3.10
|
Connected to his either-or staging of the semantic-
syntactic opposition is a cardinal axiom. Ricoeur
posits the eternal stasis of a taxonomy. His
evidence is culled from "Elements of a Narrative
Grammar". In this text Greimas explains that
Lévi-Strauss's 1955 structural analysis of the
Oedipus myth "resulted in the construction of a
simple achronic model." (67)
and
furthermore "such a model accounts for the
achronic apprehension of the signification of the
stories that could possibly be generated by a given
microuniverse" (68).
However, Greimas continues "if one considers it
[signification] as an apprehension or
production of meaning by a subject" one can
represent the taxonomic model dynamically (68). Ricoeur transfers to
Greimas
himself attributes that Greimas affixes to Lévi-
Strauss. This referential migration of the
adjective "achronic" accrues a certain force
when the adverbial qualifier "rigorously" is
attached. Ricoeur on Greimas:
Semantically speaking or to say the
same thing differently, from the point of view of
morphology the model is rigorously
achronic. It is a taxonomy, that is a system
of unoriented relations. But one can
represent the model dynamically. You just
have to move from the morphological point of view
to the syntactic one, that is, treat the
constituent relations of the
taxonomic model as being
operations. ("Greimas's Narrative
Grammar"
5-6)
The French text gives the impression that the model is
a semantics:
En tant que sémantique or,
ce qui est synonymique, du point de vue
morphologique le modèle est
rigouresement achronique. C'est une
taxinomie, c'est-à-dire un système
de relations non orientées. ("La grammaire narrative
de
Greimas" 7)
One copula is missing in the chain of statements:
the model is achronic, a taxonomy is achronic, the
model is a semantics, a taxonomy is a system of non-
oriented relations. Is a taxonomy always and only
a semantics? And is a syntax always an add-on?
3.10
|
3.11
|
The answer hinges on the distinction between achronic
and atemporal. If achronic is taken as synonymous
with synchronic, then the moves between semantic and
syntactic dimensions, indeed their very mutual
implication, cease to be wondrous. Greimas,
himself, at the end of the section treating the
narrativization of taxonomy, invites readers to note
that the "so-called achronic apprehension of myth
is an unstable instance [...] its
"dogmatic" structure is capable, at any
moment, of turning into a story" ("Elements" 68).
Exploiting the suggestion of instabilities and
responding to Ricoeur's critique, Jean Petitot (1983)
has demonstrated that the semiotic square, schematized
according to catastrophe theory, does possess a
temporality (n1).
|
3.11
|
3.12
|
Petitot, like Ricoeur, discredits the generative powers
of logic. It is banished from the explicative
framework. In Morphogenèse du
Sens he carefully distinguishes between
topological schematization and logical
formalization. The pretensions to logicity of the
taxonomy are displaced by the application of
sophisticated mathematical tools. The question of
conversion is for Petitot not one of equivalence
between metalanguages but one of "double
reading" (Morphogenèse
268). This double
reading is a "covering
of paths" in a mathematical representation of the
semiotic square (n2). Plots can be generated from
taxonomies. Petitot's work however lends credence
to positions like Ricoeur's that to do the trick, logic
alone does not suffice.
|
3.12
|
3.13
|
When pictures are made to tell stories or graphs to
sing tales, magic is afoot. Certainly topological
schematization has affinities with prelogical thought
as characterized by Lévy-Bruhl:
The concrete categories of position, location
and distance are of such paramount importance
to the conception of rude nations as are to
us those of time and causality. (n3) (Lévy-Bruhl
150)
As well, topological schematization requires a
stratified space or a space that is not uniform.
A similar condition exists for prelogical
thought. According to Lévy-Bruhl, spatial
representations have a bearing on cognitive moves and
what types of linkages are possible and permissible:
The condition of our abstraction is the
logical homogeneity of the concepts which
permits of their combination. Now this
homogeniety is closely bound up with the
homogeneous representation of space. If
the prelogical mind, on the contrary,
imagines the various regions in space as
differing in quality, as determined by their
mystic participations with such and such
groups of persons or objects, abstraction as
we usually conceive of it becomes very
difficult to such a mind, and we shall find
that its place is taken by the mystic
abstraction which is the result of the law of
participation. (Lévy-Bruhl
121)
The law of participation is posited to explain
"mental activity [which] is too little
differentiated for it to be possible to consider ideas
or images of objects by themselves apart from the
emotions and passions which evoke these ideas or are
evoked by them" (Lévy-Bruhl
36).
|
3.13
|
3.14
|
In this prelogical alloy of feeling and thought one
recognizes an equivalent to Ricoeur's pathemic
dimension. However the pejorative laden discourse
of Lévy-Bruhl on primitive mentalities has been,
through the linguistics of Viggo Brøndal,
purged. It is through Greimas's encounter with
Brøndal's work that the law of participation is
implanted into the fundamental structure of
signification. Ricoeur contends of course that
the Greimassian taxonomy partakes of a mixed nature and
hence is not purely logical. On geneological
grounds, his charges stand substantiated.
|
3.14
|
3.15
|
The semiotic square maps a relation between complex and
neutral terms. These designations are derived
from Brøndal's morphological studies. After
explaining the characteristics that define positive,
negative, neutral and complex terms, in that order, the
Danish linguist remarks in reference to the last of the
terms explicated:
L'existence ce cette espèce de termes
ambigus ou synthétiques sera d'un
intérêt capital pour la logique (je
n'ai qu'à évoquer le grand nom de
Hegel), elle sera avant tout importante pour
la solution du problème à la fois
sociologique et linguistique de la
mentalité ou des mentalités,
problème toujours actuel depuis les
études de M. Lévy-Bruhl. (Brøndal 16) (n4)
The existence of this kind of ambiguous or
synthetic term will be of capital interest
for logic (I have but to evoke the great name
of Hegel), it will be above all important for
the solution to the both sociological and
linguistic problematic of cognition or ways
of thinking. It is, since Lévy-
Bruhl's studies on
mentalités, a
problematic still with us.
Brøndal reformulates Lévy-Bruhl's
"collective representations" that peculiar
amalgam of emotion and idea. It receives a new
designation as complex term. Brøndal places
the complex term in systematic relation to three other
terms: the positive and negative terms that are
its components and the neutral term that is its
antithesis. It thus enters into the orbit of
logic. So dialectic lurks at the edges of the
semiotic square.
|
3.15
|
3.16
|
Notwithstanding Brøndal's invocation of the name
of Hegel, substitution of dialectic for logic cannot
and will not advance analysis of Ricoeur's
argument. Ricoeur terminates a long note
reviewing the work of Alain de Libéra on the
logical status of the semiotic square with the question
"But is this logic Artistotelian, Hegelian or ...
other?" He offers no answer ("Greimas's Narrative
Grammar" 30
n. 11).
|
3.16
|
3.17
|
Ricoeur is pursuing two tasks. He is
destabilizing the logical status of the semiotic square
and he is attempting to demonstrate the case that logic
proves fallow. The passage from logical relations
to syntactic operations, from the contraries and
contradictions of the semic dimension to the
disjunction and conjunction of the syntactic dimension,
is delineated by Ricoeur as the passage from a
paradigmatic axis of selection to a syntagmatic axis of
combination. It can also be delineated as the
passage from a list to a sequence. Ricoeur stakes
his critique upon the non reciprocal convertibility of
lists and sequences, syntagms and paradigms. This
is not unrelated to the fact that he describes less a
passage than a takeover:
Greimas's topological preoccuppations can be
seen as an ultimate attempt to extend the
paradigmatic as far as possible into the
heart of the syntagmatic. ("Greimas's Narrative
Grammar" 26)
The preoccupations can be seen otherwise, as the depth-
surface representation of the model indicates, as an
attempt to uncover paradigms beneath syntagms or to
link an immanent level with a manifest level.
Whatever the assessment of the threat of conquest,
Greimassian transcoding and the generative trajectory
are impossible without two-way conversions.
|
3.17
|
3.18
|
The difference between the two thinkers is partially
explained by the variance of their aims. The
object of Greimas's concern is narrativity:
the generation of meaning does not
first take the form of the production of
utterances and their combination in
discourse; it is relayed, in the course of
its trajectory, by narrative structures and
it is these that produce meaningful discourse
articulated in utterances.
[original emphasis] ("Elements"
65)
Ricoeur's object is narrative; he attends the birth of
new stories. His concern is with the production
of narratives. He expresses himself in biological
terms ("Greimas's
Narrative
Grammar" 20).
Greimas does not.
|
3.18
|
3.19
|
Ricoeur couples the image of birth with the motif of
newness. This discursive conjunction signals the
doctrinal investments of a reproductive politic.
Since the dichotomous relation of static machine to
dynamic body drives Ricoeur's discourse, his
reproductive politic may be summarized by the axiom
that novelty cannot arise out of a machine.
|
3.19
|
3.20
|
Ricoeur's argument depends upon the parallels he traces
between selection and calculation and between
combination and creation. For him calculation is
barren. In deploying this asymmetrically
valorized dichotomy, he serves the preservation of the
mystery of creation. He also divorces the play of
analytic and synthetic faculties from the act of
creation.
|
3.20
|
3.21
|
In Ricoeur's discourse logicity is not compatible with
creativity:
[...] if it is true that the
topological syntax of the transfers, which
functions in conjunction with the trajectory
of the logical operations of the semiotic
square, "organizes narration as a
process creating values". How can
this reduplication account for the passage
from the syntactic operations, which in the
taxonomic framework were "predictable
and calculable" to "process
creating values"? Of necessity,
logicity must somehow be inadequate in
relationship to creativity, which
characterizes narrative. ("Greimas's Narrative
Grammar" 23)
In Greimas's order of presentation, Ricoeur reads an
order of execution. The syntactic operations are
first the object of calculation and in the second
instance they organize, they are the subjects of an
action. Ricoeur establishes a syntagm with a
vector that runs from calculation towards
creation. The validity of the generative
trajectory's conversions is made to depend upon whether
calculation gives rise to creation. Furthermore
this condition, Ricoeur implies, is to be met with a
logic purged of Hegel.
|
3.21
|
3.22
|
It can be done.
|
3.22
|
3.23
|
Ricoeur's use of Frye discloses a way to a logic of the
machine of the elementary structure of signification.
|
3.23
|
3.24
|
Ricoeur construes the generative trajectory in terms of
a movement from theme to plot, from
dianoia to
mythos. Greimas's claim to
progress ab quo ad quem certainly
facilitates this. However, Greimas is mainly
interested in the via of the to and fro.
Nevertheless, Ricoeur finds no Aristotelian terms to
name this middle. The blame cannot be laid upon
Frye, his referenced authority on the
"systematically coupled" typologies of
mythos and dianoia
("Greimas's Narrative
Grammar"
23).
|
3.24
|
3.25
|
Surely Ricoeur cannot fail to register that Frye's
account is not dyadic. Frye's exposition is
strongly triadic. Rhetoric is for him the middle
term between grammar primarily understood as syntax or
"right (narrative) order" and meaning or
logic (n5) primarily understood "as
words arranged in a pattern of significance" (Anatomy of Criticism
244-45). Ricoeur
represses any mention that,
there, mediating between logic and grammar, meaning and
narrative, is rhetoric. In Frye's reading of
Aristotle, dianoia and
mythos are combined with
ethos. A very topological
category, ethos is permeated with
concepts of position and location. The category
of ethos consists of characters and
setting. It is "between and made up of
mythos and dianoia
which are verbal imitations of action and thought
respectively" and it is "between event and
idea" (Anatomy of
Criticism 243).
|
3.25
|
3.26
|
Frye's typology yields sites. Frye's typology
does not yield practices or processes. Ricoeur
operates according to a principle which assigns to
different sites different processes. He like Frye
subscribes to a division of spatial and temporal
arts. This division presents itself in the
alignment of eye/ear, static/dynamic and logic/story
dichotomies. But the polarity is not
mobile. This is most evident when he compares an
anatomy and its discrete parts with a more
"physiological" model of the process of
signification. Frye classifies products of
sense; Greimas models the production of sense.
|
3.26
|
3.27
|
Ricoeur's comparison deserves revisiting from a
process-centred perpspective. Signification works
on three senses of "sense,", three senses
analogous to Frye's Aristotelian triad.
Signification produces meaning
(dianoia). Within the parameters
of Ricoeur's contrast between mythos
and dianoia, signification induces
orientation which is commensurate with plot or
mythos. Ricoeur's analogies
invite a third. Comparable to
ethos, set or setting, is the work of
signification on an apparatus. When sense is
taken as equivalent to a faculty of perception, a
machine made to perceive, the Aristotelian triad is
most friable.
|
3.27
|
3.28
|
It is the pressure point that Ricoeur avoids. In
his account Ricoeur abandons the sensory
modalities. Eye and ear do not appear.
Perception is precisely what is to be understood when
Greimas discusses the production or apprehension of
sense by a subject as the basis of a narrativization of
the taxonomy. This is anything but a passive
sensorium. Imprinting theories and passive
sensoria upon which depend static/dynamic
qualifications of visual and auditory acts of
perception are alien to this conception of the
productivity of perception (n6).
|
3.28
|
3.29
|
It is simple for Ricoeur to leave behind
ethos. There is nothing
comparable to characters in Greimas. The level of
the actants comes closest. But even if this
Proppian-derived level of roles and functions were to
correspond with the category of characters and setting
in Frye's typology, Ricoeur would still be calling for
an accounting of conversions.
|
3.29
|
3.30
|
If one accepts the elementary structure of
signification as a translation machine, it becomes
easier to comprehend how it works. With an
apparatus, reduplication is creative. Without
one, reduplication remains mysterious and
unaccountable. Passages from one metalanguage to
another remain inexplicable. Answering Ricoeur's
how-does-it-work involves refining the conception of
what is imagined to be at work. Ricoeur resists
the machine. For him, applications of the
semiotic square represent "a more or less forced
understanding of narrative which proceeds not according
to the logical component, but according to the praxico-
pathetic component" ("Greimas's
Narrative Grammar" 23).
|
3.30
|
3.31
|
The machine nature of the semiotic square need not be
set in sharp opposition to a putative body.
Thought, feeling and doing are connected by feedback
loops which a machine model can emmulate.
|
3.31
|
3.32
|
Before developing the studies that led to the
formulation of the generative trajectory, Greimas had
demonstrated interest in approaches to communication
based in theory of information. In particular, he
exploited the insights offered by the problems of
developing machine translation ("La linguistique
statistique et la linguistique
structurale"). Traces of these
preoccupations remain. For example, the strong
thesis of Greimassian semiotics, in the words of Herman
Parret, holds that all "meaningful structures and
constellations [...] display programs and
performances transforming states of being" (Paris School
Semiotics xi).
|
3.32
|
3.33
|
The terminology of programs and performances recalls
cybernetics. It also recalls the work of a
British mathematician on Hilbert's third requirement
decidability. Alan Turing while working on
the Entscheidungsproblem produced
"a model in which the most complex procedures
could be built out of the elementary bricks of states
and positions, reading and writing." His
biographer, Andrew Hodges, continues
Alan had proved that there was no
"miraculous machine" that could
solve all mathematical problems, but in the
process he had discovered something almost
equally miraculous, the idea of a universal
machine that could take over the work of
any machine. And he
argued that anything performed by a human
computer could be done by a machine. So
there could be a single machine which, by
reading the descriptions of other machines
placed on its "tape", could perform
the equivalent of human mental activity.
[original emphasis] (Engima
109)
Too bad Ricoeur in his assessment of semiotic
formalisation neglects mathematical history and the
fate of Hilbert's programme. For even if he would
have difficulty agreeing with the possibilities of
machine emulation of human faculties, he would have
found an interesting fashion of relating the syntatic
and semic aspects of the fundamental grammar of the
Greimassian generative trajectory. Hodges
explicates Turing's two different arguments about
machine configuration:
From the first point of view, it was natural
to think of the configuration as the
machine's internal state
something to be inferred from
its different responses to different stimuli,
rather as in behaviourist psychology.
From the second point of view, however, it
was natural to think of the configuration as
a written instruction, and
the table as a list of instructions, telling
the machine what to do. The machine
could be thought as obeying one instruction,
and then moving to another instruction.
The universal machine could then be pictured
as reading and decoding the instructions
placed upon the tape. Alan Turing
himself did not stick to his original
abstract term "configuration", but
later described machines quite freely in
terms of "states" and
"instructions", according to the
interpretation he had in mind. [original
emphasis] (Enigma
107)
In Turing's model the moves are simple. A symbol
being scanned can be changed, erased or remain
unchanged; the machine can move to observe another
segment (square); the machine can remain in the
same configuration or change to some specified
configuration. Like the semiotic square, past
moves determine future moves; a state may also be
treated as an instruction.
|
3.33
|
3.34
|
Ricoeur might plead ignorance of Turing's work.
However, since his own critique of the Greimassian
generative trajectory targets its completeness and
consistency, one suspects Ricoeur of capitalizing on
echoes with the work of a mathematician who
demonstrated the impossibility of Hilbert's formalist
programme. Kurt Gödel tackled the
completeness and consistency criteria of Hilbert's
programme and proved the incompleteness of the axioms
of arithmetic. Ricoeur repeatedly claims that
Greimas's model is incomplete and inconsistent.
|
3.34
|
3.35
|
Gödel's proof, however much it may bolster
Ricoeur's rhetoric, raises the spectre of the
machine. Gödel showed "how to encode
proofs as integers, so that he had a whole theory of
arithmetic, encoded within
arithmetic." (Hodges
92) From a
semiotic perspective Gödel numbers have a very
interesting property for
we can take the number apart like a machine,
see how it was constructed and what went into
it; which is to say we can dissect an
expression, a proof, in the same way.
(Nagel and Newman
1690)
Certainly Ricoeur is not inclined to encode the
elements of the generative trajectory into the
fundamental structure of signification or the square
into itself. He does come close. He does
discuss the square in terms of mathematical
formalizations.
|
3.35
|
3.36
|
As the notes to his article indicate, he is well aware
of comparisons between the semiotic square and a
mathematical structure called the Klein group. In
a non-technical discussion of the Klein group,
appearing in 1966 in Les Temps modernes,
Marc Barbut explains that two representations of the
Klein group
constitute interpretations of it in two
distinct languages (endowed with semantics),
and therefore they allow a faithful
translation from one to the other; the
syntax is the same, only the meaning of the
words has changed. (Barbut
376)
In this case, syntax acts between two semantics.
However, in Ricoeur's reading of the semiotic square
and the generative trajectory, the equivalence of
metalanguages is a question of the relation of a
semantics to a syntax. Ricoeur approaches the
problem in terms of the investment of a form with
content. Greimas's terminology of levels
encourages Ricoeur's discursive collapse of the
question of the adequacy of metalanguages into the
problem of fitting investments.
|
3.36
|
3.37
|
Mathematical translation, like conversion in the
Greimassian generative trajectory, is a function of
isomorphism and depends upon a requisite degree of
abstraction. Barbut explains:
It is these translations that are called
isomorphisms: two
groups (what we are saying here about groups
may be said of any kind of structure
whatsoever) are isomorphs if they are two
representations of the same abstract
group; further, one might add: if
they have the same
structure. This means that
their elements may be placed in one-to-one
correspondence, such that the image in the
second group of the combination of any two
elements from the first group is the same as
the combination of the images of those two
elements. Isomorphism, the word itself,
is plain enough: the form, the
"syntax", the "structure"
are the same; the differences lie, not
only in the symbols used to write down the
elements this is trivial
but also in the meaning to be
given to the elements; and one may
equally well give them, provided one keeps to
the rules, whichever of the possible meanings
one wishes. [original emphasis] (377)
Abstraction makes possible the synonymity between
structure and syntax.
|
3.37
|
3.38
|
Abstraction also enables the comparison of discursive
formations including those of mathematics and
semiotics. For example, the Klein group and the
semiotic square are not isomorphic. The Klein
group is generated by two rules of combination:
transformations are commutative and each transformation
is involutive (n7), that is repeating it twice
consecutively changes nothing. The transformation
that changes nothing is represented by an operator and
results in one interesting difference between the
graphic representation of the Klein group and the
semiotic square. The former represents non-change
by a loop at each vertex of a square (Barbut 376). However this operator
and its graphic representation are absent from the
semiotic square. Although he stresses differences
between Greimas's semiotic square and the Klein group,
this point is not raised by Ricoeur since he works from
Piaget's cognitive psychology interpretation of the
group. Piaget's like Greimas's square does not
graph operators that produce no change.
Insufficiencies of logical formalization may stem from
not enough abstraction, rather than from too much as
Ricoeur contends.
|
3.38
|
3.39
|
Within an idiom of algebraic structure, logical
formalization is not so far away from topological
schematization. The Klein group operation
resulting in no change corresponds to paths that do not
cross catastrophic strata in Petitot's elementary
catastrophe representation of the semiotic square.
|
3.39
|
3.40
|
Whether or not this overlooked isomorphism between
representations of the Klein group as a table of
operations and as a square-shaped diagram resolves the
logical/syntactic binary that informs Ricoeur's
discourse, it opens a new vista. Both the Klein
group comparison and Petitot's schematization
demonstrate that the generative trajectory with some
adaptations may be able to account for steady states,
those stretches of discourse where no events are said
to happen. The narrative may be at a standstill
and the narration carries on. Thus, the nuance
between no events and nothing happens.
|
3.40
|
3.41
|
Often the affinity of narrative doing to moments of
stasis turns on this subtle distinction. For
example, in a work appearing the same year as his study
of Greimas's generative trajectory, Ricoeur postulates
that the complexity of narrative activity arises from
its power to combine sequence and configuration.
This he characterizes as a competition:
tout récit peut être conçu
comme la compétition entre sa dimension
épisodique et sa dimension
configurationnelle, entre séquence et
figure. (Narrativité
21)
any narrative can be envisaged in terms of
the competition between its episodic
dimension and its configurational dimension,
between sequence and figure.
|
3.41
|
3.42
|
What if the dimensions were not irremediably set in
opposition? What if one considered sequence and
figure to collaborate? One would face a
machine. Every description as a state of being
(configuration) possesses indexes translatable into
questions for configuration's transformation
(sequence). The nucleus of a narrative would be a
description plus a question.
|
3.42
|
3.43
|
Just as a Turing machine's configuration can be
interpreted as states of being or as instructions, a
story can be considered an apparatus processing
descriptions and questions, figures and sequences.
|
3.43
|
3.44
|
The locus of configuration has shifted. Or rather
it has expanded. Configuration is not only an
attribute belonging to the narrative, to the
story. It also belongs to narrative structure and
to narrativity.
|
3.44
|
3.45
|
A story is at once product and apparatus of
production. It is an autopoetic structure.
It will take a picture, a question, a description, an
imperative and transform either it, itself, or
both. A story is a machine that learns. It
emulates a model of the human nervous system,
especially that described in his 1970 essay
"Biology of Cognition" by Humberto Maturana:
Learning is not a process of accumulation of
representations of the environment; it is a
continuous process of transformation of
behavior through continuous change in the
capacity of the nervous system to synthesize
it. Recall does not depend on the
indefinite retention of a structural
invariant that represents an entity (an idea,
image, or symbol), but on the functional
ability of the system to create, when certain
recurrent conditions are given, a behavior
that satisfies the recurrent demands or that
the observer would class as a reenacting of a
previous one. (Maturana
45)
This is closely akin to Greimas's statement on
transcoding (n8). For him it is possible to
summarize the complementary activities of coding and
decoding by the notion of "un algorithme de
démarches qui, à partir d'instructions
initiales, se développent comme des règles
d'un savoir faire implicite qu'il s'agit de
formuler" [an algorithm of procedures which
develop like the rules of an implicit know-how which
must be formulated from initial instructions] (Du Sens 245).
|
3.45
|
3.46
|
The recreation of behaviour and the generation of
stories are not only isomorphic. They are also
linked by feedback and reduplication. Not only is
storytelling a type of behaviour, it also emulates
behaviour. It is both the real thing and a
rehersal. By enabling observation, it permits
desire. In his analysis of the modelization of
the actants in terms of wanting to do, knowing how to
do and being able to do, Greimas begins with wanting to
do. It is possible to begin elsewhere.
|
3.46
|
3.47
|
Maturana in his introdution links the ability to
observe and the capacity for desire. "If
human beings were not observers, or capable of being
so, the stabilization of their properties would not
appear to matter because they would not be able to
desire something else" (xxxviii).
|
3.47
|
3.48
|
As a signature of desire, a question might modify a
description, might modify itself or change
nothing. It's that banal. Just as Ricoeur
concludes, applications of semiotic squares are hit and
miss. Some seem more or less forced; others yield
true heuristic value. Like all autopoetic
structures, the semiotic square is sensitive to initial
conditions (n9). Likewise, the transcodability of
the story told, the picture drawn and the questions
asked, all depends on where one begins. Eye or
ear. Child or parent.
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3.48
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