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.