Revolution in Poetic Language

by Julia Kristeva

Outline
I. Introduction II. The Semiotic and the Symbolic

2. The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drive 5. The Thetic: Rupture and/or Boundary 12. Genotext and Phenotext

III. Examples for Practice

Introduction
Her focus: the workings of poetic language as a signifying practice, that is, as a semiotic system generated by a speaking subject within a social historical field (intro. 1) the infinite possibilities of language Revolution: question the traditional epistemological subject and patriarchal language

subject in process-- brings the body back into signifying practice focus on the maternal and pre-Oedipal in the constitution of subjectivity

Questions

How does Kristeva construct subjectivity? How does she combine psychoanalytic concept of divided subject with structuralist concept of language (as signification)?

Semiotic Process and chora

1. 2.

The operation of semiotic drive -- as signifying process (p.2169-72) The facilitation and the structuring disposition of drives Displacement and condensation of energies and their inscription (69) semiotic chora rupture and articulation (rhythm)
a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility( ) that is as full of movement as it is regulated. From Platos chora mobile and uncertain articulation (different from disposition)

Our discourseall discoursemoves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it.

Chora

(2170-71) Not

Is

A sign, a position, nor a signfier A model or copy

Generated in order to attain to this signifying position Precedes and underlines figuration and thus specularization Vocal and kinetic rhythm A receptacle, nourishing and maternal (2171) [physical social] Its Vocal and gestural organization is subject to an objective ordering, which is dictated by natural or sociohistorical constraints (2171)

Semiotic vs. Symbolic

Chora as the pre-symbolic: -- a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of the object and as the distinction between the real and the symbolic (2171).

(p.2172) Pre-Oedipal driveswhich are both destructive and assimilating, i.e. including displacement and condensation, absorption and repulsion (p. 2173) drive attack against stasis, chora a place where the subject is both generated and negated. The process of charges and stasis negativity

The symbolic: social language social effects constituted through objective constraints of biological difference and historical considerations (p.2171) organize the chora through an ordering (mediation) but not according to a law. The mothers body as mediation between the symbolic order and the semiotic chora

Semiotic Drives symbolization

The semiotic rhythm: text is the terrain of operating signifying process (p.2172) Checked by biological and social constraints (or the symbolic) Semiotic marks: voice, gesture, color; a psychosomatic modality connecting the physical and the social (2173) symbolization through connection and functions (e.g. metonymy and metaphor; condensation and displacement; 2174 syntax)

Summary: Body and the semiotic

Chora -- The space of the drives; The semiotic -- the bodily drive as it is discharged in signification (signifiance). The semiotic is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As the discharge of drives, it is also associated with (and mediated by) the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being since we all have resided in that body.

The Symbolic & the Semiotic

element of signification is associated with the grammar and structure of signification. The symbolic element is what makes reference possible. Without the symbolic, all signification would be babble or delirium. But, without the semiotic, all signification would be empty and have no importance for our lives. Ultimately, signification requires both the semiotic and symbolic; there is no signification without some combination of both. source

The Thetic as Rupture

Signification as proposition or judgment, a realm of positions. structured as a break in the signifying process The break is thetic; it produces the positing of signification. (Meaning is produced through rupture and break.) Thetic significationthe threshhold of language: a stage arrived at during the signifying process; it constitutes the subject, but the subject is not reduced to such stage; nor to the transcendental ego.

Genotext and Phenotext

genotext: the body of transferring process that is not restricted to univocal information (includes drives, their disposition, and their division of the body, plus ecological and social system surrounding the body) (p.2176)

2177 a process; forming structure out of ephemeral and non-signifying structures a) instinctual dyads, b. corporeal-ecological continuum, c. the social organism and family structure. d. matrices of signification.

phenotext: a structure follows rules of communications and denotes language for representation (the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of meaning involving categories) (p.2177)

Genotext and Phenotext

Genotext as topography (spaces of connections) vs. Phenotext as algebra (forms of relations) (2178) Signification: stopping the signifying process at one or another theses that it traverses; they knot it and lock it into a given surface or structure. Phenotext conveys these obliteration of the infiinity of language. A new semiotics: the genotext exists within the phenotext, which is the perceivable signifying system

The semiotic disposition

Those with the semiotic disposition allow the emergence of the semiotic in the symbolic, or the genotext in the phenotext. E.g. rhythm, ambiguity and over-symbolicity, the switches and multiplicity of locutionary positions.

The Semiotic: Examples

Music -- Mallarme air and song beneath the text (2174)

Giotto The Last Judgment 1306

Figure vs. Color

http://www.wga.hu/framese.html?/html/g/giotto/padova/4lastjud/ Fresco, 1000 x 840 cm Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua

Giotto Last Judgment 1306 Detail

Thus all colors, but blue in particular, would have a noncentered or decertering effect, lessening both object identification and phenomenal fixation. They thereby return the subject to the archaic moment of its dialectic, that is, before the fixed, specular I, but while in process of becoming this I by breaking away from instinctual, biological (and also maternal) dependence. (Desire in Language 225)

The Maternal Body

Rejected by and split from the child motherhood as a luminous spatialization, the ultimate language of jouissance at the far limits of repression, where bodies, identities, and signs are begotten (Desire in Language 269)

http://www.gfmer.ch/Art_for_Healt h/Giovanni_Bellini.htm

Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child

1487

1460-1464

http://www.gfmer.ch/Art_for_Health/Giovanni_Bellini. htm

Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child

1510

The final series of motherhood

paintingscarries on and perfects Bellinis mastery of the style he created between 1480 and 1500. The mothers face again falls into calmness/absence, dreams of an unsignifiable experience. The infantappears more easily separable. The maternal figure increasing appears as a module, a process, present only to justify this cleaved space.. . .(263-64)

Practice

On The Yellow Wallpaper: The official text needs to be broken down and the writing seen as both subjectivity and communication-writing where one reads the other (Desire in Language). Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a model of Julia Kristevas theory. (source)

Georgia O'Keeffe Black Iris

Pollock, Jackson Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952

Pollock, Jackson Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 Context: 1. existentialism ("existence precedes essence"); alone in the void (alienation); 2. the Cold War: post-Hiroshima; the Soviet Union gets the bomb in 1949; 3. the 50's beat generation (pushing to the edge of one's consciousness.) 4. Jungian analysis (the collective unconscious; the archetype; mythic structures embedded in everyone's unconscious).

5. Inspired by jazz improvisation; listened to records by Charlie Parker while he painted. Also influenced by Native American sand painting and the idea that painting could be ritualistic, a rites of passage.
(source: http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/20thcwebsite/439mid/ah439mid-Info.00011.html )

Conclusion

Retrieve subject from language: thetic signification

the text, in the concept of intertextuality, explores the internal conflicts in culture and serves as a new semiotics by ecriture feminine (p.2175) related website: The feminist Theory Website: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism