The policy relevance of Michel Riffaterre and Algirdas Greimas: the example of global climate change (GCC)

A good deal of my policy analytical work has been informed by semiotics and narratology, or at least the following traces. Someone interested in wicked policy problems (hint-hint: they are said to have no beginning or end) is understandably attracted to small-m metanarratives already in the public’s sociolect that can–no guarantees!–recast these problems into more tractable problems without reducing their complexity. Here the search is for what Riffaterre called the intertext(s), which can account for contradictions without dismissing the complexities of the competing stories.

For example, rising sea levels are frequently credited with increased salinization of the coasts. But that narrative has to be pushed much further to be relevant for global climate change. For another story out there today, the GCC modelers’ story, is that rising sea levels also cause increased storm surges and inland flooding (from the increased inland rainfall). When pushed further, the policy implications change (i.e., seawalls to stop coastal salinization and erosion can only be part of the response, as what is to happen to storm surges and inland flooding in those coastal areas now targeted beyond the ends of the seawall?)

So the policy analyst asks, like Lenin, What is to be done? What are the intertext(s) that could account for the modelers’ story and all the other stories, for good or bad, about global climate change? Riffaterre’s intertext is much like the way Greimas’s node of “both a and not-a hold at the same time” has been formulated for his semiotic square. To my mind, we are also searching for any policy relevant metanarratives around the “neither a nor not-a” node. That is, are there other language games already out there which would describe what is going on without reducing the complexity of all this, but which really isn’t about “global climate change” as currently described and problematized?

That is why, by way of answer, I remain interested in novels. Even the doomer-lit remains a fraction of what is being written about in novels: namely, the messy ways we live. (Russ Ackoff, the organization theorist, argued: Predicting the future is the mess we are in today.) Novels aren’t policy relevant because they offer or prefigure blueprints for the future; they are policy relevant precisely because of the priority they give to the “neither-nor” node of semantic reality.