“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 “Like a Thought,” an Introduction to “A Shock to Thought” (pt. 1)
Massumi, Brian. “Like a Thought.” A Shock to Thought. [Electronic Resource] : Expression After Deleuze and Guattari. Hoboken : Taylor and Francis, 2002.
“For many years in many schools expression has been anathema.The underlying assumption has been that any expressionism is an uncritical subjectivism” (xiii).
Berthoff, “Gaps, Abysses, and the Mysterious Barricades” TMB
Whitehead: “But consciousness, which is the supreme vividness of experience, does not rest content withteh dumb sense of importance behind the veil” (48). **INteresting that “vividness” is a degree (“quality”)
Berthoff: “Bottom’s Semiology” (from TMB)
“The conflation of innate powers of perception with the culture-bound apprehension of forms helps to muddle the idea of representation as copy and the idea of representation as symbolization” (40).
“Although the aim of such argument is to establish the concept of indeterminacy by demolishing the concept of an objective reality, the validity of hte subjective-objective dichotomy is, nevertheless, presupposed” (40).
