Part I: The Semiotic and the Symbolic.
In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva lays out a theory of articulations between semiotic | syntactic and semantic | extralinguistic operations related to language use. At the same time, she moves to conciliate formal and politically motivated theories, name-dropping a good chunk of the 20th Century. The result seems pretty coherent, given what she attempts, but one must be ready to let the borrowed words and phrases reform considerably to suit their new environment.
She begins by assaulting the sometimes-presumed disconnection between the linguistic or semiotic and the extralinguistic.
"To the extent that it is assumed by a subject who 'means,' (bedeuten), language has 'deep structures' that articulate categories. These categories are semantic (as in the semantic fields introduced by recent developments in generative grammar), logical (modality relations, etc.), and intercommunicational (those which Searle called 'speech acts' seen as bestowers of meaning). But they may also be related to historical linguistic changes, thereby joining diachrony with synchrony. In tis way, through the subject wo 'means,' linguistics is opened to all popssible categories and thus to philosophy, which linguistics hadthought it would be able to escape" (23).
Writing in the 1970's, K's recent probably refers to discussions of Chomsky's explorations of surface structure and resulting intimations of UG. One notes the use of Chomsky's phrase "deep structures." She goes on to corral the various explanations into two camps:
. . . the two trends just mentioned designate two modalities of what is, for us, the same signifying process. We shall call the first "the semiotic" and the second "the symbolic."
The rough pair of groups seems more than pragmatic; language is subjectively and neurologically a connection between at least two nodes. Perhaps less inevitably, she bases descriptions of extralinguistic processes in the vocabulary of Freud and Lacan, getting therefrom a "facilitation" and a "structuring disposition of drives" and "so-called primary processes." Thus:
Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body--always already involved in a semiotic process--by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are 'energy'charges as well as 'psychical' marks, constitute what we all a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movementas it is regulated" (This & the above on 25).
So she does turn the references to new ends. Chora is central here, and she goes on to describe it variously over several pages, as one does with things that defy definition.
Our discourse--all discourse-- moves with and against the chora in te sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitelyposited: as a resulte, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it an axiomatic form" (26)
"The chora is a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic" (26).
"The mother's body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora (27).
"Here we find the principles of metonymy and metaphor indissociable from the drive economy underlying them" (28).
So, while she traces the term chora to Plato's Timaeus, her descriptions draw on a broad range of 20th Century thought. It's worth noting that her "metonymy and metaphor" here is almost surely drawn from Roman Jakobson, whose metonymy is ideosyncratic.
In describing the symbolic, the language becomes heavily Freudian and Lacanian, and the observations more questionable:
"We shall distinguish the semiotic (drives and their articulations) from the real of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions" (43).
So the semiotic becomes, perhaps, expression, a relative of the surrealists' unconscious or Grotowski's organic actions? But this seems inverted; it's unlikely the point of what has been a remarkably perceptive synthesis.
"Thus we veiw the thetic phase--the positing of the imago, castration, and the positing of semiotic motility--as the place of the Other, as the precondition for signification, i.e., the precondition for the positing of language. The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic" (48).
Of course, we're head-deep in Lacan here -- the imago from "The Mirror Phase, the castration which amounts to the discovery that Mama's got a mind of her own and cannot altogether be pleased, that one must be wise rather than whole. She is actually going somewhere here. By this break that separates the world into objects, subjects, and actions appreciable as various, one gets thesis and proposition, with the corresponding repression or suppression of alternate sensuality, alternate POV's and so forth.
Kristeva's partly borrowed construction needn't be rejected outright, but inherits problems from Freud and Lacan, who also conflate types of repression/suppression. Subjectively, at least two phenomena of repression need be explained. One is casual and fairly constant. The neurosystem passes impression along, but the process is lossy. That is, some of the impressions that our sensory equipment registers get left out of the dynamic worldview we call I. We drop part of each eye's processing to create a single seamless visual field; we forget the trailing shadow-hands behind a moving hand. When stimuli subside after such experience, subsystems seem to return to firing mildly in stochaic patterns (think of the impressions of white-noise that accompany silence, or the visual field after some time in near-absolute darkness, and the relation of such things to fuzz-tone on an electric bass or static on a TV station). The impressions dissipate without applying continued pressure on the system towards their processing or coherence. On the other hand, some experience does not integrate not because it is too faint, unexplanatory, or insignificant, but because it is intense and signicant or explanatory of something that HURTS.
The distinctions between these are more than casual. The construction is part of Freud's rejection of his original trauma-based theory of neurosis, and his acceptance of repression in general as normative. In practice, the newborn baby may just as easily recognize that Mother is a different being because she moves in a way that nothing in the womb did; she appears as alternately continuous and discontinuous with the rest of the visual field. It's surely one remarkable observation among many, but there's no reason one couldn't equally build a theory around the rush of oxygen into the lungs, and the infant's appreciation of that.
These points made, the essential basis she needs for her analysis of language still seems intact. One way or another one does break sense into category. Categories do misrepresent and do tend to become fixed as part of perceptive and thoughtful systems that work to defend themselves in ways vaguely conmensurate with social hierarchies. Ergo, ipso facto, and sin qua non, we get the following:
Poetic mimesis maintains and transgressses thetic unicity by making it undergo a kind of anamnesis, by introducing ito the thetic position the stream of semiotic drives and making it signify. This telescoping of the symbolic and the semiotic pluralizes signification or denotation: it pluralizes the theitic doxy. Mimesis and poetic language do not therefore disavow the thetic. Instead they go throu its truth (signification, denotation) to tell the 'truth' about it" (60).
So, art follows out and exposes difficulties in les ideés fixés, including, probably uncoincidentally, notions of self and impressions of the perceptive processes. But for K, this all has implications for the forms of parole themselves:
Whether in the realm of metalanguage (mathematics, for example) or literature, what models the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic. This is particularly evident in poetic language since, for there to be a trasgression of the symbolic there must be and irruption of the drives in the universal signifying order, that of 'natural' language which binds together the social unit. . . . The semiotic's breach of the symbolic in so-called poetic practice can probably be ascribed to the very unstable yet forceful positing of the thetic" (62).
The connections to Jakobson and Schklovski run deep here, but let's try to rephrase. We have categories that seem to reside, at least in part, in semantics or in metaphor and its appropriation and ordering of meta or extra-linguistic phenomena, including chora and self-concepts. Assembling the semantic in syntactic units may force re-evaluation of the semantic units themselves, with reverberations through the entire semantic system. And not that K has said this is "language which binds together the social unit," so the results are also ultimately political:
To penetrate the era [of the French Revolution and Second Empire] poetry had to disturb the logic that dominated the social order and do so through that logic itself, but assuming and unraveling, its positions, its syntheses, and hence the ideologies it controls" (83).
My primary interest in these passages has to do with the ways they relate to notions of closed and open forms in and around the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. My idea is that interacting with what Kristeva calls the thetic requires a certain antithetic closure, that what's primary and desirable is not the open form of the writing per se, but the open reading that may derive thereof. Now, in Kristeva's version, the challenge that opens the thetic requires specifically metonymic (in Jakobson's sense) or syntactic operations--involves syntax, structure, and continuity. Of course, since Kristeva is actually talking about discontinuities, it's hopefully clear that this does not mean a return to a closed form, but an examination of formations of challenge.
Now, let me sketch (hopefully quickly!) one way to use these ideas in a model of change in literary activity based on social and technological change:
- Chora or vouloire-dire precipitates parole. That is, some drive to speak, express, communicate, or think happens irrespective of the form or the medium in which the expression may take place. This comes from something like the objections (in Toulmin's sense) that the speaking subject has with its perception of existent ideas or situations. Therefore, there's some sense of something like antithesis involved. But this state is relatively fixed, tightly related to the basic nature of the speaking subject, distinct primarily by virtue of the varying historical situation and context.
- The parole takes on a form, the form that the subject finds appropriate given the circumstances that it finds. These circumstances will include which language is spoken, in what medium the message will be delivered, the subject's appraisal of the listener, and so forth.
- If chora does not change, and the external media does -- from speech to writing, from scrolls to codices to radio to television and so on -- then the form must change in some corresponding way.
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