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.

Ray Jackendoff

Jackendoff, Ray. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford, 2002.

Jackendoff deals extensively with aspects of linguistics that involve semantics and neuroscience. In this, he operates differently than most linguists, who generally emphasize issues of syntax rather than semantics.

The problems seem related somehow to those of materiality in written language.


ON COMBINATORIALITY (38-67)

"To sum up, a theory of how language is instantiated in the brain must grapple with four problems that arise from the combinatoriality of launguage: the massiveness of binding in linguistic structure, the problem of multiple instances of a known unit in a novel structure, the necessity forecoding and instantiating typed variables, and the relation between long-term and short-erm memory encodings of structure" (67).

One addresses all these (if not solving them outright) by considering linguistic and neural distinctions as fuzzy or incompletely discrete at each scale and level. That is, if we consider morpheme, phoneme, word, phrase, as not referring to an entity that is atomistic, discrete, and single. Here goes:

Massive Binding

"The binding problem is usually stated this way: we have found that the shape and the color of an object are encoded in different regions of the brain, and they can be differentially impaired by brain damage. How is it, then, that we sense a particular shape and color as attributes of the same object?" (59).

The problem here arises from the categorization "different regions of the brain." This construction is partly true and partly false; that is, it describes the stituation, but with a distortion. Being creatures with relatively discrete skin boundaries ourselves, we think of space and object in terms of such discrete things. Neuroelectric waves operate differently. We think of shape and size as being relatively fixed or related to identity, location or activity as being relatively changeable. Here the shape of the brain is relatively fixed, but the shapes and shifts of modality in neural firing are not. The relationships are not between a piece of coding here and a piece there, but more the code involves this area(s) as opposed to that area(s), or, better, this composition as opposed to that. Also, what we're describing involves temporal variation, too. And we know, for instance, that the skin contains various receptors for different kinds of sensations and that pain travels on separate or relatively separate neural pathways, so there's some degree of specialization between neurons. Consequently, any impression(s), including that-those provoked by parole, involve a composition of patterns -- a composition of compositions.

It may be easier to conceive of all this if we recall that we never do experience a one object. I experience the gentleman speaking at the next table here at Starbucks as a composition of my reception of the light bouncing off of him and hitting each of my two eyes, arranged in relation with the other light and dark areas of the room and triangulated so as to create an impression of depth; the sound-vibrations he produces, again triangulated between two ears, but also classified according to my aural and linguistic experience. The woman who leans across the table towards him may feed into her impressions the touch of his hand and perhaps the sampling of chemicals he exudes that we call his smell. None of these are the gentleman, none exactly components of him. But they are precisely components of the gentleman I know, and my experience of him is exactly a composition of these and related elements.

To look at this a different way, the composition does not occupy a point or a box, but something more like ripples on a lake, radio and TV and cell phone vibrations simultaneously passing through a room, light sound simultaneously passing through a space. Put another way, the location of electricity by its nature involves time and movement. Electricity refers to a movement; consequently, it's position is not fixed, though certainly the whole activity involves extensibility and space and duration in time. To use another metaphor, as a stream flows to sea, it simultaneously involves water in the mountains and in the sea. It also involves water that has seeped out of what people usually call the stream, seeped into the surrounding soil; that's why trees on an otherwise dry-ish plain follow each bank of the river that snakes through it. When we enjoy the cool air under a tree by its banks, we enjoy the moister feel of the air that leaves it. Regarding the stream as an object obscures these things.

Likewise, certainly certain perceptions will be lost when the brain receives physical damage in one or another location. A lost component of the larger pattern will change the pattern; the subject will not synthesize certain aspects of the surroundings that others may perceive. So we might say, "He doesn't hear the man talk." But it isn't the man that he doesn't perceive; it's that part of the pattern that would allow the identification of talk. It's not a no-pattern, it's a pattern without a component, in this case a major one. Now, nothing in this indicates that the impression of the gentleman was solely or primarily a question of localization any more than the nature of a stream or a tree is primarily a function of its geographical locale.

In all these phenomena, the region of an object or action are categorizations one makes, not characteristics proper to what one describes. If word is a pattern of patterns, aspects of these may live in the same place at the same time, or overlap spatially and temporally.

Apparently, they must.

Multiple Instances of a Known Unit in an Novel Structure

Consider yet again sentence (23), in which there are two occurences fo the word star [The little star's beside the big star]. If the first occurrence simply activates the lexical entry in long-term memory, what can the second occurrence do? It cannot just activate te word a second time, since . . . the word has to remain activated the first time in order for the sentence to receive full interpretation" (61).

Here, of course, if either or both activations form part of a larger pattern, distinctions in that pattern should not be more difficult than any other distinction just because a particular segment of pattern repeats, or, put differently, because the pattern involves similar elements at different places or times or in different movements. Just the fact that we may call these patterns should clue us that they're composite; being composite, they're neither discrete nor homogenous, but involve a continuum of distinction(s).

Encoding and Instantiating Typed Variables

The example Jackendoff examines is rhyme.

Consider the problem of encoding a two-place relation such as 'X rhymes with Y.' The breain cannot list all the rhymes in the language . . . . Nor can we figure out its rhymes by analogy, reasoning for example, 'Well, ling sounds sort of like the word link, and link rhymes with think, so maybe ling rhymes with think.

He goes on to mention that new rhymes can be invented and that rhyme can be distinguished in a language one does not understand.

This problem solely consists of the assumption that the units are discrete and self-identical units. Without this assumption, it's difficult to even understand the question that's placed.

Long and Short-Term Memory

If one treats a word or phrase as an associative constellation rather than an atomistic unit, it's not surprising that greater or lesser or variant associations get generated on the fly or have greater or lesser durability. As with the prior points, far more detail remains unresolved than resolved, but already one might posit that these are differences in a pattern that may be considered as global. For instance, when speaking of the gentleman early, I could speak of his touch or smell although I did not and have not experienced them because I made categorical generalizations based on memories and processing of memories. These associations are part of global patterns of patterns.

Part of what is necessary to understand in this is that the relation described as association is fuzzy, and may be partial. [See discussions of Chomsky and Deleuze].

Spatialization and/of Language

Recognizing that semiotic association and division must be mediated spatially through a cerebral cortex, a few speculations begin to coalesce.

Given the relations between and the relations within them, words|concepts have to be moderated in part by patterns involving distance and proximity. What we experience as qualities or attributes or various neural paths along which qualities or attributes might be embodied must lie physically woven, with dendrites and dendrite-streams laced all through one another. Of course, we do know that brains are in part built this way, with areas of greater and lesser passage of electrical energy, and temporal variability of passage mediated quite delicately by constantly shifting chemical balances within and around synapses.

A consequence of all this is that certain metaphors of space-relations are most likely hard-wired -- although that does not mean that they correspond in any one-to-one way with what we see or exactly with each other. For instance, neurologists find that the visual cortex has an area about the size of a credit card in or on which visual images are staged. One has to wonder whether similar areas have not been seen for other spatial systems, for aural or kinetic processing. But it's quite likely that the trouble is simply that we have been looking, not listening or representing in mime. Scans create surfaces of virtual planes within a brain, allowing us view representations thereof. The brain's own representations that we experience as sound or motion might represent less understandably as surface, given that the initial soundings of nerves are not patterned on a single surface.

In any event, at least kinetics, touch, sight, and sound operate spatially in part, and must sharespace at at least some part of their processing. Now, space in this sense may not be totally contiguous and look like our concepts of the space we view or experience; but some interweaving and passage of neural information must happen for association to take place -- for firings in one place to excite firings in another place.

I don't mean that correspondences would always be obvious to visual inspection. For for instance, taking the sort of cellular-looking, sort of cauliflower-shaped layout of the apartment complexes where I live as a very rough model, apartment 3800 10B will predictably be in a certain position in relation to pool and parking lot as is 3700 10B and 3900 10B. There are certain differences; the layouts are not completely symmetrical.

Now, a very interesting aspect of all this is the perspective one gains on Deleuze's constant running visual representations, which I have persisted calling metaphors, and which hereby approach the status of diagrams.

A Language Model

OK, folks, here's my 1,000-word-or-so synthesis of How Words Work. Someone please wise me up before the Transcendental Signifier doth smite or kabong me.

On.

Structuralist and post-structuralist poetics descending from Saussure treat semantic meaning as systemic. A familiar demonstration involves any attempt to define a single word, in which one inevitably involves other words.

However, the words we use we do not define.

True, the 26-volume OED fairly bursts with gorgeous definitions, and when I look up the 4 pages or so of entries for the or of, I'm startled to realize that the definitions actually do bear an unusually strong resemblance to my own understanding of these words.

Do I use these definitions to write or speak? No.

The OED's entries are more-than-usually admirable approximations, nothing more. Likewise, when colleagues in discussion refine terms to increase the rigor of a conversation, we may restrict, augment, amend, or disallow associations to one or another word or phrase, but probably few among us would attempt to rigorously defend the idea that we truly define terms.

So, what does happen?

Language seems to involve a dynamic interrelationship between processes described as semantic and syntactic. Neurologists observe that cerebral activity related to language seems to have a dual center, around Wernicke's and Broca's regions, so whatever flaws may exist in the descriptions, language would seem to be in some sense dual or bilateral, and the overall processing perhaps equally describable as an articulated process or related processes.

So, given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles that of other English speakers. This "Word" might as well be a morpheme or a short phrase, but either way, my mental tracing of that sound, along with the network-constellation of associated experiential traces thereby summoned, comprises what a saussurian or structuralist might describe as signifier and signified, respectively. It's probably worthwhile to explicitly deny that I intend by this any transcendant connection to any universal idea or to anyone else's thought. We humans are similar organisms, of a species, and we hang out together; to some extent we manage to work out what our confreres are thinking; we get by, but not too altogether awfully well.

Any definition of that Word is an entity separate from and disparate from the word itself, an attempt to represent the Word-object-process in language, the better to discuss it. We have wonderful motives to define words, but those definitions do not equal the words themselves any more than Magritte's "Celui n'est pas une pipe" was a pipe, no more than I can pronounce the word table and then brace my coffee on that word while I type.

That said, the ultimate circularity of definition pointed out by Jacques Derrida in his early critiques of structuralist linguistics holds problems for meaning in that it holds problems for definitive meaning, but only in that. This takes nothing away from deconstructive critiques of attempts to linguistically objectify and delimit, but describes differently the possibility of describing and the impossibility of defining, delimiting, or objectifying the world.

Also, much of the complexity of semiotic description comes from the difficulty of matching an understanding of semantics as largely synchronic and the meanings of words as relatively durable with the obviously temporal shifting of meanings within syntax. By eschewing the relevance of defined or definitive meaning, the following simple but admittedly rough description:

Given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles those of other English speakers. Such associations are material-energetic object-acts independent of whatever process may take place in anyone else's head; no transcendent eidos or anything terribly similar is involved.

Also, whether I describe what's summoned as association or as associations, my phrase is equally misleading, since the event could as rigorously be described as compound or articulated, as process or object.

As I maintain awareness of the Word, the composition of more or less prominent aspects of association remains provisional, pending the relative completion of syntactic and syntagmatic segments.

(I've found it useful to compare this to visual attention, in which I pay more attention to or devote more neural processing to and have more complete understanding about an arc within some degrees of a point central to my binocular focus than I do about events at the periphery of my vision. Similarly, the word dog by itself may summon a ready image, which I may freely alter when it's followed by another syllable, as in dogfish or dog days.)

As Words arrive, whether by speech or by my reading, I take cues internal to the discourse to indicate that segments of discourse have closed. In practice, I may do so because I take the speaker to intend such closure or because I find I can't retain more linguistic elements and must guess as to the speaker or author's drift (see Beckett's How It Is or certain sentences of Faulkner or Proust for different ways this may work). In any event, to whatever extent and in whatever ways I consider previous discourse-segments as closed, I may forget their independent parts or banish them from immediate attention. The process is in some manner intensively recursive.

At whatever point I do this, I make an assembled construct of meaning-up-to-now, and proceed to use that as interpretive context for whatever discourse follows.

A few observations, incompletely systematized ----

In these events, nothing comprises a full stop.

As I decide that segments of language have closed and I combine words, these combinations draw attention to mutually fitting or harmonious aspects of the word-string; aspects that can be mutually imagined or embodied or otherwise incorporated. I'm tempted to suppose that this involves the firing of mutually excitable neuron-patterns, and I do supose that specific spatio-temporal embodiment must be involved, but I'm just supposing.

In any event, nothing in the process seems to be actively delimiting in the sense of a definition, but poetically suggestive. Certain meanings get eliminated, but only in the way that enacting a decision to leave the room eliminates staying in the room.

In consequence, my appraisal of the language elements remains more or less provisional, contingent on the progressive and relative closure of linguistic units, and I willingly reappraise their meaning until I am hit by a blunt object, distracted, or otherwise forgetful.

For instance, certain non-assembled semantic units do cross the "full stop," the grand divide of predication and of sentence. These tend to relate to whatever we consider as noun or scene rather than to what we consider as verb or action. So, for instance, if I write "Jim studied. He passed the test," one assumes that He refers to Jim so that studied and passed relate in a way one might diagram like the two oxygen atoms in diagram of an H2O molecule.

Accordingly, no rigorous distinction between syntax and syntagma exists. Disconnection and connection are complex, partial, and distinctly articulated, like relations between movements of a symphony or sonata.

Accordingly too, lecturers in the academy aside, humans speak something far closer to verse than prose.

The music of speech, the prosody of verse, standard punctuation as prescribed by the MLA, advertising in glossy magazines, and visually sophisticated Websites all differently stylize the logic of segmentation in ways that change syntax, therefore meaning. We interpret each of these in ways that we little understand, with little or no explicit training. That is, one reading a Website aloud will tend to convert its visual cues to aural cues based on an implicit understanding of phrase boundaries. To some extent, this understanding follows lines of custom, but to some extent the reader may reinvent it upon encountering the text and guessing at "the author's intent" or at "what makes sense."

The cues that determine phrase boundaries have to be distinguishable from cues fixedly associated with semantic meaning. So, for instance, two enunciations of the word "father" must share much meaning regardless of, say, their pitch, but pitch that rises relatively towards the end of that word effectively makes the word a question.

Meaning fixedly associated with a Word or signifier may be arbitrary, iconic, or anything on a continuum in-between, but any meaning-relationships malleable by syntax and associated with that word must be arbitrary in something like Saussure's sense, as opposed to iconic or symbolic as Peirce used these.

Some difficulties remain in describing relations between what has been called sign and referent, between a composite Word and what's taken to be a solid and identifiable thing-in-itself. These may be alleviated with the realization that what's taken as a thing-in-itself is itself a neurologically constructed composite that may in some ways less resemble the circumstances of its extra-perceptual provocation than might the verbal rendering that synthesizes sensual elements with remembered and imagined categories and abstractions. For instance, I remain convinced that the chair across the room has weight although I cannot at the moment verify that sensorially.

Among other things, this suggests that discourse involves what might be called an inevitable materiality -- although, once again, materiality and ideality remains a difficult dichotomy to maintain; what this materiality amounts to is sensual palpability. The non-semantic and officially non-syntactic aspects of a material production of writing must and do signal syntax. The undifferentiated font of a book in standard typeface signals a sequential read as easily as the differentiated font-face and color of a Website or glossy magazine may signal distinct relationships of different bodies of text onscreen, and in turn a process of cherrypicking links. If early 21st-century commentators tend to neglect this, it may be because we remain accustomed to a world of uniform letters determined by movable type and typesetting. The technology has shifted, and practice is shifting although conventions and usage take time to adjust. Yet the possibilities -- the inevitability! -- of sensory and social inflection and contexting on rhetoric, narrative, and prosody incumbent on the enhanced plasticity of digital representation is boggling -- demonstrably so, given our partly generational difficulties in absorbing it. On the one hand, one grasps that new forms will be interpreted on-the-fly by global patterns; on the other hand, one must grasp that as-yet-nonexistent social customs will factor into every interpretation, so that the meanings of one's own words have not assembled yet, and leave one's control remaining radically incomplete.