ABSTRACT
This paper deploys a diagrammatic tool pioneered by structuralist AJ Greimas
and developed by Frederic Jameson to explicate the atheism of Slavoj Žižek.
Reading the Greimas rectangle as capable of creating dynamic concepts (rather
than simply mapping static structures of meaning), I show Žižek’s atheism to be
an intellectual inversion of Blaise Pascal’s famous Wager. In light of contemporary
criticisms of New Atheist thinkers for adopting a kind of secular fundamentalism,
I argue that the Greimas rectangle can point towards novel forms of atheism that
maintain open or incomplete ontologies less prone to supporting fundamentalist
ideologies.
The last decade witnessed an explosion of texts defending and criticising the ‘New Atheism’. Popular atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens found themselves situated in a sharp and somewhat contrived binary between atheism and theism. This binary, in which atheism is associated with the most rigid form of scientific materialism and rationality while theism is reduced to literalist or charismatic fundamentalism, occludes alternative forms of identification which do not necessarily conform to such a simplistic tension. By resituating atheism in the fourfold system of articulation proposed by AJ Greimas, this paper will demonstrate the room for more nuanced forms of identification which have been largely untouched by today’s most popular proponents of atheism. While Greimas’ semiotic rectangle is geared towards the enunciation of a closed system of ideology, I will argue that it also provides a method for imagining the possibility of a form of atheism which attempts to avoid the reductive atheism/theism binary and its attendant reification of a closed ontology. Ultimately, Slavoj Žižek’s notion of ‘unbelief’ will be presented as one possible form of an atheism which emerges through Greimasian analysis and which at least partially avoids the one-dimensional view of reality common to both popular atheism and popular theism.
Greimas’ semiotic rectangle, a modification of the Aristotelian square of logic, is a late-Structuralist method ‘designed to diagram the way in which, from any given starting point S, a whole complex of meaning possibilities, indeed a complete meaning system, may be derived’. (Jameson 1972, 163) By this method, a concept is first articulated in terms of a contrariety which forms a binary opposition. These two contraries, then, are mapped as the horizontal relationship between s and s1. (Figure 1) Thus, for example, male (s) is opposed to female (s1), with the ‘complex or utopian term’ (Jameson 1987, xiv) S serving to semantically transcend both (i.e. androgyne). This opposition, now, is revealed by the semiotic square ‘to encompass far more than two available positions’, as each term is contradicted along transverse axes by ‘simple negatives’ which oppose ‘but include far more than either’. (Jameson 1987, xiv) Hence, to the binary of male and female, the Greimas square adds the negations ‘non-male’ and ‘non-female’. In turn, the complex term S is reflected in the ‘neutral term’ ‘in which all of the privations and negations are assembled’ (Jameson 1987, xiv). In this example, while the figure of the androgyne serves as a utopian term synthesising male and female, the figure of the angel might serve as the neutral term designating the complete lack of both male and female characteristics. The primary utility of the Greimas square is thus that it enables one to conceptualise different combinations of the semantic categories in play. While ‘the transversal axes map the place of tensions distinct from the principal or binary one’, for example, syntheses along the vertical connections point towards the complexity of connotations implicit in an ideological concept like ‘male’ (e.g. non-masculine males, masculine females, feminine females, etc…).
In a sense, then, Greimas’ semiotic rectangle is best understood as a tool for mapping conceptual closure, ‘the closure of ideology itself’, (Jameson 1987, xv) for the complexity of terms uncovered through synchronic diagramming remains intelligible only within its own closed structure. Granted, such semantic closure is a result of the heuristic choices of the scholar, who is able to reduce and enlarge the square’s field of application. Recognising, however, that these choices are arbitrary in a sense, as ‘each of the four primary terms of the square threatens to yawn open into its own fourfold system, down to the infinite divisibility of semiotic nature’, (Jameson 1987, xvi) the semiotic square becomes a powerful tool which can be strategically wielded as such to formulate alternative conceptions of dominant ideologies. As Jameson points out (1987, xv), Greimas’ method is deployable in ways that straddle the tension between structuralist logic and individual creativity, offering a kind of ‘discovery principle’ which ‘cannot be guaranteed to replace intelligence or intuition’. Jameson (1987, xvi) finds this discovery principle at work, primarily, in the fourth term, the negation of a negation: This must be (when the operation is successful) the place of novelty and of paradoxical emergence: it is always the most critical position and the one that remains open or empty for the longest time, for its identification completes the process and in that sense constitutes the most creative act of the construction. This tension inherent to Greimas’ square, between the limits of structuralism in mapping ideological closure and the possibility of deploying structuralist methods to articulate new modes of understanding, must be kept in mind as we approach the topic of atheism. For while atheism seems to fit neatly into the semiotic square in a closed and rigid way in certain formulations, as will shortly be shown, the square’s full potential is perhaps only realised when those easy closures are resisted. Consider for example, the characterisation of atheism as divided between gnostic and agnostic forms (Figure 2).
The last decade witnessed an explosion of texts defending and criticising the ‘New Atheism’. Popular atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens found themselves situated in a sharp and somewhat contrived binary between atheism and theism. This binary, in which atheism is associated with the most rigid form of scientific materialism and rationality while theism is reduced to literalist or charismatic fundamentalism, occludes alternative forms of identification which do not necessarily conform to such a simplistic tension. By resituating atheism in the fourfold system of articulation proposed by AJ Greimas, this paper will demonstrate the room for more nuanced forms of identification which have been largely untouched by today’s most popular proponents of atheism. While Greimas’ semiotic rectangle is geared towards the enunciation of a closed system of ideology, I will argue that it also provides a method for imagining the possibility of a form of atheism which attempts to avoid the reductive atheism/theism binary and its attendant reification of a closed ontology. Ultimately, Slavoj Žižek’s notion of ‘unbelief’ will be presented as one possible form of an atheism which emerges through Greimasian analysis and which at least partially avoids the one-dimensional view of reality common to both popular atheism and popular theism.
Greimas’ semiotic rectangle, a modification of the Aristotelian square of logic, is a late-Structuralist method ‘designed to diagram the way in which, from any given starting point S, a whole complex of meaning possibilities, indeed a complete meaning system, may be derived’. (Jameson 1972, 163) By this method, a concept is first articulated in terms of a contrariety which forms a binary opposition. These two contraries, then, are mapped as the horizontal relationship between s and s1. (Figure 1) Thus, for example, male (s) is opposed to female (s1), with the ‘complex or utopian term’ (Jameson 1987, xiv) S serving to semantically transcend both (i.e. androgyne). This opposition, now, is revealed by the semiotic square ‘to encompass far more than two available positions’, as each term is contradicted along transverse axes by ‘simple negatives’ which oppose ‘but include far more than either’. (Jameson 1987, xiv) Hence, to the binary of male and female, the Greimas square adds the negations ‘non-male’ and ‘non-female’. In turn, the complex term S is reflected in the ‘neutral term’ ‘in which all of the privations and negations are assembled’ (Jameson 1987, xiv). In this example, while the figure of the androgyne serves as a utopian term synthesising male and female, the figure of the angel might serve as the neutral term designating the complete lack of both male and female characteristics. The primary utility of the Greimas square is thus that it enables one to conceptualise different combinations of the semantic categories in play. While ‘the transversal axes map the place of tensions distinct from the principal or binary one’, for example, syntheses along the vertical connections point towards the complexity of connotations implicit in an ideological concept like ‘male’ (e.g. non-masculine males, masculine females, feminine females, etc…).
In a sense, then, Greimas’ semiotic rectangle is best understood as a tool for mapping conceptual closure, ‘the closure of ideology itself’, (Jameson 1987, xv) for the complexity of terms uncovered through synchronic diagramming remains intelligible only within its own closed structure. Granted, such semantic closure is a result of the heuristic choices of the scholar, who is able to reduce and enlarge the square’s field of application. Recognising, however, that these choices are arbitrary in a sense, as ‘each of the four primary terms of the square threatens to yawn open into its own fourfold system, down to the infinite divisibility of semiotic nature’, (Jameson 1987, xvi) the semiotic square becomes a powerful tool which can be strategically wielded as such to formulate alternative conceptions of dominant ideologies. As Jameson points out (1987, xv), Greimas’ method is deployable in ways that straddle the tension between structuralist logic and individual creativity, offering a kind of ‘discovery principle’ which ‘cannot be guaranteed to replace intelligence or intuition’. Jameson (1987, xvi) finds this discovery principle at work, primarily, in the fourth term, the negation of a negation: This must be (when the operation is successful) the place of novelty and of paradoxical emergence: it is always the most critical position and the one that remains open or empty for the longest time, for its identification completes the process and in that sense constitutes the most creative act of the construction. This tension inherent to Greimas’ square, between the limits of structuralism in mapping ideological closure and the possibility of deploying structuralist methods to articulate new modes of understanding, must be kept in mind as we approach the topic of atheism. For while atheism seems to fit neatly into the semiotic square in a closed and rigid way in certain formulations, as will shortly be shown, the square’s full potential is perhaps only realised when those easy closures are resisted. Consider for example, the characterisation of atheism as divided between gnostic and agnostic forms (Figure 2).
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