Hi Francesco,

Great post. Thank you for the clarification and the heads up on using semiotic analyses as a universal language to clarify issues and for communication of ideas. 

Can you recommend a simple straightforward text in English?

A question (possibly very naive) comes to mind about how does semiotic analysis go with the idea that the use of  nouns and verbs (objects and actions, entities and causes) isn't universal across all languages? Rather, it seems more to be a kind of structure that fits an entity relationship model that happens to be common to many of the languages of the developed world and also fits well with the idea of sequential causality. Some languages are  exceptions both to use of verbs and nouns (and hence agents and actants) (e.g. Riau - which sounds like something my cat speaks) and some do not assume sequential causality (on which the idea of action depends).  

Another question (perhaps even more naïve),  from the realm of maths and computer languages, is the potential to exchange verbs and nouns and maintain representative accuracy. What I mean is the same event can be described by making the verb parts of relationships into objects that have certain adjectivally described properties, and giving the noun objects properties  that are active. Does the role of actant (and agent/agency) flow with the change in linguistic structure to attach differently depending on which at that moment are phrased as verbs or nouns. 
If so, doesn't this imply that the role of agent or actant is not a property of the real world entities , rather it is a property of the linguistic representation in whatever form it is made?

Best wishes,
Terry

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Dr Terence Love
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Francesco Galofaro
Sent: Thursday, 2 October 2014 7:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Cc: Francesco Galofaro
Subject: Re: Agents and agency

It is really an interesting discussion. Don wrote that the term "actant" is different from the term "agent", but Latour is confused on the subject due to his post-modernistic language. Nevertheless, I'd like to explain why the concept of agent can't be confused with the one of actant.

The concept of actant is related to syntax. Lucien Tesnière developed it in the '30. Unfortunately, his seminal book Éléments de syntaxe structurale, has been published only after his death, two years after Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. Basically, Tesnière discovered that every verb is distinguished by a valency: a number, which range is 0-3, which connotes its actants. In every language, the involved actants are always the same:

0 - impersonal verbs (it rains)
1 - subject (I walk). 
2 - object (She hits me)
3 - indirect object (Adam gave me a pen).

As you can see, only the first actant can be considered an "agent" - not to speak of the passive diathesis. 
Now, a verb denotes an action (doing) or a state (being). This way, working on actantial syntax means to work on a theory of the action. This is how Greimas developed Tesnière's actantial syntax, in the opinion of Umberto Eco.

According to Greimas and Courtès (Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary: a really useful book) there are basically six different actants involved in an action: 

sender/receiver;
object/subject;
helper/opponent; 

The object carries one or more semantic values, and actantial syntax describes how this valuable object circulates, becoming conjoint to/disjoint from the involved subjects. Again, it is difficult to identify the "agent" with a precise actant; one should always specify if the considered "agent" is the sender, who transfers the object to the receiver; is the subject, which become conjoint to the value carried by the object; is the helper, which incarnates the ability of the subject to perform an action … Actantial syntax is this: a net of relationships and function, far different from the net of real people involved in the process: one can use the first to describe the second, explaining the function that the different individual or collective actors play in the action. In the light of Semiotic theory, the concept of "agent" is vague and confused and can be analyzed with precision, in each different context.

It is a good question whether these categories are just relevant to describe literature or not. It is funny how you Americans consider this theory as part of post-modernist literary criticism. Here, in Europe, it is just Semiotics. It is a theory of meaning, and there's nothing strange to use it to analyze the interaction between real people and between people and technical artifacts or other "things", if we find that this relation is meaningful. Let's see an example of how all this can be interesting in relation to Design.

I use the world "thing" and "technical artifact" because I want to avoid confusions with the Actant - Object, which is, as I said, a syntactic function. From the point of view of the theory, the Actant - Object can be a "person" (Adam, Sarah). The same way, a "technical artifact" can be the Actant - helper (Let's think to a tool), or the Actant - Sender. How technical artifact play the role of the actant-sender is Michela Deni's research theme ("Oggetti in azione", Franco Angeli, Milano, 2003): she uses semiotics to analyze and describe the way in which each technical artifact transfers us some values in terms of abilities or knowledge; or, it forbids us some possibilities; or, it sanction the result of our work with a feedback. This way it is possible to analyze and describe precisely the unique "factitiveness" of each artifact, how it determines our subjectivity as it is realized in our actions (to do) and states (to be), how it programs our actions, our spaces, our time. The richness of semiotic categories allow to write analyses in a shared technical language, to avoid vagueness and let the researcher work without having to trust only her/his fertile intuitions. 

Obviously, there are many philosophical implications as it concerns our relationship with "things", which I'm not supposed to develop here; nevertheless, in my opinion, all this is not just a futile complication, and my students in Design & Engineering at the Politecnico of Milano usually find useful to think their work in these terms. 

Francesco Galofaro


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