Firstness is for Peirce a primary ontological category denoting possibility, unqualified generality and monadic reality. Experience correlates with Secondness, the category denoting brute existence, duality, opposition, and conflict. Consciousness of the future correlates with Thirdness, which is the category denoting mediation, qualified generality, habit and continuity.
The table below shows some possible metaphorical correlates of the various aspects of our experience with Peirce's three ontological categories. I shall not, however, go into these in detail here[6].
A Cartesian, dualistic view of consciousness (one that neglects the reality of the interrelatedness of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness) tends to emphasise a stream of awareness punctuated by Jamesian `flights' and `perchings', and thus fails to understand the basic forms of embeddedness that surround the self. The `self' as we know it emerges from the presemiotic realm of feeling (non-categorised sensation), by becoming entangled in binary oppositions of Secondness that emerge from the realm outside of consciousness. The drive toward the open future of Thirdness gives the self a set of general habits and social norms that help control the multiple impactions coming from the domain of experience.
Feeling is intentional, pointing outward to objects. Firstness moves by its own inner momentum toward Secondness. Any oppositional structure within experience or Secondness will have its inner momentum moving toward forms of mediation and enhanced generality (Thirdness). The self seems then for Peirce to be a transient object located at the point in time and space where the three categories (or structures of being) are most intensely instantated. The self is seen as the `clearing' within which we can witness the actual, if elusive, transmigration from Firstness to Secondness to Thirdness. Feeling, or Firstness is central to this process because it forms a background within which other cognitive acts can obtain. In a number of other instances Peirce refers to Firstness in more phenomenological terms as `ground'.
The principle of continuity, then, denies that there is any break between matter and mind. Peirce applies the principle of continuity to the correlation between the individual and the social order, insisting there is no break either between individual selves. Each self participates in the fuller social self and can only manage to separate itself from this pregiven continuum through ignorance.
The final manifestation of continuity is the most dramatic of all. The social self seems in many ways to be primary, and the most extended aspect of the self, but Peirce sees yet another dimension. This final dimension is what he refers to as `spiritual consciousness'. The problem is however, that we by and large live in ignorance, or forgetfulness, of this continuity between the social and the spiritual consciousness. The self as we are aware of it in our day to day lives generally posesses some sort of underlying sense of its finite consciousness floating on a vast awareness potential that is vague and general. We tend, however, to ignore this spiritual consciousness precisely because of its vagueness and generality. Peirce nonetheless attributes to vagueness the highest possible ontological status. So insofar as the vague is most general, and insofar as the general is the real, then it follows that the vague is the most real. As Corrington points out in this connection, it makes no sense to talk of `degrees of reality', but he also emphasises that a language of this kind can be of great value in a pragmatic context where we are concerned with rediscovering ignored or forgotten orders of continuity.
Peirce to all extents and purposes deconstructs consciousness and the individual ego, so the self is merely left as the traces of its idiosyncratic and fragmentary experiences of the complex semiosis of reality, which manifest themselves through the ideas that emerge into Secondness from the Firstness of unexperienced sensation. It is these brief semiotic flashes and sequences that constitute what `we' perceive as `our' field of consciousness. By way of explanation of this infinite dynamic systemic complexity, Peirce introduces a rather evocative analogy between consciousness and a lake:
`...that our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at certain depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward impulse which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.' [CP 7.547]
At the bottom of the lake can be found previous experiences of the self, gathered together in `skeletal sets'. These vague, dimly lit clusters of the unconscious have the ability of attracting other materials into their orbit. These deeper layers of the lake may also be brought up into the forefront of consciousness again - by acts of purpose or self control - regaining at the same time their lost energy and intensity. There is a flow of energy moving in both directions within, or through, if you will, the `self' as we are aware of it. As an image from the depths of the unconscious moves toward the surface of consciousness, it gains in intensity and energy. As it moves back into the unconscious again, it loses intensity and energy, but does not become inactive, since unconscious processes of assimilation and integration[7] continue (jfr. skeletal sets below), and can produce quite different effects when they emerge into the consciousness once more in different forms. This process of movement between the conscious and unconscious is in fact anti-conservative, since it seems to allow for a genuine increase in energy and order under the impress of self-control (or `constraint').
The lake of consciousness is constituted by personal and prepersonal elements, each of which is shaped by the skeletal sets that lie far beneath the surface of the water - in the unconscious. The laws of continuity and association, working through resemblance, contiguity, and contrast, guide the formation of the unconscious gestalts which are thus constantling undergoing modification on the basis of experience. By an effort of will and self control, the individual can bring reformed materials from the bottom of the lake back to the surface of consciousness. Ideas moving upwards increase in energy and intensity, and new constellations of ideas formed in the dimness and vagueness of the unconscious emerge into view. External experiences fall constantly like raindrops on the lake and replenish the self with fresh supplies of signs and interpretants. If we introduce a wider `ecological', evolutionary oriented perspective; extending the metaphor of the lake and the raindrops and linking it in with the idea of the greater circle of being that constitutes the Earth's ecosystem and with the evolution and development of human culture within the horizon of this ecosystem, it is quite easy to see that many of these external experiences (drops of rain) will not only represent the many more or less random physical signs and events produced by more or less autonomous processes in nature, but also an infinite number of intentionally generated signs and interpretants belonging to the collective consciousness of humanity that are constantly being absorbed, forgotten, recycled, and recreated as new forms of signs and interpretants. In this way there is a constant growth in complexity within the whole system, and to which each individual `self' both belongs, and contributes.
The question of the scientist as `participant observer', or `subject-object' in relation to one's own field of study is a vital one, and one that is central for all fields of research. It has, however, been mostly debated and foregrounded within fields such as the social sciences and anthropology, while the natural and technical sciences have to a large degree chosen to ignore this particular issue. My ongoing PhD project is an investigation into how textual and interactional norms change when novice scientific authors collaborate with one another in distributed virtual environments. I have chosen to use an ethnographically oriented approach to this particular study. Since I as researcher will necessarily need to involve myself in various ways in the constiotution of the virtual social field which will encompass the main object of study - text- and interaction norm-change - I see little or no point in adopting a so-called `objective' stance, where the researcher attempts to instigate an investigation of some phenomenon or other without exerting an influence on what is being studied.
The same applies to the issue of how to collect data to document and describe what happens. By myself taking part in the constitution of the virtual environment, and at the same time `logging' in various ways everything that happens to me there, I hope to obtain authentic, continuous `on-line' data that I can use to develop an ethnographic narrative description of the evolving processes of norm-constitution and change, with myself `present' as actor in this life-world.
To briefly illustrate what one kind of involvement of myself as subject within the horizon and life-world of my object of investigation involves, I have included below a short excerpt from a transcript of a meeting held in the middle of October in a so-called `MOO' (Multi-user dialogue, Object Oriented). This particular virtual environment - of which there are an increasing number accessible by means of Internet - houses a small community of media researchers based in a textually generated `virtual spatial environment' called HyperHallOFame, which has been constructed by two researchers in the larger virtual environment ofMedia-MOO, based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA.
I did not `personally' take part in this particular meeting (due to the fact that it took place at 9pm EST; that is at 3 a.m. Norwegian time, or GMT-1 hour), but rather participated at second-hand merely as a textual referent in the on-going discourse, i.e. highly `virtually'. In the excerpt I have included below, some of the participants are in the process of discussing a request I had made some time prior to the meeting to one of the convenors by e-mail, where I asked that he bring up the issue of whether it would be possible to change the time frame for the next meeting so that I could attend `virtually in person'. For the time being I will let the transcript speak for itself:
Now, I will not begin to go into detail here about the technology that makes virtual meetings of this kind possible, nor will I perform any form of detailed textual or statistical analysis on the language variant that is evidenced by this transcript. I prefer instead to draw your attention to the fact that what we are looking at here is a representation by means of written language of a living process that is neither a metalinguistically based description of that process, nor a reduction of that process to an arbitrary transcription system for linguistic analysis. It is merely a textually structured (re)presentation of a written variant of the dynamic open system of the English language `in fluxu', i.e. language in use by a community of interpreters in the process of constituting a new kind of social field. The field of social activity above is, then, being both construed and enacted - to use Michael Halliday's terms - by the interaction of communicative actions performed by the participants as they engage `virtually' in `real-time' written communication. `Virtual' (textually represented) representatives for a number of living participants located at various places around the world are her engaged in the constitution of a digitally mediated, virtual social field with its own unique set of evolving text-norm systems.
Where this particular social field differs most from `real life' systems and processes of the same kind - for instance those we find in similar kinds of social fields constituted outside of the digitally generated mediating environment presented above - is with regard to the relative `richness' of the register of significational devices available to the participants while they are constituting this social field. The relative lack of richness of the language system available to participants here may however only be attributed to the nature of the `closed', or `limiting' mediating medium itself; and does not imply anything about the implicit communicative potential of the dynamic open system of language, nor of the bio- and socio-cultural life-worlds and horizons of the human participants.
Though participants are to some extent able to `position' themselves socially by means of textual descriptions of themselves which other participants can access and read, and even though they can `emote' their feelings and actions by writing in descriptions of emotional reactions and non-verbal actions that other participants can see (see the transcript for examples of this), they are still restricted by technologically `constructed' time and memory constraints to making quite short utterances on each of the potential expression planes of language. These are obviously very important issues that will need to be taken seriously and accounted for in any study which aims to investigate the co-construction of virtual social realities, or `communities' of this kind.
What is one of the most interesting aspects of studying this kind of environment is, aside from the obvious potential in the longer term, the fact that an ongoing process of meaning-making is not only being enacted, but also being construed (by being `logged' in real time) as a written `text' by the participants themselves at the same time as they are producing it. The researcher who takes part in the development of the social world in the virtual environment, while at the same time studying its ontogenesis and evolution, has a unique opportunity to document and study his or her own processes of enaction and construal within the process. This opens for new perspectives on the phenomenology of scientific investigation.
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