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”
 The operation of semiotic drive -- as signifying process
(p.2169-72) –
1. The facilitation and the structuring disposition of drives
2. 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(運動性 ) that is as full of movement as it is regulated.
 From Plato’s “chora” –mobile and uncertain articulation (different
from disposition)
 Our discourse—all discourse—moves with and against the
chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and
refuses it.
 Chora
 (2170-71)  Is
 Generated in order to attain to this signifying
 Not
position
 A sign, a position, nor
 Precedes and underlines figuration and thus
a signfier
specularization
 A model or copy
 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 socio-
historical 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 drives—which 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 mother’s 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 signification—the 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/frames-
e.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
 Giovanni Bellini

“Madonna and Child”
http://www.gfmer.ch/Art_for_Health/Giovanni_Bellini.
1510
htm

 The final series of motherhood

paintings…carries on and perfects
Bellini’s mastery of the style he
created between 1480 and 1500.
The mother’s face again falls into
calmness/absence, dreams of an
unsignifiable experience. The
infant…appears 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 Kristeva’s 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陰性書寫 (p.2175)

 related website: The feminist Theory Website:

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism