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Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Volume47, Number 1, March 2014, pp. 69-89 (Article)

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Mosaic 47/1 0027-1276-07/069022$02.00Mosaic

What Does Greimass

Semiotic Square Really Do?

JOHN J. CORSO

The semiotic square is a graphic representation of the deep structure of a semiotic

system (Greimas and Rastier 87). Greimas uses the device to bring into view

contrary and contradictory terms, thereby framing narrative segments within

a given discourse (Greimas, Courts, 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 will 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).

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.

Mosaic 47/1 (March 2014)70

The semiotic square has instigated an expansive range of critical responses that use

the device to consider paradigmatic analyses of characters (actants), narrative and

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 Jamesons famous application of the square to Dickenss Hard Times.

Chandler also mentions the use of the square by Dan Fleming to consider childrens

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 Thrlemann. Finally, Donna Haraway famously uses the square to consider the

Regenerative Politics of the other, while Rosalind Krauss has used a variantthe Klein

groupto 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 Jamesons 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 squares figurativity more carefullya

figurativity that Greimas himself provides the terms with which to investigatethey

might come to a treatment of the semiotic square that more closely resembles Derridas

deconstructive treatment of the (rectangular) coffin in The Truth in Painting.

The square takes the meaning of an initial semiotic system, S, to which Greimas also

refers as the universe of meaning. It posits a contradiction to that system S1, which

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 S1 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 S1 S2. But we can

also posit a contradictory version of this axis, producing the absence of the complex

axis. This is the neutral axis, and its semic structure is S1 S2. Greimas calls

these axial dimensions the substance of content (Structural 87). We can thus plot

these two axes to produce the following structural representations:

71John J. Corso

To reiterate, Greimas regards these basic semic structures by their constituent rela-

tions as well as their structural dimensions. The six semic structures, S1 + S2, S1 + S2,

S1 + S1, S2 + S2, and S1 + S2, S2 + S1, can also be described in terms of their con-

stituent relations as follows:

Greimas himself gives a now famous example, opposing life (S1) to death (S2) and

not-life (S1, i.e., non-living) to not-death (S2, i.e., the undead). Remember that the

semiotic system S is related to a contradictory system, S. We can therefore draw struc-

tural, contradictory dimensions between S1 and S1, S2 and S2. Greimas terms these

two dimensions schemas, which allows us to connect these simple semic terms.

Greimas sees two additional dimensions, however, that connect the semic structures

S1 + S2, S2 + S1. He arrives at these diagonal dimensions through simple implication,

terming them deixes, and representing them as unbroken lines that complete the

classic image of the square. Thus, we arrive at the image of the elementary structure

of meaning (Greimas and Rastier 88), which, in his example, looks like this:

S1 S2

S1 S2


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 pointa point

that can only be derived through visual analysisin the final section of this essay.

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:

Finally, the constituent relations can also be described in terms of their structural

dimensions:

73John J. Corso

Greimas definitively introduced the diagram of the semiotic square in his 1966

essay, Les jeux des contraintes smiotiques, 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 this new presentation makes it isomorphic

to the logical hexagon of R. Blanch [. . .] as well as to the structures called, in math-

ematics, the Klein group, and, in psychology, the Piaget group (88). Jameson also

notes the squares similarity to Levi-Strausss culinary triangle (i.e., raw-cooked-

rotten) (Prison-House 166), and Greimas certainly credits the anthropologist as a pri-

mary influence. The square fits into the first stage of an intellectual history that

Greimas himself divides into four stages. In the first stage, Algirdas Julien Greimas

begins his career in Lithuania with a short study of Don Quixote, though he recog-

nizes the 1956 publication of his article, Lactualit du saussurisme, as an early mile-

stone (Greimas, Perron, and Collins 540). In the 1956 article, Greimas investigates

works by Saussure, Merleau-Ponty, and Lvi-Strauss. He attributes to this work an

understanding of paradigmatic analysis, which would come to form half of his influ-

ential discourse analysis. The second half would come from his discovery of the pro-

genitor of Russian formalism, Vladimir Propp. Greimas recounts that Lvi-Strauss

had recommended Propps work on Russian fairy tales to Greimass friend, Roland

Barthes: There existed an American translation of a certain Vladimir Propp. Barthes

gave me the reference and I sent to Indiana University Press for the book. Although

this is anecdotal, I would like to say that Propp furnished the syntagmatic or syntac-

tic component for my work. My theoretical genius, if I can so call it, was a form of

bricolage. I took a little Lvi-Strauss and added some Propp. This is what I call the

first stage of semiotics (541).

It was during this first stage of the Paris School of semiotics that Greimas, with

Franois Rastier, released his Interactions of Semiotic Constraints. He did 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,


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 Historys 1989 volume dedicated to

Greimas. In that introduction, Perron cites Hjelmslevs 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 Greimass 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 structuresthe latterand deep structurethe 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 prominent critics deploy the square to various ends, but few sufficiently

explain its purpose beyond pragmatic, instrumental grounds. Jameson 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 Greimass

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

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)

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 Greimass 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). Greimass

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 all of Cullers charges against Greimass use of binaries are of themselves

warranted, their specific application produces an unnecessarily restrictive 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

John J. Corso


visual that he describes these oppositions rhetorically, without any graphic supple-

ment. His analysis is convincing ifas the majority of extant literature doeswe

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 Jamesons 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 Greimass application of this mechanism to the work of

Georges Bernanos. Jameson subsequently looks at his own example as applied to

Charles Dickenss 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 signifi 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 Unconscious, 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

77

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

Conrads 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

performin other words, the resolution of this particular determinate contradiction

or, more precisely, following Lvi-Strausss 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 naturalbecause it is manifested,

transcoded, within our verbal discoursesand artificialbecause it constitutes, in

John J. Corso


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 Perrons). 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 systemsgraphic 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 signifiersas an alphabetthe 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)

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 enunciators sending instance, corresponds to the

concept of recognition, which refers to the receivers 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 Perrons).

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 Courts 214).

John J. Corso


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 semiosisthat 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:

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 grida sort of signified of the worldonto a

painted canvas that allows us to recognize the spectacle it is supposed to represent.

(Greimas, Collins, and Perron 632)

81John J. Corso

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, S1 (I) is opposed to S2 (thing). In the second square, the object, thing,

becomes S1, 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

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 Perrons)

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 Courts 195).

In the case of reading an artwork, for example, the artworks status as object is

irrefutable. The mode of reading, however, requires much closer scrutiny. Since

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 systems 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 Greimass awareness that the square,

when figurativized, exceeds the flatness of the drawing.

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 figural

semiotics, however, must reciprocally be applied to natural language, at which point

we must also acknowledge a figural component within languagenot at the level of

its figural expression, but at the level of a figural content (635). To say that a planar

object is a process, a text that is realizing one of the systems 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 Perrons). 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 the topological categories in which visual figures might be catalogued, Greimas

begins with the frame, with rectilinear, curvilinear, or compound forms. 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

John J. Corso


essay, art historian Heinrich Wlfflin 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 paintings fundamental matrix of legibility in La vrit 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 Greimass

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 Greimass 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 Grard

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.) Derridas 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 Im talking

about. This certainly describes my own experience: not reading, but wondering

85John J. Corso

6. Grard Titus-Carmel. The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin. 1975. Georges Pompidou Centre, Muse National dArtModerne, Paris. Reproduced in Derridas The Truth in Painting, 199. Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork/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 Donnes 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 artists 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. Derridas). (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 producedand even, in all the senses of this

word, as model, reduced (emph. Derridas). But just as figures are not objects before

being read as such, The little princeps coffin is not given, thats 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. Derridas). (Derrida sup-

poses, They will notice that I like the word paradigm. Its the measure of my love, yes,

its the word thats 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 insistence on the figurativity of the square is not meant to bring the pendulum

to the side of the visual. (It is rather to rejoin the figure with its corpse, 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. [. . .]

87John J. Corso

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. Derridas). And it is in this statement that

I reimagine Greimass 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 artists drawing, a drawing that puts the square back into its

box. This artists drawing, a box-like rendition of the original paradigm, behaves just as

Titus-Carmels 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 series 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.

7. Cody VanderKaay. Rumor of Limits (variant). 2013. Digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.


NOTES

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

2/ See Umberto Eco, Patrizia Magli, and Alice Otiss 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, Jamesons 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 VanderKaays digital illustrations were commissioned specifically for this essay.

7/ Most helpful on this topic is Marshall Browns The Classic Is the Baroque: On the Principle of

Wlfflins Art History (Critical Inquiry 9.2 [1982]: 379-404. Print), but see also Mark Jarzombeks

De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wlfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism (Assemblage

23 [1994]: 29-69. Print).

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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.

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Plastic Arts. New Literary History 20.3 (1989): 627-49. Print.

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Maddox, Donald. Veridiction, Verifiction, Verifactions: Reflections on Methodology. New Literary History

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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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