Revolution in Poetic Language

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Revolution in Poetic Language

• by Julia Kristeva

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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

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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

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Questions

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

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Semiotic Process and chora

• 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.

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Chora

• Is
• 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
  socio-historical constraints (2171)

• (2170-71)
• Not
• A sign, a position, nor a signfier
• A model or copy

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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

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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)

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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.

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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
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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.

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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)

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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

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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.

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The Semiotic Examples

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

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Giotto The Last Judgment 1306

• Figure vs. Color
• http//www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/giotto/pad
  ova/4lastjud/
• Fresco, 1000 x 840 cmCappella Scrovegni (Arena
  Chapel), Padua

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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)

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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)

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Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child

• http//www.gfmer.ch/Art_for_Health/Giovanni_Bellin
  i.htm

1487
1460-1464
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Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child
1510

• http//www.gfmer.ch/Art_for_Health/Giovanni_Bellin
  i.htm
• 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)

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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)

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• Georgia O'Keeffe
• Black Iris

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Pollock, Jackson Blue Poles Number 11, 1952
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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.htm
l )
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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