“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.
Notes from 2017 reading of Rickert’s “Whole of the Moon”
Rickert, Thomas. “The whole of the Moon: Latour, Context, and the Problem of Holism.” Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 10 July 2016.
See notebook notes. **Really I think Rickert hurts the cause of Critical Theorists by reclaiming the notion of “context.” He identifies Latour’s “plasma” as that from which context emerges.