Analogic Square and Canonic Form generators

stephen lavelle — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:43:00 +0000

Following a brief elopement with Levi-Strauss earlier this year, I found myself one evening tinkering with a small program to generate semiotic/analogic squares.

Given two pairs of ‘opposites’ (a,b) and (c,d), one can construct a square by juxtaposing different elements from each pair.

For instance, we might get this

body bad	body good
mind bad	mind good

While reading this book, I came across a similar interpretation of Levi-Strauss’s canonical formula (more about which I will write in a future post) the form of which I’m sure you’ll be able to see by looking at a single example for a moment:

technology ends mental	->	technology means mental
nature ends mental	->	nature means physical

This interpretation is given by Racine, and is not explicit in Levi-Strauss’s original work. I don’t find it especially rich either as interpretations go, but it was interesting to look at the results it could produce.

The resulting program may be seen here.

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Analogic Square and Canonic Form generators