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“Abstract semiotic models like the very articulate and powerful one developed by Greimas and his school should, therefore, be conceived not as point of arrival but as point of departure of the comparative analysis [of cultures of meaning], offering a solid framework in relation to which contrasts could be observed and differences pinpointed.” (Leone, 2020: 193)

Joanna Kwiat (2008: 43) suggests that the actantial model of narrative structure proposed by Greimas (1983) drew on at least four theories: Levi-Strauss’ theory of opposition, which states that a given concept A is impossible to comprehend without the equal and opposite concept Not A, and how A necessarily entails Not A, and thereby every possibility between; the syntactical functioning of discourse; the inventory of actants proposed by Vladimir Propp, which he called “dramatis personae”; and the inventory of actants proposed by Etienne Souriau, which he referred to as “dramaturgic functions”.

As Kwiat explains, in Greimas’ actantial model, there are six actants that form three pairs or oppositions: subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver and helper vs. opponent. These oppositions generate three types of relations: desire, which is felt by the subject for the object; knowledge, constituted by communication between sender and receiver; and power, realised through the agonistic struggle between helper and opponent (in relation to subject vs. object and sender vs. receiver).

These actants may combine. For example, there can be a duality of roles, in which one desires something in and receives something from the other who sends. Helper and Opponent may similarly combine with Subject, being at once the (conscious) will yet also the the (unconscious) resistance to act in fulfilling desire.

Conversely, a single actant may be instantiated with more than one actor, e.g. a multiplicity of helpers.

Propp had studied Russian folktales and described their constituent functions. After studying the relationships of these functions and the characters to which they were attributed, he defined certain spheres of action and seven characters to which these spheres corresponded. For Propp, the inventory of the functions could be reduced to 31 functions that had to be in a sequential order. Greimas saw that, with a structuralist approach, these functions and characters could be still much more reduced and freed from the sequential constraint. He accomplished this in his first book, Structural Semantics (Peisa, 2008).

Greimas first turned to the seven characters, which he reformulated as the three opposing actant-pairs: subject versus object; sender versus receiver; and, more hesitantly, helper versus opponent. The defining relation between subject and object was desire that could be manifested as the subject’s quest for the object. The sender’s and the receiver’s relation was that of communication. The helper and opponent again appeared to Greimas more as circumstants (circumstantial features of the action) that, as partial formulations of the subject, affect his abilities (Peisa, 2008)

A strategic consideration was that these actants were not necessarily tied to a single representative character in the narrative. Based on Propp’s material Greimas then constructed a model, depicted in the diagram below, where the object of the subject’s desire is also the object of communication, in a sender-receiver vocabulary, or the object of knowledge, in a knower-learner vocabulary. This is the form in which the actantial model has usually come to be known although, as Peisa (2008) notes, Greimas himself has rarely referred to it in this particular graphic form.

The actantial model first appeared in its canonical form in 1966 in A. J. Greimas’s Semantique structurale (Structural Semantics). It was later refined by Greimas in his 1973 essay on “Actants, Actors, and Figures”. The model was widely influential, adopted and adapted in much subsequent narratological work.

References

Greimas, A. J. (1983). Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Herman, D. (2000). Existentialist Roots of Narrative Actants. Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 24 (2), 257–270. Available from https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol24/iss2/5/ [Accessed 17 November 2018].

Kwiat, J. (2008). From Aristotle to Gabriel: a summary of the narratology literature for story technologies. Technical Report, KMI-08-01. Milton Keynes: Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, Available from http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-08-01.pdf [Accessed 8 October 2015].

Leone, M. (2020) On insignificance: The Loss of meaning in the post-material age. London, UK: Routledge.

Peisa, J. (2008). The Unable individual. The actantial analyses of three Chinese films and discussion on their representations of the individual’s position in contemporary Chinese society [Master’s thesis]. University of Helsinki. Available from https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/19218 [Accessed 12 September 2015].

Further Reading

If you are interested in pursuing further research into A. J. Greimas and his work in semantics, semiotics and narratology, it is worth having a look at Sign Systems Studies, Vol 45, No 1/2 (2017): Special issue: A. J. Greimas – a life in semiotics. It can be found at http://www.sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/

For a discussion of the limitations of Greimasian semiotics, See Leone, M. (2020) On insignificance: The Loss of meaning in the post-material age. London, UK: Routledge.

RELATED TERMS: Deictic Cascade; Diegetic Levels; Heterarchy; Metalepsis; Modes of Existence; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop; Transgression

Designs enact deictic cascades that frame their actions, or their actantiality, their potential for action, in the theoretical language adopted here. In practice, such hierarchical cascades of deixis form strange loops and heterarchies, giving shape to the shared, common world as a social fiction or a social imaginary.

As ongoing constructions, social fictions and social imaginaries are not understood here as deficient or lacking in some sense. They are understood in a deconstructive sense as being both inventive and affirmative. In this context, designs are not simply objects (tautological things – ‘this is this’), statements (assertions or constatives – ‘this is a thing’), performatives, such as commanding or promising, although they could be taken as each or all of these kinds of example; they are also evocative. They evoke worlds as social imaginaries, both for participants in any given world-imaginary and observers of it.

Design practices, as cultural practices, involve cascades of deixis, similar to those found, for example, in drama. In drama, as Brandt (2016) explains, the first instance is the framing deixis of theatricality, or perhaps, more awkwardly, dramaticity or dramaturgicality: “I am now acting, and not behaving naturally”. The second instance is the narrative deixis: “I am now playing the role of a character in the story X”. The third instance is the aesthetic deixis: “I am shaping this role in a certain way and signing this version as ‘this way’ of playing it here now”.

The difficulty with design practices is that their cascade of deictic acts, as deictic framings, unlike, for example, those in drama, fine art or such performance media as dance, do not take place in a specific location or place, such as a theatre or gallery, to which one has to go in order to experience them. Since they take place in a range of situations, in the flow of ‘everyday life’, they may not be recognised as having a cascade of deictic acts by means of which their social and cultural meanings unfold. This may be because, unlike drama, fine art and dance, there is an expectation that designed phenomena have a staightforward instrumental function that exhausts their ‘meaning’. So, while designed phenomena may be recognised as what they ‘do’, their action is often understood solely as functional, instrumental, operational or ‘immediate’, that is, un-mediated.

The difficulty, in other words, is to open up the first instance of the framing deixis of the design, “I am now acting artificially or technically, not simply naturally, functionally, instrumentally or operationally”. This instance already assumes a theory of actantiality, wherein the design, in whatever form, whether symbol, object, technical artefact, service or environment, assumes a certain ‘agency’ in the networked or systemic situation being enacted. From there, one may begin to understand the further instances of deixis: “I am now playing the role of a character in the unfolding situation X in world Y”; and “I am shaping this role in a certain way and signing this version as ‘this way’ of playing it here and now”.

In understanding the instances of deixis, one may begin to grasp the modes of action in which the design is engaged, in addition to the assumed functional, instrumental or operational role. Furthermore, this opens up the notions of functionality, instrumentality and operationality to scrutiny, drawing out the cultural modes of action and the cultural assumptions on which they rely that are subsumed under those headings.

The discussion of deixis is valuable for design practices if it is tied into the discussion of levels of discursivity, especially in narrative discourse (diegetic levels), in relation to the implied modes of existence (or levels of existence), particularly if the focus is upon the potential transgressions, or metalepses, in the narratological sense, that may be effected through the designed instance: the appearance of a character or an entity from one level of discursivity or narration, and implied existence, in another level of discursivity or narration, and implied existence.

If the notion of levels is used, it should become clear fairly soon that any kind of hierarchy implied by the notion of level (higher or lower) will itself become problematic in design practices, as designs form strange loops or tangled hierarchies in which the top of the hierarchy becomes the bottom and vice versa, through the reflexive consciousness that the design provokes and engenders.

Such transgressions and strangenesses necessarily take place against a deictic centre, for example, a norm or an accepted reality, whose grounding, orientations and horizons and in whose person deixis ‘you’ are ‘now’ situated ‘here’, are overturned, so that ‘you’ are ‘now’ situated ‘there’, on other ‘grounds’. The participant in the design experiences both the deictic grounding and the transgressive overturning, as a passage and a disturbance which provokes learning, in the form of the questions raised for the participant, implied in the designed artefacts, by ‘now’ situating ‘you’ both ‘here’ and ‘there’ (or possibly situating ‘you’, ‘you’ and ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘here’ and ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘there’ and ‘there’, and so on, indefinitely).

This highlights the complexity of the temporality, with (at least) three ‘nows’, and the spatiality, as a proliferation of ‘heres’ and ‘theres’, of the designed artefact achieved through the practices of deictic and indexical grounding and transgressing.

Allan Parsons, edited June 2025

References

Brandt, P. A. (2016) ‘Deixis – a semiotic mystery: Enunciation and reference’, Cognitive Semiotics, 9(1), 1–10. doi: 10.1515/cogsem-2016-0001

Actantial Model – Greimas

Deixis and Deictic Acts