THE SEMIOTIC SQUARE

I appreciate  Ben Davis' explanation of the Semiotic Square on ArtNet.  I am collaborating with William Stovall on a project that draws significantly from this concept and am hoping to understand it better through the writings of others...

 

"Invented by French semiotician A.J. Greimas, the Semiotic Square is one of the favorite intellectual toys of theory-minded art critics. In a legendary essay, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," Rosalind Krauss used it to chart the different manifestations of postmodern sculpture as reactions to the opposition "landscape" and "architecture," though she uses a quirky version of the device; a much more satisfying and orthodox example is the way Hal Foster used the Square to illustrate the different positions within Russian Constructivism, as outgrowths of the opposition between "Art" and "Production." Basically, the Semiotic Square is a way of visually representing a matrix of possible relationships generated by a given opposition. The idea is relatively simple: Any principal opposition between contrary terms -- between "a" and "b" -- can be expanded to include a secondary pair of "contradictory" terms, "non-a" and "non-b." These contradictory terms have a natural relation of affinity with the respective contrary terms of the original binary, thus allowing you to form a kind of map of potential relationships within a given presupposed opposition. (You get, in Krauss words, "a quaternary field which both mirrors the original opposition and at the same time opens it.").  A useful example for me is the opposition between "law" and "crime." It’s not too difficult to see how this simple binary implies two additional terms that relate to the original terms, but are actually their internal negations. What you might call "non-law" -- people who act in the name of the law, but act unjustly (your corrupt cops, your dictators, and so on) -- is both a negation of what "law" stands for, but also has a clear relationship with the concept of "crime." And similarly, "non-crime" -- those who break the law in order to act in the name of justice (your Robin Hoods, your Rosa Parks) -- both contradicts the normal idea of criminality, and has an affinity with the sense of "law," as justice." MORE