Julia Kristeva

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Margaret Waller, Trans. NYC: Columbia, 1984.
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.

William Stokoe: Sign Language Structure

Those with a semiotic bent may find fresh perspectives in Sign Language and Structure, by WIlliam C. Stokoe.

Stokoe, WIlliam C. Sign Language and Structure: The first linguistic analysis of American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstock, 1978.

Stokoe's analysis of ASL is straightforward and basic. An early entry in a still-sparse field, it presumes no prior knowledge of signs and only a basic grasp of semiotics. For me, it verifited a few things that maybe should have been obvious.

Those of us who study literature study language that endures visually. One may well imagine Paradise Lost as sounds, but we have lost Milton's sounds in a way that we have not lost those of Joni Mitchell or John Coltrane. The recorded objects themselves, to which we refer and against which we true our conceptions of those sounds, make no more noise than the flipping of pages.

As such, we work in a visual medium. Yet ASL and similar sign languages are the only native visual languages, the only languages that anyone learns somewhat in the way that most of us learn our respective mother tongues. Since most of the deaf are deaf from birth or near-birth, they use signs as a native language: informally and formally, for public address and for private conversation, for personal calculation and for internal revery. I looked up Stokoe to see how native visual speakers inflect language, to see what implications that might have for inherently but backhandedly visual forms, like verse.

A few observations --

Visual and aural media use time differently because visual signs tend to endure. This is to a certain extent true even for signing, in which the signs generally skip by as quickly as speech; by extension, it should be at least as true for electronic presentations in which writing appears and disappears in response to links. Stokoe's appraisal in 1978 is interesting:

. . . significance rests not in the configuration, the position, or the movement, but in the unique composition of all three. The sign morpheme, however, unlike the morpheme or word of the spoken language, is seen as simultaneously not sequentially produced. Analysis of the sign morpheme then cannot be segmentation in time but must be aspectual (78).

But Stokoe complicates this observation by pointing out elsewhere that all signs for what we might consider words involve movement. Given that some signs will consist of a single morpheme, these must involve a certain temporality, however they might be considered.

Perhaps we hearing should not be surprised, since we take writing to move when it stays fairly still.

These signs must be temporal in two ways. They must be so first in the sense of taking up time in their own demonstration, given that the movement that defines the signing must not only take some time, but must pass slowly enough to register with a second party, another fluent signer; clearly, both signer and viewer take them as temporal in that way. Then, to whatever extent the signer cannot produce all the signs of a discourse at once, those signs must be interpreted as ordinal or sequential.
Stokoe may mean that each morpheme need be considered as a unit, as a kind of time-moment, but one might complain that this is just what we do with spoken language, the very process that he terms segmentation. Or he may refer to the simultaneous production of signs that arises when he discusses the utility of a signer's second hand:

. . . the signer may have a rhetorical use for the inactive hand. The left hand (of a right-handed signer) may hold a dez handshape [one that designates significance by its configuration] used in a sign for namign a person, while the right hand alone 'says something' perhaps about what another person did to the first (60).

This is something that cannot be done exclusively with a single voice. The parallels in speech-acts and in writing that one may consider make for some interesting consideration.

1. A title hangs on a page and refers to all the within.


2. An illustration, or, conversely, a caption


3. Italics, in Faulkner, for instance


4. A chord


5. A quickly picked guitar riff over a bass line with fewer notes.


6. A lecture with Powerpoint slides


7. According to Kristeva, Celine's use of invective


8. A navigational element in an HTML frameset or CSS layout.


9. A facial expression deliberately held and emphasized to accompany discouse (cf Grotowski on "organic" gestures, BTW!)

Of course there's no ending such a list conveniently. But I at least find it convenient to not think of interpretation of spoken language as breaking down into segments exactly, but into frames that include information external to what's accepted as linguistic or semantically active. For instance, the word fire means something different in a crowded theater than at an execution not because the syntax of the utterance has changed but because the most likely conclusion is different.

Some mechanism of this sort has to be operating fairly constantly to feed in the kinds of factors analyzed by Austin and others as speech acts. But this mechanism itself allows us to use aspects of discourse that we usually dismiss as nonlinguistic to create syntactic landscapes. It generally makes no syntactic difference to War and Peace that it be printed in 12-point or 10-point font, for example. But I take the larger print at the start of a chapter or on a page before the beginning of the novel to be a title. Further, I take it to name the work, and in doing so to modify without intermediary all the small print that accompanies it.

Again, one could go on about intonation and pitch and loudness and so forth, but short of explaining how these function, the point is probably too obvious: nonsemantic aspects of discourse mark phrase boundaries and other aspects of semantic elements and syntactic relations. These things may seem extraneous to literature or perhaps obtusely technical, but it seems something of this nature is needed to comprehend things like the continua of punctuation in Dickinson; Pound's "composition by the page"; the concrete poets or the "artists' books" from the 1980's; the dynamic relationship between layout, phrasing, paragraphing, and metanarrative in contemporary Website design; or, really, free verse.

Longinus

Longinus shrinks and shrink-wraps Aristotle. Where Aristotle attempts to describe living literature, pressing upon it form and category and not unmindful of the violation, Longinus prescribes. Those wishing a good critical review of Aristotle's strictures (something that bears quite directly upon any practical use of Longinus' theories) might check out J. Hillis Miller's Reading Narrative, which methodically pries apart Aristotle's readings of Homer and, particularly Sophocles. Miller doesn't answer all the questions he raises, but then, doing so may take some time.

Meanwhile, what we have at least thought we were doing writing fiction and drama has as much to do with Aristotle and Longinus as just about anybody.

Longinus grants five principles of sublime art, most of which are moderately self-explanatory as far as he investigates them:

1. Conception of "high" idea. He does conflate "high" both with selfless and with social status, though he seems most concerned with the requirement to see outside of one's POV. The gesture feels like Kant's more extensively articulated descriptions in A Critique of Judgment.
2. Passion.
3. Figure -- He divides these into figures of thought and figures of expression, apparently but not explicitly regarding these as separable even while granting thought a figure.
4. Diction
5. Elevation.
* ability to perceive beyond individual perspective
* even under duress
* amplification -- by which he seems to mean something like what writing primers call parallel structure. He gives Demosthenes' reliance on parallel structure as occurring most when listeners are to be "most enthralled" (83). I suspect if one thinks of MLK, that's a good comparison. He goes on about Cicero:

"The profusion of Cicero is in place where the hearer must be flooded with words, for it is appropriate to the treatment of commonplaces, and to perorations for the most part and digressions, and to all descriptive and declamatory passages, and to writings on history and natural science, and to many oher departments of literature" (83)

As the flood of words fits the common, so the channeled words with repetition, with alignment of sensual details, fits the exalted, the noble, the sublime -- a rather nifty observation, however one may want to play with dichotomies of high and low. And I think the analysis gains from his treating fictional and nonfictional, poetic and rhetorical discourse within the same rubric.

He holds amplification attainable in part by the implementation of various techniques:

EMULATION of previous poets. Attitudes about copying have changed vastly with the refinement of systems of production and distribution of texts. For a medieval person to criticize the copying of a text would be like somone criticizing Olivier for copying Shakespeare because he played Hamlet. For more on this, Ong, Walter, especially Orality and Literacy. Jerzy Grotowsky had related observations on the differences between performers from literate and pre-literate cultures, but I'm not certain he ever got them into writing. I intend to go back through the one collection I have seen of his work:

Grotwski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuan, -- I'm not sure what year.

IMAGES -- ". . . the design is enthrallment". He uses an example by Demosthenes to indicate that image must correspond to argument, an issue of qualifications in a sense almost like Stephen Toulmin's, although not articulated in detail.

WORDS WITHOUT CONNECTING LINKS. He gives an example from Xenophon, but misunderstands it, if I may judge by the translation: "'Locking their shields,' says Xenophon,'they thrust fought slew fell.'" He describes the urgency created by the rush of words, but neglects the logical distinction: these seem to become, in a sense, one action. They move a step closer to being hyphenate. There's a suggestion, then, not only of rush, but of a lack of intervening reflection. Altogether it's a fine observation, and deserves more attention.

For examples, see the following:

1) Nakell, Martin. Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other, which makes frequent successful use of the form. Nakell seems abundantly aware of both the effects on intensity and the warps of logic involved.

2) Kristeva, Julia. "From One Castle to the Other." I don't recall which collection this is in, but she considers L.F. Celine's obtrusive swearing and elipses as dissociating elements from sentence syntax, thereby, she claims, slamming them directly into the syntagma. There's a natural ground here for reflections on the shifts of syntax and signification within the sentence as controlled by factors outside the sentence itself.

3) The Objectivist poets, with their concern with the "little words." One has to dig for this, but I'd go through George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky particularly, and notice the play with (and without!) prepositions and articles.

4) Ginsberg does this and seems to do it more in his best work, although I'd argue that the effect seems different than that which Longinus describes. He seems to associate this with the "lengthening of the line in American Poetry" that he discusses frequently. In some interview, Ginsberg says he finds connection more interesting and powerful than disconnection. In his classes at Naropa (some are available on mp3, as are a lot of other wonderful things, on the Naropa Website) he seems extensively concerned with relations between this kind of diction and breath and Charles Olsen's "Projective Verse" and a relation to Buddhism.

INVERSIONS - Longinus claims that inversions make for intensity. Go figure. Perhaps Celine's interjections or Dickinson's repeated pauses might be construed as a positive example of this. But one can as easily posit the urbane inversions of John Milton or Henry James as counterexamples. On the other hand, one wonders whether Longinus is not taking a different view of intensity itself.

* REPETITIONS - He names this separately from the parallelism above, but gives little reason for the distinction
* DIALOG - cites the enhanced immediacy as opposed to narrative.
* 3RD PERSON NARRATOR ASSUMES 1ST PERSON, PAST BECOMES PRESENT.
* PERIPHRASIS = Contemporary "making strange"
* METAPHORS he treats separately from images. Says little of it, as though the question were whether to use them, not how they function or differences between them.
* HYPERBOLE - he doesn't really describe this.

ELEMENT 5 - ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS IN A CERTAIN ORDER -- In this he recognizes sublimity an effect of syntax or syntagm, of arrangement:

"So the constitutents of grandeur, when separated from one another, carry with them sublimity in distraction and when further encircled in a chain of harmony they become sonorous by their very rotundity; and in periods sublimity is, as it were, a contribution made by a multitude" (96 Hazard Adams).