“Peirce characteristically begins not with the classification of signs as promised—Icon, Index, and Symbol—but with his cenopythagorean categories which, in Quaker style, he had named Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness. They were the modes of being [Latour], ways that both ideas and things exist in the world, and though the analysis of just how they are related involves Peirce in noting degrees and reciprocities which must be named and adjusted, he manages to proclaim more than once that for his ideoscopy, it is Thirdness which is all-important, chiefly because it allows him to define a sign: ‘A Third is something which brings a First into relation to a second…A sign is a sort of Third…A sign is something by knowing which, we know something more (S. and S., p. 31)'” (59). **The third is the mediator/mediation/relationality. It is relationality emerging/formationing into being.
Massumi’s “Such as it is” (2015)
Massumi’s “Autonomy of Affect” (pt. 4)
Part III: This bit about Reagan is fascinating in light of the reign of Donald Trump.
“He was able to produce ideological effects by non-ideological means, a global shift in the political direction of the United States by falling apart. His means were affective. Once again: affective, as opposed to emotional. This is not about empathy or emotive identification, or any form of identification for that matter.” Reagan politicized the power of mime” (102). ***Wow! This is Trump! Seriously!
Massumi’s “Autonomy of Affect” (pt. 3)
“According to Simondon, the dimension of the emergent—which he terms the “preindividual”—cannot be understood in terms of form, even if it infolds forms in a germinal state. It can only be analyzed as a continuous but highly differentiated field that is “out of phase” with formed entities (has a different topology and causal order from the “individuals” which arise from it and whose forms return” (95). ***At this point, thinking about affect dives lower than the thinking of Berthoff in terms of thirdness. The phase of potentiality, the fields of potentiality, discussed here are “about” the body. And yet, these fields are inevitably shaped by the socio-lingual, right? I mean, they are not soci0-lingual. But wait… How can a field of potential avoid being understood in terms of form? A field is a form. It’s just not a purely human form? This is sub-epistemic and yet shaped by meaning on some level>?
