PART I: THEORY 1. GREIMAS and PEIRCE 1.1 Greimas 1.1.1 The
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
PART I: THEORY 1. GREIMAS AND PEIRCE Algirdas Julien Greimas' semiotics is concerned with semantic and nar rative structures of language and culture and is based on a model which explains texts as the result of a process of meaning generation. This gen erative process is conceived as a trajectory of progressive investments of content and consists of three successive stages, which lead from the most abstract and fundamental investments toward the most concrete and fig urative. In the practical part of his semiotics, Greimas has developed both a semantic and a narrative model especially suited for the analysis -or rather construction- of a text. Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics is a "logic of thinking", a theory of knowledge. He described people's thought processes as interpretations or processes of giving meaning by means of signs. His concept of the process of interpretation can also be understood as a generative process in different stages. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to describe Greimas' gener ative semiotics and elements from Peirce's semiotics; second, to show that the ideas of Greimas and Peirce are complementary and can be homolo gated. Of these aims the second, the homologation of Greimas and Peirce, is the most important. This homologation will be the basis of a generative semiotic approach of narrative texts, which will be described in the next chapter. 1.1 Greimas 1.1.1 The General Starting-Points of Greimas' Semiotics In his semiotics, Greimas gives an explanation of the way in which people give meaning t.o things. According t.o hirn, this generation of meaning, be ing based on the human perception of differences, is the construction of re lations or networks of relations between objects in the world. The grasping and producing of differences and relations is t.he core of t.he meaning gener ation, which can be summarized as t.he transposition of objects into mean ings, or the transposition of meanings int.o other meanings (DS:int.rod.; Dict:352f;298f).1 Relations have been a core concept in the struct.uralist. 1 The first number after Diet refers to the page of the original French text; the second number refers to the page in the English translation. 7 tradition since De Saussure. It was he who described language as a system of relations between language-signs, which in turn consist of the relation between that which is signified, i.e. the various relations between units of meaning within a language, and the signifier, i.e. the language-specific relations between units of sound. But whereas De Saussure focussed on static relations, Greimas is mainly concerned with grasping and producing these relations; he focusses on the production or transposition of meanings. Following in the footsteps of Hjelmslev (1943, 1961), Greimas furt her c1arifies the process of meaning generation. The world appears as an amor phous mass of possible meanings: people restrict the unlimited potential of meaning by distinguishing substances of expressions and substances of content, or meaningful categories and units. These substances only exist from the moment they take shape in language or culture: they are created by the form of expression and the form of content. This is why Greimas, following Hjelmslev, only considers the shaping of the substances in lan guage of importance for meaning. Human subjects produce meanings by the formation or articulation2 of the content form and by linking this with an expression form into a sign. A sign does not refer to the outer-semiotic world, but to the substances that have already been distinguished by peo pIe within a certain language and culture. There are different ways in which substances can be articulated, and they result in different sign systems, such as chemical, literary, and theo logical sign systems. These can be linked with each other, but not with the outer-semiotic world: inner-semiotic relations are possible, outer-semiotic references are not. This is also true for the everyday semiotic system which we experience as "natural", as not constructed by human beings. People are born and raised in a pre-ordered world in which substances have al ready been distinguished for them, and Greimas calls this the "natural world". With given natural languages they join in old patterns and cre ate new ones. They live within a "natural semiotics" or "natural semiotic system", which is the combination of a natural language and a natural world,3 and it is impossible for them to transcend this semiotically con structed and transposed world (Dict:233.310.340; 259.287.374).4 Within 2 Greimas uses the word "articulation" to designate all forms of semiotic organization which create distinct and combinable units of meaning. Articulation is consequently the production, creation, generation or formation (shaping) of meaning. It will also be used in this chapter in this sense. 3 Greimas uses the term "natural semiotics" with a double meaning: he uses it as the term for the stlldy of the natural world and naturallanguage, and as a synonym for the combination of the natural world and natural language, Le. as the topic of this study. 4 From the point of view of Lacan and Kristeva one can wonder how it is possible that edllcation and training fail in a natural semiotics, as in cases of insanity, aggression etc. 8 .