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Transformative Criticism, Virtual Meaning, and Community: Peirce on Signs and Experience

In two fairly early papers, Charles Sanders Peirce claims both that logic should teach us how to be "masters of our own meaning" (EP1,126) and that the meaning of a thought is "altogether something virtual" (EP 1, 42). For those of us still struggling to free ourselves from Cartesian subjectivism, with its "elusive and misleading ideal" of certainty (Lachs 1996, 20), these claims appear difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile. For Peirce, however, "modern science and modern logic" (EP 1, 28) show us that "the problem becomes how to fix belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community" (EP 1, 117). As a consequence, he will insist that "the existence of thought now, depends on what it is to be hereafter, so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community" (EP 1, 54). My aim in this article, therefore, is to explore Peirce's analysis of cognition as essentially communal and historical in order to emphasize its political and epistemological value. Borrowing also from the insights of contemporary feminist science scholarship and art criticism, I will argue that, because of its potential to correct and enlarge upon our individual efforts at thought and meaning making, Peirce's appeal to the community of inquirers renders our attempts to reflect upon experience not just full of risk but a source of hope. 1 will illustrate this by considering Lucy Lippard's discussion of a failed feminist performance art piece from the 1980 "Times Square Show." (To anticipate, what makes this particular work of interest is the audience's reaction to its didacticism.) Before doing so directly, however, I must first offer a brief exploration of Peirce's early account of cognition. Fueled by his distrust of introspection's claim to transparency, Peirce will begin his analysis by asserting that the only "permissible supposition" to make in this endeavor is that "the mind reasons" (EP 1, 30). In good pragmatic fashion, he will define reasoning as "find[ing] out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know" (EP 1, 111) and will apply this understanding of the point and purpose of reasoning to his account of mental