Johannes Beetz

Latour with Greimas

Actor-Network Theory and Semiotics

2013
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 1. Introduction
In his book 'Reassembling the Social', hidden in a footnote, Bruno Latour writes that
it “would be fairly accurate to describe ANT as being half Garfinkel and half Greimas”
(Latour 2005, fn. 54, p. 54). And he goes on to say that his actor-network theory “simply
combined two of the most interesting intellectual movements on both sides of the Atlantic”
(ibid.). The two intellectual movements referred to here can be identified as North
American ethnomethodology and French structuralism or semiotics1. While Latour is
undeniably influenced by semiotic theory and structuralist thought, this characterization of
his theory is surprising. Particularly so, considering that Latour's few references to Algirdas
Julien Greimas and the semiotics he is a proponent of are mostly vague and broad gestures,
rather than thorough critiques or in depth discussions. Also, the structural linguistic
approach that Greimas stands for appears to be incompatible with a sociology that presents
itself as irreductionist and refrains from talking of structures. Latour does not even seem to
be concerned with the same object of study. Greimas studies language as structure and
wants to account for the production of meaning, while Latour studies the emergence of
actor-networks, scientific objects and other material and immaterial entities that are
potentially extralinguistic.
His reliance on semiotics in general and Greimas in particular is, however, much greater
than Latour makes explicit in his texts. Semiotics, I will argue, can be seen as a “basic
theoretical tool” (Hostaker 2005, p. 5) of actor-network theory. The utilization of the
concept of nonhuman actants, the narrativization of descriptions and the analysis of
scientific texts in semiotic terms are only the most visible indicators of Greimasian
semiotics’ influence on Latour.
The relationship between semiotics and ANT has not been thoroughly theorized as much as
it deserves to have been. There are only a handful of texts written on this topic. Timothy
Lenoir, for instance, in 'Was that Last Turn a Right Turn', argues that Latour is led back to
the “old ground of realism and representation” through his plea “to find a grounding for
signs in things-in-themselves” (1994, p. 126) as well as in his use of Greimas's narrative
schema and his actantial theory. Roar Hostaker, on the other hand, reads Latour as a

1
I use semiotics as the global term for the study of signs and meaning production. It includes semiology.

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theoretician, most of whose “views can be connected to semiotics” (2005, p. 5) and
suggests that the solution to ANT's problems is more, not less semiotics. Michael Cuntz, in
his thorough discussion of Latour's use of semiotics (2009), describes him as
deterritorializing Greimas in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari (cf. 2005, p. 54) by
creatively using his concepts as a toolbox without subscribing to the whole structuralist
program (cf. Cuntz 2009, p. 25). John Law uses the same metaphor when he describes ANT
as a “disparate family of material-semiotic tools” (Law 2007, p. 2). Latour himself states
that he considers “semiotics as the organon, as a sort of tool box” to treat questions “of
agency, questions of objectiveness, questions of the careers of objects” (Latour 2009). But
what exactly are the semiotic tools Latour makes use of?
In this paper, I will show in what ways semiotics influence Latour's actor-network theory
(ANT), and how he modifies semiotic concepts in order to make them applicable to
extralinguistic entities and settings. In particular, I will investigate the relation between
Greimas's theory and method and Latour's approach to sociology. To this end, I will briefly
introduce Greimas's semiotics (chapter 2.) to then present his narrative theory as the 'tool-
box' Latour takes most of his semiotic concepts from (chapter 3.). Here, the semiotic
origins of Latour's notions of actors, actants, trials of strength and programs of action will
be discussed, and we will see how Latour extends semiotics to nature and context. In the
next part of the paper (chapter 4.), I will show how the semiotic operation of
engagement/disengagement informs Latour's science studies. His modifications of this
operation enable him to study not only signs, but also material objects and social contexts
in the form of settings in semiotic terms and include an extra-textual referent in his semiotic
framework. The last chapter (chapter 5.) sums up the findings and draws some conclusions.

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 2. A Few Words on Greimas
Algirdas Julien Greimas was a semiotician and linguist from Lithuania. His impact
on English speaking academia has not been great, and he seems almost forgotten by literary
scholars and social scientists alike. An exception, aside from Latour, would be Fredric
Jameson who (re-)introduced him to the Anglophone world and calls him “the last of the
great thinkers and theoreticians of French structuralism and poststructuralism”; but not
without characterizing him as one of “the most difficult and forbidding” (Jameson 1987, p.
Vi) of these theoreticians.
In his main work 'Structural Semantics. An Attempt at a Method', Greimas develops a
stringent method for examining the production of meaning on all linguistic levels, and does
so in strictly semiotic terms by “codification […] of the whole semiotic tradition” (Jameson
1996, p. 12). His project is to account not only for the meaning of a single sign, but also for
the meaning of narratives and larger discourses. “Starting with the meaning of words or
lexical items, Greimas attempts to formulate rules and concepts to account for the meaning
produced when they combine in sentences or in complete texts” (Culler 2002, p. 88). To
this end, Greimas develops a metalanguage that enables him to treat all linguistic units in
the same terms.
As in all structuralist theories, meaning is produced through difference and relations. This
is true for small linguistic units as well as for bigger ones, such as sentences, or even large
narratives. The smallest unit that carries meaning is, for Greimas, the seme. These semes
are properties, or distinctive features, of lexemes. For example, masculine, feminine, large,
small and so forth. Lexemes are words (or object-terms as he calls them) that are realized in
speech or writing. From these small elements he sets out to explain the production of
meaning and “unveil the underlying structure of texts” (Hostaker 2005, p. 7)2. When Latour
characterizes this form of semiotics as “the ethnomethodology of texts” and adds that it
“helps replace the analysts prejudiced and limited vocabulary by the actor's activity at
world making” (Latour 1993b, p. 131), he does not refer to the larger structures and
universals structural semiotics want to unveil, but to the fact that Greimas's semiotics stays
in the text. In Latour’s reading of Greimas the meaning of a text is accounted for without
any recourse to a referent outside the text (nature, the real world), the social context of its

2 For a slightly longer introduction to Greimas's semiotics see appendix 1.

3
production or the intentions of the author; the intuition, socialization or ideological position
of the reader is equally ignored. The context and the locutor of a text are “cut out” (Latour
2009).
Unlike other structural linguists, Greimas does not solely concentrate on the langue side of
language. Saussure claimed that the scientific analysis of parole, the innumerable
utterances and actualizations of written language was impossible. Language could only be
studied synchronically as a system of signs at one point in time. Greimas on the other hand:
rather than separating immanence and manifestation, competence and performance, deep
structures and surface structures, langue and parole, on hierarchically distinct levels, […]
situates the actants of discourse, the units of narrative semantics, and the functions of
discourse, the unit of narrative syntax, on the same level of semiotic and narrative
structures (Schleifer 1988, p. 85).

He is concerned with langage. The parole, or performance, or surface structure side of

Greimas's theory is what Latour relies most on. The deep structure of discourse is
represented by the semiotic square. It formulates the smallest possible system generating
meaning (cf. Angermüller 2003, p. 201) and can account for the meaning of semes as well
as large narratives3. Hostaker and Lenoir argue that Latour makes use of the square
(Hostaker 2005, p. 16f; Lenoir 1994 p. 130ff), but Latour himself does not make any
reference to it, and Hostaker fails to give proof of his claim, while Lenoir merely shows
that Donna Haraway utilizes the semiotic square in her material semiotics.
Even though Greimas's theory and method focus mostly on language and texts in the
narrow sense, his semiotics aim to explore larger semiological or semiotic phenomena in
linguistic terms. This turns one characteristic of Saussurean structuralism on its head.
Saussure situated linguistics as a part of semiology and semiotics. For Greimas, semiology
and semiotics are sub-fields of linguistics (cf. Greimas 1987, 63ff.)4. The material world,
social practices, art, architecture, fashion and everything else that is able to generate
meaning can be scrutinized with semiotic methods in linguistic terms. Still, what remains at
the center of his semiotics is the meaning of signs.

3 Because the semiotic square is so fundamental to Greimas's semiotics, a brief presentation of it can be
found in appendix 2.
4 The same can be said for theorists like Roland Barthes or Claude-Levi Strauss.

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 3. Greimas's Narrative Theory as Latour's Semiotic
Toolbox
3.1. General Notes on Narrativity
It is Greimas's narrative theory, that Latour borrows the majority of his semiotic
tools from. Most notable of those the category of actants, the narrative programs and the
trials of strength, all of which are important parts of his science studies. On a more
fundamental plane, however, narrativity itself informs Latour's readings of scientific texts
and actor's accounts as well as his own descriptions. Greimas's narratology generalizes
narrative structures of myth proposed by Vladimir Propp as the basic structure of narration.
Latour, leaning on Greimas, then uses the narrative theory to develop his infra-language,
used in the description of actor-networks and their forming.
Structuralist narrative theory was developed in order to study myths, folk tales,
literature and poetry. The aim was to identify underlying structures in the narratives and to
account for their production of meaning with semiotic (mostly binary) models. Greimas
modified and further developed these theories – especially those of Levi-Strauss and Propp
– by simplifying and generalizing them. Integrating narratology into his semiotic
framework enabled him to treat narratives as linguistic units that could be analyzed in the
same terms as sentences. Narratives in this framework have grammars and to understand
them, the receiver and the sender of the narrative must “have access to an elementary
structure that articulates signification into isotopic sets” (Greimas 1987, p. 108). Indeed, a
sentence can be analyzed as a narrative if it displays “a temporal succession of functions (in
the sense of actions)” (Greimas / Courtés 1982, p. 203). 'Gabe writes a poem' is a simple
narrative, because it is analyzable as the passage from a previous state to a later state,
“carried out by doing” (ibid.). The next step was to broaden the field narrative theory could
be applied to. In Greimas's words, “narrativity was seen as not simply narrativity but as the
syntactic form of the organization of the world” (Greimas 1989, p. 543). There are
“organizing principles” that apply to “all narrative discourses” (Greimas / Courtés 1982, p.
204). While narrative theory is part of Greimas's rigorous theoretical apparatus that studies
language as a system (as langue), it is also a tool that enables him to study language as a
process (cf. Hostaker 2005, p. 8). His project is to study langage, not just langue. This

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means that he proposes a theory of language, which encompasses both the paradigmatic and
syntagmatic axis. On the syntagmatic axis language as process is analyzed as narrative. The
models generated from the extraction of universal principles of narratives can then be
utilized, not only for the analysis of manifested language, but also “used to describe social
practices” (Greimas 1989, p. 543).
Analyzing social practices with models developed for the study of fictional writing, gives
the social scientist certain advantages. For Latour, what counts most is the freedom of
agency that comes with an observation language informed by literary studies. It is literature
“that allows you to give agency to the technical artifact” (Latour 2009). This is why “ANT
has borrowed from narrative theories, not all of their arguments and jargon to be sure, but
their freedom of movement” (Latour 2005, p. 55). When Law writes that ANT tells “stories
about how relations assemble or don’t” (Law 2007, p. 2), or Latour defines a good ANT
account as “a narrative […] where all the actors do something and don't just sit there”
(Latour 2005, p. 128), they refer to narratives where both humans and nonhumans can
appear as actants or actors, which are defined by their relationality and never act alone.

3. 2. Actors and Actants

Latour takes the term actant from Greimas's narrative theory. There, the concepts of
actants and actors aid in the analysis of narratives. They promise nothing less than being
applicable to virtually all – but especially literary – narratives. Drawing on early
structuralists' interpretations of folk tales and myths, the notion of actants offers an
inventory of classes of entities in a narrative, which are defined by their relations to one
another.
Actors and actants are elements of Greimas's narrative grammar. To see where this notion
of narrative grammar comes from, and how it relates to Greimas's project to account for
meaning on all linguistic levels in the same terms, we can quote him at length:

6
 The linguist will not fail to take note that the narrative structures present characteristics
which are remarkably recurrent, that these recurrences allow for the recording of
distinguishable regularities, and that they thus lead to the construction of a narrative
grammar. In this case it is evident that he will utilize the concept of grammar in the
most general and non-metaphorical sense, understanding such a grammar to consist in a
limited number of principles of structural organization of narrative units, complete
with rules for the combination and functioning of these units, leading to the
production of narrative objects. (Greimas 1971, p.794)
We can, in other words, treat a narrative just like a sentence with grammar, subject and
object. The narrative units Greimas is talking about are the actants. And indeed, their
enumeration starts with the Subject and the Object of the narrative. But there are also the
Sender, the Receiver, the Opponent and the Helper5. As narrative units, these actants can be
endowed with life by the actors in the story. These “human or personified” actors are the
characters, objects or animals, which “accomplish tasks, undergo tests, reach goals” in a
narrative (Greimas 1987, p. 70).
He distinguishes between actants, “having to do with narrative syntax” and actors, which
are “recognizable in the particular discourse in which they are manifested” (Greimas 1987,
p. 106). Simplifying, we can say that actors are the things in a narrative that have names
(the King, Tom, Excalibur), and actants are the narrative units they manifest. One actant
can be manifested by several actors. The converse is equally possible, just one actor being
able to constitute a syncretism of several actants. In a classical folklore tale, for example,
the king (Sender) calls on his bravest knight (Subject) with his magical sword (Helper) to
bring freedom (Object) to his daughter (Receiver), who is held captive by the evil sorcerer
(Opponent); every actant is manifested by one actor. But in the comic series Batman,
Subject and Sender are the same person in the narrative. Bruce Wayne (Sender), who gives
himself the mission to bring justice to Gotham City (Object) is Batman (Subject), who
fights The Joker, Poison Ivy and others (all Opponent) to secure the lives of the citizens of
Gotham City (Receiver).

5 For scientific probity's sake, we should note that Greimas’s concept of actants of a narrative owes a great
deal to Propp's dramatis personae, which consists of the villain, the donor, the helper, the sought-for
person (and her father), the dispatcher, the hero and the false hero. (Greimas Struc. Sem. 201). Terry
Eagleton puts it nicely, when he writes, in Literary Studies: “A. J. Greimas' s Semantique structurale
(1966), finding Propp's scheme still too empirical, is able to abstract his account even further by the
concept of an actant, which is neither a specific narrative even nor a character but a structural unit. The six
actants of Subject and Object, Sender and Receiver, Helper and Opponent can subsume Propp's various
spheres of action and make for an even more elegant simplicity.” (Eagleton 1996, p. 91)

7
The examples not only show that actants can be manifested by several actors and that one
actor can manifest several actants, but also that actants do not have to be manifested by
human characters (the freedom of the daughter, justice for Gotham City). Objects and
abstract concepts can be actants just as much as humans, as long as they can be identified as
“that which accomplishes or undergoes an act” (Schleifer 1987, p. 88). When Greimas talks
of anthropomorphisms in narratives, this is what he means.
For Greimas, narrative grammar (and with it the actants) is a property all narratives inherit.
He adds that “the actorial form of the manifestation of actants” is a “property of all
discursive manifestations independent of whatever natural language is used” (Schleifer
1987, p. 84). The actantial organization is universally applicable to narratives6. And just
like the elements in the semiotic square, the actants are determined by their relation to other
actants (e.g. no Subject without an Object).
The universality of this actantial theory, as well as the claim to read narratives in structural
terms, treat actants as syntactical units, and the aim to unveil elementary structures that
enable the scientist to account for the meaning of virtually all texts, seems to be
incompatible with Latour's ANT. Reducing vast corpora to a limited number of principles
determining them is contrary to the irreductionist approach Latour stands for. Also,
Greimas's models are cognitive ones in the sense that the actantial figuration of narrative
discourse is presented as a cognitive operation that makes those discourses intelligible to
the receivers and senders of the narrative utterances. The presentation of a psychoanalytical
actantial model inspired by Lacan in Structural Semantics even proposes this model to
organize the unconscious and account for human behavior (1983, p. 214). To Latour, on the
other hand, what happens in actors’ brains, and the questions of the existence of
psychological universals or the structure of the unconscious are not of interest. It is of no
surprise then that he does not subscribe to the whole model and its categories. He creatively
makes use of it as an instrument, while staying true to a few key features. Greimas's
definitions are technical and almost mathematical in their formalization. His entire theory,
building from the smallest semiotic units (semes) a system that eventually incorporates

6 For instance, Greimas analyzes interviews in actantial terms. An interviewed head of a business gives an
account of his work where the investor is the subject-hero, the health of the enterprise is the object,
scientific and technological progress is the opponent and the sender is the economic system etc. (1983:
210). He also gives the example of the Marxist narrative: Subject: man; Object: classless society; Sender:
history; Receiver: mankind; Opponent: bourgeois class; Helper: working class. (Greimas Struc. Sem. 208)

8
grand narratives, gives the impression of being a hermetic structure that can only work as a
whole. So how does a social scientist make use of the actantial theory without buying into a
formalist structuralism?
Latour gives several definitions of actants and actors. In 'A Summary of a Convenient
Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies' written with Madeleine
Akrich, an actant is defined as “whatever acts or shifts actions”, and an actor as “an actant
endowed with a character (usually anthropomorphic)” (Akrich / Latour 1992, p. 259). A
very similar definition can be found in 'Where are the Missing Masses?' where he uses
“actant to mean anything that acts and actor to mean what is made the source of an action”
(1992, p. 177). In 'Science in Action' whatever or whoever is represented is an actant (1987,
p. 84), and in 'Reassembling the Social', actors are defined by making a difference and
actants are actors that have no figuration yet (2005, p. 71), figuration meaning some flesh
and features, however vague (ibid., p. 53). However, in 'Pandora's Hope' the focus is
shifted away from what an actor is, to the question of how it emerges and is defined by a
list of trials in which the performance of the entity decides on its fate as an actor. The term
actant is only occasionally used “to include nonhumans” in the definition (1999, p. 303). In
'The Pasteurization of France' the distinction between actants and actors disappears
completely, and the entry in the glossary reads: “I use actor, agent, or actant without
making any assumptions about who they may be and what properties they are endowed
with” (1988b, p. 251).
Such a lax and inconsistent use of the vocabulary lets Latour's adaptation of the concept
appear as a creative remodeling at best. He sometimes uses the terms synonymously,
changes their meaning from text to text and never explicitly refers to the actantial
categories of Subject/Object/Sender/Receiver/Helper/Opponent. He might occasionally
refer to 'heroes' in his accounts and even frame his stories in a mythical way when writing
about those heroes “triumphing over all powers of darkness” or being challenged by “a new
bad guy, a storm, a devil, a curse, a dragon” (1987, p. 54), but the categories stay implicit.
Some aspects are, despite all this, kept constant. Actants and actors can be human and
nonhuman, and they are only actants if they make a difference. Also, actants and actors – as
in Greimas – never act or even exist alone. Both, Latour and Greimas, treat “actants as
entirely relational and not allowing an essential nuclear core in them to withdraw behind

9
relations” (Harman 2009, p. 156). They gain strength through associations with other
actors. What is taken from Greimas, is the ability to write descriptions that let act whatever
acts and show relations in their making without making assumptions about the origins of
agency at the outset. The main benefit of Greimas's model is, in other words, that actors,
“both non-human and human, can more freely be constructed on a joint plane of
immanence” (Hostaker 2005, p. 6).

3. 3. Trials of Strength
In Greimas's narratology, the actantial figuration of discourse is not the only
characteristic of narratives. There is a canonical narrative schema in which actors follow
narrative programs and undergo tests. Before the actants in a narrative are recognized as
actors they must display performances that are made possible by competences they inherit.
The qualifying test endows the subject with a knowing-how-to-do or a being-able-to-do. It
thereby corresponds to competence. This competence is presupposed by the next, the
decisive or main test, which consists of a performance “bringing about the conjunction of
the subject with the sought-for object of value” (Greimas / Courtés 1982, p. 68). The third
test is a cognitive performance that recognizes the performance of the decisive test by
producing a subject being-able-to-cause-to-know (cf. ibid., p. 137). This is called the
glorifying test. The heroine takes on a quest laid upon her by the queen. She then undergoes
a rite of passage or somehow gains competence and know-how (qualifying test) to then free
the prince (decisive test). Back home, now a true heroine by virtue of her two tests, she
recognizes herself as such and is recognized and glorified by the queen (glorifying test).
In Latour's science studies, objects undergo similar tests before they are recognized as
actants. These test are called trials of strength. If an actant is whatever acts or shifts actions,
and actions are defined through a “list of performances in trials” (Akrich / Latour 1992, p.
259), then there are no actants and actors without trials. This means that scientific objects,
as actants, come into existence through a series of trials. In the beginning they are nothing.
It is only though experiments (trials) in the laboratory that they take shape. The object
undergoes tests, but it is not yet defined as an essence. It is simply a “name of action”
(1993b, p. 36), a “score list of a series of trials” (1987, p. 89), “properties looking for the

10
substance they belong to” (1999, p. 119). As soon as their performances in trials are
identified as presuppositions of competences, however, they turn into scientific objects that
could only perform in such a way because of an essence that affords the competences
necessary. A non-entity becomes an entity through trials of strength. This entity might then
be recognized by scientists, but only as long as it is victorious in later trials.
An entity can become less real, lose competences or vanish all together if it fails tests.
Latour gives the example of N-rays, which were 'discovered' by a French physicist. They
were recognized, papers were published on them, and they seemed to resist trials. It was
only when an American scientist decided to visit the physicists laboratory to play villain
and put the N-rays through new ordeals, that they lost their competences, their essence. By
removing an aluminum prism that was supposed to measure the rays' performance, and
discovering that the results (inscriptions on metal plates) were still the same, the N-rays lost
all their performances and competences. The inscriptions were made by something else.
There were no N-rays anymore (cf. Latour 1987, p. 75f).
Performances presuppose competences, and both are a condition for the recognition of the
entity. In both Greimas's narrative schema and Latour's science studies there is no action
without a knowing-how-to-do or a being-able-to-do. But there is one important difference.
In the folk tales and stories Greimas is most concerned with, the entity (subject-hero)
acquires the competences throughout the course of the story (cf. Hostaker 2005, p. 11).
According to Latour, however, this relationship is quite the opposite in scientific practice:
performance comes first, then competence. The competence is deduced from the
performance.
Actors grow more powerful and more real in trials of strength and can equally become
impotent and imaginary in them. Ultimately, trials encompass the reality we live in – not
just in laboratory settings, but also in the (social) world in general. In a sense, Latour
ontologizes Greimas's narrative theory (Latour 2009). The claim not only applies to
narrative characters and inanimate objects, but also to collective actors, concepts, theories,
governments etc. In fact, for Latour “there are only trials of strength, of weakness. […]
There are only trials” (1988b, p. 158). What is real is determined by its resistance, and to
resist one has to form alliances, associations, interest others. “No actant is so weak that it
cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which

11
they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many
others” (ibid., p.159). Because nothing ever acts alone and every actant can enlist others
and form alliances7, the reality and power of something or someone is always a product of
the relationality produced in trials of strength. Just like the signifiers in structuralist
linguistics (cf. Saussure 1966, p. 120), material entities are significant only in relation to
other entities.

3. 4. Programs of Action
If an actor has a goal, an intention, something it might do or something it is in a
(whatever vague) way supposed to do, we can speak of a program of action (cf. Latour
1999, p. 178). Such a program of action is always a trial, a struggle, against anti-actors with
their anti-programs that try to prevent the actor from fulfilling his/her/its program. To reach
their goals and defeat the anti-programs, actors might have to take a detour and complete
another program first, delegate tasks to others, or built associations with other
actors/actants.
These programs of action are a generalization of Greimas's narrative programs (cf. Akrich /
Latour 1992, p. 260). In a narrative, a program is “composed of an utterance of doing
governing an utterance of state” and can be interpreted “as a change of state effected by any
subject (S1) affecting any subject (S2)” (Greimas / Courtés 1982, p. 245). A subject does
something affecting him/her/itself or something/someone else. With such a minimal
definition there is a multitude of programs present, even in the most boring story. 'The
monkey ate an apple' would have a narrative program because the monkey changes a state
(before the eating) by a doing (eating the apple) into another state (after eating the apple).
But what if the apple is hanging from a tree, and the primate must obtain it before it can
enjoy it? It will have to run an instrumental program. This can be done in several ways.
The money can fetch a stick in order to get the apple it wants to eat. Or it can throw a stone,
or shake the tree. If it is a clever monkey, it can also delegate the task of obtaining the apple

7 Interessment, enrollment and the mobilization of allies are operations (or performances of persuasion as
Greimas would say) that play a significant role in ANT's concept of translation. While those translations
are related to trials of strength and can be important in the delegation of programs of action, the concept is
greatly influenced by French philosopher Michel Serres. Many concepts, aspects and operations presented
here are intertwined with others that cannot be presented here.

12
to another actant. It can manipulate a member of its group into getting it, or – even more
clever – work a machine that performs the task. This delegated instrumental program is
called annex program. The first program can be called base narrative program to
distinguish it from the other two (cf. ibid.). In a novel where the reader follows a heroine
and her programs (together they form the trajectory of the story), there will be trials and
obstacles to overcome. There will be anti-heroes and anti-programs. That means, “in a more
or less hidden way” the “story of the villain” is told as well (Greimas / Courtés 1982, p.
205), while the starting-point and the followed trajectory (whose story is told and when it
starts) is decided for the reader.
When settings are studied, however, the starting-point has to be chosen by the researcher
who also decides whose/what's story will be told. Once a starting point is selected (Latour
says it does not really matter where we start (Latour 1995, p. 278)), we can follow the
actors in their programs of action. In Latour's observation language there are no
instrumental or annex programs, yet there are detours and delegations (cf. 1999, p. 174;
1995, p. 278), which denote something very similar. But he adds one crucial instrument:
associations with other actants. Associations can be instrumental, but when the other actors
associated with change the original program of action and do not just act as intermediaries,
those actors become mediators.
If, for example, someone is betrayed or hurt and wants to take revenge (that is her program
of action) she might not be strong enough to avenge herself when facing the enemy empty
handed. She must make a detour to reach her goal. So the person forms an association with
another actant: a gun, for example. If the original program of action had been 'shoot the
enemy!' and she went on to do so with the gun, that gun would serve as an intermediary (cf.
Latour 1999, p. 178). As a simple instrument that makes no difference in the achievement
of the end. Most of the time, according to Latour, something else is the case. Out of the
association between gun and person, a new actor emerges (“citizen-gun, gun-citizen” (ibid.,
p. 179)) and the program changes. It is not the program of the person, nor the program
(script) of the gun. It is something new. “You only wanted to injure, but now with the gun
in your hand, you want to kill […] and the gun is different with you holding it” (ibid.).
There is a hybrid actor, and it is not possible to attribute the action of shooting to either the
gun or the person. One actor can manifest several actants, and one actant can be manifested

13
by many actors, but there are no hybrid actor/actants in Greimas's narrative theory and
action can always be attributed to the actor that instrumentalizes, manipulates or delegates.8
So, associations with other actors or actants, which may have programs of their own and
thereby translate and transform the original programs, can help fulfill programs. And if we
pick, as a starting-point, an actor and his/her/its program we might find that the actor is not
one single (non)human being but a network, a hybrid that does not act alone and does not
have a program of his/her/its own.
But there is more to programs of action. Take the program of a lone concierge of an
apartment building in Berlin: 'Please lock the door behind you during the night and never
during the day' (Latour 1991b, p. 17). If he wants everyone to do as he wishes, he will have
to bring the inhabitants of the house onto his side. He can do so by telling everyone in
person what a nuisance it is to him to constantly have to check whether the door is locked
or not. If he is successful, we could apply Greimas's narrative schema and say: To fulfill his
base narrative program 'get everyone to lock the door at certain times' our subject-hero had
to run the instrumental program 'tell everyone in the house to lock the door at certain times'.
If he chooses to put up signs saying 'please lock the door behind you during the night', his
instrumental program would have been an annex one, because it was delegated to
something else. Achieving such an ambitious goal with just a few words or a sign is
unrealistic if we consider the masses of anti-programs it faces. Thieves, lovers, doctors,
mailmen all want to enter the building during times it is supposed to be shut. The concierge
has to counter-act all those anti-programs. In Latour's story – the story of the Berlin key –
the concierge forms associations with a key, the door and a Prussian locksmith (ibid., p. 18)
in order to fight the disobedient Berliners. The new key's script materializes a program of
action by making sure that tenants lock the door behind themselves when entering the
building during the night. It has two identical bits on each end, and to retrieve the key after
unlocking the door, it has to be pushed through the keyhole and turned again on the other
side of the door, thereby locking it once again. During the day, this mechanism is disabled
by the concierge – the doors cannot be locked.
On the one hand, the material key transforms a program of action, which was thus far only

8 Unfortunately, we can not go into detail about the implications such transformations, or translations, of
programs through associations carry. It will have to suffice to say that they play a major role in Latour's
theory and hope that it becomes a bit clearer in the following examples.

14
present in the sign and the words of the concierge, into an object9. We go from the world of
signs to the world of things. We will encounter this operation of shifting down in chapter
4.2. On the other hand, it does not just express the same semiotic content in another form. It
would then simply be an intermediary, doing nothing else but “carry, transport, shift,
incarnate, express, reify, objectify, reflect, the meaning of the phrase: 'Lock the door behind
you during the night, and never during the day'” (Latour 1991b, p. 18). The key is a
mediator, because it forms and makes the disciplinary relations necessary for the program to
be successful and not only expresses them (cf. ibid., p. 20ff.).
But the key would not work by itself. That is to say, it does not exist in the way it does in
and of itself but only in relation to the tenants, the door, the concierge. If the inhabitants of
the house found a way to render the door mechanism useless, the trial of strength would be
lost. Equally, if the door was broken or the concierge stopped disabling the mechanism in
the morning, not only would the program not be fulfilled, but the key would lose its
significance. The woman with the gun, the concierge with the locksmith, the door, the key
– none of them act alone. They only act and exist in associations or networks. They are
constituted in associations and thus a result of the relations they are part of. “Objects,
entities, actors, processes - all are semiotic effects: network nodes are sets of relations; or
they are sets of relations between relations” (Law / Mol 1995, p. 277). They are semiotic
effects precisely because they are relational. Actants and actors are always relational: We
have seen that they never act alone; that the trials they go through are mastered by forming
relations; and that programs of action are transformed, followed, fulfilled or failed
depending on how associations, translations, delegations – in short: relations – are
fashioned.
We can now better understand what Latour takes from semiotics, in general and
Greimas, in particular. He does not seem to be concerned with meaning in the conventional
sense and uses the tools provided by Greimas for something different than accounting for
the production of linguistic meaning. Instead, semiotic operations are used to study the
construction of entities and their programs. These entities and their construction are located

9 This transformation from sign to thing is discussed more explicitly in the description of another key.
There, hotel guests are urged to leave their keys at the front desk when leaving the hotel. The program
'Please leave your keys at the front desk' is delegated to a heavy weight on the key. Most guests do not
want to carry a heavy key around with them and leave the key in the hotel. The anti-programs of confused,
lazy or rebellious guests are countered and the hotel-manager loses less keys (Latour 1995, p. 103ff.).

15
in two realms that were bracketed out by semiotics in order to grant meaning production its
autonomy: reference and the social conditions of production. Material objects (the
'referents' outside the text) and the context of the emergence of entities, however, are now
part of what is being studied (cf. Latour 1993a, p. 64). Rather than locating ANT outside of
semiotics, Latour is “extending the semiotic turn to this famous nature and this famous
context” (Latour 1999b, p. 76). This extension comes at a price. If semiotics is “the study
of how meaning is built” (Akrich / Latour 1992, p. 259), meaning can no longer be
constrained to signs. The question of meaning is then one about “how one privileged
trajectory is built out of an indefinite number of possibilities”, and semiotics is the study of
“order building or path building and my be applied to settings” (ibid.) and entities as well
as texts. The insights of linguistic semiotics are retained but they are applied to a broader
field and modified. In the following chapter we will see how Latour uses and modifies
other semiotic concepts so as to study scientific texts, practices and settings.

16
 4. Circulating Reference
4. 1. Engagement/Disengagement
Closely related to narrative theory and Latour's adaptation of it, is his use of the
semiotic concept of engagement/disengagement. Circulating under such pseudonyms as
positive/negative modalities (1987, p. 23), shifting in/shifting out (1988a, p. 5) or
upstream/downstream reference (1999, p. 70) it denotes an operation by which a frame of
reference is moved away or towards the production circumstances of a statement (cf.
Akrich / Latour 1992, p. 260).
Exploring “the semiotics of the practices that lead to scientific truth-claims” (Law
2007, p. 5), Latour, in ‘Science in Action' (1987), introduces modalities that make
statements appear more of a fact or less of a fact. These modalities are sentences in which
the statement in question is incorporated. They modify the statement's meaning-effect by
leading it away from or towards its enunciation and enunciator. A short example can
illustrate what Latour means by this: A statement like “The primary structure of Growth
Hormone Releasing Hormone (GRHR) is Val-His-Leu-Ser-Ala-Glu-Glu-Lys-Glu-Ala” is
devoid of “any traces of ownership, construction, time and place” (Latour 1987, p. 23). But
consider the following sentences: “Dr. Schally has claimed for several years in his New
Orleans laboratory that [the structure of GRHR is Val-His-Leu-Ser-Ala-Glu-Glu-Lys-Glu-
Ala]. However, by troubling coincidence this structure is also that of hemoglobin, a
common component of blood and frequent contaminant of purified brain extract if handled
by incompetent investigators” (ibid.). These sentences modify the former statement by
shifting it towards its production circumstances. The statement is thus transformed from a
fact into a claim by one scientist in a particular time and space as well as a man-made
product that is a result of complicated practices. Those practices include isolating a
hormone in a laboratory without letting the purified brain extract become contaminated
with blood. The second statement is a negative modality, because it leads the original
statement towards its conditions of production and explains “in detail why it is solid or
weak” (ibid.).
The transformation of statements through negative and positive modalities has
consequences for the definition of factuality and is, by this trait, a concept situated at the
very basis of Latour's science studies. A given statement is made more or less factual,

17
depending on its use in other sentences. This means, according to Latour, that by “itself a
given sentence is neither a fact nor a fiction; it is made so by others, later on” (ibid., p. 25).
We have encountered this suspension of the fact/fiction-dichotomy before when we
examined how scientific objects become more or less real in trials of strength, and we will
get back to it later. For now, what interests us more is how he makes use of the semiotic
operation of engagement/disengagement in other contexts, and how he modifies it for his
purposes. To this end, we first have to establish Greimas's understanding of this narrative
operation.
Engagement/disengagement is a semiotic tool originating from the shifters
introduced by the Russian linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson (Jakobson 1957).
Shifter was later translated into French as embrayeur (engager) and then further developed
by Greimas, which led to a distinction of two kinds of shifting, namely engagement and
disengagement. In their dictionary, Greimas and Courtés define the latter as “the operation
by which the domain of the enunciation disjuncts and projects forth from itself, at the
moment of the language act and in view of manifestation, certain terms bound to its base
structure, so as thereby to constitute the foundational elements of the discourse-utterance”
(Greimas / Courtés 1982, p. 87). It will suffice, at this point, to very briefly characterize the
domain of enunciation as the production situation of the utterance10, which in turn can be
described as that which is said or written – the content of language11. Traces of the
enunciation can be found in the utterance, for instance in the form of deictics (I-here-now).
Those traces are eradicated by disengagement, and the utterance disjuncts itself from the
enunciation.
Authors (enunciators) of literature and poetry make wide use of this operation in
their texts in order to convey a sense of realism in their stories. When Boris Pasternak
writes in Doctor Zhivago: “One evening at the end of November Yura came home late from
the university; he was tired and had eaten nothing all day” (Pasternak 1959, p. 69), the
reader (enunciatee) is lead away from Pasternak at his study in Moscow. Instead, the
reader’s attention is moved to an actor (Yuri), at another time (one evening at the end of
November), in another place (Yuri's home). We can see all three types of disengagement

10 Or the “situational actualization of text” (my translation, Angermüller 2000, p. 70).

11 Following a Peircian Semiotics, we could also say that the statement shifts from index to symbol (cf.
Peirce 1955, p. 104ff; Schleifer 2009, p. 144).

18
put forward by Greimas, in this sentence. There is actantial disengagement, which consists
of a disjunction of a 'not-I' from the subject of the enunciation, and projection into the
utterance; temporal disengagement, which postulates a 'not-now' distinct from the time of
the enunciation; and spatial disengagement, which opposes a 'not-here' to the place of the
enunciation (cf. Greimas / Courtés 1982, p. 88). The actants that are disengaged from the
enunciation – like any actants in Greimas's theory – can be human or nonhuman. In a
sentence like 'the bus from the university arrived at the train station at 9 p.m.', the actorial
disengagement works just as well with a bus as it would with a person.
We can now more easily define engagement as the opposite of disengagement. It
designates “the effect of the return to the enunciation. This effect is produced by the
suspension of the opposition between certain terms belonging to the categories of actor
and/or of space and/or of time, as well as by negation of the domain of the utterance” (ibid.,
p. 100). Latour's negative modalities presented above are, in fact, an engagement in
Greimas's sense, because they have the effect of returning to the enunciation.
In the remainder of this chapter I will argue that Latour makes extensive use of the
concept just presented and that it is indeed this notion of engagement/disengagement from
semiotics, in general, and Greimas's narrative semiotics, in particular, that he is referring to
when talking about shifting in/shifting out, upstream/downstream reference or
positive/negative modalities12. Furthermore, Latour's use of it will elucidate some other
aspects of actor-network-theory, particularly the internal referent. His 'Relativistic Account
of Einstein's Relativity' can serve as an example of his utilization and modification of what
he calls 'shifting in/shifting out'. In this text, Latour introduces the operation of shifting
in/shifting out13, as one of the “basic tools for analyzing texts” (1988a, p. 5), with which he
attempts to read a semi-popular book by Einstein on his theory of relativity. His definition
of this operation is identical to Greimas's explanation of engagement/disengagement in the
‘Dictionary’: Shifting out is the operation of shifting the attention of the reader away from
the enunciation and the enunciator to a new actant, operating elsewhere, at a different time
(cf. ibid.). Shifting in denotes the opposite.

12 Latour refers to Greimas's operations of disengagement/engagement both implicitly (by adopting the three
forms of disengagement) as well as explicitly, when he cites Greimas in his explanation of shifting out
(Latour 1988a, p. 5).
13 Latour's use of the terms shifting in/shifting out instead of engagement/disengagement might be owed to
Francoise Bastide, a student of Greimas's, who studied the semiotics of scientific texts.

19
 What enables Latour to use this instrument of narrative theory on a scientific text is
his reading of Einstein's book as a narrative (he calls Einstein's book a 'drama'). He can do
this, on the one hand, because Greimas's narrative semiotics is – as we have seen -
applicable to all texts that incorporate a “succession of functions (in the sense of actions)”
(Greimas / Courtés 1982, p. 203). On the other hand, it can be applied to texts other than
fictional literary works, because the division between fiction and science is
methodologically suspended. This is not only a result of Greimas's and Latour's claim that
fictional and factual texts can be read and analyzed in the same terms, but also has to do
with the notion that factuality – like realism – is something that is produced in the text. We
will see how this is accomplished by building an internal referent in the next sub-chapter.
Greimas himself points out the applicability of his method to scientific discourse when he
writes, in a late article on veridiction, that scientific discourse is one of the order “of
objectivizing camouflage. In order to be accepted as true, it tries to appear not to be the
subject's discourse, but rather a pure utterance expressing the necessary relations between
things. It thus, to the extent possible, erases all marks of enunciation” (Greimas 1989, p.
658). Scientific texts, in other words, always rely heavily on the operation of
disengagement, which Latour is concerned with here.
What becomes clear in Latour's account is that disengagement is a presupposition of
every utterance. Neither spoken language, nor scientific texts can function without a
shifting away from the enunciation. “Nothing can be said of the enunciator of a narration if
not in a narration where the enunciator becomes a shifted-out character” (Latour 1988a, p.
27) because “if there were no shifting, there would be no way of ever escaping from the
narrow confines of hic et nunc, and no way of ever defining who the enunciator is. There
would be utter silence” (ibid., p. 9). The use of the deictic 'I' in a narrative may pertain to
the illusion that the enunciator, the author and the 'I' in the text are one and the same
character (cf. Latour 1988a, p. 6) – this remains, however, an illusion by definition: “No 'I'
encountered in the discourse can be considered as subject of the enunciation strictly
speaking, nor identified with that subject” (Greimas / Courtés 1982, p. 104). The authorial
'I' already marks a disengagement from the enunciation. In Latour's terms, a shifting out to
another frame of reference takes place. In his account, Latour goes on to list trials, extract
main shiftings, important actants, marks of enunciation etc. from Einstein's text. He, quite

20
simply, lets Einstein undergo the whole Greimassian program of narrative analysis. Latour's
aim, however, is not only to analyze Einstein's text with semiotic tools, but also to show
how Einstein himself focuses the reader's attention on the very operations of shifting in and
shifting out. Einstein, writes Latour, “is interested only in the way in which we send any
actor to any other frame of reference. Instead of describing laws of nature, he sets out to
describe how any description is possible” (Latour 1988a, p. 9). One conclusion Latour
draws from his reading – he does a great many other things in his text, but we want to
concentrate only on this aspect – is that description without actantial shifting out is not
possible. The scientific description depends on the possibility of shifting actants out and
shifting them back in. To shift, in other words, the attention of the reader to the actants and
their time and space, and shift the attention back to the describer/description on a different
frame of reference.
Up to this point, Latour fully subscribes to Greimas's semiotics and his notion of
engagement/disengagement. However, he has to modify it slightly so as to make use of it
in the context of science studies. So far, he does not have the tools to account for
truthfulness or factuality. Neither does Greimas's narrative theory enable him to study
material settings. The semiotic toolbox will have to be equipped with a few more concepts
before we can enter the 'real world'.

4. 2. The Internal Referent

Latour needs to account for the distinction between realist writing and scientific
texts. This difference pertains to what the two genres refer to. At first glance there does not
seem to be much of a difference at all. Both journal articles and novels build an internal
referent. This means they create a type of realism by giving the reader the feeling that not
everything is possible in the narration. They not only do this by shifting a statement out,
away from the enunciation, they also do this by letting the actants in their story impose
constraints on one another (cf. 1988a, p. 7). For Greimas, reference “designates the oriented
[...] relation which exists (or is recognized) between any two entities” (Greimas / Courtés
1982, p. 259). We have seen earlier that actants are always relational. In a narrative, they
enable, restrict, help or fight each other. It is easy to see why there is an internal referent in

21
fictional novels. Their stories do not necessarily refer to the reality outside the text. We do
not expect there to be proof of Asimov's spaceships, but we might want proof for a
statement like 'Betelgeuse is the eighth brightest star in the night sky'. We might request
proof that there is an outside referent - a real celestial body that shines brightly in the sky -,
which the statement refers to. It seems pretty simple. The reader can go outside, look at the
night sky, find Betelgeuse (the star in the upper left corner of the Orion constellation) and
decide for him/herself. Like the old example, 'the cat is on the mat', there seems to be no
problem with reference if the cat and the mat are right there in front of the enunciatee. The
external referent is sitting there, confirming the statement. In actual practice, however, “one
never travels directly from objects to words, from the referent to the sign, but always
through a risky intermediary pathway” (Latour 1999, p. 40), as we will see. Objectivity in
scientific texts is not produced by pointing at a single outside referent, but by building a
strong chain of reference inside the text. That is why Latour says that it is “Greimas's great
discovery, that objectivity is the inside referent, it's never an outside referent” (Latour
2009). What Greimas says about reference is, in a nutshell, that every discourse builds its
own internal referent:
The linguistic content [...] becomes the locus of the text's reference and the specific
elements of this context are then called referents. In this sense the term referent is then
synonymous with what is anaphorized. At this point and in this way, it appears that the
question of the reference needs to be addressed so as to describe the network of references
both within the utterance and also between the utterance and the domain of the
enunciation. [...] The problem, which needs to be addressed, is not that of a referent
given a priori, but rather the problem of the referentialization of the utterance. (Greimas /
Courtés 1982, p. 260-261)
This does not mean that scientists tell each other stories that are unverifiable. To illustrate
this, Latour adds a final shifting in that separates the scientific from the fictional. In fiction,
there is shifting out and shifting in. But one form of shifting in is only applicable to
scientific texts: the final shifting in into the production situation – the engagement towards
the actual enunciation. He adds another frame of reference.
If we went to a novelist’s office to find proof that his/her characters really exist and the told
stories really happened, we would not be disappointed to walk out empty handed. But if we
shifted in to the production circumstances of a scientific paper, we would (and rightfully
so) be shocked if the scientist could not produce evidence that what he/she described in
his/her text really exists. Partly so, because in fact-writing the author shows that he/she has

22
documents that guarantee what the text says (cf. Latour 1988a, p. 12).
Those documents can be inscriptions in the text. Inscriptions can be graphs, pictures, tables
or other materials in the text. If they 'fit' with the text - that means if they support the
impression that the text is about what the inscriptions show – the reader will more readily
accept the account as factual. The operation of inscription refers “to all the types of
transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a
document, a piece of paper, a trace” (Latour 1999, p. 306). The scientist is also expected to
have another reference (other documents), which lies outside the text and is what the final
shifting shifts to. For Latour “the ability of semiotics to be extended to science depends on
its ability to deal with this reference that underwrites the inscriptions commented in a text”
(Latour 1988a, p. 14). We will see in a moment what it means when 'an entity becomes
materialized into a sign', and what an underwritten referent is. Latour is now almost ready
to leave the written text and enter the material world. And what could be more material
than the Amazon rainforest of Boa Vista?
In a book chapter titled 'Circulating Reference. Sampling the Soil in the Amazon
Forest', Latour follows a botanist, two pedologists and a geomorphologist on their quest to
determine whether the Amazon forest is advancing into the bordering savanna or if it is, in
fact, the other way around. What he is concerned with is the referent of scientific discourse.
Semiotics is an “excellent tool chest for following the mediations of language.” As we have
seen, its methods are useful when analyzing texts, “but by avoiding the double problem of
connections to the referent and connections to the context, they prevent us from following
the quasi-objects to the end” (Latour 1993a, p. 64). The cat on the mat seems to be
validating the statement 'the cat is on the mat', but how about a statement like 'the forest of
Boa Vista advances on the savanna'? “How can I point to that whose presence would
accord a truth-value to my sentence” (Latour 1999, p. 40) in this case?
It looks like Latour wants to re-introduce the external referent Greimas had abandoned.
This is what Lenoir maintains, when he accuses Latour of going back to the “old ground of
realism and representation” (Lenoir 1994, p. 126). He does something quite different,
however:
His preliminary answer to the question of the referent reiterates something we have already
seen: The scientific text differs from other forms of narrative because it speaks of “a

23
referent, present in the text, in a form other than prose: a chart, diagram, equation, map, or
sketch. Mobilizing its own internal referent, the scientific text carries within itself its own
verification” (ibid., p. 56). But what do charts and diagrams refer to? Doesn't there have to
be an external referent to verify them? And if there is such an external referent, how do
scientists (or anyone) bridge the gap that would then exist between the two “ontological
domains – language and nature” (ibid., p. 24)? Latour wants to show that there is no need
for an external referent. There is no big gap to be bridged, and there are no two domains
standing opposed to one another. Instead, there is something else: circulating reference.
This reference points to the quality of the reference chain that we can shift out and in on. If
it is a good chain – one that is not interrupted on any frame of reference, and one that we
can always shift up and back down on – there is reference. When the team of scientists
produces knowledge about the forest, they do so by transforming it from matter into form
(from thing into sign) on a chain of reference that is reversible.
The investigators in Latour's story use numbered tags nailed to trees to turn the forest into a
laboratory. This means, by dividing it into squares they gain some control over it. They
create an artificial setting for their experiment. Holes are dug to obtain soil samples, these
holes are marked and their distances measured with the aid of a topofil and its thread. Next,
they take samples of leaves and soil within each square. By numbering those samples they
are linked to their specific square. The soil then undergoes a special treatment: It is placed
in a wooden frame containing cardboard boxes forming a square – the pedocomperator
(Latour 1999, p. 47). The soil is not placed into the cubes at random. The arrangement of
the samples mimics the square structure of the area obtained with the help of tags and the
topofil's cotton thread. The pedocomperator makes something thus far invisible visible. It
re-presents, it articulates the composition of soil in an artificially demarcated piece of land.
This instrument, with all the pieces of soil inside it, can now be transformed into a diagram.
The diagram can then, in turn, be textually represented.
To understand what happens here, Greimas's operations of engagement must be modified.
As soon as the three-dimensional world of material things is entered, the chain on which we
shift in and out on has to become two-dimensional. A forth form of shifting is added. This
shifting up/down is the operation that is described above. The supplementing of the
actantial, temporal and spatial shiftings with material shifting, enables Latour to account

24
for the transformations the forest of Boa Vista goes through in order to be represented –
referred to – in a text. Material shifting modifies “the matter of the expression” (Akrich /
Latour 1992, p. 259), by transforming things into signs (shifting up) or signs into things
(shifting down)14.
The scientists shift out, away from the messy, material, local and particular forest, to the
demarcated squares. From there, further out, to the soil samples, which are transformed in
the pedocomperator. They shift further out to the pictorial inscription of the diagram and
finally into the written text where the enunciation, the production circumstances, are
gradually erased. This shifting out, however, is only possible because of the small steps of
transformation that accompany it. The soil, in all its materiality, becomes something else
once “placed inside the cardboard cube. […] [T]he earth becomes a sign, takes on a
geometrical form, becomes the carrier of a numbered code, and will soon be defined by a
color” (Latour 1999: 49). There is another shifting up when the pedocomperator, “in the
regularity of its cubes, their disposition in columns and rows, their discrete character, and
the possibility of freely substituting one column for another” (ibid., p. 48) becomes a sign,
through its arrangement of matter (the soil) in its compartments. The pedocomperator, as
abstract as it is, remains a material object – a thing. For the next transformation it is not
form, but matter. It is transformed into an inscription, a two-dimensional diagram.
These are only a few of the transformations from thing to sign described by Latour, but the
examples are enough to show that each frame of reference is “matter for what follows and
form for what precedes it” (ibid., p. 74). At each step we are shifting up and out. This is the
engagement of things into discourse that makes extra-linguistic entities available for words.
The chain can now be extended indefinitely to either side. What is important is that no
matter how far we shift in, we never encounter an external referent that we could point to.
What we find are transformations from signs to things, which are signs in the next step of
shifting in. We are in the material world (there are wooden boxes, pieces of string, soil,
leaves, shovels and a whole lot of paper), but we never truly leave the world of signs.
What then, is the reference? If we need an uninterrupted chain that we can shift
in/out/up/down on to have reference, it is because this kind of chain is strong enough to

14 This operation of shifting up/down was first introduced by Latour in 'Where are the Missing Masses? The
Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’ (Latour 1992). Its bearing on Greimas's theory is commented on
in a text written shortly after (Latour 1993b, footnote 16, p. 141).

25
keep something constant. By shifting up and out, materiality, particularity, locality etc. are
successively lost. At the same time, something is gained: “compatibility, standardization,
text, calculation, circulation, relative universality” (ibid., p. 71). It is a successive
movement from the concrete to the abstract. In all the transformations, however, specific
properties of the Boa Vista forest are immutable. By shifting up when taking the soil out of
the ground and placing it in the pedocomperator, or by transforming the pedocomperator
into a graph on a piece of paper, “something that re-presents the real is transformed into
something transportable”, while “a trace is maintained” (Hostaker 2005, p. 12) that keeps
some information constant throughout the process. The pedocomperator, unlike the
rainforest, could be picked up, stored in a suitcase and sent to Paris or anywhere else in the
world. Wherever it ends up, some information about the soil it was composed of will still
be present in it. The graph extracted from the pedocomperator is even more mobile. It can
be faxed, mailed, copied and distributed without losing its information value. Both, the
wooden box and the document, are kinds of inscriptions. Because they are transportable
and keep something constant, we can also call them immutable mobiles. When arranged in
a strong chain, “they produce the circulating reference” (Latour 1999, p. 307). The
reference is simply whatever information or relation is kept constant throughout the
transformations.

26
 5. Conclusion
We have seen how Latour uses and extends semiotics in his actor-network theory.
In this utilization he relies heavily on terminology and concepts developed by Greimas.
Particularly Greimas’s narrative theory serves as a toolbox, from which Latour borrows
methods and vocabulary to write his accounts. He narrativizes his observations and tells
stories where – like in fictional literature – everything can be made to act by making a
difference in the narrative. Latour’s description language uses concepts developed by
Greimas and other semioticians. It was shown how the notion of actants, which can be
human and non-human, material and immaterial, animate and inanimate, is inspired by
narrative theory and the how the vocabulary is taken from Greimas. The fact that it is their
relations to other entities that determine these actants and actors underlines the semiotic
origins of Latour’s actor-network theory.
Two other examples elucidated the relation between Latour’s theory and semiotics. Trials
of strength, inspired by the tests a character in a narrative faces, were described to
determine how powerful and strong actants and actors are. The more associations they
form, the more stable and resistant they grow. In this sense, trials of strength crate order by
stabilizing entities. Furthermore, programs of action, which are generalizations of
Greimas’s narrative programs, are fulfilled and at the same time altered by forming
associations. Everything is entirely relational. There is no essence to programs, nor to
actants, be they humans, ideas, material things or collectives.
The semiotic operations Latour uses are modified to make them applicable to material
objects and settings. The objects and settings studied in ANT represent something that was
“bracketed out” by semiotic theory: nature and context (cf. Latour 1999b, p. 76). Material
entities, far from being “objective, unproblematically composed of forces, elements,
atoms”, are “package[s] of former crossovers between social and natural elements” (Latour
1999, p. 205). Those crossovers can be analyzed in semiotic terms when the forming of
relations, which bring the entity into being, is studied in settings. The study and description
of settings is aided by Greimas's narrative theory. Through the operation of shifting
up/down extralinguistic objects can be made available to semiotic scrutiny. By adding this
form of shifting to the actantial, spatial and temporal shiftings proposed by Greimas, one
can follow the transition from thing to sign and from sign to thing or, in other words, make

27
the referent and the practice of referentialization available to study.
Latour extends semiotics. This extension is accomplished by defining meaning as
something that is made durable and stable. While this definition still includes the linguistic
notion of meaning (the meaning of a word or a sentence as something always already given,
made possible by conventionalized operations), it now also extends to “settings, machines,
bodies, programming languages as well as texts” (Akrich / Latour, p. 259). Semiotics, for
ANT, is then “the study of how meaning is built, but the word “meaning” is taken in its
original nontextual and nonlinguistic interpretation; how one privileged trajectory is built,
out of an infinite number of possibilities; in that sense, semiotics is the study of order
building or path building....” (ibid.). Latour does not stay true to the whole of Greimas's
semiotics. He uses it as a toolbox, creatively remodeling and redefining concepts, applying
them to things other than signs. In this, it seems, he follows advice Fredric Jameson gave
the readers of Greimas: We “should also feel free to bricolate all this, that is, in plainer
language, simply to steal the pieces that interest or fascinate us, and to carry off our
fragmentary booty to our intellectual caves” (Jameson 1987 p. Viii).

28
 6. Works Cited
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for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies, in: Bijker, Wiebe E. / Law, John
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ARMSTRONG, NANCY 1981: Inside Greimas's Square: Literary Characters and Cultural
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CULLER, JONATHAN 2002: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the

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 EAGLETON, TERRY 1996: Literary Theory. An Introduction, Blackwell: Oxford

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GREIMAS, ALGIRDAS-JULIEN 1971: Narrative Grammar: Units and Levels. Bodrock,

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_____1983: Structural Semantics. An Attempt at a Method, Lincoln: University of

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_____1987: On Meaning. Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, Minneapolis, MN:

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_____1989: On Meaning. In: New Literary History, 20:3 (1989: Spring) p. 539- 550.

_____1989: The Veridiction Contract, in: New Literary History, 20:3 (1989:Spring), pp.
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HARMAN, GRAHAM 2009: Prince of Networks. Bruno Latour and Metaphysics.

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HOSTAKER, ROAR 2005: Latour – Semiotics and Science Studies. In. Science
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INTERVIEW 2009: "Where Constant Experiments Have Been Provided" A

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 JAKOBSON, ROMAN 1957: Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb.
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JAMESON, FREDRIC 1981: The Political Unconscious. Cornell University Press:

Ithaka, New York.

______1987: Foreword, in: Greimas, Algirdas Julien: On Meaning. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, pp. Vi-xxiii.

______ 1996: On Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

JOHNDUFF, MIKE 2012: Punctualization. Law and Greimas, WWW-Document:

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LATOUR, BRUNO 1987: Science in Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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_____1988a: A Relativistic Account of Einstein Relativity, in: Social Studies of Science,

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_____1988b: The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

_____1991a: Technology is Society Made Durable, in: Law, John (Ed.): A Sociology of
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_____1991b: The Berlin Key. Or How to do Things With Words, in: Graves-Brown, Paul
(Ed.): Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, London: Routledge, pp.10-22.

_____1992: Where are the Missing Masses? In: Bijker, Wiebe E.; John Law (eds.):
Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge,

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MA: MIT Press. 1992, pp. 225–258.

_____1993a: We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

_____1993b: Pasteur on Lactic Acid Yeast: A Partial Semiotic Analysis, In: Configurations
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_____1995: Gaston, A Little Known Successor of Daedalus. A Door Must Be Either Open
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_____1999a: Pandora's Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

_____1999b: The trouble with Actor Network Theory. In: Soziale Welt 47, pp 369-381.

_____2005: Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

LAW, JOHN 1992: Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy
and Heterogeneity. Published by the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University,
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ANT.pdf

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 LENOIR, TIMOTHY 1994: Was That Last Turn a Right Turn? The Semiotic Turn and
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_____ 2009: Intagible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge and the Power
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SCHÜTTPELZ, ERHARD 2012: Elemente einer Akteur-Medien-Theorie, in: Tristan

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33
 Appendix 1: Greimas's Structural Semantics
Greimas's project could be described as developing a method to account for meaning.
Not only for the meaning of a single sign, but also for the meaning of narratives. “Starting
with the meaning of words or lexical items, Greimas attempts to formulate rules and
concepts to account for the meaning produced when they combine in sentences or in
complete texts.” (Culler 2002, p. 88)
As in all structuralist theories, meaning is produced through difference. This is true for
small linguistic units as well as for bigger ones, such as sentences, or even narratives. The
smallest unit that carries meaning is, for Greimas, the seme. These semes are properties, or
distinctive features, of lexemes, such as example masculine, feminine, large, small etc.
Lexemes are words (or object-terms as he calls them) that are realized in speech or writing.
From these small elements he sets out to explain the production of meaning.
For an object-term to have meaning, it has to be perceived - or thought of – in relation to
other words. A word does not have meaning by itself and thus “it is at the level of
structures, and not at the level of the elements, that the elementary signifying units must be
sought.” (Greimas 1983, p. 20) So, for a word like 'girl' to have meaning, it has to be
perceived with another word. The relationship between the two words perceived together is
not arbitrary but particular:
1. In order for the two object-terms to be perceived together, they must have
something in common. (This is the problem of resemblance, and by extension, that
of identity.)
2. In order for the two object-terms to be distinguished, they must be somehow
different (the problem of difference and non-identity). (ibid.)
In our example, the other object-term would be 'boy'. To see what the two words 'girl' and
'boy' have in common and what distinguishes them, we have to move move down to the
level of semes.
What the two lexemes have in common is the semantic axis, which is the “common
denominator of the two terms from whose ground the articulation of signification emerges.”
(ibid. 21) Or, to put it another way, a seme the two words share, like 'sex'.

34
The difference between the terms can be found on the same level. A seme 'boy' does not
share with 'girl' and that enables us to account for their distinction is 'femininity'.
“Therefore, the relationships between the two object-terms:
girl r(sex) boy
can be translated by
girl(femininity) r boy(masculinity) (ibid. 23)
while 'r' stands for the relationship.
In an example as simple as this, we can already see problems arising. For instance, 'woman'
does not have the same meaning as 'girl', but it seems to share its semes 'sex' and
'femininity'. So clearly our initial presentation of Greimas's ideas is pretty truncated. Also,
there are words with more than one meaning (his example is 'head' and he gives an
abundance of meanings of this word in different sentences and syntagms). Another thing
not taken into consideration here is the situational contexts, in which the lexeme is realized.
Greimas goes through lengths to solve these problems, and does so, amongst other things,
by trying to find a common semic nucleus of all possible usages of a lexeme. 'Head', for
him, has the common semic nucleus 'extremity' and 'superiority', while they don't always
have to appear together. We do not have to explicate on all of this, as long as we remember,
that “structure is the mode of existence of signification” and that this singnification is
“characterised by the presence of the articulated relationship between two semes.”
(Greimas 1983, p. 29)
From these small units he continues to move move up to bigger ones. In the sentences or
proverbs the lexemes occur in, analyzing the context they appear in can specify the
meaning of each lexeme. The French tête [head] can be used in la tête d'un abre [the top of
a tree] or in tête de cortège [head of a procession]. Tête in these two cases means something
different because they appear in different context occurences and have different semic
content (the semes of the lexemes in their context). La tête d'un abre has, among others, the
semes extremity + superiority + verticality, while tête de cortège has extremity +
anteriority + horizontality + discontinuity. (ibid. 50) The context accounts for the
difference in meaning of the two terms. The meaning effect emerges out of two elements:
The classeme (Cs) and the semic nucleus (Ns). A classme is “a contextual seme, that is, a
general abstract category by means of which a nuclear seme takes on a specific meaning in

35
a given context.” (Makaryk 1993, p. 522) Classemes manifest themselves in units bigger
than a word, like syntagms (combined terms), sentences or texts. Together with the nuclear
seme a classeme makes up a sememe (sememe Sm = Ns + Cs). In our case, the sememe is
'tête' with the semic nucleus 'extremity' or 'superiority' in its specific context.
With this very rigorous method of dissecting a lexeme by looking at all its possible
meanings in contexts and breaking it down into an invariable semic nucleus and all its
variable contextual semes, we can now somewhat analyze the meaning of a word in the
context of a sentence or a term like 'the head of the company' and explain the variations of
the meaning of one object-term in different contexts.
These operations can now be performed on every word in a sentence and by equally
mathematical and logical procedures it can be accounted for the meaning of a sentence. He
does not stop there, however.
His aim is to retrace the production of meaning of whole texts, scientific or fictional. We
will see how he proposes to do this in a moment, when the semiotic square is presented.
But one last term (isotopy) should be introduced, because it shields Greimas from some
criticism. Jonathan Culler remarks, that one of the problematic moves of Greimas's is “to
account for meaning in literature on the hypothesis that minimal semantic features combine
in rule-governed ways to produce large-scale semantic effects.” (Culler 2002, p. 89) and
“Greimas's attempt to work from minimal units to larger units encounters difficulties
because he must try to built in at lower levels all meanings that might be encountered at
higher levels.” (ibid. 92) This is something Greimas sees himself and he is aware, that
meaning in literature is more than the sum of its smallest units and their meaning.
The classemes we have encountered can only be analyzed as such, because they are
repeated or, to use a word more familiar to Saussurean structuralism, conventionalized. The
sememe 'bark' in the sentence 'the commisioner barked' is different from the sememe 'bark'
in 'the dog barked' because, while sharing the same semic nucleus, they differ in their
classemes, which have come into being by repetition and convention. With this step we
make a move from words to words in context. By a similar operation we can take the next
leap.
If we agree that most texts are about something, we can ask how this theme can be
determined from the smaller units that make up a text. What holds the text together, for

36
Greimas, is its isotopy. “Just as the repetition of semes leads to the formation of classemes,
so the repetition of classemes in a text enables the reader to identify a level of coherence”
(Culler 2002, p. 92) and this isotopy unifies it. A text only makes sense, if certain linguistic
categories or bundles thereof reoccur. In turn, a text is nonsense if no such reoccurence is
present and the sentences are not bound together by isotopy, but string themselves together
as a collection of independent sentences. That means, without the concept of isotopy,
Greimas could not – or only partially and not very convincingly – move from the smaller
units of signification to bigger ones. Without isotopy, indeed, a text would be nothing more
than the sum of its parts.

37
 Appendix 2: The Semiotic Square
The best known of Greimas's “graphics of formalization” (Jameson 1987, p. vi) is
probably his semiotic square. What makes it his “supreme achievement” (ibid. vi) is his
“formulating the smallest possible system generating meaning” where “four constitutive
elements are generated by the three fundamental operations of contrariety, contradiction,
and implication.” (Angermüller [Forthcoming], p. 123) What it does is it visualizes the
relationships of signs that are necessary to produce meaning. The square is reproduced
below:

We can see the four positions s1, s2, ~s1 and s~2 and their relations of contrariety,
contradiction and implication. This lets us observe one crucial characteristic of Greimas's
theory: Instead of a simple binary opposition between elements, we find six relations
between four elements. It is thus “a decisive enlargement of the older structural notion”
(Jameson 1987, p. vi) of the simple s1 versus s2.
In the semiotic square the classical relation of contrariety is still present between s1 and s2.
But in the next step the position of ~s1 is filled, which implies s2 but stands in
contradiction to s1. The fourth term ~s2 stands in contradiction to s2 and implies s1. The
square also has the levels S and ~S, while S is the complex term and ~S is the neutral one,
which means that S is both s1 and s2, and thereby transcends the two, and ~S is neither s1
or s2.

38
So, if we start with a binary opposition like black and white, we first have to decide, which
of these is our positive term s1. It makes a fundamental difference whether the founding
binary is arranged as white vs black or as black vs white (cf. Maeße; Jameson 1987, p. xiv),
because (most
lay on the of and
square the time) it determines
it always the outcome
seems to imply of of
some sort thea inquiry weoflay
hierarchy theon the square
positive term
and it always
s1 over seemsterm
the negative to imply
s2. some sort of a hierarchy of the positive term s1 over the
negative term
If we take s2. vs white, we can now think about, what the third position ~s1 would be. It
black
If
haswetotake black vss1white,
contradict we caninnow
and stand think about,
a relation what the thirdorposition
of presupposition ~s1 would
implication to s2.be. It
This
has to be
could contradict s1 andIt stand
colouredness. in white
implies a relation
(if weofaccept,
presupposition or implication
like Schleifer to s2.
suggests, that This
white is
could be colouredness.
all colours, because of It
theimplies white
absolute (if weof
presence accept,
light) like
but Schleifer
it is moresuggests,
than thatthat whitered
- green, is
all
andcolours,
blue forbecause of .the
example absolute
And presenceblack,
it contradicts of light) but it black
because is more
is than
not athat - green,
color red
(ultimate
and blue offorlight).
absence example
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And this
it contradicts black,is because
operation does, black
specify the is not we
structure a color (ultimate
are examining
absence of light).
(Maeße 6). We areOne thing this
analyzing operation
black vs whitedoes, is specify
in regard the structure
to color. we are
Color is then examining
what we have
called thep. semantic
(Maeße, axis
6). We are before, itblack
analyzing is both s1 andins2.
vs white Had to
regard wecolor.
chosen 'human'
Color as what
is then the third
we
term,called
have we might
the have foundaxis
semantic ourselves
before,init aisracist
bothdiscourse,
s1 and s2.orHad
structure.
we chosen 'human' as the
The next
third term, step is to have
we might determine
found ~s2. This in
ourselves position
a racistisdiscourse,
the negation of the negation of our
or structure.
positive
The nextterm
step black
is to and is neither
determine ~s2.s1This
(black) nor s2is(white).
position For Jameson,
the negation this is theofmost
of the negation our
difficult term
positive element to and
black determine in the
is neither s1 utilization
(black) norofs2the squareFor
(white). for Jameson,
analyzingthis
narratives. It is
is the most
sometimes
difficult left blank
element and has the
to determine potential
in the of exploding
utilization the square,
of the square giving all
for analyzing present terms
narratives. It is
1
a new meaning
sometimes . In our
left blank and example ~s2 can of
has the potential beexploding
coulorlessness. It is neither
the square, black
giving all nor white,
present terms
awhile meaning1. implying
new somehow black (which
In our example ~s2 canisbenocoulorlessness.
colors) and contradicts white
It is neither (which
black is all
nor white,
colors).
while somehow implying black (which is no colors) and contradicts white (which is all
Our square
colors). Ourwould
squarenow look
would something
now like this:like this:
look something
black white

colorlessness coloredness
We can
We can stop
stop here,
here, to
to ask
ask again
again what
what exactly
exactly the
the semiotic
semiotic square
square isis and
and what
what itit can
can do.
do.
We saw
We saw that
that the
the generation
generation of
of meaning
meaning here
here is
is not
not reducible
reducible to
to aa binary
binary opposition
opposition between
between
two terms
two terms where
where we
we start
start with
with aa term
term ““white”,
““white”, which
which proves
proves to
to be
be internally
internally defined
defined byby aa
hidden opposition
hidden opposition we
we articulate
articulate byby promoting
promoting the
the concealed
concealed pole
pole “black”
“black” toto visbilty.”
visbilty.”
(Jameson 1987, p. xvf.) Rather, for meaning to be generated, more relations between
1 An illustration of this explosion can be found in Ronald Schleifer's book “A.J. Greimas and the Nature of
Meaning”. There he starts from the opposition of agriculture (s1) vs war (s2), while one is life-sustaining
and the other one life-destroying He then sees the third term ~s1 determined as hunt and in the last step
chooses exchange as the fourth term (~s2). He writes: “If hunting combines warfare and agriculture (both 39
s1 and s2), it does so precisely by joining the opposed minimal units in s1 and non-s1, the life-sustaining
aspect of agriculture and the life-destroying aspect of warfare. […] In this square what makes exchange
such a 'decisive leap' […] is that its inscription in the square can only occur when we have reconceived the
semic element, s1: in this new context what is life-sustaining about agriculture is its 'harvest': what is
elements are necessary. Nancy Armstrong narrates the generating of the semiotic square as
follows: “Once any unit of meaning [s1] is conceived, we automatically conceive of the
absence of that meaning [~s1], as well as an opposing system of meaning [s2] that
correspondingly implies its own absence.” (Armstrong 1981, p. 54)
The semiotic square is a visualization of that cognitive process. And it is not just any
cognitive process that is formalized here. It is the elementary structure of all signification. It
is not surprising, then, that Jameson notes that the semiotic square is what Greimas “takes
to be the logical structure of reality itself.” (Jameson 1987, p. x) With its help, not only the
meaning-structures of semes and sentences can be described, but also can narrative
structures be visualized. However, far from being an instrument to account for the real and
definite meaning of a seme or any other linguistic unit, the elements in the semiotic square
are not determined at the outset and there might be numerous ways to fill the positions after
choosing the positive term s1. It can by no means “be guaranteed to replace intelligence or
intuition.” Rather, we can “very properly use this visual device to map out and to articulate
a set of relationships that it is much more confusing, and much less economical, to convey
in expository prose.” (Jameson 1987: xv)
One thing we can do with the square is visualizing the deep structure of a narrative. This
deep structure is what lies underneath or structures the narrative as opposed to the surface
structure which is the story told with all its characters and events. Here Greimas becomes
directly applicable to literary studies, because he gives us a tool to analyze literary texts and
their structures in their entirety. There are many ways to do this, we will, however use
Jameson's interpretation and application of the square to show it in use.
Jameson uses the square to bring to light the deep structure of the novel La Vieille Fille by
Balzac (Jameson 1981, p. 165). In the novel the rich middle-aged maid Mlle Rose Marie
Victoire Cormon, is being courted by several suitors. There is the liberal bourgeois De
Bousquier and the noble but poor Chavalier. Cormon chooses de Bousquier, who is “abrupt
energetic, with loud manners and brusque and rude of speech, dark in complexion, terrible
in appearance” over Chavalier, who is “mild and polished, elegant, carefully dressed,
reaching his ends by the slow but infallible methods of diplomacy” (ibid. 162). De
Bousquier might be more sucessful than Chavalier, but he fails miserably in the bedroom.
That is, in the nutshell, the story, or surface structure of Balzac's novel. The deep structure

40
 Realism and Desire I 167
confront the latter's palpable military failures and administrative inefficiencies,
although that period itself, a kind of hybridization of Jacobin values and monar
Faced with a contradiction of this kind—which it cannot think except in terms
is not about courting and impotence,
called but about
the political the conflictnonetheless
unconscious, or development from
seeks byFeudalism
logical permutations and
begin
to Early Capitalism. The to do owing
characters to the
become semicofdissociations
functions alreadyorimplicit
the deep structure, actants, in
as the initial oppos
Greimas would say. The"impotence" or "sterility"
deep structure, which is (part of a larger
the conflict ideologeme
between the Ancienthat denotes the world o
Regime
the valorized seme of the "ancien regime" from its general debility which may p
and the Bourgeoisie isthe
visualized bythis
like). At Jameson
point,(1981,
we canp. 167)
mapinthese
formterms,
of the semiotic
and the square:
possibilities of new com

We do not have to goItinto

now becomes
detail clearexactly
about how that ofthe
theactors
four (de
chief logicaland
Busquier combinations
Chavalier) available here,
semic system generates those anthropomorphic combinations that are narrative
represent or stand forrepresentation
the Ancien Regime or the
of the Bourgeoisiewhile
"Chevalier," and how the surface structure
the combination -S and S gives anthrop
168 I symbolic
of the narrative is a “socially The Political Unconscious
act” (Jameson 1981, p. 17), a symbolic solution of a
real problem, to see combinations designated
what the semiotic square by Greimas
enabled as thetocomplex
Jameson and thethe
do. It allowed neutral term respe
a single unity, and that union of purely negative or privative terms which would
visualization of the deep structure, which is not apparent on the surface structure.
methodological hypothesis would be validated, and our demonstration of a cha
To get to this point, “one lists a variety
equivalent in theofBalzacian
entities totext.
be coordinated” (those may be events,
objects, semes, characters) But we andhave
picksalready
a startingmentioned
point (s1). aThen,likely thecandidate for the
semiotic square canneutral
”be or neuter term
the sorry young would-be poet Athanase, and beyond him by Romanticism itse
called on simply to map thoughts and interpretations arrived at in other (seemingly less
As for the complex term or ideal synthesis, we have omitted to mention until no
technical) fashions” (Jameson
climactic1987, p. xv).This
decision. For the positions
is the arrival,of attheMademoiselle
square to be assigned
Cormon's to house, of an e
elements many configurationsthe region, have is to
forbea tried
fondout,moment
altered,imagined
and abandoned,by Mademoiselle
until the square Cormon to be the "
Unfortunately, the Count is already married; this "solution," which would satisf
is finished. It might not ever be finished, as the fourth position is sometimes left blank. We
Napoleonic type, is thus explicitly marked by the narrative as a merely "ideal"
have already hinted at Thethe"Count
possibility for the fourth
de Troisville" thus term to 'explode'
figures as whatthe wesquare.
will call This is
a horizon-figure in t
where it exceeds the mere one: mapping
a historyofwhich some
thought. genuine
It can, at thisRestoration
moment, surprise would andstill be possible, provided
redirect
the literary scholar. One tries out different combinations and because the terms are allwish-fulfilling or
combines aristocratic values with Napoleonic energy (at some
14. On Balzac's antiromanticism, see Pierre Barberis, Balzac et le trial du siecle
interrelated through the different
Realism andoperations
Desire Ibetween 169 them (contrariety, contradiction, and
15
implication) the fourthobviously has himself
term can change in mind).
everything . This is then the ultimate sense in which the nov
at once! the very caricature of a dialectical resolution—is not truly a definitive
In this light, Les Paysans—which is something like a transposition of these mat
15 An illustration of this explosion can be found in Ronald Schleifer's book “A.J. Greimas and the Nature of
by Lukacs
Meaning”. There he starts shown to
from the opposition be a premature
of agriculture (s1) vs warfinalization.15
(s2), while one isFor the doomed hero of Les
life-sustaining
and the other one life-destroying He then sees the third term ~s1 determined as hunt and in the last step
chooses exchange as the Napoleonic one,Heand
fourth term (~s2). the“If
writes: doubtful legitimacy
hunting combines ofand
warfare hisagriculture
"feudal"(both authority over the
Ronquerolles
s1 and s2), it does so precisely by joiningand Soulanges,
the opposed minimalstill in inthe
units s1 possession
and non-s1, theof authentic noblemen. The
life-sustaining
aspect of agriculture and the life-destroying aspect of warfare. […] In this square what makes exchange
neighboring
such a 'decisive leap' […] horizon-figures,
is that its inscription theonly
in the square can representatives
occur when we have of areconceived
more authentic
the nobility, ha
semic element, s1: in Paysans (like that of La Vieille Fille, a reflection of a certain empirical history)
this new context what is life-sustaining about agriculture is its 'harvest': what is
exchanged is 'already harvested'” (Schleifer 1987, p. 31)
which offers it to us as merely conditional history, and transforms the indicativ
II
The preceding demonstration posited a constitutive relationship 41 between three