGreensboro) retired from the Georgia Probation Department, was theCoordinator of the GED Adult Literacy Program/Superior Court Judges andalso coordinated the Overcomers Substance Abuse Program. His poetry has

Contributors/244

been published in a number of journals, including the South Carolina Review,Poem, Louisville Review, Vanderbilt Quarterly, Voices International, WindLiterary Arts Quarterly, and the DeKalb Literary Arts Journal. He received theInspired II Creative Writing Award from the University of North Carolina atGreensboro for “Wilder Places” and has given performance readings ofDonald Davidson’s work, “Lee in the Mountains,” and his own work, “PickettRemembers Pickett.” His other areas of interest include evangelism and theol-ogy. Contact information: [email protected]

TERRY J. PREWITT (Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma) is a socio-cultural anthropologist and retired Professor, University of West Florida,whose work bridges the fields of semiotics and religion. Among diverse writ-ings, he is the author of The Elusive Covenant: A Structural-Semiotic Readingof Genesis (Indiana University Press, 1990), A Gospel for James: An HistoricalCritical Retelling (Legas Press, 2011), and co-author with Dallas Blanchard ofReligious Violence and Abortion: The Gideon Project (University of FloridaPress (1993). Dr. Prewitt has also served as Executive Director of the SemioticSociety of America, and currently maintains an active scholarship on projects oflifelong interest, including development of several poetry collections, ethno-graphic works on contemporary Irish culture, and an ongoing book project withKaren Haworth on semiotics and the origins of human linguistic capacities.Contact information: [email protected]

semiotics and the sacred

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