Originally published in Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster by MacMillian, 1991

Dip him in the river who loves water.
from Blake's 'Proverbs of Hell'

Mythographers and anthropologists recognize the ancient presence of the Trickster figure, and according to Paul Radin in The Trickster (1972), he is the oldest of the mythic figures and a major proto-structure of the narrative hero. The Trickster is the undifferentiated hero who, in ludic form, is used to satirize the conventions of cultures whose narratives tell about him, and I have often referred to Trickster in this study as connected with the generation of marginal signs either as personal or cultural change, or as dissolution or growth. Still as one looks closely at Trickster he has an extended cultural role that participates in the full range of semiosis. Not only is Trickster closely identified with the culture hero who, in a more developed form, risks all and brings whatever sacred gifts a people use (in Levi-Strauss's pattern) to identify themselves as human beings, but in the shamanistic tradition the proto-priestly shaman is also often a Trickster figure: one who speaks the old animal languages, one who can change bodily forms, or one who always walks the edges of the Sacred and Profane to practice behaviors which to most 'normal' folk are insane, sacred or blasphemous. The shaman is the visionary of the tribe, who knows the secrets of dreams, the wisdom of the herbs and the paths to contact the spirits; that is, he or she knows the various semiotics of other states of consciousness.

As Joseph Campbell argues in The Power of Myth (1988), the experience of the shaman is intensely personal and authentic. It may be of service to the tribe, but this service will not have the dogmatic and institutional authority of the priest. Like Blake argued about Poetic Genius or Peirce about dreams, the shaman gives to the airy powers 'a local habitation and a name' which more literal minds will take as the Revealed Truth, indisputable by the authority of the Priest. But the authority of the shaman's vision will lie in its authenticity, and that is something which is culturally negotiated. He or she attends, directs and provides the rituals of sacred substances and sacred techniques which are the doorway to higher consciousness. He or she translates semiotically the old and new symbols of the resident culture and develops the Social Self through the resources of the Cultural Other.

Thus both Trickster and the shaman are of semiotic significance for several reasons. One is that the Trickster, in his rawest form, is pure ambivalence; he is always the border creature who plays at the margins of self, symbol and culture and who echoes the epigenetic ambivalences of any line of demarcation. The shaman too is a creature of the margins, but apparently one more in the service of culture than just a narrative personification of a culture's own marginalities. In fact, he may be as much in service of marginalities than he is culture, but nevertheless he stands at the margins and is perceived as helping the tribe to control the unknown on the other side. Like Trickster, he carries the mark of the non-cultural, but unlike Trickster, he is more culturally organised, a later cultural understanding of what marginality and ambivalence are. Yet both are methods and means of cultural instruction -- the Trickster more by example and satire, and the shaman more by the cannon of belief validated by experience. Each represents a different level of culture with different mythic functions, but the Trickster tends more to the animalistic and the character of narrative, while the shaman tends more to the cultural and the character of ritual. What one must remember is that at some point in the history of culture these are all more or less contiguous and not yet separated into to the more iconoclastic categories of post-Cartesian thought.

The second reason for Trickster and shaman forming a semiotic conglomerate is the genesis of mythos, ritual and narrative for the purposes of both teaching and satire. The shaman embodies the processes of instruction in the signs and symbols of specific cultural contexts and of transformation of those signs and symbols into human agents. The Trickster is the cultural vortex which allows the very process of transformation that Juri Lotman (1974) sees as the basic driver of cultural change. He embodies the processing of cultural materials from a state of non-culture to a state of cultural use, and the shaman is his ritualistic incarnation. Trickster is the symbol driver and shaper of the cultural impetus, for he is ontologically a creature of language. He speaks the language of the animals, he plays the language of forms and he focuses the language of his tribe. That is, in every way he is a semiotic generator of forms, languages, cultural concepts and context.

It is the jokes told about Trickster and the laughter of his audiences that fundamentally set human beings apart from their animal kin. They are the marks of human sign activity and creativity, a clear indication that signs and symbols have become multivalent enough to support complex states of consciousness. As Mark Twain said, 'Man is the only animal who laughs, or needs to', and both the laughter and the need to laugh are by virtue of the symbol system and human methods of knowing. So Trickster and his shamanistic incarnation are the cultural institutions of semiotic implicature to emphasise the limitations of the cultural matrix, the tensions of its semiotic processes and the role of human laughter as a defense against its self-generated paradoxes. Even Kristeva's semiotics of dialectical materialism ends on this function of laughter: 'Laughter is what lifts inhibitions by breaking through prohibition (symbolized by the Creator) to introduce the aggressive, violent, liberating drive.' (224) Trickster is a joker, one who laughs at his own pain and potential and the limitations of himself and his culture. His laughter (and ours) is the closure that comes with change and limitation either to find new signs or redeem the old ones.

Another reason for using Trickster is he is only a hero in undifferentiated form. He represents both the Cultural and Non-Cultural for his narrator and audience, and he does so by being undifferentiated. That is, he is marginal and participates in all the marginal activities of the culture -- sexuality, ritual, technique, explanation or discovery. Wherever the culture has drawn a line of demarcation, Trickster is there to probe the line and test the limits. Of course, laughter at his discomforture is culturally didactic, but it is also compensatory, for he reminds us that the cultural boundaries are arbitrary, and he releases the desire, at least vicariously, to challenge those boundaries. He both exercises and exorcises the negation of the Cultural Other.

Trickster becomes an agent of individuation, to use Jung's term; he is an agent of cultural growth. He allows one to meet, understand, grapple with and control the Shadow and unthought of the culture. He naturally grows from being a buffoon and joker to being a culture hero who will find the gifts of culture or slay the monsters that threaten the culture. But at that point Trickster has moved much too close to the cultural validation of the hero, and some of his eternal presence is damped. In earlier and more ambivalent stages, he is much closer to the individual and personal experience of culture than the Hero is. Although heroes may make great fantasy, daily life is probably much more marginal for all of us. Heroes may have great victories and great defeats; their very lives and activities may ring with significance, but for most of us, life is much closer to the edges of meaninglessness. Except for our dreams and fantasies, our lives usually consists of small victories and small defeats -- the whole panoply of domestic boredom. We are much more likely to see our lives as a series of cunning blunders, self-imposed traps, or fortuitous ventures than as cosmicly significant morality plays. So Trickster is also constant reminder of the marginality and liminality of our personal experience, and it seems quite logical that his model would be one that is followed by the shaman because it is so close to the individual experience to almost guarantee authenticity.

A fourth reason for using the shaman/trickster is the fact that he/she is a user of all the various methods of developing the cultural semiotic. The shaman/trickster utilises hallucinogens, stress methods, textual implicatures and dreams as devices for cultural change and validation. He stands in the exact same tensive relation to the culture theorised by the psycho-semiotics of depth psychologists as the polarities of human cultural mentality. She moves easily between the Primary and Secondary processes and utilises all the tensions between the preconscious and the unconscious. His Lacanian Real and Imaginary are put to the test in terms of the Symbolic Order by his vision quest. Her dying and rebirthing are archetypal transformations not only of the individual stuff, but often of the cultural stuff. He is on the edge of the Symbolic Order and the Collective Unconscious and participates in the non-cultural to renew the cultural. As Foucault (1973) argues, she faces the limits of culture and its unthought, bounded only by the finitude of Death, Desire and Law. Like the mystic, he seeks a permanent symbolic state that eternally renews the signs of the culture by recasting the entropic state of orthodoxy into a more viable and adaptive negentropy of signification. As an embodied dissipative structure of consciousness and culture, she is, thus, the symbol factory for the priest and worshiper and the sign factory for a culture's residents. Of course he may very well be regarded as a threat to the comforts and stabilities of cultural orthodoxy, but the trickster/shaman may also become, in the more 'civilized forms,' the prophet, the poet, the visionary, or if one allows a slight shift in terms, the dream walker searching the edges of culture for new materials.

  Trickster and Culture 

Paul Radin points out that Trickster is one of the most widespread 'expressions of mankind,' and he defines the Trickster as one who is 

Apparently Trickster is not just an undifferentiated narrative figure; he 'is primarily, an inchoate being of undetermined proportions, a figure foreshadowing the shape of man' (xxiv), and he represents a number of highly ambivalent and powerful things to cultures telling his stories. Trickster has all the complexity of an undifferentiated god and hero. In fact, as Radin points out, 'one must distinguish carefully between his consciously willed creative activities and the benefactions that come to mankind incidentally and accidentally, through the Trickster's activities' (125) because his very ambivalence raises the question of whether Trickster is a deity in a state of decay or a hero 'represented either as human or animal'. (125)

Whatever the answer, it is obvious that Trickster is a world straddler -- part human, part animal, part human, part divine, part hero and part buffoon, and his ambivalence provides the energies which allow him to serve human cultural purposes. Trickster's ambivalence is the source of his complexity, for out of it arises an immense amount of laughter and social satire. He is a creature of irony and laughter that Radin believes represents part of the reality constructs of peoples who tell his story. In short, Trickster is a complex figure whose exploits, situations, discoveries and difficulties to provide a text for cultures to explore their own limitations.

Such a reading is certainly a psycho-cultural reading of Trickster, but the treatments of him have been as complex as he is. Although I am primarily interested in Trickster's semiotic role, he also has been regarded as prototype of the culture hero (Radin), a figure of the creativity and chaotic energies of the species (Kristeva and Kerenyi), the portrayal of infantile appetites in a process of individuation (Jung), the prototype of a spiritual questor and the shaman (Jung, Campbell, 1969), the functioning scapegoat for cultural blame (Yamaguchi, 1979) and the source of cultural violence (Girard, 1972). So I will comment on these briefly to relate them to the semiotic role of Trickster playing at the marginality of cultures.

Radin's account of the Winnebago Trickster figure is one of the more complete accounts of Trickster, and Radin uses the Winnebago narratives to examine the role of Trickster in maintaining (and adapting) Winnebago Culture. Although Radin recounts two of four narrative cycles in great detail, it is obvious that Trickster develops more fully in the later cycles. From the ambivalence of a stupid and cunning explorer in the Trickster cycle (the first) to the more godlike discoveries and inventions of the Hare cycle (the second), Trickster eventually becomes a cultural hero in the Red Horn cyle (the third) who struggles with giants to subdue the earth. In the Twins cycle (the fourth) he splits into the Twins (Flesh and Stump) whose familial adventures are preparatory to make the earth ready for habitation. Trickster's double role of fool and culture hero is, according to Radin, 'the outstanding characteristic of the overwhelming majority of trickster heroes wherever they are encountered . . .. Trickster is represented as the creator of the world and the establisher of culture, and there is no fixed sequence in the order in which the episodes connected to him are told.' (125)

It is true that elements of the cultural hero in the Trickster cycle are neither clearly developmental nor evolutionarily sequential, but the emphasis of the four cycles is very much the emphasis of a culture hero who grows in cultural stature. The infantile Trickster has to learn to control his physical appetites, to understand his body parts and to find his place in the scheme of nature, but the Hare Trickster performs the 'classical' cultural hero functions in the discovery of tools and foods, the articulation of sexual roles and the proper cultural patterns governing behavior. Of course Trickster often uproariously errs rather than invents, he often breaks strictures rather than illustrating them, but then this is part of the ironic nature of his chaotic laughter and appetites.

However although Trickster's comedic aspect often is buried in the later cycles, there is something always slightly atavistic about the Trickster complex, something which hints at an undifferentiated past. As his heroic or demonic qualities become more articulated, the Trickster narrative, even in its cyclical development, embraces a fundamental ambivalence for humankind about its own cultural growth. As Radin puts it, 'It embodies the vague memories of an archaic and primordial past, where there as yet existed no clear-cut differentiation between the divine and the non-divine.' (168) There is no clear differentiation between the culturally foolish or cultural discovery because the Trickster complex straddles both the spiritual and material resources of culture and humankind is wont to be anxious over both. 'For this period Trickster is the symbol. His hunger, his sex, his wandering, these appertain neither to the gods nor to man. They belong to another realm, materially and spiritually, and that is why neither the gods nor man know precisely what to do with them.' (168) So Trickster's humor always has a hint of terror in it, for his humor hints at the sensation of an older, less tame realm, and his cultural advances may be as threatening as they are productive. That is probably the reason why the cultural hero must go into the wilderness, the uncultured lands, to claim or steal the cultural treasure.

Moreover even when the role of the hero is culturally serious, Trickster's ambivalent humor will often be embodied in the sidekick, or foil, to remind one that there are wildernesses in the cultural mind as much as in an unknown land. As Radin says,

So the Trickster narrative functions archetypally to remind human beings of the margins of 'civilizations' and the undifferentiated situations from which cultural values derived, and he represents something fundamentally human about how human beings are acculturated.

The Cognitive Model: Trickster as Shaman

 For Jung, Trickster's ambivalence is a fundamental process of both personal and cultural individuation, for he identifies Trickster with both spirituality and the reversal of hierarchies. (Radin, 1972:195) Archetypally, what Jung seems to recognise is Trickster's sense of, and attraction to, disorder operating in Individuation. That is, the only way one can deal with the limitations of one's life is to make those limitations conscious and to explore them even if such exploration is only by the reversals of hierarchies narratively or dramatically. Through such reversals, Trickster is able to explore the unconscious, and thereby aid in the discovery of new spiritual truths. He is a walker of cultural boundaries whose very ambivalent nature participates in the old divine order and the new human order sometimes with the magic of gods, the stupidity of animals and the cleverness of the human.

This view is parallel with Karl Kerenyi's view, who sees Trickster as 'the spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries,' (185) But Kerenyi tends to emphasise the antinomian qualities of Trickster in that 'disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is Trickster. His function in an archaic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, and experience of what is not permitted.' (185) However both of these views emphasise the spiritual nature of the Trickster, for he gives form and experience to the unarticulated aspects of culture. As Jung puts it, he 'is represented by countertendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality, of a puerile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves in spiritualistic seances . . .'. (Radin, 1972:202) Jung further identifies this countertendency with the Shadow as the unknown and unclaimed aspects of the personality which are descended from some 'numinous collective figure' in the collective conscious and unconscious of culture.

So Trickster 'gradually breaks up under the impact of civilization, leaving traces in folklore which are difficult to recognize. But the main part of him gets personalized and is made an object of personal responsibility.' (Radin, 1972:202) Trickster embodies both the spiritual past and cultural future in the guise of personal responsibility and respones. Not only is he the incarnation of the individual and cultural, but he is also the incarnation of the Sacred and Profane. Often the boundaries at which Trickster plays are the boundaries of the Sacred, for the Sacred is only the non-temporal and non-cultural invested with spiritually positive qualities. Yet the very label of 'positive spiritual' qualities is a specific abstration of general 'spiritual' qualities which means there are also 'negative spiritual' qualities. In fact, the source of Trickster's power is his very familiarity with spiritual powers in general; so not only does he speak with the animals and embody the Other, but he also speaks the human language of dreams and visions and thereby is a medium for communications with the gods if not a part of the divine himself. He represents, as Jung argues, the Shadow, both personal and collective, both individual and cultural, and in the shadow lurks not only what is positive but what is negative.

  The Linguistic Model: Trickster as Artist

  Radin, Jung and Kerenyi are all aware of the literary nature of Trickster, and some of Trickster's complexity is obviously derived from his narrative role. That is, he is both a narrative figure and a narrative force, much the same way as he is both human and divine. His role as creator and generator of forms and his role with the 'languages,' human, animal and divine, make him a literary force of creation. He seems to participate in the Firstness of a kind of literary abduction as he walks the boundaries of the unarticulate. There he brings the qualia to sign status, he activates Eco's implicature (1984:89); he returns to the source of semiotic production as the semiotic chora. As the straddler of culture and non-culture, he represents the creative center of both the langue and the parole participating in both the limits of the system and the generative capacity of its individual users.

Thus Jung identifies Trickster with comedic inversion and the articulation of the unrecognised; he is the embodiment of things to be remembered and things to be discovered. Kerenyi identifies him with 'an unchanging, indestructible core' (Radin, 1972:174) of a 'picaresque mythology [which]. . .has always existed, only the proper name for it was lacking, and a scientific survey capable of grasping it in its essence.' (175) As the 'enemy of boundaries,' he enables us to express what has yet not been expressed; so the semiotic role for creative expression is quite clear.

Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), uses the Trickster construct to outline the evolutionary process and practice of signification and to argue that the process and practice of signification, in its poetic forms, seek to make the symbolic modes (of cultural signs) less opaque and 'real' by returning to the process of the semiotic. This returning destroys the cultural fiction of the transcendent ego or the speaking subject on which social constraints are based. Essentially what she does is to construct the subject as a trickster figure who eternally renews the semiotic process on which culture is based.  

Morris Peckham, in Man's Rage for Chaos (1967), makes a detailed literary and artistic case for the Trickster function, and although he never specifically uses the term, he, like Kerenyi, identifies the aesthetic mode as an enemy of boundaries. In contrast to the critical shibboleth that art is a quest for Order, Peckham argues that it is a quest for disorder that gives an adaptive tolerance for 'cognitive dissonance'. Much like Kristeva, he sees the function of artistic order as semiotic self-reflexiveness, or 'stylistic dynamism' as he calls it. 

But Peckham sees some artistic roles as demanding a disorientation (81) and attempts a semiotic understanding of that artistic disorientation by discussing the artificiality of artistic signs. In his view , the artistic sign, particularly in its cultural nature, has meaning but is primarily an 'empty' sign, one which has no direct correspondence to natural reality. Its investiture lies in its cultural association, and its pleasure lies in its ability to disrupt normal perception. It causes individuals to look anew in light of the disorientation of an imbalance between semiotic stability and dynamism, between an ever changing environment and a stabilised cultural map. In short, Peckham sees the disorienting sign as a part of evolutionary growth; as he says, 'For our purposes all that is necessary is the notion of cognitive frustration, the recognition that the organism can respond to disparities and the realisation that this response leads to further problem solving behavior.' (215)

Thus the vehicle for such paradoxical relations between Order and Chaos, between Change and Stability lies in 'the distinguishing character or attribute of the perceiver's role [as]. . .search- behavior focussed on awareness of discontinuites.' (220) This is the Trickster function, where 'Art, as an adaptational mechanism, is the reinforcement of the ability to be aware of the disparity between behavioral pattern and the demands consequent upon the interaction with the environment.' (314) Trickster in the artistic guise of play provides 'a rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation . . .'. (314) He models and strengthens 'the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and significant problem may emerge.' (314) In short, Trickster as 'Art is the exposure to the tensions and problem of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world.' (314)

Trickster's play at the margins and boundaries of culture allows human beings to find an adaptive way to handle their own 'cognitive dissonance' and to focus on the problems which arise because of the difference in reality and the cultural maps. Of course as a culture draws its maps more rigidly, the Trickster function is obligated to walk the cultural margins that much more persistently, and obviously the game of map and margin can escalate from bawdy humor, to irony, to satire and even to revolution as much as it can to evolution.

Since Trickster deals intimately with the spiritual forces of the universe, he is often portrayed as either the source of difficulties and or error, and his penchant for playing at the margins of culture make him quite libel to charges of disruption. His presentation of cognitive dissonance may, as a matter of fact, make him the source of evil, or at least the bearer of bad news for cultural maps. Thus Trickster's role is often transformed in that of scapegoat. Masao Yamaguchi (ISISSS, 1985) has re-examined Frazer's Golden Bough in light of the scapegoat function of Trickster, and like Rene Girard has concluded that the Trickster function is a way of dealing with violence and taboo in a culture. As Rene Girard points outs, in Violence and the Sacred (1972), Trickster is identified with the 'incarnations of sacred violence,' collective violence and the dualities of good and evil. (253-254) The laughter aimed at Trickster may not be the individuating activity Jung expects, rather it may be preparatory to the expulsion/sacrifice of a scapegoat to purge (and celebrate) a particular evil within a cultural map.

Such scapegoating is not contradictory to the Jungian pattern of individuation, but it does suggest something more repressive and sinister than evolutionary growth. Of course Girard's view is that violence is endemic to our species, and that this process is a way of handling that characteristic in ourselves. But I think it important to underscore that the 'violence' here is symbolic (even when it involves human sacrifice), and what is operating is a ritual for marginality of culture. Violence is surely a fundamental part of our history as a species, and our reliance on it is an important ethical issue for us. Still 'evil' and 'violence' are as much characteristics of marginality as ethical behavior, and the issue of Trickster's violence is a function of negative marginality.

Despite Peckham's contention, cultural Signs are not just empty signs; such a belief is based upon the mythos of reference. Our signs of evil and violence, our signs of sexual roles and appropriate social behavior, or our signs of the spiritual, the beautiful and the ugly carry much cultural import, and the Trickster function will always return to the 'chora,' to use Kristeva's term, of their creation. They will return to the abduction of Firstness, to use a Peircean term, and in that cultural turmoil is much energy. Thus the energies of Trickster can often be turned into something demonic, particularly in cultures which find it necessary to resist change.

The problem of change and stability are not small issues; they are systemic issues with which all systems of growth (that is, living systems) have to contend. The ambivalence of Trickster and his flirtations with marginality are ideal functions for portraying such systemic activity. So it is natural to associate Trickster with these various models of psycho-cultural activities. It is logical that Trickster would be a hero/protagonist who challenges the 'enemies' and discovers the 'friends' at the cultural margins. It is logical that he would demonstrate the activities of the sacred -- be they the paths of spiritual truth or sacred violence, and it is logical that as a creator, he would be enact the capacity of human beings to create abductive signs at the margins of their experience. His laughter may be very well be lessons in cognitive dissonance -- so much so that one of the more accurate definitions of our species is the 'animal who laughs because it hurts.'

 The most noticeable thing about Trickster is his sense of play. It is uproarious, childlike, chaotic, low-brow and in bad taste. From his experiences with the Laxative Bulb to his transparent cons, from making stone soup to becoming a woman, from his contest with his Penis to his playing with cultural mores, Trickster evokes all the laughter of gross jokes. Basically Trickster's sense of humor is not intellectual although it can and does occur in higher forms. It can be a bawdy, disrespectful humor whose intent, when it is conscious as in Zen Koans, is to manipulate the categories of the perceiver -- perhaps by absurdity, perhaps by outrage, perhaps by dissoance, but always with the discomforture of marginality.

This discomforture and the primal, gross quality of Trickster's humor often makes him all the more disreputable to those who wish to be validated by their cultural beliefs, particularly as those beliefs become increasingly intellectual and over-invested with cultural weight. Trickster plays a head game, and his intent is to 'fuck over,' as the street people say, the heads of his audience. Of course audiences are not passive, and their reaction to cognitive dissonance is often to laugh. Perhaps it is nervous laughter, but it is laughter nevertheless, and it does arise because of the grinding of one set of cultural signs against another, undoubtedly the 'scre-eee-etching' of some non-cultural chalk on a cultural blackboard. The important thing about Trickster's humor and play is that it is categorical play -- not only in the sense of Peirce's Categorical Firstness, but also in the sense of categorical maps of culture.

The energy for Trickster's humor comes from the undifferentiated state of his character, the marginality of his activities and the ambivalence which he and his audience feel about his activities. The source of any 'cognitive dissonance' comes from the semiotic rubbing of categories which either are not usually associated, or which are yet not recognised by the culture. Using Lotman's model of Culture versus Non-Culture (1974), one can see Trickster as the change agent at the margin of the two sets. He now dips into non-culture and brings in a disparate element and then dips into culture and highlights a paradoxical or arbitrary element to produce the cognitive dissonance. Or he pulls up an item of culture which is passing into non-culture and highlights it against some element more central to culture. That is, Trickster continually over-rides the normal logical rule of mutual exclusiveness and forces a culture to recognise the arbitrariness of the cultural map. He uses the generative capacity of Firstness to elicit laughter and play, for from that he can generate new forms, renovate old forms and modify the function of existent forms of culture.

To play with culture and non-culture is by definition to play with semiosis and language; so Trickster is a semiotic tour de force. He speaks the language of animals, dreams, visions and gods or spirits; he embodies the Other, the inarticualte and the unthought. As a creator of culture, Trickster not only is used to recount etiological myths in order to provide the origins of names of animals and objects, but his actions are often the source of cultural habits and rituals. Trickster's narratives are often dramatic portrayals of the Brute Resistance of Fact. From the limit of appetites to limits of culture, from stone soup to an overactive cloaca, from his stupidity to his cleverness, Trickster repeatedly meets the resistance of Secondness in order to engage in the discoveries of Thirdness. In earlier phases his creativity may be as comic as it is serious, but some of this activity is, of course, from the Firstness of his being and tends to have a serious creative nature. Some part of his creativity is 'primitive' only in the sense that it come from an undifferentiated marginality. The Firstness of Trickster abductively charts the territory of the non-culture, and even when it participates in the nature of the Other, it often is an aid in understanding something in a new light of connectiveness.

A fundamental aspects of culture is, of course, its tools, for culture is the tool adaptation of natural evolution. So Trickster becoming the discoverer of cultural tools is a logical adaptation since tools are by their very natures ambivalent. They may provide advantages to their users, but they change their users as well. This leads to Trickster's confrontation with his appetites, sexual or environmental. The joy of our cognizance, be it dissonant or not, is that we have to face the consequences of our mental or physical creations, and Trickster often plays upon the ambivalence that we feel about our technologies. Also the consequences of our tool use is usually disruption and oftne violence, for the purpose of tools is to exploit the environment, or our co-species and conspecifics. Such is true both of the gentle tools like fire and agriculture, but it is also true of less gentle tools like weapons.

Thus when the negative aspects of our cultural activities come to the fore, it is logical that Trickster becomes either a scapegoat or a demon. He leads culture to reflect upon the negative of its creations, and sometimes even leads to the celebration of those activities. As in our appetites, we have to understand our relation to the whole eco-system, and if we play predator, it is logical that we will be prey in our turn. That is a nice holistic notion unless you happen to be the prey, and the ambivalence of our competitions between ourselves or other species may lead us to celebrate the violence of which we are capable. The mythos that surrounds the warrior and the cult of the Left-hand path of the warrior in martial arts are clear examples of our abilities to glorify and celebrate war. The ambivalence that cultures feel toward the protectors (police, warriors, veterans) is characteristic of our discomforture with the violence of war, but our celebrations and reminiscences over military victories suggest how much we can relish our capacities for violence. We, of course, do not tend to think of our military activities in the same way as we think of human sacrifice, but the celebration of violence is still very tricksteresque. The good spirits felt at time of war (before the killing starts and sometimes even after it stops) is a clear indication of our love of violence. So we embrace Trickster with an ambivalence characteristic of the marginality in war and violence.

  The major semiotic function of Trickster is a matter of Firstness. The undifferentiated marginality of Firstness as an infinity of Possibility must, for we semiotic creatures, find itself in semiotic embodiment. That embodiment is at such a connective level that what operates is a high state of semiotic ambivalence and tension, which can generate a 'complexus,' as Peirce names the system of developing qualisigns. (3.311) This complexus when faced with the dynamic object and the reification of Secondness forms a replica of generalised rules from Thirdness. Semiotically it is a system, but in the function of Trickster the systematicity is contrasted with the generative capacity of Firstness. When it works effectively, it forms the fully semiotic abduction and becomes the sequence of reasoning where categorical tensions allow the development of Interpretance.

The tensions of semiotic categories utilised by Trickster may be what Umberto Eco has called 'over coding,' but if so, it seems to be a uniquely functional kind. These semiotic marginalities of Trickster, work by Eco's 'implicature' (1984:89), but they do so in a vast territory of cultural and non-cultural implications. Their tensions stress the semiotic fabric so much that one must look for additional meanings. Like their tamer sister, the metaphor, the implicatures of paradox, oxymoron and category-destroying puzzles intensify the tensions of the sign system. (Wilden, 1980:509f) Like poesis's estrangement, they focus on the limits of the sign system and embrace the edges of the cultural and non-cultural. They think the unthought, but their structural and functional power arises from the genesis of the sign. That is, to signify one thing is to weave a semantic circle around it at least a Coleridgean 'thrice,' which both encloses and excludes and always leaves the possibity of more signing.

The nature of Firstness is the nature of Infinity, and as Peirce argued the Infinite is infinitely divisible; it is simply divided into 'neighborhoods' which can be further subdivided along a scale of infinity. As Peirce describes Firstness it is 'first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent,' (1.357) and it constitutes that 'general vague nothing-in-particular-ness that preceded chaos,' (6.200) It is the First Boundary of the Semeiotic because it potentiates the feelings of similarity that become signs. Yet Secondness is our most particular experience of a Neighborhood, and its resistance is much of what forms us as creatures, for Secondness is the 'brute force' (1.427) of our experience of the universe as Other in giving us our fundamental notions of ego and non-ego and of self and Other. (1.325) It forms the other Absolute Boundary of the Semeiotic in particularity by the power of difference to mark individuality. However the semiotic essence of Thirdness also divides the Infinity of Firstness and the Plenitude of Secondness according to cultural rules.

The sign system, as the primary cultural rule, turns on the marker of difference (as Secondness or systemic slot) and its tension with similarity, on what Peirce took from Duns Scotus as haecceitas -- the insistence of the 'here and now' of this-ness, and consequently the implicature of the 'there and then' of that-ness. From phonetic and phonemic distinctive features, to metaphoric and metonymic tropes, to primary and secondary processes, to digital and analogical modes, to reality and virtuality and to iconic and indexical modes, the 'stuff' is divided by the semantic tensions of the sign. Semiotics is a discipline which focuses on the ambivalences, tensions and polarities of human communication systems, and Trickster plays at all the edges of the Semeiotic. As a principle of Chaos he returns the system to the semiotic chora of Firstness, and he over-rides our cultural isolation of particularity in Secondness. In an undifferentiation state, he generates new differences and remixes them to stress the cultural rules which made them in the first place. By participating in both chaos and order, by utilising both similarity and difference, and by undifferentiating the differentiation of his established culture, he allows the potential of a new formation of Thirdness and a new understanding of the semiotic processes of culture.

 It is obvious that a structure as undifferentiated as Trickster and Firstness will create a sense of cognitive dissonance, and such a pattern can be seen in the psychological renderings of the Trickster pattern. From Freud's sense of the psychological power of the joke to his mythos of the Primal Murder, from Lacan's re-interpretation of the Mirror Stage and the mythos of Lack, and from Jung's sense of the Collective Shadow to his construct of Individuation, Trickster seems to serve as a prototype of the undifferentiated human being who will grow to wisdom or self-destruction. The Freudian vision of the primitive tends to accentuate the violence of Trickster; the Primal Hoard and the Primeval Murder, the Oedipal Complex and Freud's hydraulic metaphor clearly distrust the unarticulated of the Primitive, and for Freud, if Civilisation is not to be lost in its discontents, the Primitive Trickster must be contained and controlled by the civilising super-ego. Lacan's re-interpretation is somewhat more sophisticated than Freud's original vision. His sense of Lack is nicely and symbolically genital, and the impact of the mirror stage certainly gives much weight to Cultural Imperatives, but Lacan is distrustful of the Father Cult and tries a more hermaphroditic vision of psychological balance. That in itself is very tricksteresque, but the mirror stage of Lacan is parallel to the self-reflexiveness of both Trickster and his narratives. Also the Lacanian self in the mirror stage is a great deal like the Idiot Savant of Trickster; his ability to con and manipulate both animals and fellow human beings, in a way that is so transparent to the audience, is a kind of rhetorical genius which is parallel to the discovery processes of Trickster.

The process of differentiation in Trickster, whether it is seen as a process of control by the super-ego or by cultural imperative is a matter of growth -- certainly in the sense of the organism's growth, but also in the senses of both Peirce's 'principle of growth of principles' (6.585) or Jung's process of individuation. Trickster's continual marginality and ambivalence, his probing of the limitations of culture and his creative spirit provides the material for possession and incorporation of the Shadow, cultural or personal. The vividness, or grosses if you prefer, of Trickster's passion and appetites provide texts for learning to control one's creative and procreative activities. It can function either as a reversal of hierarchies or as cognitive dissionce, but it will function as a feedback mechanism for extrapolating the effects of cultural and personal patterns. To the civilised mind, Trickster represents the marginality of human activities, and whether he is seen as 'primitive,' 'infantile' or 'insane,' the embodiment of his activities are reminders of the limitations of culture and of humanness. His powerful emotions, heroic activities and value articulations provide a path of spiritual discovery, but that path achieves cultural and personal renewal by allowing a culture to 'own' its Shadow characteristics whether as scapegoat or as generation of new forms.

  Trickster as Semiosis

 Peirce, of course, never really treats semiosis as tricksteresque even though he himself often has a tricksteresque sense of humor. Still he does stress the non-rationality of the Pre-logical sciences as processes of Firstness, and when he discusses the teaching by experience, he puts it this way: 

Open your mouth and shut your eyes

And I'll give something to make you wise;

Although I suppose it is questionable whether nature 'torments' us or not, the function of Logic is to prepare for and to avoid the surprises that Experience and nature throw our way. And it is a method of teaching which is tricksteresque, and if not always laughable, it is always surprising.

In fact, the real effect of experiential surprises is that they produce anomalies that need further explanation and thereby require the further development of signs. Abduction from natural, or unnatural, experience is the development of new hypothesising signs to prepare against the surprises of experience. Moreover even though it is an escalating game as the ever-receding Final Interpretant suggests, it is also a continually productive game, one of continual growth and ever new sign material. As Peirce puts it somewhat more seriously, 'Now the Sign and the Explanation together make up another Sign, and since the explanation will be a Sign, it will probably require an additional explanation, . . .; and proceeding in the same way, we shall, or should, ultimately reach a Sign of itself, containing its own explanation and those of all its significant parts'. (2.230) So the sign contains surprises of its own, and it can accelerate the pattern of growth, by sparking the self-reflexivity of signs. The sign, at the margins of the semiotic, is a self-generating spark of more semiosis: some stupid and useless as our own appetites, some laughable and enjoyable as our own cleverness, some practical and useful as tools and some -- a small few -- glimpses of the divine and the demonic.

 As the Gnostics thought, the human carries in it a spark of the Divine which could be used to redeem the world from Archonic Error. It is quite similar to Peirce's principle of growth of principles in that the same kind of Divine Spark is an operation of Firstness through Evolutionary Love. Trickster clearly has the ambivalence of a divine spark, and in his state of undifferentiated characteristics, he has all of the qualities of a pre-logical state, intensely emotional and intensely sensuous. This is the same distinction that Peirce tries to make between Induction and Hypothesis. He recognises that induction is 'a much stronger kind of inference than hypothesis' (2.642) because hypothesis often treats of facts 'not capable of direct observation.' The strength of hypothetic reasoning lies in the fact that 'Hypothesis substitutes, for a complicated tangle of predicates attached to one subject, a single conception [a qualisign].' This tangle of predicates is bound together in 'a peculiar sensation. . .that each of these predicates inheres in the subject.' (2:643)

This peculiar sensation then yields to 'a single feeling of greater intensity' which Peirce identifies 'a single harmonious disturbance which I call an emotion, . . .essentially the same thing as an hypothetic inference, and every hypothetic inference involves the formation of such an emotion. We may say, therefore, that hypothesis produces the sensuous element of thought, and induction the habitual element.' (2:643) The nature of Trickster is certainly to be sensuous, but the emotions generated in and by his activities also suggest the joining together of a complex tangle of predicates which is also part of the semiotic process. Sensuousity provides the possibility for habit and growth just as hypothesising is preparatory to inductive reasoning. It would be ridiculous to cast Trickster in the role of induction, but his undifferentiated structure does provide the material for the induction and the eventual abstracting of probabilistic deductions as to the Laws of the Universe.

Ernst Cassirer's vocabulary is probably more idealistic than Peirce's, but the differences Cassirer ascribes to theoretical and mythical thinking in Language and Myth (1953) are quiet similar to Peirce's distinctions between induction and hypothesis. If one can see Cassirer as using the term 'intuition' in a way parallel to Peircean 'perceptual judgments,' then as Cassirer argues, 

Mythical thought, abduction and tricksteresque inversion are at base focusing devices for semiotic attention. As Cassirer puts it, 

For Cassirer, the ambivalences of the system are held together in an emotional and sensuous state of tension until that tension arcs into a spark which subsumes all experience and is reified as a god or a demon by the act of naming.

Peirce is less interested in gods or daemons than Cassirer and does not give just animistic qualities to the act of naming. The thrust of Firstness perception to Secondness Induction and the genesis of 'theoretical thinking' takes place by a spark of intuition, and once the 'spark' has done its work, the process of 'theorematic thinking', to use Peirce's term, can begin to operate. I would suggest that both of these occur at the margins haunted by Trickster, and that both are ambivalent sign complexi whose power to enthrall attention and be sensuous are the semiotic energies that will become more developed signs. Thus the abduction, or the mythical thought, is a powerful and sensuous thought that will embody the potentiality of Firstness into sufficient semiosis to be operated on by the rest of the sign system. And after all, one of the discoveries of the Trickster Figure is always the spark of fire, physical or semiotic.

 One, of course, may question what does all this have to do with growth, but as Peirce argues growth happens by association and the eventual generation of ideas through abduction. So this pattern of 'sparking' from the vague and undifferentiated, or from the mere possibility of Firstness, is the initial embodiment of association that will then be processed by the more formal and stronger operations of deduction and induction. As in Peirce's 'Neglected Argument for the Reality of God' (6.452f), the process continues to grow and eventually becomes the living pattern of Evolutionary Love. It provides the pattern for the living reality of Ideas and for the anthropomorphic pattern of the Universe, the Godhead and the Law of Mind, which in Peirce is the concept of abduction as the method of discovery. Still for Peirce, abduction and unlimited semiosis turn out to be his 'highest level of realism,' (Eco, 1979:193) for he always understood discovery as a process of signs. As Eco puts it, 'The system of systems of codes, which could look like an irrealistic and idealistic cultural world separate from the concrete events, leads me to act upon the world; and this action continuously converts itself into new signs, giving rise to new semiotic systems.' (1979:195)

What is fundamental in Peirce's concept of abduction is the eternal continuum of ever changing signs, systems of signs and sign users in a sequence of 'dissipative structures' which are the process of sign leaps and sign change, of category making and breaking, of hypothesising and fantasy; that is, a complex sign matrix of culturally selected chains of implicature. As he says, 'The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although extremely fallible insight. . . ., but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation.' (5.181) The 'Abduction merely suggests that something may be' (5.171), and the proof of the abduction, then, lies in its use for creativity or pathology, for 'An abductive suggestion, however, is something whose truth can be questioned or even denied.' (5.187) Thus a model of ambivalence is necessary I think because, as Eco argues, 'A sign is a textual matrix' (1979:184) and as Peirce believed, such is the principle of the growth of principles. The textual fabric grows by the abduction and the tension of the Trickster function.

  The Trickster Point: Movement from Object to Interpretant

 The semiosis of the Trickster function is similar to what Anthony Wilden calls the 'point of punctuation' between systems. It is the transition point from the Object reference to the Interpretant forming, for it shows the shift in the value of objects. It is the transcending ratio, and I have echoed its shifting and its transcendence throughout my argument by the use of terms like 'play' and 'game'. I have done that intentionally for four reasons. First, a constant characteristic of the Trickster figure is his production of laughter and his ability to play. Trickster, in his mythic form, is playful, and his play, directed at this own over-cleverness and at his audience's over-cleverness is an transcendent function. The Trickster figure modulates cultural divisions and cultural limitations; it releases tensions and weaves a wholeness of community; it defines boundaries, articulates their cutting edges of potential violence and gives a culture some tool leverage on its own categories. The Trickster narrative is an experiential returning to the ambivalent point of category making, and it is a very precious semiotic gift giving laughter and play -- sign health. Second, a part of the semiotic of 'tool,' in western culture, is a division of human activity into 'work' and 'play,' 'creation' and 'recreation,' or 'serious' and 'frivolous'. This semiotic division is so deep we often misunderstand the simple pleasures that come from Trickster's actions and discomfortures, and often it causes us to avoid the very gifts Trickster brings; it is a modern disease, which Huizinga (1955) has demonstrated with clarity. Trickster, of course, reflects this same cultural ambivalence; he is a tool maker/finder, but he inevitably is also a gamester with tools as much as he is his own body and culture. Third, as Kerenyi says, Trickster is 'the spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries'. (1972:185) He is a creature of the Margins and represents Firstness (historically, mythically and narratively) as well as any construct I can think of. Fourth, as Peirce argues in 'The Play of Musement' play is activity of the Margins and of Firstness. When something is clearly in the process of becoming, it will have some nature of Firstness about it, and the discovery and articulation of it will be an activity of margins and Firstness; it will be at base pre-logical.

So I have tried to use 'play' here in order to confound that modern cultural division between tools and play because not only does Trickster confound that division, but play is a fundamental part of the relation of tool use to objects. In fact, tools are toys and vice versa, even if our too-serious selves are uncomfortable with the equation. Still as Bateson argues the game, like the sign, is a frame of action more than an action itself, for 'the game and the creation of the game must be seen as a single phenomenon, and indeed, it is subjectively plausible to say that the sequence is playable only so long as it retains some elements of the creative and unexpected.' (1972:151) Therefore one must take the formal and pragmatic difference between tools and toys as minimal, for one of the chief markers of complex neurology, creativity and social learning is discovery as play, and toys are obviously the functional tools of a sign-using species at learning and discovery. (6.461) As such, they are semiotic entities, and tools, signs or numbers will show up as play -- tools as toys, verbal and visual signs as jokes, and numbers as counting songs, rhymes or puzzles. But the most important indication of their semiotic role is how we wax rapturous over them -- the tool maker over the beauty of his tool, the story teller over the beauty (or cleverness) of his narrative, and the mathematician over the beauty of his equation. The pleasure that one feels from the sign, the tool or the model is the pleasure of play; so semiotic creatures play on and continue to explore, learn and create patterns.

The creation of tool or sign is an ambivalent deed; therefore, I would like to refer to the state of ambivalence as the Trickster Point, or the T Point, for what characterises Trickster is the ambivalence of the undifferentiated form of the culture hero who specifically brings to his culture the tools of that culture. The Trickster Figure is the ambivalent generator of things, and his bringing of the gifts of culture is a bringing of semiotic gifts -- tools, signs, arts, crafts, etc. He is the maker and challenger of boundaries, and what culture has to learn is how to live with the limits of the new cultural order in tune with the previous natural order. Semiotic mucking with the stuff of the world changes it and has complex consequences which cannot always be determined. Signing about objects faces the same difficulties as the evolutionary contraries of stability, change, conservativism and adaptability.

As Ilya Prigogine (1984:12-14) might argue, what has taken place is a dissipative restructuring, and previous orders have been torqued to the service of a new ordering, even if Davis mathematically cautions that 'there is no systematic way of telling a priori what forces exist and must be taken into account.' (1981:76) The semiotic act, as tool, toy, sign or model, is essentially a drawing of boundaries to the world of stuff, and the Trickster figure, as the repository of cleverness and humor, is both a creator and a challenger of limits, which come from bifacial boundaries. And his discomfiture at limits is often the primary object lesson for the culture which tells his stories. In dramatic, narrative fashion the Trickster figure works out the margins of cultural categories and signs.

The T point is that complex of sign boundary, sign stability and instability, where are nested the relations between the functional needs of an older, but superseded order and those of a newer, more inclusive order. As a part of the sign, it is what Poinsot called the 'relatio transcendentalis;' (Deely, 1982:171) it is a transcendental ratio, or what modern folks mean when they refer metaphorically to the 'cutting edge' of some process or technology. The T point is both a systemic and a spatio-temporal event which arises because of the unlimited boundary making marginality of the sign. To use a systems model from Buckminster Fuller, it is a semiotic version what he calls a 'critical proximity. . .where there is angular transition from 'falling back in' at 180-degree to 90-degree orbiting;' it is the 'transition from being an aggregate entity to being a plurality of separate entities.' (1975:11) Fuller calls this 'precession,' which is a form of torquing and orbital balance between entropy and system stability. 'Critical Proximity' is the sufficient blend of speed, distance and mass that allows a body to remain in orbit around another and to form a system.

Thus the T point is a semiotic critical proximity in which the torquing of the pre-sign is sufficient to create the stability of relations to become a full sign; it is the leading point of a line that forms an orbit or a circle. Physically its trajectory is the arc of a semiotic orbit, and thus it is literally the function of a transcendental ratio. But as with all orbits, it can decay or it can breakaway. So its stablisation is a 'dissipative structure,' the threshold of the shifting in orders of organisation, and when orders shift, they are most vulnerable to breakdown and destruction. So when the sign divides the stuff, it not only produces division, it also produces ambivalence, for as Peirce argues, as the transcendence of Pi demonstrates, as the spherical geometry of orbits suggests, and as Anthony Wilden stresses, the nature of sign is the nature of division and the production of categories, which never fully match the continuum of stuff. The sign system is by it very nature a fabric of boundaries and categories -- numeric or semantic inclusions and exclusions which define a thing as the thing it is.

 The T point is both the crystalisation and fragmentation of pattern, and as Wilden points out, systematising as reflection or generation is a matter of determining pattern, something created and something perceived. Wilden's punctuation is very like what Wordsworth argued poetically; it is something that 'we half create and half perceive,' and the essence of patterns is thingness, repetition and periodicity, the three aspects of the physicality of signs.

I suspect that the semiotic act is analogous to kerfing, the splitting of facets on a gem stone. The mark is a bifacial cutting tool which fractures the continuum into the planes of signification and sensation and which refracts and reflects just a part of its whole light. The use of the mark is like the use of the kerf; one assesses an undifferentiated lump of stuff, and finding the best fracture lines, one draws a line in the stone and then strikes it with the kerf hoping and expecting the useful and beautiful face of refracted and reflected light to appear. It is a skill of hands-on geometer that works any stone or space in order to manipulate patterns for beauty and practicality. What signing does to us is to make us hypothesis spinners and pattern makers, and from those we create the arrow of time and all its entropic chaos. But we also create the arrow of semiosis and all of its creative sequencing.

By the creation of hypothetical facets, by the refraction of the planes of dimensionality, and by the reflection of our own lights, we create the beauty of sign fire and we seem to capture light in the mirror sheen of our created facets, but we are also drawn into the transcendent repetition of sign creation. Thus as though we were in a hall of mirrors, we think we are trapped in the mirror of time, either infinite and irreversible, or trapped in the mirror of semiosis, either grammatic and internally reversible. But that is only the magic of mirrors. Tension and tense or reversal and regression are just markers of the game. They are the wondrous torquing of the mirror and perspective, and as in most mirror games, we are continually drawn to look first at the reflection and then at the object and then back at the reflection. Checking to see who is who and lifting a hand to check for handedness, we bounce perspective back and forth trying to figure out the slight shift of difference which comes from the mirror of semiosis and what it may pertain for the irretrievable past and not yet attainable future. As Eco argues, 'This virtual duplication of stimuli, this theft of image, this unceasing temptation to believe I am someone else, [is what] makes man's experience with mirrors an absolutely unique one, on the threshold between perception and signification.' (1984:210) 'Tis a puzzling and fascinating game, which sparkles like frozen light, but it is the given of the self-reflexivity of the Speaking Subject.

The ambivalence of Trickster is the ambivalence of the Speaking Subject. Like reversal in mirrors, the self-reflexive ambivalence is a semiotic problem derived from the externalising and kerfing process of sign generation and the nature of any narrative. As Lacan reconstructs Freud, it is the mirror stage, where, as Wilden puts it, 'this is a period when a child comes to discover his 'Self' by a mirror-like identification with the image of another' (1980:20) and through which 'he discovers opposition'. (1980:148) Because of self-reflexivity, mirrors show the fascination of the self -- from the comic antics of a kitten to the preening of a teenager to the sartorial checking in an adult, and one can only imagine, I am sure in quite comic terms, how Trickster might behave with a mirror, for he is quite comic when he mistakes the reflection of plums in the water as real plums. (1972:28) He rebukes himself for not recognising the reflection as a reflection, and as he does with his own body parts, he reifies himself as an another person.

This is, of course, a splitting of the Self, Real and Imaginary, which, for Lacan, is an alienated self trapped by the Symbolic Order of the Language and can be saved only by 'the introduction of mediation'. (1980:260) But even with the Lacanian paradox, this is essentially the Cartesian dualism of subject and object -- the product of the sign's division, but it need not be so. As Julia Kristeva argues, the process and practice of signification seek to make the symbolic modes (of cultural signs) less opaque and 'real' by returning to the process of the semiotic, a returning which destroys the cultural fiction of the transcendent ego, the speaking subject, the transcendent object or the perfectly motivated sign. Soller's 'double causality,' as Kristeva uses it, is essentially sign generation at the T point returning the bifacial, cutting edge to operate once more upon the world stuff, even the sign system itself.

Thus the physicality of signs, our handedness in the process, the geometry of our thinking, the mirrors of our categories and the boundaries of our division are always parts of our perceptual grid, and the search for a fixing point in the Universe is doomed to return to point zero, where we will have to chip, cut, and sign once more. It would seem we have our six directions and no place to go unless we wield our semiotic kerf for the facet's beauty. Yet there is still a T-point at which the marginality of the sign system is used to produce new signs and new understandings along the path of Inquiry. Moreover the process of inquiry, seen in a Peircean and semiotic perspective, lies at the central ambivalences of modern concepts about human intellect and knowing, for since Descartes we have been following a line of thought which has divided human mentality into two parts: one is that of consciousness as reason, intellect, awareness or a mental sense of objectivity in the Social Self, and the other is that of unconsciousness as non-reason, instinct, somatic awareness or perception by subjectivity in the Cultural Other.

As Foucault argues, our modernity 'is concerned with showing that the foundation of those determinations is man's very being in its radical limitations; it must also show that the contents of experience are already their own conditions, that thought, from the very beginning, haunts the unthought that eludes them.' (1973:339) This rationalistic schizophrenia is the reason, I believe, that dreams and hallucinations have proved such a fascination for our modernity. This systemic polar tension between consciousness and unconsciousness, or between awareness and unawareness, is also the nucleus of the semiotic problem of Saussure's langue and parole, Freud's consciousness and unconsciousness, Chomsky's linguistic competence and creativity, Lacan's Real and Symbolic orders, and Eco's virtuality and reality. All these binaries are fascinations with the Cartesian dualism and its derivatives and seek to reify the 'Self' and the 'Other' which exist because of the process of semiosis.

At the T-point the mysterious idiotic grin seems to await us and mock all our endevours at sign, self or wisdom. However despite the tensions of the modern episteme, the process of inquiry, as argued by Peirce and applied here, is a process which may function without the consciousness (that is, awareness in varying degrees) of the individual. It may be comedic; it may be innocent; it may be mystical; or it may be visionary. The 'Sudden Insight' of abduction is not really a controlled process even though the 'testing' of it may be. Since in semiosis anything can be used as a sign, and since, as Eco argues about Peirce's constructs, 'Any sign interpreting another sign, the basic condition of semiosis is its being interwoven with signs sending back to signs, in an infinite regression,' (1979:188) the complexity of consciousness submits itself to all the divisions intellect (as semiotic process) can generate, and one of our fundamental reactions to those divisions will be to laugh and grow -- if we embrace the T-point, Trickster, and his kerfing intellect to ride the wave of our own signing ability. So as Blake says in Jerusalem:

Let the Indefinite be explored. and let every Man be Judged
By his own Works, Let all Indefinites be thrown into Demonstrations
To be pounded to dust & melted in the Furnances of Affliction:
. . . .
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
And not in Generalizing Demonstrations of Rational Power.
(Plate 55: lines 57-63)