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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
namely, fun–boredom (aligning boredom with evil as in the proverbial
wisdom that ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’). This
mythological revolution was acomplished in the simplest and yet
most ‘theologically’ radical switch – no less than the moral inversion
of good and evil. In addition to the need to position (or
reposition) the product in relation to rival brands, part of the thinking
was presumably that consumers no longer had the faith in science
(or indeed God) which they were once assumed to have. Of course,
whether this revolution in conceptual alignment generated by semiotically
inspired marketing actually ‘caught the public imagination’
would require empirical testing.
THE SEMIOTIC SQUARE
One analytical technique that seeks to map oppositions and their intersections
in texts and cultural practices involves the application of what
is known as ‘the semiotic square’. This was introduced by Algirdas
Greimas as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully by mapping
the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic
features in a text (Greimas 1987, xiv, 49). The semiotic square is
adapted from the ‘logical square’ of scholastic philosophy and from
Jakobson’s distinction between contradiction and contrariety. Fredric
Jameson notes that ‘the entire mechanism . . . is capable of generating
at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary
opposition’ (in Greimas 1987, xiv). While this suggests that the possibilities
for signification in a semiotic system are richer than the
either/or of binary logic, they are nevertheless subject to ‘semiotic
constraints’ – ‘deep structures’ providing basic axes of signification.
In Figure 3.4, the four corners (S1, S2, Not S1 and Not S2) represent
positions within the system which may be occupied by concrete or
abstract notions. The double-headed arrows represent bilateral relationships.
The upper corners of the Greimasian square represent an
opposition between S1 and S2 (e.g. white and black). The lower corners
represent positions which are not accounted for in simple binary
oppositions: Not S2 and Not S1 (e.g. non-white and non-black). Not
S1 consists of more than simply S2 (e.g. that which is not white is
not necessarily black). The horizontal relationships represent an