Biosemiotics

DOI 10.1007/s12304-011-9137-x
O R I G I N A L PA P E R

The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences

of Stanislavski

Gerald Ostdiek

Received: 12 July 2011 / Accepted: 16 September 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract Practice commonly develops independent of theory: only rarely does

some heritable informational structure knowingly emerge. With this in mind,
Biosemiotic theory is well served by an informed synthesis with Constantin
Stanislavskis theatrical technique. For it is not enough merely to catalog signage by
studying the consequence of its function, we also seek to generate signs with
knowing intent. This implies more than the strategic use of signs, which all complex
living things do, and of which our many subjective selves emerge. It calls for an
objective artifice of signs, that is, some set of techniques competent to produce
subjectivity, and capable of being objectified such that it can become a knowable
standard. This is precisely what Stanislavski offers, ways of knowingly creating
novel, actual, believably generative, signs. Within the realm of human action and in
terms of human knowing, he positively exemplifies applied semiotic theory: his
approach to dramatizing fictional characters also expresses how self-consciousness
comes to be. What Stanislavski implies, Charles Tilly presumes and this essay
asserts: our own biotic evolution has been influenced by post-biotic or metaphoric
evolution, which results from the living interaction of certain classes of non-living
things. These derive from the pragmatic a priori made implicit by Chauncey Wright,
which is the motivation of living things to act on specific needs within specific
situations. The need to breathe is one example; the need to make competent use of
existing epistemic structures is another. But such structures have their own needs,
and act to fill them. When this is compounded culturally, it may result in self-
consciousness a self-constructed artifice of semiosis with great consequence to
biotic processes. Tilly supplies evidence that such compounding happens within
human society, as well as a theoretical basis for its expression as a semiotic
sociology. This essay uses pragmatic semiotics to explore the strong parallels that
exist between the deliberately objective motivations upon which science, sanity and
self-consciousness all depend, Stanislavskis practicable artifice of signaling pathways
and social emergence, and Tillys approach to society as ongoing performance.

G. Ostdiek (*)
Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: ostdiek.htf@gmail.com
 G. Ostdiek

Keywords Semiotic artifice . Social movement . Pragmatic a priori . Constantin

Stanislavski . Charles Tilly . Chauncey Wright

Art should be on good terms with science.1

Introduction: Biology as Social Theater

Constantine Stanislavski is to Theater what Charles Darwin is to Biology; this is to

say, not only did modern theatrical methodology originate with Stanislavski, but also
nothing in theater makes any sense without him.2 Stanislavski came after Darwin,
yet we have little evidence as to what he thought of him.3 He was an intensely
practical man, but as unconcerned with the world outside the theater as Darwin was
of the world within it. Yet within their respective fields, both discovered the value of
treating novel origination as a consequence of experiencing, both created sets of
theory and method intertwined to actively explore this discovery, both focused on
individual mechanisms taking place within holistic processes and the reciprocity
thereof, which is the interaction of parts that creates a whole that maintains the parts
indefinitely repeated. And both recognized celebrated the formational power of
interaction as the source of origination, the cause of the stable, identifiable forms that
are all that we are, but also all that we know. And though neither seems to have known
it and certainly neither explicated it, both presumed a pragmatic semiotics.
Knowingly or not, Stanislavski and Darwin grounded their work in a similar
ontological principle that interaction is a true a priori: interaction between various
beings, as well as between various scales of being, and across time as well as space.
Living things originate within the interaction between some specific heritage of past
interaction and some present need projected into being via biological or
psychological intent. For Darwin as for Stanislavski and all classical Pragmatism,
true novelty is a consequence of actions of relating, which are reciprocal and
formalized interactions that store histories by limiting potential within future
interactions. In biology, this becomes canalization. On the animal scale and within
neuro-physiology, we see this same principle in the phenomenon of dendritic
pruning. Within theatre, it is a vital aspect of the more general concept of repertoire.
It is a necessary component of all pragmatic thought, and it grounds Peirces logic,

1
Stanislavski and Benedetti (2008), pg. xxiv
2
In the world of theater, this can be a highly partisan statement. However, the so-called polar opposition
between (e.g.) Brecht and Stanislavski is all inside the family. A wise man will see that Aristotle
platonizes and despite Brechts aggressive dismissal of Stanislavskis approach, he presumes greatly upon
his most vital aspects. I.e., Brechts approach to interaction and the subconscious is grounded within
Stanislavski (Brecht and Mueller 1964).
3
However, we do know that Stanislavski was at least passing familiar with William James. His shelves
contained books that cited Principles of Psychology (1890). Also, he was a close friend of I. I. Lapshin,
the Russian translator of Psychology: the briefer course (1892). Much of his System hangs upon the
James-Lange theory of emotional response, as well as Jamess notions of habit, plasticity, muscle
memory and second nature (Whyman 2007). Moreover, the only psychologist cited in Stanislavskis
published work, Theodule A. Ribot, maintained a fruitful correspondence with James; the two influenced
each others thought and cited each others work (Bixler 1945).
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

semiotics and community of inquirers, as well as Jamess radical empiricism and

mind/body psychology. As Tilly makes plain, it is repeated on the social scale of
human affairs. And nearly everyone who has ever dated knows that a successful act
of relating opens possibilities only by closing others, and turns a potentiality into a
history by eliminating its rivals.
Obviously, this has much to do with factors of evolution both actual, biological,
evolution and actual, though metaphorical, cultural evolution. Although there is
great value in maintaining evolution as a strictly biological phenomenon and great
absurdity in claiming otherwise, we cannot ignore the many parallels that exist
between the functioning of semiotic mechanisms on and across the many scales of
life. Whether in a petri dish or an opera house, culture happens as actions of
relating bind together multiple scales of living things. Biological interactions are
bound into histories and engaged with selection by taking part in culture. And
these many scales of interaction that both form and transcend that of the individual
organism, clearly all have consequence to the living of things: this is post-biotic
evolution. Aldo Leopolds mountain is no mere metaphor, but an emergent
wholeness: it certainly does not think like I think, but then again neither do you.
Yet when you and I collectively fail to think like a mountain, but instead organize
pogroms to kill the wolves such that the deer devour the brush and the land washes
to the sea selection happens. And though mankind may be a geological agent par
excellence, we are certainly not the only species of sign-reading, culture-building
organisms. Metaphorical evolution is nearly as old as biological evolution: the two
remain quite intertwined.
In this, Tilly presumes upon Darwin and Stanislavski equally. More, his work in
social theory offers proof that cultural evolution operates within the scale of human
affairs via the semiotic bridgework that is the cosmic weather of Chauncey
Wright.4 Tillys work is absurd without this self-compounding leaping of and
binding across differing scales of interaction, which sometimes takes on a life of its
own even acting in ways counter to that of its parts. Here too, the objective
motivation that Wright places at the center of scientific effort and sets in opposition
to the utterly subjective motivation of anti scientific thought, takes on its own
character, and acts to further itself. 5 But all living things consist of the struggling
of individual characters within some specifiable series of interactions, each of which
survives by taking on a life of its own. These are the repertoires of Tillys
Contentious Performances.
It is striking that Tilly spoke of the Invention of the Social Movement,6 for
neither culture nor society nor life itself is invented. Yet this term may be quite
apropos: social movements are clearly artificial things, wherein culture is knowingly
reconstructed via some deliberate re-shaping of social interaction.7 Perhaps this
language, and Deweys, is proper after all. We invent and construct ourselves
many times over (just one of my many sets include: theater geek, furniture-maker,
professor). While it may appear that our many roles are thrust upon us by natural
4
Ostdiek (2011), and also (publications pending), Minding Signs and What Signs Do
5
Wright (2000) pg. 49, A curiosity which is determined chiefly or solely by the felt imperfections of
knowledge as such is prompted by what we call an objective motive.
6
Tilly (2008), pgs. 117145
7
Ostdiek (2011), pg. 80 Autopoesis is ecopoesis is autopoesis.
 G. Ostdiek

circumstance (son, father, worker), yet also we (collectively) invent them (husband,
father, worker) or at least, abductively infer their action. These social selves are
constructed objects; the roles we play are artifice. Yet we (and they) are as prone to
selection as any other living thing. They offer a compounding unseen in nature yet
remain subject to it. Tillys approach to the artifice of social performance,
contentious repertoires, trust networks, WUNC displays and the defining of the
social actor, all place human culture squarely within the framework of Darwinian
Selection, Evolutionary Semiotics, and Stanislavskis logic of performance.
Artists tend to forget (or often fail to ever realize) that their creating also involves
chance and elimination, and reproduction with variation plus selection. Creativity
does not come entirely of the artist (in the common, neo-platonic perversion of
Jamess stream of consciousness), nor does it offer proof for the supernatural. It is
not naturally instinctive (genetically programmed), nor does it appear ex nihilos.
Artistic creation is an event of post-biotic or metaphorical evolution. Hamlet was a
redub. Shakespeare took from others he lifted whole scenes, even titles, and
reworked what he took out of time (the Ur-Hamlet he likely saw in his youth) into
what he put into time (Hamlet by William Shakespeare, et. al.). His dramas are
limited into being by what he inherited, what he encountered, and the mechanisms of
interaction that marked and demarked his specific situation. The same thing happens
whenever thought evolves, for both the biological foundations of self-
consciousness and self-consciousness itself, function as semiotic repertoire.

Semiotics: Culture, Consciousness and Biology

A sign is something which stands for another thing to a mind.8 In so doing, signs
mark the instigation of potential relating, which is always a specification of potential
and therefore a limitation thereof. The sign that says New York 20 miles that way not
only puts me in a specific spatial relation to New York, it also means that I am not in
Kansas. But the value of signage is not only relative to place: relations take time and
so signs leap time. That same road sign also indicates how long it takes to get to
New York, though the time signature changes depending on how I get there.
So too, a thing becomes a sign only by being read, by being entered into the
mental relationships of some living thing. Yet also, the thing that stands is the
result of some heritage objectified. Whether natural (animal mimicry) or not (New
York 20 Miles), signs are the consequences of some previously successful
interaction successfully projected into a future event (for Peirce, this is thirdness
becoming firstness). E.g., the deceptive markings in some species of caterpillar that
resemble bird droppings are read in the mind of predatory birds as standing for a
future experience of tasting excrement. And they leave the caterpillars alone. The
rattle of a diamondback warns away all but the most aggressive of foes with the
promise of deadly poison, and saves the rattler the expense of potentially costly
battle.
Such examples are legion, but by no means limited to the so-called natural world;
they range from the simplest complex living thing to the rated heights of

8
Peirce et al. (1998), W 3.82, Of logic as a study of signs MS 380
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

ratiocination. And such examples always involve the individual that reproduces and
the population that evolves both in relation to a social environment. E.g.,
Shakespeare reproduced and Hamlet evolved. This is metaphorical rather than
biological, of course, and the distinction is at times critical. But for evolution to have
consequence across all life, not all in life can be reducible to the mechanisms of
biology. Rather it scales up from it. And so, relations on the scale of human
psychology and culture are not mere replications of relations on the scale of
microbiology, but an outgrowth of it. While the cultures in French cheeses share
with French culture certain similarities in the mechanisms of the interaction of which
they are both comprised, in no way is Frenchness merely a great cheese.
The very functioning of biological networks gives evidence that life is the
opposite of reductive: it compounds. Across many levels of living interaction,
successful acts of relating generate heritages which die (or remain meaningless)
unless re-related, re-produced, re-engaged, re-enacted, but also reciprocated or even
reversed, within some present situation via some focused intent on future interaction,
knowable only retrospectively. And so the semiotic is pragmatic; it is by
consequence alone that we either know or be.9
In all this, it remains basically impossible to find an objective entre into the
necessarily subjective quality of life and this is true for all complex living things,
not only self-knowing life. Objective interpretations do not exist, and so science
remains forever an art.10 The age-old effort to shine up science by eliminating
subjectivity works well enough for some things, but persistently fails to account for
the knowing subject and all its consequence. By contrast, uncovering the
mechanisms of semiotics generates competence for science to speak of subjectivity
(including non-human varieties). These include the various sets of objects on various
scales we generally call codes, which severely restrain the relational potential of
various reads into coherent things, including organisms, species and cultures.
These also include quantifiable interpretive systems, which are developmental
pathways distinct from evolutionary codes, but which generally reveal the codes of
which they originate, and which by taking part within a relational history they
shape. There is semiotics in the self-in-other compounding of natural biotic
acculturation, as well as the unnatural, pseudo-teleological artifice of self-
consciousness and all the human cultures of which it is made and which it makes.
Strictly speaking, culture and self-consciousness are coherent intertwined post-
biotic interpretive systems. Both display some of the features of evolutionary
development: e.g. modularity, small-world relational networks, depth in scaling, and
coded (grammatically determined) behavior, but also both take on features of
premeditated intention (design), choice in constructing behavior or interpreting
codes (or free will). All biotic cultures exist as the interaction of multitudes of
individually living (minding) things along with all the objects of artifice that are all,

9
Consequence is to Pragmatism what experience is to Empiricism and ideals to Idealism. E.g., Pierces
pragmatic maxim: In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider
what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and
the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception. (Peirce 1935, CP 5.9)
10
As Stephen Jay Gould put it: Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all
the curious tools of inference that mind permits from metaphor and analogy to all the flights of fruitful
imagination that C.S. Peirce called abduction. (Gould 1987, pg. 6)
 G. Ostdiek

each one individually, original consequences of semiotic behavior. This includes

bright feathers, bold nests and barbeques, but also all the psychological structures of
our subjective selves.
Human culture differs from natural culture only in that the subjective object11 has
given way to an artifice of natural cunning: the subjective self. Whereas natural
semiosis implies the lack of self-identifying otherness, a subject knowingly
differentiated from its objects of knowledge (the ideas that comprise it) is an artifice
of self-compounded semiosis, which does not seem to exist below the state we
identify as self-conscious. This subjective sense is formed and maintained within
that greater scale of subjectivity that we objectify as a culture, which is some
greater set of settled relationships (we do it this way) having taken on a life of
its own. All this argues against the claim that human culture is reducible to a
discombobulated realm of lumbering robots, or self-consciousness to that of
insensate memes. Quite to the contrary, minding is an ongoing, scale-thick
mnage,12 wherein the knower is a consequence of her knowing, shaped by the
environment of her shaping: for a self-conscious being, this is necessarily
consequential to shared semiotic reciprocity with other self-conscious beings.
And yet the question remains: how do we enter this hermeneutic roundabout? The
common answer is we dont, life is a mystery after all. The classical modern answer
is we do by training our objectivity, by aping an angelic view. The answer given by
artists and pragmatists alike is that we do by means of practiced absurdity: the
method of abductive inference. While Peirce objectified this art as logic to be used
within science, Stanislavski objectified the logic within art, specifically the art of
performance.

Constantin Stanislavski

The whole point of Stanislavskis method of physical acting is to train the human
body (including its psychological aspects) to function knowingly as a sign vehicle, to
work with signs as signs within acts of signing and not merely to presume upon
mono causal, mono directional effect via the presentation of a settled stock of
mimicry. His intended result is the emergence of a competent artificial culture with
all that this implies. His focus is on training the actor to avoid signaling
contradiction to the action of the play: i.e. signs that can only read as I am on
stage.13 This is accomplished by bodily abstracting the minding intent of the
character as a semiotic teleology so as to isolate sign function in ways both practical

11
For Winnicott this term means, the object not yet repudiated as a not-me phenomenon (Winnicott
1971, pg. 89). He argues that the subject destroys the object [which] survives the destruction (90) and
that this results in fantasy, which begins the process of self-formation. I claim Winnicotts argument as
supporting my own, but use subjective object as the conflation of self/other that consistently recurs
within self-construction, i.e., any other not yet known as such.
12
A thing is thick if it offers great relational potential the thickness stems from it being comprised of a
great number of settled relationships. A thing is scale thick if its existence necessarily depends on
functions that cross a multitude of scales i.e. cell, organism, ecosystem, and, the consequences of its
existing likewise extend across a multitude of scales (re: life is scale thick). The presumption is that no one
scale is the true scale, of which all others are derived.
13
Stanislavski (1948), pg. 101
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

and pragmatic: i.e., both in terms of intended object plus method of achievement, as
well as in terms of consequentiality.
[T]he major concern that Stanislavski placed at the heart of his system was
the constant dialogue between our physical (seeable) bodies and our inner
(unseeable) psychologies. Humans are psycho-physical beings the more
expressive and responsive our bodies can be, the more detailed and nuanced
our portrayals of characters can be.14
But this is not merely conversation. It is within the actual conversion of body and
mind into each other that character actual psychologies as well as competent
theatrical portrayals thereof originates. The functionality Stanislavski brought to
theatre came neither from monologue (Platonic essentialism) nor dialogue (Cartesian
mind and matter), but a semiotic trialogue (Peircian mind-body-reading) centered
on the organic being minding its needs within some precise and knowable but open
(i.e. indeterminate) situation. Importantly, for Stanislavski as for James, life exists
within the minding intent to go on minding; moreover, this minding continually
modifies (adapts,15 reconstructs,16 rebirths17) body and mind, as well as the situation
in which this interaction is embedded, of which it emerges and through which it
exists. This is semiotics on our scale of things: living psychologies originating
within the reading of what signs they can discern within specific situations.
In addition to the live bodies he trained and the working notes of his many
productions, Stanislavski presented his method in several semi-fictional books that
follow several years in the training of a young actor but which are fairly obtuse,
poorly organized, badly translated and horribly edited.18 Moreover, much of what is
known of Stanislavski is less Stanislavski and more Stella Adler or likely entirely
Lee Strasbergs so-called Stanislavski method, which seems to have very little to do
with Stanislavski.19 In my experience, Stanislavski scholarship is somewhat akin to
that of Peirce: great potential obscured by chaos within the life of the paterfamilias,
obscured further by early admirers, now turned into a vast row of contending
interpretations. I leave aside mired controversies and present an admittedly simplistic
version of his approach sufficient merely for our purposes and limited to the
cumulation of his lifes work.20

14
Merlin (2008), pg. 2
15
Reference: Darwin, The Origin of Species
16
Reference: Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
17
Reference: Dylan, Its Alright Ma (Im only bleeding); i.e., he not busy being born is busy dying.
18
Stanislavski continually revised his technique to serve the needs of the day. Even when working on
publication, he displayed little regard for literary product; his writings were generally a mess. Fortunately,
we now have Jean Benedettis re-constructive translation An Actors Work. This essay uses Benedettis
structure, but cites the classic Hapgood translation An Actor Prepares, as it is by far the most familiar (and
works well for this presentation).
19
Strasbergs method stresses emotional memory in a manner which presumes that mental action
inherently pre-determines physical action. This is a fundamental misconception of Stanislavski, for whom
emotional memory was a near synonym of musculature memory.
20
With the caveat in place that: Stanislavski constantly shifted his views, always trying to find more
efficient ways for the actor to perform. This is why he was hesitant to publish his work for a long time. If
he were alive today, it is most likely that he would have continued to change his views. Thus, while
understanding his System, it is important to refrain from fossilizing his ideas. (Sawoski 2010)
 G. Ostdiek

Stanislavski began his lessons with exercises in experiencing,21 which he

describes in a manner quite similar to Dewey in Art as Experience,22 and which
he breaks into 6 integral aspects. These are Action, Proposition (called The Magic
If), Given Circumstances, Imagination, Focus (called Concentration and Attention),
and Muscular Relief. Each is presented as necessary to the whole. Each must be
mastered by anyone presuming to act well both onstage and off. I argue they serve
anyone whose intent is to grasp knowingly, from within human subjectivity, via the
semiotic mechanisms that embody the human animal.
That action is vital to experiencing needs no defense. But immediately we see
Pragmatism: in pure abstract, isness is as meaningless as chairness but the potential
for chair is originated by the action to sit (a concrete recognizable intent in action). The
things we call chairs originated via some ancient abductive inference upon the action of
sitting. Action, then, is not only a source of experiencing, but also a source of the
objects of experience, both natural (unplanned) and teleological (purposefully
constructed). For Stanislavski as for the classical Pragmatists, action is a coordination
of being; a successful interaction is one that stores relations as histories, by generating
objects of future interaction.23 Peirce would have called this the emergence of a
thirdness, competent to function in firstness. Like Peirce, Stanislavski defined these
interactions as a semiosis: an interaction begins with a reading of potential. We dont
try closing walls, but do close hearts and doors. And when needs be, we stand on chairs.
What Stanislavski called the Magic If is far more important than is generally
realized and as vital to science as to art. As Chauncey Wright argued: the generation
of and action upon a coherent set of hypothetical propositions is both the origination
and the experience of self-consciousness.24 It is not merely, What Would I Do If I
found a box of treasure or my brother burned all my money; rather, What If plays
with what if its this versus what if its that. Science and sanity both began and are
forever renewed with what if Im wrong. But the most fundamental hypothesis
remains I exist. According to Wright, self-consciousness is fully realized within the
proposition what if I am real. This is not accomplished merely by the use of signs (as
all complex living things do this), nor by isolating signs as signs which is the crux
of interpretation (animals, insects, fishes, birds, and all manner of living things do
this); but by the isolated use of signs specifically to construct a novel artifice of
proposition capable of objectification, A Magic If.25

21
Stanislavskis word perezhivannia is a noun of action derived from the verb perezhit. Its English
equivalent may be to experience, to undergo, to endure, or even to relive an experience, but also, a
way of experiencing unfavorable conditions. Its Darwinian equivalent may well be struggle. Many
Stanislavski scholars place this at the center of his entire system. (Hobgood 1973)
22
Dewey (1958), pg. 43: An experience has pattern and structure, because it is not just doing and
undergoing in alternation, but consists of them in relationship. The action and its consequence must be
joined in perception. This relationship is what gives meaning The scope and content of the relations
measure the significant content of an experience. Italics added.
23
Stanislavski insisted that his actors begin work on their characters with neither props nor sets, and often
not even any direction, saying: You may not produce with perfection, but what you do will be in accord
with the logic of physical actions. The point is that that objects including the directors ideas of how to
deliberately, i.e. artificially, shape the action would come later and emerge from interaction (Coger
1964).
24
Wright (2000), vol. 1, The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and again, Evolution of self-consciousness
25
Compare this, for example, with Santayana (1955), pgs. 233239: the dog can read the signs that
identify his bone, but never seems to wonder if the bone is real.
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

And if I am real, then my sense of self originates through selective consequence

within some given circumstance. This is Deweys situation, the reconstruction of
which is the process of which all reality consists.26 Stanislavski instructed his
students to explore the range of play within exact situations, offered methodologies
by which a living body can identify the constraints inherent of and in both situation
and self, and demonstrated how the interaction of the circumstances and the ranging
therein gives birth to both the new situation and the new I that explores it.
Imagination, focus, and muscular relief all have to do with the animal that is us. The
experiencing of action and proposition within a situation forces us to use our imagination
to generate circles of attention and concentration that generate a precise focus for our
musculature efforts. When this is physiologically expressed, or fully and successfully
experienced, it is felt as bodily relief respite within the struggle for life. This is
experienced both in the immediacy of strife and in the calm of recovery thereof, for the
body naturally regulates the resources it commits based on its reading of what is
necessary within some circumstance. E.g., a calm, confidant swimmer can swim far,
while one whose heart beats the refrain Im going to drown! is more likely to tense up,
waste energy, and die. Here too James found that sense of ease that marks the
unmasking of competent rationality, which likewise appears not only after reasoning but
also within it.27 So too, the many situations in which Stanislavskis fictional narrator
Kostya observed his cat move about their tiny flat, fully demonstrate that the grace and
skill we so often see in nature results from a successful semiosis. The calm physical
skill of the animal is seldom made awkward by some discomfiting What-If interfering
with the process of experiencing. Kostyas physical and hypothetical musings turn this
particular self-conscious abstraction into a coherent theory of pragmatic semiotics. E.g.:
The Director insisted that each pose, whether lying down or standing up, or any
other, should be subject not only to the control of self-observation, but should also
be based on some imaginative idea, and enhanced by given circumstances.
When this is done it ceases to be a mere pose. It becomes action. Then
superfluous tension will disappear, the necessary muscles will come into action,
and all this will happen without the interference of any conscious technique.
Nature operates a live organism better than our much-advertised technique!28
And looking ahead, we also read:
a live objective and real action naturally and unconsciously puts nature
to work. And it is only nature itself that can fully control our muscles, tense
them properly or relax them.29
26
James (1978), pg. 103: Deweys favorite word is situation. A situation implies at least two factors,
each of which is both an independent variable and a function of the other variable. Call them E
(environment) and O (organism) for simplicitys sake. They interact and develop each other without end;
for each action of E upon O changes O, whose reaction in turn upon E changes E, so that Es new action
upon O gets different, eliciting a new reaction, and so on indefinitely. The situation gets perpetually
reconstructed, and this reconstruction is the process of which all reality consists.
27
James (1956), pg. 63: he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes everything else, by certain
subjective marks with which it affects him. When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the
rationality. What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition
from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
28
Stanislavski (1948), pg. 99
29
Stanislavski (1948), pg. 101
 G. Ostdiek

In the second year of training, Stanislavski turns his students attention towards
the pseudo-teleology of human intending, which he describes as absolutely integral
to our way of experiencing. The two can only be separated in the abstract and known
only by the consequences of the abstraction. Intending is also broken into necessarily
integrated aspects, which include unit objectives, adaptation, the unbroken line,
through events, the super-objective, and the subconscious mind. All these are
consequential to the leaping of scales that is at once an action of sentience and
interpretation but emerge within the experiencing of communion, emotional
memory, and what Stanislavski called faith or a sense of truth. Again we have sets
of features, which form parts of one whole the human experience, which is always
part of some greater whole. And again, Stanislavski offers a pragmatic semiotics by
which we can whittle all this down to a handy size.
A unit objective is a portion of action dominated by single need or desire
by pursuit of a goal. It is always defined by the infinitive of an active,
transitive verb plus a living object. A shift in intent marks a shift in the shape of
our being. By isolating moments of intention, we are better able to see what it is
that we read (what we are becoming) within both self and situation. In this, to
drink beer functions poorly as a unit objective, the object of the infinitive is dead
incapable of semiotic reciprocation. By contrast, my sorrows are live; and the
unit objective to drown my sorrows engages my current self with my past self in
the emergence of my future self or my idea of myself with the reality of myself in
the generation of the circumstances of myself. This engagement with other life
(actual or metaphorical) serves well to display character on stage because it
actually generates character in life.30 A unit objective driven by interaction with
biotic or post-biotic things potentially creates living consequence; it compounds
itself so as to take on aspects of Chauncey Wrights cosmic weather wherein the
whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. And so, sorrow, struggle and soul
and all my notions of myself, but also Leopolds mountain, the heart of New York,
the great Czech nation etc., as well as such abstractions as justice, motherhood and
the American Way, are all factors of Wrights weather and serve well as living
objects.
Non-living objects we use obliquely. I may well use the drinking of beer within
the intent to seduce my colleague. But it is the response to the attempted seduction,
the interaction with other life (or life), which generates signs that can be publicly
read and culturally compounded. This reciprocity, this reading of my reading, is
the semiotic compounding upon which Wright centered the emergence of sentience,
James centered psychological competence within sentient beings, and Peirce
centered pretty much everything.31

30
This does not ignore the role that non-biotic objects play. Nearly any physical object can function as an
expressive object; i.e. in the rate, arc, and emphasis of his twirling, Charlie Chaplin used his cane as a
tool to express a vast range of psychological states (e.g., Pudovkin 1958).
31
This touches on a disagreement between Peircian semiotics and biosemiotics. For Peirce, all
interactions, including four fundamental physical forces, are eventually subsumed by the semiosphere.
Biosemioticians generally argue that semiosis is limited to living things (of a sufficient complexity), and
that while the language of cause and effect perfectly applies in non-living interactions, it does not within
biotic (and I add: post-biotic) interactions wherein reciprocity generates semiotic agency, which is not
reducible to simple causation.
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

In all this, as with the Pragmatists, Stanislavski rejected both the error of categorical
abstraction as well as that of false endpoints: i.e., it is entirely possible to intend
(consciously or not) to seduce a colleague and win back my wifes love and save
mountain and drown my sorrows simultaneously. However, these efforts are unlikely
to succeed; such disparate action is not possible without abstracting beyond our bodily
capacity. This is commonly aggravated by our tendency to conflate subjective focus
with (so-called) objective categories, which are absolutist distinctions (that falsely
include me and my). Likewise, for Stanislavski (as for Darwin et al), endpoints are
always natural both for his work, which he revised until death, and within his work:
i.e., every objective successfully achieved, every artifice enacted or formed be it
physical or ideal, simply renews the interaction that is all that actually is.
Real characters natural or staged continually adapt their unit objectives to fit
their situation. As our objectives morph, unbroken lines of action create through
events wherein action generates all sorts of objects, natural and artificial, physical
and psychical. And this reveals the super-objective, which is the minding arc of
some cycle of events, but which generally remains subconscious even if the unit
objectives should rise to consciousness. A well-honed subconscious supplies the
attentive, disciplined signal man [who] is your sense of truth which co-operates
with your sense of faith in what you are doing, to keep you on the right track32 A
track, Stanislavski reiterates, which emerges consequentially to physical semiosis. In
life as on stage, my own super-objective to win back my wifes love may well be
unknown to me but conscious or not, it becomes visible within various unit
objectives, such as to provoke her or to placate her, etcetera as expressed through
such disparate actions as washing dishes, purchasing gifts, flirting gently, smashing
crockery, etcetera. Such an arc might also be to earn the respect of my father, with
the unit objective to conquer Baghdad or to prove Richard Dawkins wrong. These
all bleed into each other, mostly within the subconscious which is generally
where signs are read and minding happens, but from which the objective artifice of
so-called self-consciousness emerges, and of which it is constructed.
What is important for Stanislavskis purposes as well as our own, is that such
semiotic interactions feed each other, compound each other so as to create heritages
of signaling pathways (patterns or codes) along with heritages of canalized
developmental potential (coherent interpretive systems). But also, what we
commonly call our selves is an artifice constructed within a vast unknowable
semiosis, which is at once heritage, interaction, and consequence. Moreover, while
here and now we consciously postulating upon semiotics, we can only access
semiosis by jiggering and jollying our subconscious selves. Peirce called this the
abductive inference, and hoped it could be trained to answer to logic. Stanislavski
seemed to think this impossible, but founded a methodology by which it could
answer to nature.33

32
Stanislavski (1948), pg. 139, Italics original
33
In my experience, working actors tend to ignore the last chapter of Stanislavskis An Actor Begins
On the threshold of the subconscious, yet scholars place his discussion of character as a construct of
unconsciousness at the center of his approach. E.g., the actors obligation is not to yield to the
capriciousness of the inspired subconscious, but consciously to bring the subconscious to heel. This then is
the central paradoxical idea in Stanislavsky: to structure that which by definition is unstructured.
(Maxwell 2004, pg. 96)
 G. Ostdiek

The study [of the subconscious] is a fundamental part of our system. Our
conscious mind arranges, and puts in a certain amount of order into, the
phenomena of the external world that surround us. There is no sharply
drawn line between conscious and subconscious experience. Our con-
sciousness often indicates the direction in which our subconscious
continues to work. Therefore, the fundamental objective of our psycho-
technique is to put us in a creative state in which our subconscious will
function naturally.
It is fair to say that this technique bears the same relation to subconscious
creative nature as grammar does to poetry. It is unfortunate when grammatical
considerations overwhelm the poetic. This happens too often in the theatre, yet
we cannot do without grammar.34
Likewise, Stanislavski regularly returns to issues of communion, both individual
and cultural, and aspects of metaphorical evolution that result in the actual binding
across scales that makes individuality possible:

When the director came in he turned to Vassili and asked: With whom or with
what are you in communion at this moment? Vassili was so absorbed in his
own thoughts that he did not immediately recognize the purport of the
question. I? he replied, almost mechanically. Why, not with anyone or
anything. You must be a marvel, was the Directors joking remark, if you
are able to continue in that state for long.35

For Stanislavski, the pluralism of communion, the act or instance of sharing,

is as necessary for life as it is for cognition. This sentiment also appears in the
empirical unitarianism of James (and his neutral monism and mind/body
psychology), the ontological trinitarianism of Peirce36 (and his cenopythagorean
categories, semiotic logic and community of inquirers), and the cosmic weather of
Chauncey Wright.37 When communion functions in absolute natural coherence, it
results in part in a particular kind of knowing, which is Stanislavskis emotional
memory. In this, the animal faith of George Santayana fits neatly with the faith
and sense of truth that Stanislavski uses to depict a natural knowing which is a
natural acting. For it is musculature/emotional communion or body/mind
connection, which is the heritage of sentiment made bodily object, that is first
and most deeply inscribed within human and other animal physicality, and the last
to be lost to memory dysfunction. It is no coincidence that almost the only person
cited in all of Stanislavskis published work is most noted for precisely this
realization: i.e. Ribots law.38

34
Stanislavski (1948), pg. 266
35
Stanislavski (1948), pg. 182
36
For Peirce communion is necessary for all being, for James it is only necessary for living being. While
Peirces pansemiotics is logically coherent, it is (perhaps) empirically absurd. By contrast, Jamess
postulation that living being is synonymous with minding being represents a significant contribution to
biosemiotic thought.
37
Ostdiek (publication pending) Minding Signs: the semiotics of Chauncey Wrights Psycho-zoology
38
See, for example, Frankland and Bontempi (2005)
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

Charles Tilly

With these two years of drill, Stanislavskis students are prepared to begin producing
theater, and his lessons change focus accordingly. For our purposes, the next stage is
the one in which an actively subjective self is engaged within the social repertoire of
a specific culture, with the intent to reconstruct it in accord with some proposed
ideal. And already we see our next parallel with pragmatic semiotics. In post-biotic
phenomena, the formation of a proposition is an act of origination; and so to propose
a better culture is a means by which an individual re-constructs her own social
interactions, and hence, herself. For Charles Tilly, neither practicality nor force of
means can accomplish this kind of effort, but applied semiotics can and does. In
calling our attention to countless thousands of situations of interaction, reciprocity,
and claims of mutuality with a view towards pragmatic consequence, of mutuality
with a view towards pragmatic consequence, Tilly demonstrates how cultural
novelty originates as WUNC39 displays within appeals to a greater whole. Success
is not countable in terms of direct causal events, but by the ability to throw off
spandrels, to generate bounded, indeterminate, transactive consequence. This is all
part and parcel to his definition of social movements as bounded contingent,
interactive performances by multiple and changing actors.40
Tillys work largely consists of proposed explanations of social phenomena set
within a vast array of instances of human history, which stand as evidence for his
notions. He offers a few items of great importance to the claims I make for
Stanislavskis semiotics. The first is Tillys definition of an actor as any set of living
bodies (including a single individual) to which human observers attribute coherent
consciousness and intention.41 In the manner of classical Pragmatism, Tilly claims
that collectives can have living consequence. A trade union hasnt consciousness
in any coherent biological sense, but we readily attribute conscious intention to
unions. And indeed they play a part as a post-biotic actor within social transaction.
Likewise, Tilly never argues that its culture all the way down,42 but that upon
some sufficient level of complexity it becomes culture all the way up at least so
far as we are able to discern. However he does see culture at least part way down: we
also commonly attribute intention to blatantly metaphorical aspects of our own
selves. I.e., when my heart leads my head, it acts and I follow.
Second, we turn to Tillys definition of identity as: an actors experience of a
category, tie, role, network, group or organization, coupled with a public
representation of that experience [which] often takes the form of a shared story, a
narrative.43 Identity can either be embedded, that is, result from selective
fortification of certain social ties and divisions at the expense of others,44 or
detached wherein ones identity has less to do with individual social ties and more
to do with the social ties at the scale of some greater actor, be it church, race,
nation, etcetera. Again, we see Tilly dealing with post-biotic phenomena (the many

39
Tilly et al. (1999), pg. 261 Worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment
40
Tilly et al. (1999), pg. 256
41
Tilly (1998b), pg. 456
42
Compare, for example, David Hamiltons evolutionary economics and Stephen Hawkings turtles
43
Tilly (1996), pg. 7
44
Tilly (1998a), pg. 218
 G. Ostdiek

identities of a single self) as a scale-thick complex formed of semiotics (the many

readings of the self) as well as pragmatics (the consequences of the experience of
the self). For Tilly, as for most pragmatists, it is absurd to fetishize individualism.45
Just as no living thing can exist in total isolation, no self can be contained without
killing it (re: Stanislavski above). Likewise, for Tilly as for James, a man has as
many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of
him in their mind.46 But also this number is forever uncountable for a man is also
an individual capable of recognizing his self.47 It is also pragmatically limited for at
its best todays self is tomorrows heritage. More, selves are always scale thick and
include all our notions of hearth and heart, but also: a mans self is the sum total of
all that he CAN call his. 48
This brings us to a third point (or vital corollary) the dispelling of two false
notions:
For reasons that will turn out to be crucial to an explanation of the social action
involved, social movement activists themselves promulgate these mistaken ideas
more or less deliberately. The first idea is that social movements are solidaristic,
coherent groups, rather than clusters of performances. The second is that social
movements have continuous, self-contained life histories in somewhat the same
sense that individuals and organizations have life histories.49
Such claims are a constructive artifice. In pretending an absurd coherence to their
efforts, social activists (collectively but often unconsciously) ply the unit objective: to
strengthen their hand. But as Tilly reminds us, coherence is relative, really relative it
is an actual set of relations within some actual situation. To act as if their society is
akin to a biological individual may help (or it may well harm) the self-identity of
movement adherents (as individuals and as a group), but the claim bears no relation to
the actual situation. Individuals do not evolve; a species does but only as individuals
thrive and reproduce as humans, this happens best when individuals and cultures
alike metaphorically evolve. Likewise, a cluster of performances is more or less
deliberately self-aware actions of cultural re-construction; such a repertoire is a set of
combinations of interactions chosen from what was made available by the previous
history of interactions of some contiguous set of social actors. A social repertoire is a
coherent post-biotic living thing; though it shares certain similarities with actual
living things, the two are neither identical nor is one reducible to the other.
While social movements do not consist of continuous, self-contained life
histories in the same sense that organisms do, they do lay down coherent histories
within their boundaries. [They] involve complex encounters among changing
actors, [wherein] what happens early constrains what happens later.50

45
Dewey being the notable exception
46
James (1890), vol. 1, pg. 294, italics original
47
Any individual who recognizes himself generates a new image of himself in his mind, thereby
generating a new social self which is a new self. (Ostdiek 2010)
48
James (1890), vol. 1, pg. 291, emphasis and italics original, not only his body and his psychic
powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and
works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions.
49
Tilly et al. (1999), pg. 256
50
Tilly et al. (1999), pg. 257
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

As in pragmatism, actors are scale-thick sets of consequences. This is part of the

evolutionary aspects of Tillys social theory, wherein social objects are contingently
stable things at best, habituated, relative and canalized. E.g., Tillys social sites are
interactive and evolutionary performances:
New Performances arise chiefly through innovation within existing performances,
but tend to crystallize, stabilize, and acquire visible boundaries once they exist. The
evidence fully documents innovation within existing performances as well as
routinization of such innovations as the petition march, the street demonstration,
and the public meeting.51
Semiotics, wherein representamen generates relations (which store histories), is
entirely presumed within Tillys work and seldom explicated. This is most clearly
seen in his definition of social movement as:
A sustained challenge to power holders in the name of a population living
under the jurisdiction of those power holders by means of repeated public
displays of that populationss worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment.52
All to frequently, sociological commentary on Tilly identifies the objects of
WUNC as worthy of investigation, and ignores the more vital aspect: repeated
displays, which are deliberately crafted (artificial) acts of signing intended to
reconstruct the public. Tilly consistently describes social actors (including but not
limited to persons) as emerging from semiotic interaction even if he seldom used
the term. He likewise describes the abstracted constructs of worthiness and
commitment as emerging from semiotic interaction and playing their roles as social
actors. We do, after all, readily ascribe intention to just such meaning laden terms (i.e.,
Justice Demands). Within this artificiality as within natural processes, the question
of how interaction becomes object is a question of how relations store history. Tilly
begins his answer by reiterating:
My question concerns relations among social locations not just persons but
also jobs, organizations, communities, networks, and other such sites, just so
long as they include some distinguishing properties and coordinating structure.
It rests on the assumption that individuals as such do not constitute the bedrock
of social life, but emerge from interaction as other social locations do.53
The larger question is broken into two parts: how does the history of a social
relation impinge on subsequent activations of that relation? and how does
interaction within a given relation transform that relation? We have already found a
few of many parallel answers: first, signs function only by limitation. By opening
one possibility we necessarily close others. Second, Stanislavskis artificial
construction of character out intentionality in conjunction with through events
wherein relations generate their objects. And third is Peirces semiotic ontogenesis: a
sign in firstness is an unknowable potential of relating, in secondness it is in action,
in trying, in effort and selection, and a sign in thirdness is made object

51
Tilly (2008), pgs. 117145
52
Tilly et al. (1999), pg. 257
53
Tilly (2000), pg. 721
 G. Ostdiek

constructed Dewey would say. Whenever a sign-in-thirdness happens, it is the

transformation of the interaction of relating, which is secondness, into a novel
object; whereupon it becomes some thing with a novel potential for relating i.e. it
becomes an original firstness.
For his part, Tilly offers us three examples typical of bad answers found
throughout human thought. The first is grounded in neo-platonism and belief in
absolute individuality, the second is grounded in behaviorism and belief in mono-
causal, mono directional effect from the environment to the living thing, and the
third is grounded in cultural mysticism and belief in eternal archetypes. He calls this
last set of answers worse than the other two, for it combines their defects. In their
place, he offers us creative interaction and cultural ecology. Tillys definition of
creative interaction is closer to Wright than Peirce: only some interactions compound
themselves, become more than the sum of their parts, and take on aspects of cosmic
weather. This necessarily involves a semiotic leaping of and binding across multiple
scales of living things, and results in the emergence of some new, novel, way of
living being. On the human scale(s), this proceeds as:
improvised interaction, surprise, incessant error and error correction,
alternation between solo and ensemble action, and repeated responses to
understanding shared by at least pairs of players. After the fact, participants
and spectators create shared stories of what happened, and striking improvisa-
tions shape future performances. If we could explain how human beings bring
off such improvisatory adventures, we could be well on our way to accounting
for how relations store histories in contentious repertoires 54
The second aspect is co-equal to the first; cultural ecology is a consequence of
how:
Social life consists of transactions among social sites, some of them occupied
by individual persons, but most of them occupied by shifting aspects or
clusters of persons. None of the sites contains all the culture all the shared
understandings on which transactions in its vicinity draw. But transactions
among sites produce interdependence among extensively connected sites,
deposit related cultural material in those sites, transform shared understandings
in the process, and thus make large stores of culture available to any particular
site through its connection with other sites. Relations store histories in this
dispersed way.55
Tilly argues: if genetic, evolutionary, or neurophysiological theorists would take
the storage of histories by relations seriously, they might supply the breakthrough
that has so far eluded workaday sociologists. Tillys desired study is precisely that
of biosemiotics. A great strength of the biosemiotic approach is the ease with
which it stitches together science and the humanities. In this, it unites Tillys four
methods of informational interaction56 into the very superior stories around which
he centers self-consciousness. For Stanislavski and Tilly alike, the telling of such

54
Tilly (2000), pg. 723
55
Tilly (2000), pg. 723
56
Tilly (2006), re: conventions, stories, codes, and technical accounts
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

stories is an artifice, act or pose, a presentation generally crafted in and of the

subconscious. Stanislavski, Tilly and the classical pragmatists find the only source of
such stories within living, and living, need. Here we find a major element of
Wrights contribution to Pragmatic thought, which we can call the pragmatic a
priori the demands of life whereupon the subjective sense (self-conscious and not)
originates.57 Here too we find the grounding sense of Deweys aesthetic ontology,
Peirces semiotic ontogenesis, and Jamess mind/body psychology and radical
empiricism. Like James and Peirce but unlike Dewey, both Tilly and Stanislavski
consider aspects as well as collectives of self conscious living things as having
their own needs, and playing their part in the social drama that renders interactions
into relationships by and through biological and post-biological history. Like
Dewey and James but unlike Peirce, Tilly and Stanislavski both hold that living is its
own reward; that nothing comes of life but more living, that culture compounded is
more culture. For all pragmatic thinkers, including Tilly and Stanislavski, a person
is whatever we (artificially) cobble together out of our (natural) relational histories.

Conclusion

Much has been made of the notion that either one finds culture all the way down,
or it is scientifically irrelevant. My contention is rather different. In its widest
meaning, including an organisms physical and psychical being, culture is a
consequential phenomenon that science must take into account. Also, there is some
threshold below which the integrating patterns that define the term simply do not
exist. Precisely where to draw this line is beyond my ability to reckon, but it lies
somewhere between non-living things and living things of a sufficient complexity to
enter into a semiotic repertoire.
When we divorce Stanislavskis approach from his practical goal of training
actors to work naturally, and look at it as a theoretical semiotics, we find he offers
a technique with which we may better isolate the objective artifice of self-awareness,
and distinguish it from natural subjectivity. That the self is an object of interaction
needs no defense. The point is that it is an artifice of social sites, constrained by its
ability to perform, to play off other living (and living) actors, draw propositions out
of circumstance, improvise, focus, etc. Success is marked by muscular-emotional
calm, which is respite within the struggle for life.
It may help us to understand life to think of it as a series of live performances, a
repertoire of interactive displays that consist of initiations via actions of signing, and
conclusions via the origination of objects of signs. Non-living objects can be read,
and also used as expressive objects within actions of signing, but the general failure
of non-living things to enter into reciprocal signing relations renders them incapable

57
Wright (2000), pg. 43 The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer and pg. 199 Evolution of self-consciousness;
also Ostdiek (2010), pg. 28: With respect to C.I. Lewis, the pragmatic a priori may well be more
fundamental than his famed conception. I argue the concept originated with Chauncey Wright, for whom
the needs of living things (both biological or metaphorical) shapes their interactions, which shape (which
is) their being. These needs may be only perceptual (i.e., they may be sourced in the mind) but in this
perceiving both our bodies and minds take their actuality. To pragmatic thinkers, the only essential a priori
is living.
 G. Ostdiek

of joining in culture incapable of evolution, metaphorical as well as biological.

And yet, certain non-living things do enter into relationships capable of novel
origination. These post-biotic phenomena include aspects of a single self as well as
those of collective experience, and serve as actors in the social drama that is the
human equivalent to Darwins tangled bank. Tilly offers evidence that human
cultures (including the individual) result from exact complexes of interaction that are
artifices forged of metaphoric evolution.
Likewise, there may be great value in treating the knowing self as an artifice of
intentionality distinct from biological intentionality, and human systems of knowing
as constructs that follow upon and are constrained by biological patterns but function
as distinct, and distinctly post-biological, phenomena. The natural storage of
history by relations is uncognized. It is pure evo-devo, re-writing biological
morphology through accidents of reproduction with variation plus selection while
and also re-writing developmental pathways of semiotic action. This necessarily
results in the formation of subjective objects, which are complexes of
experience unlike other objects in that they can neither be known nor be, excepting
as they re-engage in experience. So-called self-consciousness, or awareness of ones
own object of subjectivity, is an artifice constructed within and of subconscious
semiotic (social/cultural) experience.
We access our own subjectivity not by pretending it away, but by
recognizing it as staged. A subject suffers needs, and moves to fill them.
Most living things improvise their actions in accord with momentary
opportunity thoroughly engaged within their umwelt. But a (nominally) self-
conscious living thing blocks out (frames or plans) her actions to fill needs she
thinks she experiences including needs of her own devising (even while her
culture and subconscious both seek to fill their own needs). It is the artifice of
this that generates the self-knowing subject distinct from the objects of knowledge,
the ideas of which it is comprised. Subjectivity is ubiquitous to life, yet cannot
attain self-awareness sans the unnatural society of post-biotic actors: i.e., Tillys
social sites, which also serve as Stanislavskis living objects. Our sorrows, our
societies and our selves are all equally contrived, yet our own very real sense of
self is formed by how thickly and well we ply them. There is nothing trite to the
argument that to be self-aware is to accept culpability in the construction of our
very own myriad of selves.
Within our bodies, our cultures and our minds, successful relations store
interactions as historical objects, which are thereby re-subjected to selection.
The better we are able to identify the semiotic reciprocities that feed our
subconscious minds, the better we thrive. This applies to all our senses of self
as well as Leopolds brave mountain. On every scale, interactions become
meaningful by facing down the fresnels and kliegs, and by doing it well, by
rocking the house, by mastering the show and not just in our own minds.
Ideas have needs of their own, and seek to fill them. Ideas want to perform
well as ideas, with no regard for the wants of the mind wherein they happen. The
social expression of such ideational excellence is the telling of Tillys superior
stories, through which we construct selves out of social sites. Stanislavskis
pragmatic semiotics offers a method by which the artifice of all this can be grasped
by any thinking person.
The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

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Note: Various English writers spell both Constantin and Stanislavski in various ways. I use the most
common, but maintain the inconsistencies in the references.