Semiotic Square

What Does Greimas's Semiotic Square Really Do?
Author(s): JOHN J. CORSO

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 1, featuring: NICHOLAS
ROYLE (March 2014), pp. 69-89
Published by: University of Manitoba
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030128
Accessed: 07-03-2019 14:18 UTC
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Semiotician A.J. Greimas introduced the semiotic square to consider semiotic relationships (and constraints)
between binary terms. Literary, art, and music critics have seized upon the procedure to analyze actants, narra-
tive structures, and discursive paradigms. This essay argues that current literature ignores the visual aspects
of the square.
What Does Greimas's

Semiotic Square Really Do?
JOHN J. CORSO
system (Greimas and Rastier 87). Greimas uses the device to "bring into view"
The system contrary
contrarysemi otic (Gcreitorymasterms,and thereby
and contradi square "frami
contrading cnarrati
tory vande segments"
is a Rastiwitehirngraphic terms, 87). representation Greimas thereby "framing uses of the the deep device narrative structure to "bring segments" of into a semiotic within view"
a given discourse (Greimas, Courtes, and Rengstorf 571). In The Prison-House of
Language , Frederic Jameson states that the "semantic rectangle" is "designed to dia-
gram the way in which, from any given starting point S, a whole complex of meaning
possibilities, indeed a complete meaning, may be derived" (163). (Jameson is right to
call the figure a rectangle but, owing to convention, I wil continue to call it a square.)
Elsewhere, Nancy Armstrong writes that the square allows us to "identify the precon-
ditions for the meaning of particular narratives" (53). In these cases, the square allows
a visualization of two particular kinds of relationships: those of "opposition" and
"contradiction" ( Prison-House 162).
Mosaic 47/ 1 0027- 1 276-07/069022$02.00©Mosaic
70 Mosaic 47/1 (March 2014)
The thethesemiotic
device todevice to square
consider consideranalyses
paradigmatic has paradigmatic instigated
of characters (actants),annarrative
analyses expansive
and of range characters of critical (actants), responses narrative that and use
thematic structures, discursive boundaries, and a variety of objects that depend on
oppositional relationships. Visual semiotician Daniel Chandler synopsizes several
prominent texts that deploy the square. He cites work by Varda Langholz Leymore
that uses the square to chart oppositions between the beautiful and the ugly (119).
Chandler notes Jameson's famous application of the square to Dickens's Hard Times.
Chandler also mentions the use of the square by Dan Fleming to consider children's
toys, by Gilles Marrion to look at clothing, and by Jean-Marie Floch to analyze "con-
sumption values" in Habitat and Ikea furniture. To these examples, we might well add
other notable instances of the square in work by Paul Ricoeur, Donald Maddox, and
Felix Thürlemann. Finally, Donna Haraway famously uses the square to consider the
"Regenerative Politics" of the other, while Rosalind Krauss has used a variant - the Klein
group - to look at "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" and The Optical Unconscious.
In this essay, I focus on two specific discussions of the square, those by Jonathan
Culler and Frederic Jameson. I look at the primary critiques that Culler launches
against the square, and I recount Jameson's contention that the square functions to
illustrate ideological closures. Not in opposition but, rather, in addition, I suggest that
if these (and other) critics were to consider the square's figurativity more carefully - a
figurativity that Greimas himself provides the terms with which to investigate - they
might come to a treatment of the semiotic square that more closely resembles Derrida's
deconstructive treatment of the (rectangular) coffin in The Truth in Painting.
The refers
referssquare
as "theas universe
"the takesof universe
meaning."the meaning
It posits of meaning."to that
a contradiction of ansystem
initialS1,It posits
which semiotic a contradiction system, S, to to that which system Greimas S1, which also
denotes the "absolute absence" of meaning S. Greimas continues that, in addition to
the contradiction, a contrary to any semiotic system can also be posited, so that SI is
opposed to S2 (Greimas and Rastier 87). These two "constituent relations," the contra-
diction and the contrary, can in turn be understood as multiple "dimensions." Along
one contrary axis, the complex axis, is the semic structure SI <
also posit a contradictory version of this axis, producing t

axis. This is the neutral axis, and its semic structure is SI <
these axial dimensions the "substance of content" (

these two axes to produce the following structural r
John J. Corso 7 i
SI <
Šī <
Greimas himself gives a no

not-life (SI, i.e., non-living)
semiotic system S is related to
tural, contradictory dimens
two dimensions "schémas,"
Greimas sees two additional d
SI + S2, S2 + SI. He arrives at
terming them "deixes," and r
classic image of the square. T
of meaning" (Greimas and Ra
To reiterate, Greimas regard

tions as well as their structur
SI + SI, S2 + S2, and SI + S2,
stituent relations as follows:
Finally, the constituent relations can also be described in terms of their structural
dimensions:
Let me turn to another example. If we consider a subject, we can oppose it to an object

such that the following two contraries exist:
The subject (e.g., "I") relates to the object (e.g., "thing") along the complex axis,
and its contradictory, not-object and not-subject (e.g., not-I, not-thing), lies along the
neutral axis. These two axes constitute the axes of content. The schematic dimensions
that relate the subject to the not-subject and the object to the not-object describe con-
tradictions. Finally, we can assume deixic relationships between the subject and the not-
object, the object and the not-subject. Jameson is one of the few to note that such an
instantiation groups "semes or conceptual features" and is not yet "in any sense the slots
of narrative characters or indeed other narrative categories" ( Political 254), though
indeed critics use the square to examine all of these. It is also valuable to note that
Greimas never draws in lines between the implied deixic dimensions. This is valuable
because our initial formal analysis will irrefutably demonstrate that this figure is neither
a square nor a closed rectangle (a closure), but a precarious set of axial relations con-
tingently arranged along a single paradigmatic plane. I will return to this point - a point
that can only be derived through visual analysis - in the final section of this essay.
John J. Corso 73
Greimas defintively introduced the diagram of the semiotic square in his 196
es ay, "Les jeux des contraintes ' émiotiques,'" reprinted in English in Yale French
Studies two years later as "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints" (Greimas and
Rastier 86). Greimas and Rastier note that his "new pres nta ion makes it isomorphic
to the logical hexagon of R. Blanche [. .] as wel as to the structures caled, in math-
ematics, the Klein group, and, in psychol gy, the Piaget group" (8 ). Jameson also
notes the square's imilarity to Levi-Straus ' "culinary triangle" (i.e, raw-co ked-
rot en) ( Prison-House 16 ), and Greimas certainly credits the anthrop logist as a pri-
mary influence. The square fits into the first stage of an intel ctual history that
Greimas himself divdes into four stages. In the first stage, Algirdas Julien Greimas
begins his care r in Lithuania with a short study of Don Quixote , though e recog-
nizes the 1956 publication of his article, "L'actualité du saus urisme," as an early mile-
stone (Greimas, Per on, and Colins 540). In the 1956 article, Greimas investigates
works by Saus ure, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévi-Straus . He at ributes to this work an
understanding of par digmatic an lysi , which would come to form half of his influ-
ential discourse an lysi . The second half would come from his discovery of the pro-
genitor of Rus ian formalism, Vladimir Prop . Greimas recounts that Lévi-Straus
had recom ende Prop 's work on Rus ian fairy tales to Greimas' friend, Roland
Barthes: "Ther existed an American translation of a certain Vladimir Prop . Barthes
gave me the ref rence and I sent o Indian University Pres for the bo k. Although
this is anecdotal, I would like to say that Prop furnished the syntagmatic or syntac-
tic ompone t for my work. My theoretical genius, if I can so cal it, was a form of
'bricolage.' I to k a lit le Lévi-Straus and ad ed some Prop . This is what I cal the
first stage of semiotics" (541).
It François
FrançoiswasRastier,
duringreleased
Rastier,histhis"Interactions
released first
of Semiotic
stage his Constraints."
of "Interactions
He did
the not
Paris School of Semiotic of semiotics Constraints." that Greimas, He did with not
modify the original square, but augmented the program of the first stage to account
for narratology. The second stage, according to Greimas, came shortly thereafter,
whereupon close study of the work by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev imparted onto
Greimassian linguistics an attempt "to formulate better the elements of narrativity."
Greimas writes that beginning in the nineteen-seventies,
What became obvious is that if you want to construct a narrative grammar, then it has to
be a modal grammar. This is where the revolutionary concept of the whole project took
place since, if doing or causing are broken down, then, for example, to communicate can
be analysed as to cause to know. It is not a knowing-how but a using to know, that is to say,
the causing can be in either a realizing or a virtualizing position. Thus, doing or causing
and being are modalities. From this point of view the whole grammar is composed of
modalities; the rest is simply content, semantics. (Greimas, Perron, and Collins 542)
In 1979, Greimas published an extensive dictionary of semiotics, released in 1982

under the English title Semiotics and Language : An Analytical Dictionary. Its status as
a dictionary is, actually, under debate,2 so I will instead draw from the excellent intro-
duction Paul Perron wrote for New Literary History's 1989 volume dedicated to
Greimas. In that introduction, Perron cites Hjelmslev's concept of the "semantic uni-
verse" as prominent within Greimassian semiotics. That universe, which is "coexten-
sive with the concept of culture," essentially refers to "the totality of significations
prior to its articulation." Perron notes a practical difficulty with the concept, though,
and presents Greimas's solution: "[Since] the semantic universe (the set of the systems
of values) cannot be conceived of in its totality, Greimas introduced the concepts of
semantic microuniverses and universe of discourses. The semantic microuniverse,
which is apprehensible as meaningful only if particularized and articulated, is para-
digmatically and syntagmatically manifested by means of discourses" (525). These
two planes, the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, are often described by Greimas (and,
as Greimas notes, similarly described by the likes of Chomsky, Freud, and Hjelmslev)
as surface structures - the latter - and deep structure - the former. Paradigms are
deep in that they derive meaning from their unarticulated relationship to other
(absent, but connoted) paradigms. The investigation and reduction of the simplest set
of such planar relationships ultimately defines the primary role of the semiotic
square, a concept to which I will return.
Instigated by a 1985 conference at the University of Toronto, Greimas posited
that he and his colleagues were already within a fourth stage of semiotics. In this stage,
Greimas and his colleagues were considering the problem of a discursive grammar. It
is just before this fourth stage, in 1984, that "Figurative Semiotics and the Semiotics
of the Plastic Arts" was published, though it was written for an earlier project that
went unpublished.3
Many explain
explainprominent
its purposeitsbeyond
purposepragmatic,
critics beyond deploygrounds.
instrumental pragmatic, the square
Jameson offersinstrumental
the to various grounds. ends, but Jameson few sufficiently offers the
most thoughtful explanation of the merits of the square. On the other hand, Culler
painstakingly exposes its multiple demerits. (To be precise, Culler attacks Greimas's
reliance on oppositions.) In this section, I will sketch out the respective approaches by
Jameson and Culler. Ultimately, I remain dissatisfied with these invocations of the
John J. Corso 75
square because each author seems indifferent to its visual status.4 Seemingly without
exception, literary and art critics use the square as a visual mnemonic to invoke a well-
rehearsed script on binary relations; they invariably skip over the square as a figure or
what, as an art critic, I might call a "drawing." I will conclude this section by insisting
that Greimas gives us the tools with which to consider the square figuratively.
Moreover, following the grammatological cautions of Derrida, it behooves any post-
structuralist to remove the figure of the square from its supplemental status and
restore its figurativity to a status equal in importance to its linguistic status.
Culler considers at length "Greimas and Structural Semantics" in his classic
Structuralist Poetics from 1975. Culler duplicitously leads his reader to consider the
role of structural semantics: "One might expect semantics to be the branch of lin-
guistics which literary critics would find most useful" (75). The remainder of the
chapter intricately dismisses any such potential in the case of Greimas's structural
semantics. Semantics have failed, according to Culler, because any successful theory
"must use concepts which can be defined in terms of empirical techniques or opera-
tions and it must account for intuitively attested facts about meaning" (76). Greimas's
semantics miss the mark by either using an "explicit metalanguage" that is incapable
of accounting for all "semantic effects," or else by developing "concepts which specify
the effects to be explained but which are not themselves explicitly defined" (77).
Culler shows in example after example that by begging the question, Greimas consis-
tently fails to account for all semantic effects or else his rigorously scientific veneer
reveals a machinery incapable of sustaining objective, repeatable results. Among his
many examples, a line by John Donne particularly strikes me: "For I am every dead /
thing" (qtd. in Culler 86). Culler uses this example to demonstrate the difficulty in
plotting a dead-live, or animate-inanimate opposition, since in this case the subject
insists on being both at the same time; a semiotic square would therefore fail to
describe the coexistence of these two contrary terms. I would prefer to focus instead
on the actant of the sentence, "I," which, given the first example I have provided,
would similarly correspond to the "subject." I might suppose this subject to have a
corresponding object, which I will describe as the "thing." In this way, I could plot an
actantial square that relates I to thing, not-I to not-thing. For the time being, I will
hold off from drawing the square, but I will return to this particular example shortly.
While warranted, all oftheir

warranted, Culler theirapplication
specific specific s produces
charges application againstrestrictive
an unnecessarily Greimas'spic-
produces use an of unnecessarily binaries are restrictive of themselves pic-
ture of semiotic constraints. Culler seems unconcerned that when Greimas analyzes
such binaries, he does so by drawing a square. Indeed, Culler is so unmoved by the
visual that he describes these oppositions rhetorically, without any graphic supple-
ment. His analysis is convincing if - as the majority of extant literature does - we
ignore the possibility that drawing the square changes its relationship to the rehearsed
script that Culler rightly dismisses. Before considering the implications of such a sup-
pression, I will turn to Frederic Jameson s use of the square.
Jameson talks of the square throughout his career but is perhaps best known for
using the square in his 1974 Prison-House of Language , and again in 1981 in The
Political Unconscious. In the earlier work, Jameson explains the merits of the square:
"So the first merit of Greimas' [sic] mechanism is to enjoin upon us the obligation to
articulate any apparently static free-standing [sic] concept or term into that binary
opposition which it structurally presupposes and which forms the very basis for its
intelligibility." He explains that the "next operation," or the articulation of contrary
terms, might be regarded as an "unconscious meditation." He qualifies his compari-
son of the plotting of the square to the plotting of unconscious processes: "Such an
articulation would thus be perfectly consistent with the narrative form as such, where
the mind is confronted with a series of imaginative possibilities in succession" (164).
The completion of the square similarly might yield unconscious contradictions or
implications. Jameson relays Greimas's application of this mechanism to the work of
Georges Bernanos. Jameson subsequently looks at his own example as applied to
Charles Dickens's Hard Times. Jameson explains the implications of such an exercise,
in which an absent term or signification becomes visible through the plotting of the
square: "The previous sections taught the lesson that in the long run it is impossible
to separate signifié from signifiant in any way that would be meaningful either
methodologically or conceptually. With this realization, the third moment of
Structuralism comes into being. This moment shifts its attention to the total sign
itself, or rather to the process which creates it, and of which signifier and signified are
themselves but moments, namely the process of signification [sic]." Thus, the square
has the paradoxical advantage since "in that instant of separation, in that ephemeral
void between the two which vanishes even as we stare at it, signification itself as an
emergence is to be found" (168).
In The Political Unconsciousy Jameson further situates the role of the square as
that which instigates "ideological closure." Jameson contends that "only Marxism
offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the
dilemma of historicism," which Benedetto Croce powerfully described: "All history is
contemporary history" (18-19). For Jameson, "only Marxism can give us an adequate
account of the essential mystery of the cultural past" by temporarily resuscitating that
mysterious past "to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to
John J. Corso 7 7
it" (19, emph. Jamesons). Jameson writes: "It is in detecting the traces of that unin-
terrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried
reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds
its function and its necessity" (20). One of the fundamental tools with which to resus-
citate this unconscious is, of course, the semiotic square. In a discussion of Joseph
Conrad's Lord Jim , Jameson draws the square to describe five pairs of axes. In doing
so, Jameson takes extraordinary artistic license, though, since he multiplies the origi-
nal three pairs of axes into an expanded figure resembling a semantic baseball dia-
mond. (I like to think that the chase between the bases illustrates the pursuit of the
political unconscious.) Jameson explains the workings of his schematic: "Such a
schema not only articulates the generation of the characters, insofar as it represents a
contradiction to be 'solved,' or an antinomy to be effaced or overcome; it also suggests
the ideological service which the production of this narrative is ultimately intended to
perform - in other words, the resolution of this particular determinate contradiction -
or, more precisely, following Lévi-Strauss's seminal characterization of mythic narra-
tive, the imaginary resolution of this particular determinate real contradiction" (256).
Seemingly in response to Culler, Jameson writes that "the point about this binary
opposition, however, is not its logical accuracy as a thought concerned to compare
only comparable entities and oppose only terms of the appropriate category, but, on
the contrary, its existence as a symptom." In other words, by drawing a semiotic
square that places ideological oppositions and contraries within a field, Jameson is
able to make visible, "in the form of an ideological closure," social dilemmas, aporias,
and contradictions (254).
Neither Jameson nor Culler attends to the particular significance that the visual
form of the semiotic square affords to the description of its constituent relationships.
Though Greimas himself did not discuss the significance of the square as a figure, he
did indeed give us the tools with which to consider the square figuratively. His article
"Figurative Semiotics and the Semiotics of the Plastic Arts" contains three parts, enti-
tled "Figurativity," "The Plastic Signifier," and, finally, "Toward a Plastic Semiotics."
The latter part only indicates a direction in which a semiotic investigation of plastic
representation might occur, but it does not offer anything of a how-to guide (Perron
523). The article immediately poses a problem for a "visual semiotics," given that such
a semiotics cannot be readily identified as either of the two macrosemiotics resulting
from the human condition, that is, as a "natural" language or world (Greimas, Collins,
and Perron 628). Greimas asks after the place of the "figurative": "Where do we place
this phenomenon of the visual which is both 'natural' - because it is manifested,
'transcoded,' within our verbal discourses - and 'artificial' - because it constitutes, in
the form of 'images,' an essential component of constructed poetic language?" He pro-

visionally offers that visual semiotics must be defined by its " planar structures ," and
that those structures work within "tridimensional space " (emph. Greimas, Collins,
and Perron's). Greimas consents that such a formulation, already of "scarcely articu-
lated specificity," quickly vanishes when considered alongside systems of writing or
other modes of graphic representation. Without a more precise figurative scope,
Greimas proceeds to problematize the use of the word "semiotic" in that formulation;
the word, semiotic, "implies that the markings covering the surfaces chosen to receive
those markings constitute signifying wholes and that collections of these signifying
wholes, whose limits are yet to be defined, in turn constitute signifying systems"
(629). This implication "justifies" for Greimas the semiotic postulation regarding the
materiality of the plastic arts.
But, in order to offer semiotic analysis, Greimas must ask a preliminary question.
He writes, "Are visual configurations, which are constructed upon planar surfaces,
representations?" If so, Greimas continues, what kind of systems might they entail,
and can we recognize those systems as languages? "In other words," Greimas writes,
"can they speak of something other than themselves?" (Greimas, Collins, and Perron
629). In the case of the letter "o," Greimas argues that there is no iconic relationship
between the visual depiction of the letter and its corresponding sound. Thus, the link
between the two is "a correspondence between two systems - graphic and phonic -
such that the figure-units produced by one of the systems can be globally homolo-
gated with the figure-units of another system," never requiring any "natural" link
between the two (630). This relationship never exceeds one of analogy.
On the other hand, in the creation of formal languages, while such languages
may use equal visual signifiers - as an alphabet - "the internal organization of the
visual figures is a matter of indifference to them." That is, in the case of "writing as a
system," Greimas posits "oppositions" between possible features (or the absence
thereof) as constitutive, while formal languages use those signifiers in an independ-
ent and "discriminatory" way. Greimas articulates the importance of this distinction:
If we now set aside the rapprochement between graphic and phonic systems [. . .] we see
that in the case of our two extreme examples, we can speak of two "representation systems"
and mean two different things by that. Writing is an articulated visual mechanism which
can represent anything (the semantic universe in its totality). Formal language on the con-
trary appears to be a "corpus of concepts" that can be represented in any way (using vari-
ous symbol systems). What seemed especially interesting to us was to show that one and
the same alphabet could be used to two different ends, that one and the same signifier could
be articulated in two different ways and thus be used to constitute two different languages.
(Greimas, Collins, and Perron 630)
John J. Corso 79
The preceding passage provokes my primary criticism of Greimas and an internal

inconsistency I will attempt to ameliorate with the introduction of a grammatologi-
cal perspective.5 In the alphabetic example, Greimas clarifies the difference between
the functioning of writing as a representation of the semantic universe versus the dis-
interested use of writing in a formal language. The formal language, by definition, is
unable to comment immanently upon its own formation; therefore, any system of
writing cannot function intertextually. For this, Greimas posits the need of a meta-
language to transpose between discursive universes.
Following the two types of representation, Greimas further complicates the sce-
nario with the introduction of the age-old problem of iconicity. Frustrated that
"despite all the refinements that centuries of thought have brought to the concepts of
'imitation and 'nature'" (Greimas, Collins, and Perron 632), Greimas complains that
nevertheless a sentiment persists that correlates the "likeness" of an image, as a "moti-
vate" icon, to a referent in the real world. Such an imitation "presupposes a very thor-
ough implicit analysis of 'nature'" and a recognition of the fundamental articulations
of the natural world" that the painter is said to copy. Greimas doubts that any such
reduction can maintain fidelity to the "richness of the natural world." Those marks on
a canvas, he writes, "are perhaps identifiable as figures^ but not as objects of the world"
(630, emph. mine). Greimas writes: "The concept of imitation , which in the com-
munication structure refers to the enunciatori sending instance, corresponds to the
concept of recognition , which refers to the receiver's instance. To 'imitate' in the pre-
carious conditions we have just described makes no sense unless the visual figures
thus traced are offered to a spectator in order for him to recognize them as configu-
rations of the natural world. But this is not 'doing painting'" (631-32, emph.
Greimas, Collins, and Perron's).
In this way, Greimas argues for an emphasis on the "legibility of the natural
world," which generates the sense of imitation, rather than something manifest in the
code of the image itself. For, what "is 'naturally' given?" Greimas asks. A figure (which,
Greimas clarifies, is "constituted by features coming from different senses") cannot be
legible as an object without being transformed into an object. An object, "insofar as it
is, for example, contrastable to 'process,' is interoceptive rather than exteroceptive, and
is not 'naturally' inscribed in the primary image of the world," Greimas adds paren-
thetically (Greimas, Collins, and Perron 632). Greimas later comes to describe the
dichotomy between exteroceptive and interoceptive as the "set of semic categories
which articulate the semantic universe," that, further, constitutes "a paradigmatic clas-
sification that enables us to distinguish figurative from non -figurative (or abstract)
ones" (Greimas and Courtes 214).
Perron explains the reading grid as the mechanism, "subject to cultural rela-
tivism, in which the figurative forms of visual figures are identified as 'representing'
objects of the world transformed into object-signs through semiosis"; objects then
become "the result of reading constructions" (529). Greimas writes:
It is this grid through which we read which causes the world to signify for us and it does so
by allowing us to identify figures as objects, to classify them and link them together, to
interpret movements as processes which are attributable or not attributable to subjects, and
so on. This grid is of a semantic nature, not visual, auditive, or olfactory. It serves as a
"code" for recognition which makes the world intelligible and manageable. Now we can see
that it is the projection of this reading grid - a sort of "signified" of the world - onto a
painted canvas that allows us to recognize the spectacle it is supposed to represent.
(Greimas, Collins, and Perron 632)
The idea of the reading grid eventually drops away, a result of an early formulation of
the subject-object-act trio described in "Figurative Semiotics." Given the interim role
of the reading grid, which more essentially posits iconicity in the reader rather than
the signifier, Greimas affirms the non -iconic character of plastic representation.
Instead, iconicity is determined from a culturally-defined set of schemata, intuited at
the moment of textual reading. It is not, however, the only means of perception. "Such
an iconizing reading is, however, a semiosis - that is, an operation which, conjoining
a signifier and a signified, produces signs." Greimas deems the reading grid to be "of
a semantic nature," which, we must assume, possesses a paradigmatic dimension.
With the reading grid, a reader can group salient features together into "figurative for-
mants," which transforms those visual traces into "object-signs." The crucial act of
grouping "is a simultaneous grasping that transforms the bundle of heterogeneous
features into a format, that is, into a unit of the signifier." The "grid of the signified"
is what allows for recognition, and it is at this moment that the reader may correlate
the representation as one of an object of the natural world (633).
Regardless of the means of analyzing the reader (whether as subject to the reading-
grid as within this essay, or as an actant), the important attribution here that remains
constant is sequence. In this system, grouping features into figurative formants occurs
at the level of the act of reading, and it does so on the basis of culturally inflected, par-
adigmatic reading grids. Greimas makes clear that the moment of semiosis is respon-
sible for which particular features are amalgamated into signification. Greimas writes:
John J. Corso 81
We can see that the formation of formants, at the time of semiosis, is no more than an artic-
ulation of the planar signifier, its segmentation into legible discrete units. This segmenta-
tion is done with a view to a certain kind of reading of the visual object, but as we saw in
connection with the twofold function of the alphabet, it does not exclude other possible
segmentations of the signifier. These discrete units, constituted out of bundles of features,
are already well known to us. They are the "forms" of Gestalt theory, "figures of the world"
in the Bachelardian sense, "figures of the level of expression" according to Hjelmslev. This
convergence of points of view originating in seemingly very disparate preoccupations
allows us to speak here of a figurative reading of visual objects. (633-34, emph. Greimas,
Collins, and Perron's)
It is in this sense that I insist on the figurativity of the square. Though Greimas insists
on a much more open stance to the formation of formants, as I will soon demon-
strate, his critics have been far less generous in their denial of the "twofold function"
that Greimas notices in the alphabet. I hope to show that critics have maintained a
semantic "functional fixedness" in their refusal to admit to the square any "other pos-
sible segmentations of the signifier." Allow me at this point to return to the earlier
example from Donne: "For I am every dead / thing." Earlier on, I suggested a square
that would oppose the subject (I) to the object (thing). But looking at this sentence
reveals a mirror image, in fact a reflexivity that imposes one square upon another. In
the first square, SI (I) is opposed to S2 (thing). In the second square, the object, thing,
becomes SI, and its opposite, I, takes the position of S2. The two squares reveal that
they were not separate planes, but rather one figure, which when released from its
5. Cody VanderKaay. Rumor of Limits (variant). 2013. Digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.6
pinned-down perspective, can be read as the interaction of planar signifiers. Though

Culler insists that the square is incapable of actualizing both live/dead at once, this
drawing by artist Cody VanderKaay (see Fig. 5) shows that the figure is at once given
(I, alive) and withdrawn (thing, dead).
By the time "Figurative Semiotics" was written, Greimas had a modal grammar
well in place, and the concept of modality reached its most developed form following
the publication of "Figurative Semiotics." Greimas later allows a "first stage" of under-
standing modality that divides modes of verbal forms into "utterances of doing and
utterances of state." "In other words," Greimas writes, "the following can be conceived:
(a) doing modalizing being ( cf. performance, art), (b) being modalizing doing ( cf.
competence), (c) being modalizing being (cf. veridictory modalities), and (d) doing
modalizing doing (cf. factitive modalities.) In this perspective, the modal predicate
can be defined first of all by its sole tactic function, by its transitive aim, which can
affect another utterance taken as object" (Greimas and Courtes 195).
In irrefutable.
irrefutable.the
Thecase of The
"mode "readinghowever,
of reading," "mode anrequires
of artwork," reading,"
much closer however,
scrutiny. Sincefor example, requires the artwork's much closer status scrutiny. as object Since is
reading an artwork is not factitive, we must assume the instance of "doing modaliz-
ing being." The "being," though, might easily mislead, since it is yet unclear whether
this mode is itself virtual, actual, or realized. Greimas later clarifies: the "planar
object" that produces "meaning effects" therein affirms its membership within a semi-
otics system (Greimas, Collins, and Perron 636-37). But, though we may have access
to its mode of manifestation, the system's existence is unknowable. Greimas explains:
"Knowledge of particular planar objects alone can lead to knowledge of the system
which underlies them. This means that if the processes are grasped in their realized
form, they presuppose the system as a virtual one, and thus as one that can be repre-
sented only through an ad hoc, constructed language" (637, emph. mine).
Though we can only know an object through what Greimas elsewhere calls a
metalanguage , he nevertheless holds that such a process of description does not pre-
clude other "signifying articulations of planar objects" and, in fact, refers only to fig-
ures that are assigned "with 'natural' interpretation." Because figurativity is generated
through the process of reading, here given a priori structure through the reading grid,
Greimas demonstrates that the "biased" and "partial" perspective implies that figura-
tivization seems "to go beyond the limits of the planar vehicle or support, upon which
its manifestation is based" (Greimas, Collins, and Perron 634). This is a critical aspect
for this discussion. It emphatically demonstrates Greimas's awareness that the square,
when figurativized, exceeds the flatness of the drawing.
John J. Corso 83
In the remainder of "Figurative Semiotics," Greimas outlines the "initial steps"

for the semiotician "to establish an area of investigation wherein to inquire into the
how and why" of figure-objects (Greimas, Collins, and Perron 636). A recapitulation
of the relevant Greimassian points will yield the following: semiosis occurs at the
moment the paradigmatic is organized syntagmatically within the reader (or enunci-
ator). Within "visual semiotics," the reader of an image produces a semiosis by means
of a culturally informed, a priori reading grid, which allows that reader to posit a
given bundle of features as figurative. Figurativity, then, while appearing to refer to
something of the natural world, is, in fact, a result of a predisposition in reading,
rather than a natural link to the world. The very logic that allows us to posit a figurai
semiotics, however, must reciprocally be applied to natural language, at which point
we must also acknowledge a figurai component within language - not at the level of
its figurai expression, but at the level of a figurai content (635). "To say that a planar
object is a process, a text that is realizing one of the system's virtualities," is an admis-
sion of the semiotic method of analysis characterized by unscrupulous dissection in
efforts to arrive at the smallest observable unit. Such a directive leads Greimas to the
next step of attempting to isolate and identify a smaller segment within the plastic sig-
nifier, that is, "strictly plastic units which ultimately are carriers of significations
unknown to us." The drive in this endeavour is one toward operationalism: "Now,
given a visual text which we consider to be a segmentable signifier, we need but enun-
ciate our final postulate, that of operativity. This consists in saying that an object can
be grasped only through its analysis. Put simplistically, it can be grasped only through
being decomposed into smaller units and through the reintegration of those units
into the totalities that they constitute" (637, emph. Greimas, Collins, and Perron's). I
will soon turn to Derrida to propose an alternative to this operativity, an alternative
frame (or drawer) from which to reflect upon the object.
The first option in such a segmentation lies in the "topological mechanism" of the
image. By this term, Greimas attempts a systematic means of reading the "reading" of an
image. I will outline the scheme he introduces, but first I must emphasize that it is not the
particular mechanism in Greimas that interests me, but rather the "area of operation" that
he identifies, an area I will describe in a grammatological sense as writing or drawing.
Of begins the with

begins "topological withwith
the frame, the rectilinear,
frame, categories" withorrectilinear,
curvilinear, in which
compound forms. visual curvilinear, figures or might compound be catalogued, forms. Greimas He then
He then
moves swiftly into an opposition between eidetic (the qualities of an image inde-
pendent of colour) and chromatic categories. I need not critique these insufficient
categories here. Very nearly one hundred years earlier than the publication of this
essay, art historian Heinrich Wölfflin developed a more complex series of opposi-
tions, the creation of which has subsequently been thoroughly deconstructed by
newer art histories.7 Furthermore, by 1978, Jacques Derrida dismantled the surety of
the frame as a painting's fundamental matrix of legibility in La vérité en peinture.
(Formal categories being of especial interest to art critics, there is, in fact, a body of
literature far too great to outline here, as German, Viennese, and American schools of
formalism abound in such treatises.)
Greimas alternatively calls these forms "topological," as a general term, or "plastic
categories," referring to the "minimal substructures" that can be discerned from topo-
logical segmentation. What holds relevance here is not the verification of Greimas's
weak formal categories, but rather that implicit "area of operation" therein, an area that
he himself neglected to investigate owing to the aforementioned bias against the writ-
ten or drawn. Greimas writes: "These topological categories, projected upon a surface
. whose richness and polysemy would otherwise render it indecipherable, bring about its
reduction to a reasonable number of pertinent elements necessary for its reading"
(Greimas, Collins, and Perron 639). Those elements, Greimas goes on to demonstrate,
are subject to the same kinds of discursive analysis used upon linguistic structures.
Greimas grants a certain relativity to the reduction factor of those minimal units,
a relativity that Culler would doubtless chastise: the semiotician, Greimas says, "must
be satisfied with the example offered by semantics." This statement is instructive, since
it indicts Greimas's most infamous contribution to semiotics, the exercise known as
the semiotic square, an exercise used to consider the semantic, or paradigmatic, rela-
tionship of a given element. He explains the similarity to semantics, and this passage
is equally pertinent as a description of the utility of his square: "Semantics, faced with
the impossibility of establishing a limited inventory of its semic categories that would
still cover the whole of the cultural universe, has to be satisfied with taking into con-
sideration only those categories that are relevant to the analysis of such and such a
given micro-universe" (Greimas, Collins, and Perron 640).
It is here that I return to The Truth in Painting. Derrida is also deeply interested
in the paradigm, and he breaches the term when musing on the artworks by Gerard
Titus-Carmel, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin and the 61 Ensuing Drawings , which were
exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1978. (See the first and last of one hundred and
twenty-seven "coffin" drawings in Figure 6.) Derrida's prose floats above the "mute
coffin," below it, and within it. The chapter enigmatically begins, "If I now write IT
WILL HAVE REMAINED WITHOUT EXAMPLE, they will not read." Instead, dis-
tracted by the enigma and "scarcely reading at all, they will wonder what I'm talking
about." This certainly describes my own experience: not "reading," but wondering
John J. Corso 85
6. Gérard Titus-Carmel. The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin. 1975. Georges Pompidou Centre, Musée National d'Art
Moderne, Paris. Reproduced in Derrida's The Truth in Painting, 199. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris.
what these marks mean. It seems, though, that Derrida describes exactly the fate of
the semiotic square: viewers scarcely read the image, wondering only what it means,
what Greimas is talking about. In the case of the coffin, for example, Derrida asks,
"Am I talking about the word or the thing?" (185). And, perhaps that was our same
response when we encountered Donne's phrase? (If I now write FOR I AM IN EVERY
DEAD THING, they will not read. Am I talking about the word or the thing?) On the
one hundred and twenty-seven coffins in the artist's series, Derrida writes: "Not for-
get a single one and let each one remain alone, if at least those not yet reading me
want to follow this theory of coffins, the obsequence of this cortege in singular line-
age, the series without model whose procession in a double band, on this wall, still fas-
cinates them too much for them to listen to me saying IT WILL HAVE REMAINED
WITHOUT EXAMPLE." But what if we were to consider the square similarly? All of
the semiotic squares in series? ("Whence my discouragement, today: I can only speak
generally about them, or at best generically or genetically" [186]).
Derrida recounts his visit with the artist to see the one hundred and twenty-
seven drawings, which they withdrew from "enormous black cardboard boxes shaped
like drawers. [. . .] They [the boxes] contain the drawings , the 127 drawings in the
form of drawers. [. . .] We untied them in order to draw out, one by one, the coffins
which themselves, exhibiting their cords, etc." (192, emph. Derrida's). (Are the
squares, too, not drawn drawers?) Derrida calls this little coffin a "paradigm," and he
writes: "But if the paradigm appears to be at the origin of the genealogy [that is, the
first of the one hundred twenty-seven coffins], the scandal of usurpation will not
delay and the paradigm will have to withdraw (retreats, exile, retirement). The para-
digm was not at the origin, it is itself neither producer nor generator. It is a fac-
similie of a model, will first have been produced - and even, in all the senses of this
word, as model, reduced " (emph. Derrida's). But just as figures are not objects before
being read as such, "The little princeps coffin is not given> that's the least one can say;
it is not fair, a prior given, belonging to a sort of nature, native and autochthonous, as
are, most often, 'models,' examples, "referents'" (194, emph. Derrida's). (Derrida sup-
poses, "They will notice that I like the word paradigm. It's the measure of my love, yes,
it's the word that's needed, for the coffin, the word and the thing" [196]. We might
add, for the square, the I and the thing. And it is just as proper for my purposes here.)
My to insistence theofsidetheofvisual.
to the side on the(Ittheis rather
visual. tofigurativity
rejoin the (It is rather
figure with of
its the to square
corpse, to placerejoin is the not figure meant with to bring its corpse, the pendulum to place
it to rest within its drawer.) I side with Derrida, who writes that "a paradigm offers
itself not only to sight, pre-posed like a precedent laid out flat, like a prior plan. [. . .]
John J. Corso 87
7. Cody VanderKaay. Rumor of Limits (variant). 2013. Digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.
It occupies a volume, it puts itself forward as a structure of reliefs belonging to the space
of manipulatory construction, as the model of a building or of a monument, of a device
or a machine, a boat for example" (197, emph. Der ridas). And it is in this statement that
I reimagine Greimas s hope that the semiotician "establish an area of investigation
wherein to inquire into the how and why" (Greimas, Collins, and Perron 636). For per-
haps it was not Greimas the semiotician, but Greimas the draftsman who began this
process. It may be that the artist is more capable of manipulating the paradigm. Take,
for example, Figure 7, an artist's drawing, a drawing that puts the square back into its
box. This artist's drawing, a box-like rendition of the original paradigm, behaves just as
Titus-Carmel's coffins. Derrida writes, "Titus-Carmel cadaverizes the paradigm." And
this we can see in the absent example, the empty cartouche. But we see this exact process
in the very first (and perhaps the very last) semiotic square: "Hounding its effigy, feign-
ing the feigning of it in a series of simulated reproductions, he reduces it, he transforms
it into a tiny piece of waste, outside the séries in the series, and henceforth no longer in
use." What does Greimas really do? Like Titus-Carmel, "He does without it ((no) more
paradigm, (no) more coffin, one more or less), he puts an end to it" (198). The semiotic
square, too, cadaverizes the paradigm.
NOTES
1/ That is to say, "overbar S," meaning, not-S, etc.

2/ See Umberto Eco, Patrizia Magli, and Alice Otis's "Greimassian Semantics and the Encyclopedia" ( New
Literary History 20.3 [1989]: 707-21. Print).
3/ Curiously, Greimas does not outline the third stage of semiotics, but one might posit "Figurative
Semiotics" as falling within that range.
4/ Admittedly, Jameson's reference to the "semantic rectangle" attends more carefully to its visible geome-
try than does the term "semiotic square."
5/ While it would be sheer conjecture to surmise whether my forthcoming revision would be positively
received by Greimas, he, nevertheless, was eager for constant revision to what he termed the "semiotic
project."
6/ Cody VanderKaay's digital illustrations were commissioned specifically for this essay.
7/ Most helpful on this topic is Marshall Brown's "The Classic Is the Baroque: On the Principle of
Wölfflin's Art History" ( Critical Inquiry 9.2 [1982]: 379-404. Print), but see also Mark Jarzombek's
"De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism" ( Assemblage
23 [1994]: 29-69. Print).
WORKS CITED
Armstrong, Nancy. "Inside Greimas's Square: Literary Characters and Cultural Constraints." The Sign in
Music and Literature. Ed. Wendy Steiner. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 52-66. Print.
Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1975. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
Greimas, A.J. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983. Print.
Greimas, A. J., and François Rastier. "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints." Yale French Studies 4. 1
(1968): 86-105. Print.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Frank Collins, and Paul Perron. "Figurative Semiotics and the Semiotics of the
Plastic Arts." New Literary History 20.3 ( 1989): 627-49. Print.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Joseph Courtes. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Print. Advances in Semiotics.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Joseph Courtes, and Michael Rengstorf. "The Cognitive Dimension of Narrativ
Discourse." New Literary History 20.3 ( 1989): 563-79. Print.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Paul Perron, and Frank Collins. "On Meaning." New Literary History 20.3 (198
539-50. Print.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 2002.
1981. Print.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Print. Princeton Essays in European and Com
Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. Print.
John J. Corso 89
Maddox, Donald. "Veridiction, Verifiction, Verifactions: Reflections on Methodology." New Literary History
20.3 (1989): 661-77. Print.
Perron, Paul. "Introduction: A.J. Greimas." New Literary History 20.3 (1989): 523-38. Print.
Ricoeur, Paul, Frank Collins, and Paul Perron. "Greimas's Narrative Grammar." New Literary History 20.3
(1989): 581-608. Print.
Thürlemann, Felix, and Cheryl Spiese McKee. "Fictionality in Mantegna's San Zeno Altarpiece Structures
of Mimesis and the History of Painting." New Literary History 20.3 ( 1989): 747-61. Print.
JOHN J. CORSO is Assistant Professor of contemporary art history and critical theory at Oakland
University in Rochester, Michigan, and an art critic. He is currently writing a monograph on the
U.S. sculptor Sheila Pepe.

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What Does Greimas's Semiotic Square Really Do?

Author(s): JOHN J. CORSO

What Does Greimas's

Mosaic 47/ 1 0027- 1 276-07/069022$02.00©Mosaic

also posit a contradictory version of this axis, producing t

these axial dimensions the "substance of content" (

Greimas himself gives a no

To reiterate, Greimas regard

Let me turn to another example. If we consider a subject, we can oppose it to an object

In 1979, Greimas published an extensive dictionary of semiotics, released in 1982

While warranted, all oftheir

the form of 'images,' an essential component of constructed poetic language?" He pro-

The preceding passage provokes my primary criticism of Greimas and an internal

pinned-down perspective, can be read as the interaction of planar signifiers. Though

In the remainder of "Figurative Semiotics," Greimas outlines the "initial steps"

Of begins the with

1/ That is to say, "overbar S," meaning, not-S, etc.

Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.

Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. Print.

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