Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
What happens if you negate or deny imagination? What would happen if, on the contrary, you
negated facts? Little by little the products of Mr Gradgrind's system show us the various forms
which the negation of the negation, which the denial of Imagination, may take: his son Tom
(theft), his daughter Louisa (adultery, or at least projected adultery), his model pupil Blitzer
(delation, and in general the death of the spirit). Thus the absent fourth term comes to the
centre of the stage; the plot is nothing but an attempt to give it imaginative being, to work
through faulty solutions and unacceptable hypotheses until an adequate embodiment has been
realized in terms of the narrative material. With this discovery (Mr Gradgrind's education,
Louisa's belated experience of family love), the semantic rectangle is completed and the novel
comes to an end. (Jameson 1972, 167-168)
In his foreword to an English translation of a book by Greimas, Jameson reflects on his own use of
the technique. He suggests that the analyst should begin by provisionally listing all of the entities to
be coordinated and that even apparently marginal entities should be on this initial list. He notes that
even the order of the terms in the primary opposition is crucial: we have already seen how the first
term in such pairings is typically privileged. He adds that ' the four primary terms... need to be
conceived polysemically, each one carrying within it its own range of synonyms... such that... each of
the four primary terms threatens to yawn open into its own fourfold system' (in Greimas 1987, xv-xvi).
Jameson suggests that Not S2, the negation of the negation, 'is always the most critical position and
the one that remains open or empty for the longest time, for its identification completes the process
and in that sense constitutes the most creative act of the construction' (ibid., xvi). Using the earlier
example of aesthetic movements and their dominant focuses, the reader might find it interesting to
apply the semiotic square to these. To recap, it was suggested that realism tends to be primarily
oriented towards the world, neo-classicism towards the text and romanticism towards the author. We
may assign the concepts of world, text and author to three corners of the square - a fourth term is
conspicuous by its absence. Jameson's caveats about the order and formulation of terms may be
useful here.
Turning to other contexts, in relation to children's toys Dan Fleming offers an accessible application of
the semiotic square (Fleming 1996, 147ff). Gilles Marion has used the Greimasian square to suggest
four purposes in communicating through clothing: wanting to be seen; not wanting to be seen;
wanting not to be seen; and not wanting not to be seen (cited in draft publication by David Mick). Most
recently, Jean-Marie Floch has used the grid to illustrate an interesting exploration of the
'consumption values' represented by Habitat and Ikea furniture (Floch 2000, 116-144). However, the
Greimasian analysis of texts in terms of the semiotic square has been criticized as easily leading to
reductionist and programmatic decodings. Worse still, some theorists seem to use the square as little
more than an objective-looking framework which gives the appearance of coherence and grand
theory to loose argument and highly subjective opinions.
Critics of structuralist analysis note that binary oppositions need not only to be related to one another
and interpreted, but also to be contextualised in terms of the social systems which give rise to texts
(Buxton 1990, 12). Those who use this structuralist approach sometimes claim to be analysing the
'latent meaning' in a text: what it is 'really' about. Unfortunately, such approaches typically understate
the subjectivity of the interpreter's framework. Illuminating as they may sometimes be, any inexplicit
oppositions which are identified are in the mind of the interpreter rather than contained within the text
itself (Culler 1975; Adams 1989, 139). Yet another objection is that 'the question of whether
categories like sacred/profane and happiness/misery are psychologically real in any meaningful