Gesture from a critical realist perspective: beyond Peirce’s triangle

ABSTRACT

The paper deals with the theory of gesture from the point of view of relational sociology. On the one hand, the thesis of the ‘complete gesture’ developed by Giovanni Maddalena is appreciated as a significant step forward from classical pragmatism. On the other hand, since theories based essentially on phenomenology and semiotics are at risk of nominalism and constructivism, if we want to understand the gesture from a critical realistic perspective, we need to complement the theory of gesture with a relational social ontology. This means that the theory of the gesture as action (unit act) must be placed within an ontological and epistemological framework, in which Peirce’s triangle is related to the latent value of the real as indicated by the sign. A relational alternative to Peirce's semiotic triangle is presented here with the aim of connecting the sign of the gesture to the underlying reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Gesture
• relational sociology
• Peirce
• critical realism
• semiotics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In my discussion of Maddalena's perspective, I will refer in particular to Husserl's phenomenology even if Maddalena's thought is not directly influenced by this perspective. I therefore offer my own interpretation of the relevance of Husserl's phenomenology, being aware that the distance between Peircean and Husserlian phenomenologies is a matter of disagreement in philosophical debates.

2 According to relational sociology, a relationship, when it is properly significant, is not a simple symbolic reference (refero), but is an 'emergent' (a sui generis reality) that is generated by the fact that the symbolic reference becomes a bonding structure (religo) between the related terms, so that the combination of refero and religo originates a Third entity. The Third is an entity in itself, which is not the sum of the contributions given by the terms it connects, but is a different order of reality, the relational order of reality (see Donati 2021a, 29–33).

3 An anonymous reviewer argued that I do not adequately consider Peirce's concept of Thirdness. S/he notes: "The author suggests that the 'process of signification' is 'a generation of a relationship'. On my understanding of Peirce, this is exactly the idea he is trying to communicate with his concept of Thirdness (…). Peirce refers to Thirdness as 'the category of thought, representation, triadic relation, mediation' (Essential Papers 2, 345, 1905). Peirce also writes: 'The third is that which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each other' (Essential Papers 2, 248)." In response: as I explained above by commenting on Marks-Tarlow (2018, 9), according to Peirce the sign expresses a general or abstract relation between the object and the interpretant, and carries the meaning of this relationship as a nominal relationship, but it is not a relationship as a contextual emergent effect in the way critical realism understands it.

4 ‘The fact that meaningful intention is unified with intuition in the modality of filling, gives the object that manifests itself in intuition, when we are primarily directed to it, the character of the known’ (Husserl 2005, vol. II, VI §8, 334).

5 ‘Semiotic scaffolding can be seen as enabling processes of sign action unfolding at several levels of organization, focusing energy flow and agency of the system or subsystem upon a constrained repertoire of possibilities, thus guiding the system’s behaviour to follow a more definite sequence of events’ (quotation from Claus Emmeche 2015, 275 who refers to the works of J. Hoffmeyer).

6 ‘Any gesture—a cool greeting, an appreciative laugh, the apology for an outburst—is measured against a prior sense of what is reasonably owed another, given the sort of bond involved.’ (Hochschild 1979, 568).

7 On the figure of the 'Third' - excluded by Luhmann (tertium non datur), and instead included (tertium datur) for relational sociology – see Pyyhtinen (2010).

8 As an anonymous reviewer pointed out to me, ‘Peirce's struggled all of his life against nominalism; he considered anti-nominalism to be the pivotal aspect of his philosophy. Nonetheless, most Peircean scholars acknowledge that Peirce's realism was mainly concerned with avoiding what he meant by nominalism, namely the Kantian division between noumena and phenomena, reality and knowledge. At the same time, Peirce's semiotic understanding of dynamic mediation between the two opened up to the possibility of infinite semiosis. Not Peirce's inclination to nominalism, but this apparent clash between objectivism and constructivism seems at stake in Maddalena's book.’ while I agree with this suggestion, going beyond the treatment of Maddalena and his intentions, I try to show why and how Peirce offers us an insufficient perspective to clarify the mediation between reality and knowledge due to a deficient conception of the relationship between them.

9 I am aware there is a serious problem about the "true meaning" of pragmatism, and what the "true" reading of Peirce, or Mead, is. The literature on these topics is abundant, especially on Peirce's triangle, and its intriguing theory of signs that cannot be reduced to three types of them. I apologize if I have to omit this discussion due to lack of space.

10 According to Hegel (1997), due to the excess of meaning over the sign expression in the symbol, what seems to be missing is the adequacy of, and the conformity between, sign and meaning, which are only found in classical art.

11 Ch. Peirce, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, in The Popular Science Monthly, vol. 12, 1878, 286–302, in CP 5.400 (Italian translation in Peirce, 2003, 383).

12 Here, I refer to the concept of value as Collier (1999) understands it.

13 The distinction between signs and symbols is often not clear. In the culture of the English-speaking world, they are very often the same thing. I believe, however, that a symbol is a special sign of a transcendental character.

14 I refer to the previous Figure 3.

15 On the concept of meta-reality, see Bhaskar (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pierpaolo Donati

Pierpaolo Donati is Alma Mater Professor (PAM) of Sociology at the University of Bologna (Italy). Former President of the Italian Sociological Association, he is internationally known as the founding father of an original Relational Sociology, or Relational Theory of Society. Among his recent books are The Relational Subject (with M.S. Archer, Cambridge 2015) and Transcending Modernity with Relational Thinking (London, 2021).