At the Bottom of It All, or the Pool

For a second your head is under water, exhaling intensely until there it goes bobbing back up. The clarity of chlorinated, fluorescent-blue water and the bathing suit of the person in front is exchanged for a total blur of surfacing with goggles on. You are surrounded by strange creatures, covered largely, but often not nearly enough, in stretchy, tight materials, heads appearing undeniably egg-like and small, while the goggles add an insect-like dimension to the overall look. In the next lane might be a banker, while that lady ahead works at your deli. Up ahead vigorously waving her arms before jumping in is your professor. And at the same time, these aren't the same people you know. Within the semiotic system of the swimming pool, the usual lines of communication are gone, and energetic interpretants rule the world.  Peirce defines the energetic interpretant at one point, in the following way: "If a sign produces any further proper significate effect, it will do so through the mediation of the emotional interpretant, and such further effect will always involve an effort. I call it the energetic interpretant. The effort may be a muscular one, as it is in the case of the command to ground arms; but it is much more usually an exertion upon the Inner World, a mental effort." ('Pragmatism', CP 5.475, 1907). And so it is our muscles that react first, respond as they might, while our minds are focused on them. 

You don't look for much beyond speed, stroke, potential hazard, move almost mindlessly next to people from all walks of life as you would on the street, yet in a strangely more deliberate and intimate setting. Peirce speaks of three categories of being: "The first," he says in "A Guess at the Riddle", "is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor lying behind anything. The second is that which is what it is by force of something to which it is second. 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." In a sense, everyone turns into cars, moving on our bellies and backs, trying to pass the slow people doing belly-flops in the medium lane: you give them disapproving looks through the goggles, fail at that, but speaking is out of the question for fear of messing up the breathing rhythm -- and besides who's going to hear you anyway, the pool renders everyone equally deaf: the pool etiquette relies on indices almost exclusively -- you race past only to encounter another swimmer just turning about face and heading straight at you. 

A head-on collision is nearly inevitable: the reverie created by the speed of your leaps, the perfect sync of your body's movement in the position reserved in our lives largely for rest, and if not that, certainly not transporting oneself -- the firstness one might call it (I've ruined it of course by describing it) of flying through this world is quite literally terminated. And yet, that perception of the other swimmer quickly results in a dive underneath him, and the clash stays only in the mind, and here we enter thirdness -- a natural law makes it possible in water to simply go underneath someone -- not so on the street. Smaller instances of these states of being occur with each individual stroke. The underwater-back-to -surface process is in itself a constant return to secondness, but it is also a matter of habit -- and habit-formation happens in thirdness. 

It is interesting, too, that no physical trace (perhaps a chemical one does, but not perceivably sans an advanced chemistry kit) of me having been in the water exists in that water, yet the smell of chlorine sticks to my body and hair despite the shower. Most people would easily detect, without being Sherlock Holmes (or Peirce), where I'd just been. And there, in the shower, suddenly everyone turns back into people you might see on the street,  New Yorkers, except nude. We, who don't talk in the subway, walk fast through our city's busy intersections, are entirely vulnerable and uncovered in front of each other. We're all strangers, or friends even, suddenly disrobing and washing ourselves, slowly assuming our usual shapes, re-learning to talk, hear, stay upright, ready to return to the outside world, where we'll run into each other time and again, and despite having been in the same shower, not acknowledge each other, but keep moving past, in the usual way. 

~Marina Kaganova

(New York) City-ness?

        Having grown up with New York City as my only city, it has been the basis upon which I have judged all other cities.  Thus, when I presume ‘city-ness,’ through my own biases I assume ‘New York City-ness.’  Furthermore, when I presume ‘New York City-ness,’ it is really my individual experiences of New York City being reflected.  This, I have realized, is vastly different than the standard definition of the word ‘city,’ which Webster’s Dictionary defines as merely “a large or important town.”  If only I knew that when traveling to other cities as a child…

   

http://www.amazon.com/My-New-York-Anniversary/dp/0316927112

       I remember when growing up, my first time in London or Los Angeles, I was disappointed by those cities by not meeting my predetermined standards of what was expected from a city.  To me a city meant adjacent skyscrapers, in a relatively condensed area, or a grid of streets that go on in a straight line until they hit water or park.  Granted, much of New York City does not even fit this definition, but my New York City did.  

The issue at hand relates back to the Peircean notion of firstness, which he defines as “‘an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever…’” (Zeman quoting Peirce [1.306]).  My first experiences of New York City, being the city, were the establishing moments that created my eventual conception of city-ness.  Those ‘feelings’ of being in New York City were the same feelings I expected to experience from other cities, but to no avail.  My notion of city-ness generally was at that point confused with and dependent upon New York City-ness.  

  The firstness of city being marred as such, ultimately so was the secondness in this situation, the Peircean term that Zeman summarizes as “the category of the actual existent.”  The issue was that my presupposed evocations of a city led to the assumption that all cities had the grid, the subway system, the sounds of horns honking, the sporadic scents of sewage and crisp autumn air intertwined, and the sights of never ending park amidst tall high-rises in the distance that were encountered in my personal experiences.  

http://gothamist.com/2011/07/22/nyc_concierge_creates_scratch_n_sni.php

         What I did not understand at the time was that these essences evoked by New York City-ness were not necessarily contiguous with the general notion of city-ness.  Consequentially, the thirdness, or reality, that is a city, in actuality became my personal conception of New York City.  I expected to encounter those same signs that I witnessed in New York in other cities as well.

         No city is like New York City insofar as it is unlike any other city.  Thus, city-ness must be determined upon more general terms than what would be deemed as New York City-ness.  The issue with determining such a quality is the same with determining any other realm of ‘firstness’: “...when we recognize that something is grasped as a first, its firstness as firstness effectively evanesces” (Zeman).  Thus, city-ness is “prereflexive,” which causes several conflicts in discussing the matter.  Being that as a child I only had New York City to encounter city-ness, New York City-ness was mistaken for city-ness in general.  The ground for which I determine a city has changed through experience and contact with “other” cities, defined as such by Webster, as well as a quality that makes New York City distinctive, for they are certainly--as I now reluctantly acknowledge against my NY pride--two very different ideas.  

[by Jacob Kayen]

References:

Zeman, J. 1977. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. 22-39 in T. Sebeok (ed) A Perfusion of Signs. Bloomington: Indiana.