Emulations


3.0

Asking a question is akin to telling a story.  Drawing a picture is like telling a story.  Both, drawing pictures and asking questions, are ways of orienting.  Both focus attention.  Of course telling stories is a way of orienting.  The circularity of these assertions depends not upon the equivalency of the products, question, picture, story, but the activities, asking, describing, telling.

3.0

3.1

As ways of orienting, all are moments of a relentless semiosis, all rework representations, all participate in some measure of transcoding.  These ways of doing are readily framed as the potential of an object.  What can be described becomes narratable and open to interrogation;  what is askable has a story.  Actions and objects correlate;  praxis bears on semantics.

3.1

3.2

This slippage between doing and meaning is the central point of Ricoeur's critique of Greimas's narrative grammar.  At stake is the adequacy of transcodings.  Also at stake are the bases of formalization:  permissible degrees of abstraction, legitimate limits to the role of reduction and extrapolation in interpretation.  In short, hermeneutics confronts semiotics over the proper use of tools.

3.2

3.3

Ricoeur expresses reservations about the equivalence of metalanguages and about the conversions that turn an achronic taxonomy of logical relations into the syntactic operations of a narrative structure.  In short Ricoeur is troubled by the generative trajectory traced by Greimas, a trajectory that according to Ricoeur depends upon the mixed nature of its fundamental structure.

3.3

3.4

For Ricoeur, this mixed nature of the model conditions its applicability and so he claims in his concluding statement

to explain to readers of works stemming from this school why the semiotic square sometimes seems to have a true heuristic value, and sometimes to be simple transcription, which can be more or less elucidating but sometimes corresponds to a more or less forced understanding of narrative which proceeds not according to the logical component, but according to the praxico-pathetic component of the mixed model. ("Greimas's Narrative Grammar" 28)

What could be attributed to skill is vested by Ricoeur in the appropriateness of the tool.  However the square is not for Ricoeur just an anthropomorphized error prone machine.  He takes great pains to demonstrate that the machine part, the logical component, cannot alone generate narratives;  a body needs to be imported into the model or must be present from the outset.  Machine and body are not Ricoeur's terms.  In his discourse, logic is set against doing and feeling.  This opposition is temporally figured as the difference between static taxonomy and dynamic narrative.

3.4

3.5

It is through this set-up that Ricoeur reads Greimas.  However, there is a glitch in Ricoeur's motion detection device.  Ricoeur introduces alongside the Greimassian nomenclature two Aristotelian terms, dianoia and mythos ("Greimas's Narrative Grammar" 23) which are said to conform to Greimas's "heterotopic spaces".  In Frye, who is Ricoeur's authority here, the difference between the two Aristotelian terms is related to a division of the senses, a division of labour for the eye and the ear (Anatomy of Criticism 77).  The ear is matched with narrative or mythos; dianoia or meaning, with the eye.  The coupling of this sensory mapping with the dynamic/static binary affects Ricoeur's evaluation of Greimas's model.  In particular, his judgement on its ability to bridge the taxo-narrative hiatus is overdetermined by his yoking of the static with the visual.

3.5

3.6

What A.J. Greimas designates as the elementary structure of signification has come generally to be known as the semiotic square.  Greimas himself does not reduce the elementary structure to its graphic incarnation.  He states that the square is a visual presentation of a relational network ("Entretien" 21).  In an 1984 discussion with Ricoeur, he states that "As to the semiotic square, it could be a square or a cube or a circle.  The shape is of no importance whatsoever.  It was necessary to formulate a minimum number of relational tools, and in this case, a fundamental structure of discourse that was as simple as possible" ("On Narrativity" 554-555).  The two criteria, a minimum number of tools and simplicity, only appear to be unrelated to shape.

3.6

3.7

Certain geometries are precluded from Greimas's list.  His enumeration contains aught but closed figures.  Furthermore each of the closed figures is symmetrical.  The range of choices is not without consequences.

3.7

3.8

Simplicity can be quite complex.  Semiotic formalization, if it is like that of mathematics, attempts to meet Hilbert's three basic requirements:  consistency, completeness, and decidability.  Ricoeur works the tension between completeness and consistency.  His critique retraces the moments where elements are, he claims, added or introduced at each subsequent level of the generative trajectory.  His critique terminates with the declaration that Greimas's point of departure must be heterogeneous.  The model possesses a mixed nature.  One recognizes the dilemma: either incomplete, in need of additions at every stage, or inconsistent, mixed from the outset.

3.8

3.9

Ricoeur wishes to determine the consistency of the procedures that guide the transformation of a semantic binary into a series of narrative utterances.  Ricoeur's critique centres on the satisfactory passage from a static morphology to a dynamic syntax.  It is the temporalization of taxonomy or the narrativization of the fundamental structure of signification that concern him.

3.9

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.

3.48


wake bridge prow





© François Lachance, 1996