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?

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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