Between Hermeneutics and Semiotics

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law III/8 [1990]

BETWEEN HERMENEUTICS AND SEMIOTICS* In homage to Algirdas J. Greimas

by

PAUL RIC(EUR

My purpose in this essay is to situate in a broader framework the confrontation I first took up in The Conflict of Interpretations between, on the one hand, Greimas's semiotics, which has primarily to do with narrat ivi ty , and, on the other hand, that variety of hermeneutics whose theory I outline in my essay "On Interpretation", and which for my own part I have applied to narrativity in Time and Narrative. 1 This larger framework is that of the debate between explanation and understanding, whose origin was principally German. This discussion is illustrated in exemplary fashion by Wilhelm Dilthey in his theoretical writings on autobiography, in his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, and above all in his well-known essay "The Rise of Hermeneutics. "2 Yet this debate is not just a German one. It was taken up independently by Wittgen- stein and the neo-Wittgensteinians who dist inguished different language games, governed by distinct sets of rules. For example, in the theory of action, the game of causality (something happens due to its causes) is not the same as the game of motivation (someone makes something happen for certain reasons).

Translated by David Pellauer from the French, "Entre herm6neutique et s~miotique", Nouveaux Actes S~miotiques (Vol.II, 1990, forthcoming).

1 Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974); "On Interpretation", trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 175-97; Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-88).

2 Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); "The Rise of Hermeneutics", trans. Fredric Jameson, New Literary History 3 (1972), 229-44.

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The general orientation of my essay will be as follows. On the one hand, I will maintain that the dichotomous way of posing what is at issue here in terms of an exclusive either/or, either explanation or understanding but not b o t h - the form that this argument has taken in both its English and its German f o r m s - - is no longer valid. On the other hand, I will take the distinction between understanding and explanation as fully justified, and maintain that it is so justified even within that semiotic field Dilthey sought to characterize in terms of understanding alone, to the exclusion of explanation. In other words, I want to show the fruitfulness of our considering this issue in terms of a specific dialectic between explanation and understanding, precisely on the basis of work done within the field of narratology. Thus I shall not define hermeneutics as a variant of understanding that excludes explanation, as in the Diltheyian model, but as one of the ways we make use of the relationship between explanation and understanding, one where understanding preserves its primacy and makes use of explanation as part of the mediations it requires, but also one where explanation is a secondary phenomenon. I shall also define structural semiotics as a use of this same relationship between explanation and under- s tanding, but on the condition of a methodological reversal that gives primacy to explanation and that confines understanding to the level of surface effects. What I propose, therefore, is not syncretism but a rule-governed confrontation on a common ground of the epistemological concepts of explanation and understanding.

Therefore I reject the following two extreme positions, whose outlines I am about to sketch. On the one side, just explanation. This position follows from the thesis known as the "unity of science", rep- resented in its time by the Vienna School. According to this thesis, there are not two scientific fields, one for the natural sciences and one for the social sciences. The latter deserve to be called sciences only insofar as they are based on the same explanatory procedures as are the natural sciences. If intuitive procedures such as empathy, through which the observer communicates with the mental states of others, continue to play a role in psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology, this just proves that these sciences have not yet at-

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tained the level of a rigorous scientific discipline, something that may continue to be the case for a long time to come for a quasi-science such as history. Understanding, for this kind of philosophy of science, can in no way provide an alternative epistemology. At worst, it is the residue of a prescientific age surviving in the age of science; at best. it constitutes a more or less subjective corollary of explanation in sciences of a lower epistemological level. As for explanation, it cannot be reduced to the subsumption of facts under empi- rical regularities, to use the positivistic caricature that too many hermeneuticians still want to accept. Instead, if we make use of a

more detailed typology such as that proposed by Jean Ladri~re, in L'articulation du sens, it refers to a multiplicity of procedures, which give a variety of meanings to the notion of subsumption. For example, laws may be the laws of dynamic systems, of structural configurations, of factual regularities, or of the approximation of an extremum. What is more, explanation actually goes beyond the subsuming of facts under principles in the different senses just listed. It also includes reduction procedures, by which we form hypotheses concerning some situation or a more stable, underlying layer, making use of a surface/depth relation. It also includes genetic procedures, by which we explain the present state of a system by reconstructing the intermediary stages between an initial stage and a final one. We may also need to isolate, as a distinct mode of explanation, the principle of an extremum, as it is exemplified in theories implying states of equilibrium, stability or metastability, optimalization procedures, etc.

Given this broadened view of explanation, understanding may be said to lose any distinct epistemological rights. At the limit, we should say that a process has been understood when its explanation has entirely reconstructed all the intermediary degrees between a fundamental principle and what follows from it, and that, further- more, we can repeat for ourselves this whole process or reconstruction, and teach it to others, who can then be said to have understood what has been explained to them. At the limit, understanding not only loses all distinct epistemological status, it really has to do with pedagogy, not with epistemology.

At the opposite extreme to this theory of the unity of science is- suing from the Vienna School, Dilthey's dichotomous theory opposes explanation and understanding from the points of view of both their

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method and their object. The domain of understanding is that of signs and meanings. Signs are understood, facts are explained. In its most basic form, a sign is the expression (Ausdruck), the externalization of another's psychic life, and understanding is the grasping of the cohesion, the Zusammenhang that holds these meaningful configurations together. Understanding or com-prehension as a kind of "grasping together" can be synchronic, as when we make sense of a physionomy or a gesture, or diachronic, as when we grasp the cohesion or the interconnectedness of a whole life, the Zusammen- hang eines Lebens, as we find in b i o g r a p h i e s - and it will be recalled that Dilthey himself was the author of a highly praised life of Schleiermacher. This opposition between a world of signs and one of facts, which governs the epistemological opposition between unders tanding and explanation, finally takes on an ontological significance inasmuch as the realm of facts is the realm of nature, while the realm of signs is that of the intellect or mind. Whence the general opposition between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswiss- enschaflen in Diltheyian hermeneutics.

Just as the adversaries of positivism have comforted themselves with a simplified image of explanation along the lines favoured by the Vienna Circle, the adversaries of Dilthey's hermeneutics were happy to come up with a truncated and easily discredited version of his idea of understanding. The movement of empathy by which a second subject transferred itself into the mind of another in order to decipher the signs by which the mental life of this first subject was externalized was accentuated. Understanding was thus held to re- store these objective expressions to the processes for producing meaning that underlay them as expressions. That this is a goal of understanding is indisputable. But this produces an epistemological problem, and even constitutes a distinct epistemological process, insofar as objectification is a mandatory mediation between the result and the process of externalization. The particular epistemological problem that arises has to do with and stems from the kind of semantic autonomy that characterizes sign systems that get detached from their originating sources, where grasping the internal relations of such systems of signs is the only possible way of getting back to the underlying process of objectification. This is already the case for those works that, in the practical sphere, get detached from their authors and fall into the public realm, where it is the other who

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ratifies their meaning following a process that Hegel had already described in the chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit devoted to the dialectic of work. It is even more the case for inscriptions of every sort, including writing, which base their semantic autonomy on the outward appearance, the durability, and the stability of an ap- propriate medium: cave walls, painter 's canvas, matter to be sculpted, stone tablets, papyrus, paper, the page of a book, etc.

It was the problem of how to deal with this second degree of objectification that, in the final period of Dilthey's work, led him to a distinction between understanding and interpreting, where understanding is the immediate moment and interpretation the mediate one made specific by the phenomenon I have just described in terms of the general term, inscription. Dilthey thereby rediscovered the general rules Schleiermacher had derived from the exegesis of particular texts (biblical texts, classical texts, even juridical texts), and at tempted to place them within a more systematic framework. Hermeneutics was thus defined as a second-order discipline in relation to exegesis, which was applied directly to texts. Among these rules were those that related to philology (or grammar) and those that related to discovering the author's intention, as well as those that related internal structure and external context, the circular relationship between whole and parts, and the more encompassing circle linking an initial guess regarding what the text was about and what it in fact said.

Yet, despite all these methodological refinements, which are still worth noting and recalling, hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation remained for Dilthey something defined as derived from understanding, which excluded explanation, following the same relationship of externality that placed the Geisteswissenschaften outside the Naturwissenschaften. It is over against this particular epistemological schema that I would like to oppose that of a general hermeneutics, defined by the internal dialectic between explaining and understanding. And in this sense, I would define A. J. Greimas's semiotics as one variant of this general hermeneutics, one opposed to that of Hans-Georg Gadamer and my own. According to this latter variant, explanation is held to be a mandatory mediation of understanding, following the maxim: explain more to understand better. For the first variant, which I see masterfully illustrated by Greimas, understanding is taken to be a surface effect of explanation,

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where, despite this, the understanding of surface figurations does not lose its heuristic role, which I shall endeavour to illuminate in the following discussion. Already here, we may say that while a methodological inversion separates these two hermeneutics, I see this inversion as being brought about inside a general hermeneutics for which the difference between explanation and understanding remains unsurpassable.

II

But why, it may be asked, should we at all costs preserve any difference be tween explanation and unders tanding? Before considering in a more technical way how this distinction takes on a frankly dialectical shape in the argument between semiotics and hermeneutics, I would like to illustrate its unsurpassable character on the basis of a few simple examples. These examples will take us across three thresholds, before we come to the place where a hermeneutics based on understanding and one based on explanation stand opposed, yet interwoven with each other.

Our first threshold: action. In crossing this first threshold, understanding finds itself initially defined in terms of such problem- atic notions as ex-pression, em-pathy, or transference into another life, which seem to exclude but which really call for a corresponding model of explanation. To see why, let us consider as an example, action, as distinct from mere events or occurrences. We say that we understand an action when we are capable of giving a certain kind of answer to the quest ion " w h y " , an answer in which the phrase "because" means "reason for" and not some antecedent cause (in the Humean sense of cause understood as a recurrent sequence). This re- sorting to the category "reason for" does not necessarily reduce the intentional field to some model of abstract rationality, be it instru- mental, strategic, or moral. For even desire enters the field of motivation through what has been called its aspect of desirability, that is, the feature identifiable by others that allows us to say in what way something may be desired by someone. This "as what" is also a "reason for". Now in this basic example, understanding is quite distinct from a certain kind of explanation, explanation in terms of physical causality, but it is not distinct from all explanation since

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we can answer the question "what" (X does Y) without answering the question "why". So what we may call explanation in terms of reasons is still an explanation, even when it opposes motivating causes to antecedent physical ones. And making use of such explanation in terms of a "reason for" is the path understanding, seeking to move back from the objective result of action to its origin in the initiative of acting subjects, has to take. Why? Because doing so frees understanding from seeking to coincide with some mental entity we could call an intention. An explanation in terms of reasons is thus a development of that understanding which from the beginning includes the "as what" of the character of desirability.

I also see a second reason for choosing action as our initial paradigm for the necessary dialectic between understanding and explanation. Action is distinguished from an event as some singular occurrence for other reasons than our having to make recourse to explanations in terms of "reason for" in order to understand it. Action is also distinguished from such events in that it makes something happen rather than just occurs; where making something happen means making use of an ability to do something which belongs to the practical repertory of an agent 's abilities. This making something happen can be conceived of as coinciding with the first link in a chain of the states of some actual dynamic system, with the result that the action in question has to be described as a tangle of practical syllogisms and actual segments of the system, following a mixed model such as has been proposed by G.H. von Wright. This mixed model , which combines intentionality and causality, is why von Wright could entitle his work Understanding and Explanation. 3 As this title indicates, he refuses to reduce one model to the other, just as he refuses simply to oppose them to each other or to consider them as affecting two different operational fields. Action as a kind of "interference" in the course of things is that mixed something that requires us to conjoin understanding and explanation.

3 G.H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).

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A second threshold: everyday narration. We can see that it is easy to pass from this first example of understanding nearest to action, in the exchange of questions and answers, to narrative, as soon as chains of events are not clear, or when the contribution of someone to some common action is not easily delimited, or when the competi- tion and struggle that oppose protagonists are hidden. Initially, we have just a few facts, behaviour that seems erratic, mute traces, un- decipherable documents. Our task then is to configure in some plausible fashion the circumstances, intentions, interventions, and stra- tegies of various agents, in their relations with unfavourable or favourable situations, all the while taking account of the assistance of helpers and hindrance of opponents. Narrative is the privileged medium for grasping such a configuration of actions. And narrative is thus, even in the midst of action, the initial test of meaningfulness, or at least of any complex meaning. It is not yet a matter of literary narrative, removed from the sphere of actual action, but of that narrative that is still part of the web of conversation, itself immersed within the course of everyday action. This is why I speak here of everyday narration. Nevertheless, the future aspects of fictional narrative already announce themselves in the gap, however slight it may be, between action and narrative. Hannah Arendt has said concerning this kind of narrative that it reveals the "who" of action. But this is a " w h o " that cannot be separated from a "wha t" or a "why" . Thanks to this nascent gap between action and narrative, understanding is dependent upon the production of an imaginative schema distinct from the actual course of action. To make sense of this reconstruction, we might even speak, in a pre-literary sense of the term, of a mimetic representation which is equivalent to the producing in our imagination of a schema of action, a practical model, more or less adequate to the narrated events, but yet distinct from them. This is not yet literary fiction as Aristotle speaks of it, but it is already a use of the productive imagination, concerning which we must say, as we did above with regard to simple intentional actions, that the schemata produced are stated in language and thus presented for public examination.

This is the point where explanation again gets grafted on to understanding. First, in the sense that a narrative further develops explanation in terms of motives and reasons; next, in the sense that a narrative articulates these reasons in terms of causes and chance, us-


ing mixed models of intervention similar to the ones mentioned earlier. Finally, and most important, understanding calls for the mediation of explanation owing to the merely plausible character of the symbolic system that makes up the schematism of action. An ar- gumentative process gets under way, where truth claims, denials, evidence, supporting testimony, and rebuttals all clash with one another. And this field is open to one or the other of the kinds of explanations mentioned in my opening remarks. To see how these explanations flower, though, we have to cross our third threshold.

Our third threshold: literary narrative. I am taking the term "literary" in its strict sense: discourse consigned to letters~ to writing. Fictional narrat ives and historical narratives make up its two largest forms, with each of t h e s e - particularly the former m

having innumerable subclasses, running from myth to folklore, to ancient epic and tragedy, then to the modern novel and its most recent forms. Literary narrative differs from everyday narrative in that it is no longer caught up in social transactions via conversation, but rather is detached from such social goings-on so as to enter into a distinct universe whose closure is expressed by the primacy of the relation of intertextuality over the relationship of literature to life. However the idea of de tachment expressed by the notion of literariness does not prevent such narrative from remaining in an indirect way a mims~sis praxeos a mimetic operat ion that refers back to human action. This tie depends on the act of narration, which is a mode of social exchange between a narrator and a narratee. Today the solitary reader has replaced the festive reception of tragic or epic narration by a broad audience, but if the tie to social practice could be distended to such an extent without breaking~ it is also true that it can be put between parentheses for reasons of me thod , and that literary criticism has the right to remain within the closure of the text and to consider as not relevant the referential relation that Aristotle named catharsis, which surely has to do with a significant effect exercised upon an audience.

It is given this presupposition of closure that a specifically literary mode of understanding comes to light. Its object is the very configuration of the narrative, a configuration that can be separated from what I call the refigurative power of narrative, of which catharsis is one aspect. For myself, I find in the Aristotelian concept

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of muthos (which we can translate as "fable", if we wish to emphasize its fictional aspect, or as "plot" if we wish to emphasize its structural or organisational aspect) the model of a kind of understanding limited to the internal configuration of a narrative. To speak here of understanding is not to refer to some kind of divination or guessing game by which one consciousness, the receiver of the narrative, would transfer itself into the consciousness of another, the giver of the narrative. In fact, there is no need whatsoever to resort to a vocabulary of consciousness or of empathy in order to make sense of the act that consists in grasping the structuring operation that "brings together" a multiplicity of events in one unique story. Here, once again, the "taking together" or "grasping together" of understanding applies to the "holding together" of the configuring operation of narrative. This kind of understanding is thus addressed to the operative, dynamic character, which produces emplotment.

Following Aristotle, and also taking into account Augustine's theory of time, I have attempted to elaborate three features of this kind of understanding, which allow us to speak of a narrative understanding. First of all, fable and plot are temporal wholes, where the organic relation of the whole to the parts is more important than the simply additive relation stemming from the linear chronology of the narrative. Second, emplotment consists in the interplay between the integrative effect belonging to the aspect of the story as a single story, and the dispersive effect exercised by the peripetia and various reversals of fortune within it. It is this dialectic of discordant concordance that we understand when we understand the plot. Finally, at the edge of intertextuality, each plot inscribes itself within a tradition of narrating, within which conformity and innovation play off each other. To understand a narrative means to grasp the subtleness of this play within it, without which what is new about this story would not be recognizable owing to our inability to identify the background against which it appears. What is more, this third aspect bears witness to the historicity of what I have called our narrative understanding.

This narrative understanding, therefore, is far removed from any alleged conjoining or emotional fusion of one consciousness to another. It has to do with the configurative operations within a text, not with the mind of the author. Whether it be a question of the organic character of how the text is structured, the interplay of discordant


concordance, or the interplay of conformity and innovation with regard to established canons, this narrative intelligence is an intelligence for narrative. It may become the sign of a high culture, when it has been developed through familiarity with a large number of narrative works produced at different times and places. And from it proceed those specific passions that Aristotle has said are purified by the spectacle of what happens in the story. Aside from its therapeutic or mystical aspects, this purification consists essen- tially in an insight into these very passions through our compre- hending of the plot.

In sum, this is my defense of understanding, understood as a kind of narrative comprehension, at the level of literary narrative. It is this very understanding that calls forth explanation, not as its ad- versary, but as its complement and its mediator. And it is possible for us to move beyond this third threshold, short of which understanding still is subordinate to explanation. But once across this threshold, a new status is assigned to explanation, for what takes us across this threshold is the very act of criticism, that is, the act of assuming a second-order distance with regard to all extra-linguistic reality. The first act of such distanciation occurs along with the very literaryness of a deliberately crafted narrative inasmuch as it tries to c u t its ties to the real and to base itself on the intertextuality of a purely l i terary universe. But, even given this first act of distanciation, the mimetic operation, in the sense of a refiguration of life, remains bound within any narration in that it is an instance of a social interchange. Narrative comprehension, in other words, does not fulfil itself except through a passage from the internal configuration at work in a narrative to an external refiguration, which we sometimes call today an aesthetics of reception on the basis of the work of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss.

With criticism, in the strong sense of the term, a second act of distanciation takes place; in effect, the closure of the text, incom- plete at the first level, is completed on this second level. The narrative becomes an object for analysis, in that it is taken as an ordered system of signs. And the composition procedures by which the signs get arranged into sentences, which are principally statements about actions, and by which these action statements get ordered into well-structured series, themselves become the object of a textual semiotics, distinct from the semiotics of individual signs; that is, a

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discursive semiotics, which takes as its object those large-scale textual units that make up narratives. Now the question is not that of reactivating by means of understanding the act that structures the text, but rather to describe the structures that issue from this act in terms of their own objectivity. So explanation stops being one mode of understanding, as was the case for explanations of actions in terms of reasons for action, or even for the explanations included within our understanding of everyday narratives. It comes to stand on its own as something distinct. And it becomes, through borrowing from one or another of the modes of explanation I mentioned in opening, nomo- logical explanation, reductive explanation, causal explanation, structural explanation, and so on.

Narrative semiotics thus can be said to be born from the reversal of the priority of understanding over explanation, without however all the ties to narrative comprehension being thereby broken, as I would like next to discuss.

By drawing upon the explanatory modes listed above, narrative semiotics refutes the distinction between the natural and the human sciences upheld by Dilthey. It is within a single field, that of signs, not in two distinct fields, those of spirit and nature, that the two cognitive modes of understanding and explanation clash. In this way, a certain truth is acknowledged in the Vienna School's theory of the unity of the sciences insofar as explanation is common, in varying degrees and different forms, to every scientific field. Yet, at the same time, one aspect of Dilthey's emphasis on intuition is also preserved in that explanation is not excluded from understanding. Instead, in the area of hermeneutics, opened by actions, works, and texts, the relation between explanation and understanding is simply inverted. Our adage, to explain more to understand better, thus loses that aspect that makes it just a truism, in that it is henceforth explanation that leads the way, with the concomitant risk that understanding will be reduced to the status of a surface effect. It is in terms of this reversal of the priority of understanding over explanation, and not in terms of the elimination of the former by the latter, that I would like now to attempt to characterize my friend A. J. Greimas's structural semiotics of narrative.


III

In discussing his work, I should like to return to my earlier com- ments in an essay entitled "La grammaire narrative de Greimas", 4 which were taken up in a more condensed form in the second volume of m y Time and Narrative. However , unlike in those analyses where I had adopted a more or less defensive stance in favour of a hermeneutics centered upon understanding, and thus a somewhat polemical tone m mode ra t ed , it is true, in the case of Greimas here I would like to make a more productive use of what I then considered to be objections, and in this way to bear witness to the synergy between explanation and understanding that today I see more clearly at work in the construction of Greimas's models, from Structural Semantics in 1966, to Du Sens I (1970), Maupassant (1976), and Du Sens II in 1985. s

Narrative semiotics assuredly does stem from a methodological reversal , the one that gives priority to narratological rationality over narrative comprehension. In m y earlier writing, I looked with regret at this substituting of narratology for what I have called narrative comprehension, particularly insofar as it seemed to conform to the more extreme declarations of Roland Barthes made at the time of his important essay "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" (1966). 6 There we could read that "analysis today tends to 'dechronologize' the narrative continuum and to 'relogicize' it, to make it dependent on what Mallarm~ called with regard to the

4 Actes-Sdmiotiques-Documents, lI, 15 (Paris: CNRS-EHESS, 1980). English translation: "Greimas's Narrative Grammar", in P. Perron and F. Collins, eds.,Paris School Semiotics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1989), Vol. I, 3-31. See also Temps et R~cit (Paris: Seuil, 1984), II, 78.

5 In English, see Algirdas Julien Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Danikle McDowell, Ronald Schleifer and Alan Velie (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983): On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text, trans. Paul J. Perron (Amster- dam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1988).

6 In A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 251-95.

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French language, 'the primitive thunderbolts of logic.'"7 And, on the same page: "Time does not belong to discourse strictly speaking, but to the referent; both narrative and language [langue] know only a semiological time, 'true" time being a 'realist, ' referential illusion, as Propp's commentary shows. It is as such that structural descrip- tion must deal with it. "8

On rereading Greimas's writings I was struck by how much care he takes, even already in Structural Semantics, to acknowledge what there is that is innovative in those transformations that make up the structuring operations of narrative - - a term that I would like at least provisionally to pair with my own term, emplotment. Yes, Greimas does intend that the transformations applied to some semic category, at the level of the model which is the basis of his semiotic square, should be characterised as types of conjunction and disjunc- tion. B u t - - and this is my t h e s i s - a narrative comprehension continues to serve as the tacit guide that makes sense of notions such as contract, breaking a contract, and restoring a contract, even at the very moment when this contract is assimilated to a conjunction between interdiction and violation, with the restoration being another conjunction. In a similar way, in the passage from the ideas of lack and liquidation, which we understand, to the many dis- junctions and conjunctions that mark its progress, it is once again a narrative comprehension that serves as narratological rationality's tacit guide.

And the same may be said about our understanding the temporal development of a narrative, by way of the figures of test, quest, and s t ruggle , with all the axiological nuances added by the ideas of violation and restoration, which guide the logic of transformations that narratological rationality superimposes on narrative comprehension. I see in this a relation similar to that of cognitive psychology, when it makes use of simulations, as regards the understanding or pre-understanding we have of the act of knowing. That, in this methodological reversal, the narrative transformations should be based on synchronic structural properties, and that all diachrony should stem from these very properties, is the result of an epistemological reversal that gives the lead to explanat ion over

7 /b/d., at 270.

8 /b/d., at 270-71.


understanding. Nevertheless, it remains true that the very idea of a transformation is grafted on to the understanding we have of narrative temporality through our acquaintance with narratives and their plots.

With Du Sens and Maupassant, this methodological reversal is brought to its highest degree of radicality. Following the order rec- ommended in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints, "9 it is the deep structures that define the conditions of intelligibility of semiotic objects. The intermediary structures, where the discursive re- sources of the anthropological doing of something are unfolded, only constitute superficial structures in contrast with these deep structures. And the plane of figuration, where our narrative comprehension works, becomes merely the plane of manifestation. This reversal, whereby narrative comprehension is assigned to the space of manifestation of the syntax (or the grammar) of the deep structures, conforms to the spirit of explanation. Even if causal explanation is set aside, along with the positivism of any sociological approach, the proposed explanation of the more superficial in terms of the deeper lying structures may be compared to explanation by reduction, in the sense discussed above. So we may say that what is specific about structural semiotics is that it has combined synchronic structural explanation with reductive explanation of the plane of manifestation to its deep structures, as well as with genetic explanation, reduced to a logic of transformations. In this sense, structural semiotics borrows abundantly from the broad palette of explanation.

But having said this, it seems to me today that the enrichments, which I previously saw as compensating for the radicalization leading to the constitutional model indicated by the semiotic square, 1° are in fact both guided behind the scene by our narrative comprehension and rendered perfectly homogeneous with the trans- formational logic unfolded by the constitutional model. The refor- mulation, in terms of oriented operations, of relations of contradic- tion and contrariety and presupposition, inscribed on the semiotic square, is rightly called by Greimas a "narrativization" of the constitutional model. This narativizafion expresses the synergy of

9 On Meaning, supra n.6, at 48-62.

10 "Les jeux des contraintes sdmiotiques", in Du Sens (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 136. For my earlier remarks, see 127 n.4, supra.

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narrative comprehension and narratological rationality. I find this same synergy between implicit understanding and ex-

plicit explanation on all the levels of the construction of Greimas's model: the grammar of doing, with its modalities (knowing-how, being-able, wanting-to, etc.); the introduction of a polemical relation between two narrative programs; the distinction between object value and modal value (to acquire power, knowledge, wanting to do something); the comparisons among confrontation, domination, and the attribution of an object value; the carrying over of the category of transference to the structure of exchange; the topological syntax of transfers of value; etc. And the same may be said for the methodological decisions that permit him to define the notion of a perfor- mance and to assign it the status of being the formal skeleton of every narrative.

Rereading his Maupassant reinforces my conviction in this regard. The addition of aspectual structures to the logic of transformations shifts the problem of the synergy between understanding and explanation to the field of the phenomenology of time. With mutual benefits as the outcome. On the one hand, it is the setting out in a precise way on the semiotic plane of the signs of durativity, with their extreme forms of inchoativity and terminativity, along with the signs of tensitivity, that allows the enriching of the phenomenology of time in terms of its non-linear and non-chronological dimensions. On the other hand, to the extent that such aspectual features may be integrated into our experience of temporality, particularly as it is marked by the notions of permanence and specific occurrence, these notions take on greater meaning precisely as modes of temporalization. Therefore there is a double and mutual homol- ogy at work here. Yes, it is semiotics that has to be credited with the underlying discovery here inasmuch as such aspectual features were first laid out on the basis of their textual indications, but I would argue that what is designated with the term "temporal position" in the final analysis has a double, semiotic-phenemenological status. To see this we have to turn to the experience of reading, for this is where this reciprocal homologization takes place. The study of texts requires the addition of aspectual structures to the plane of the deep structures, but my claim would be that it is the increase in self-understanding on the part of the reader that finally validates this addition.


If we accept this claim, all the other discoveries of Maupassant can be related to this same reciprocal process of homologization: the euphoric and dysphoric connotations enrich the axiological values already assigned to the deep structures by means of the notion of an object-value and, even more so, of a modal value. And the reinforcing of the actantial status of the sender calls forth as its echo a herme- neutic of handing over, of the mandate, by which the protagonist of an action in the form of a quest is instituted as, is set up as a subject capable of doing something. As for the distinction on the semiotic plane between pragmatic doing (doing in the usual sense) and cognitive doing, with its double valency of persuasive and inter- pretive doing, we may readily concede that the semiotician does not lack textual indices to articulate these differences.

However, I amless inclined to grant to semiotics the initiative and autonomy it still seems to continue to claim for these enrichments. Here, the preunderstanding that we have of these distinctions on the phenomenological plane seems to me to exercise an irre- placeable guiding role~ even if it is the textual articulation of these distinctions that helps this phenomenology of preunderstanding to move from vagueness to distinctness.

As for the semiotic square, the recourse that is made in this regard to the categories of appearance and being seems to me clearly to give precedence to phenomenology, even if, here once again, this phenomenology has everything to gain from seeing distributed on this square, in an elegant and convincing manner, the four sides of "veridiction": truth, falsity, the lie, and the s e c r e t - as articulated in terms of the common basis of the conjunctions between being, appearing, non-being, and non-appearing. I would say that nowhere are the intricate ties more close between semotics and phenomenology, and, in this sense, between explanation and understanding; the initiative falling more or less necessarily on explanation in this semiotic version of hermeneutics.

The methodological reversal that gives structural semiotics its claim to scientific status is in no way called into question by my longtime argument concerning it, namely, that "from the construction of the semiotic s q u a r e - Greimas's analysis is ... teIeologically guided by anticipation of the final stage, namely, the one where

132 PAUL RIC(3~UR

narration is a process that creates values. "~1 It is to this kind of tacit guidance tha t I have referred when I have underscored, first, the oriented character of the transformations described on the plane of deep structures; then the massive contribution of the praxic categories on the discursive plane, particularly through the polemical representation of the logical relations; and, finally, the permanent role of the axiological categories (values, object-values, modal values, euphoric and dysphoric values).

My argument comes down to saying that the methodological reversal that gives the first step to explanation rather than understanding does not abolish their dialectic relation, it merely reverses their order of priority within what we may call a textual hermeneutics. In saying this, I am not claiming to carry out any form of disciplinary imperialism. For a hermeneutics focussed on explanation, as illustrated by Greimas's semiotic square, remains perfectly autonomous with regard to one focussed on understanding, which would include my own work. A totalizing hermeneutics, which would claim to abolish the difference between the explanatory version and the version centered on understanding, would have to be yet another version of the Hegelian claim to absolute knowledge.

As for the opposite claim, that an explanatory science can entirely break free of its dialectical relation to understanding, it can be refuted in my view by simply recalling that science itself is a form of practice, a form of theoretical practice, to be sure, but one that, like all forms of practice, has to be grasped in terms of its internal ends. We can do this only by telling the story of its advances, its ruptures, its revivals. By means of this story m or rather these stories, with their multiple plots u devoted to theoretical practice, we can catch sight of m p r e - u n d e r s t a n d , we might say, fol lowing Jean Ladri~re m the unassignable horizon of meaning against which this theoretical practice arises and stands out, conjointly with every form of human practice, among which we must be sure to include ethics and politics.

11 Time and Narrative, supra n.1, vol. II, 56.