Julia%20Kristeva%20(1)

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Julia Kristeva (1)

• Her Views of the Semiotics

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Her Life and Works

• Raised in communist Bulgaria.
• At the age of 25 she left for Paris with a
  doctoral research fellowship in hand.
• By1967 her articles were already appearing in the
  most prestigious reviews, Critique and Tel Quel.
• Her doctoral thesis, La Revolution du langage
  poetique, in 1974.
• Eastern European training with a solid background
  in Marxist theory and fluent Russian enabled her
  to acquire first-hand knowledge of the Russian
  Formalists and, more importantly, societ theorist
  Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work she was instrumental
  in introducing to the Western world.
• (source http//www.msu.edu/user/vasicekb/980/KBIO
  .HTM )

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Note Her Life and Works

• To put it bluntly, I speak in French and about
  literature because of Yelta. I mean that because
  of Yelta, I was obliged to marry in order to have
  a French passport and to work in France
  moreover, because of Yelta, I wanted to marry
  the violence that has tormented me ever since,
  has dissolve identity and cells, coveted
  recognition and haunted me nights . . . I have no
  I any more, . . . (source Lecht 93 )
• note 1945  -  End of Bulgarian monarchy. Yalta
  treaty makes Bulgaria a USSR satellite state.

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Major Concepts

• 1. Her attempt to bring the body back into
  discourses in the human sciences
• 2. Her focus on the significance of the maternal
  and preoedipal in the constitution of
  subjectivity
• 3. Her revision of contemporary linguistics
  which focused on the communicative function of
  language (e.g. generative grammar, speech acts).
  ? genotext, as semiotic disposition
• (The genotext exists within the phenotext,
  which is the perceivable signifying system.)
• (Her notion of abjection as an explanation for
  oppression and discrimination. source)

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Three Periods

• 1960s early 1970s discusses and modifies
  linguistics in order to develop a theory of the
  dynamic and unrepresentable poetic dimension of
  language its rhymes, rhythms, intonations,
  alliteration, . . . music.
• 1970s the refinement of the concept of le
  semiotique. K shows more debt to pyschoanalysis
• 1980s the notion of abjection, with examples of
  some works of art (Cf John Leche 4-6)

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Her Life and Works

• Her semiotic theory "demonstrates precisely her
  radical attack on the rigid, scientistic
  pretensions of a certain kind of structuralism,
  as well as on the subjectivist and empiricist
  categories of the traditional humanism." (source
  http//www.msu.edu/user/vasicekb/980/KBIO.HTM )

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Questions

• How is Kristeva related to the theories weve
  discussed so far? (e.g. de Saussure, Levi
  Strauss) How is she related to Louis Marins
  views of Disneyland?
• How do we practice her views of semiotics (a
  production of models that simultaneously offers a
  critique of itself)?

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Semiotics A Critical Science and/or a Critique
of Science (1968)

• 0. semiotics resisted by some other schools as
  being obscure, gratuitous, schematic or
  impoverishing (274). We need to formulate a
  theory of its evolution and link it with Marxism.
  
• Semiotics as the Making of Models
• Semiotics and Production (Marx and Freud)
• Semiotics and Literature

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Semiotics as the Making of Models

• Whats wrong with existing scientific approaches?
  Sees semiology as part of linguistics
• Semiotics a formalization or production of
  models. (275)
• How semiotics is different from the exact
  sciences (p. 275)
• Theory model semiotics cannot be separated
  from the theory constituting it a theory of the
  science constituting it.
• Self-reflexive a critique of both its models and
  itself, or a critique of semiotics (276), a
  crique which opens onto something other than
  semiotics, that is, ideology
• Science (e.g. mathmatics, logic, linguistics)
  develops into a system Semiotics
  self-questioning reveals how science is born of
  ideology (277)
• Introduces new terms or alterity in terms

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Some Terms 1) formalization the Axiomatic

• The characteristics of formalization in
  mathematics
• 1. The axiomatic method an existing set of
  proven axioms (??) are the point of departure for
  the development of new axioms
• Existence free from contradiction so that the
  law of identity holds, i.e. a a
• The law of the excluded middle a b, or a ?b,
  there is no third way
• The decidability of every mathmatical or logical
  problem. (Lecht 94)

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Semiotics and Production(three kinds of work)

• Allied semiotics to Marxs strategy a classical
  semiotics of work (which presents an economy or
  society signifiedas a permutation of
  elementssignifier p. 277)
• Marx redefined the concept of work and link it
  to different semiotic systems
• Work (a supernatural creative power) redefined
  ? a work process with some social relations of
  production as its own specific logic (278)
• Value redefined crystallization of social work
• 1) Work as value in the field of production
  (exchange value and use value p. 278)
• 2) circulation of money as arbitrary signs Marx
  critiques the circulation of money measurable
  communication in and after production. (money as
  signs//writing as exchange of money) ? work means
  nothing

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Some Terms 2) gramma and grammé

• And Derridas Grammatology (published in 1967)
  the major argument writing is a kind of
  totality which is not identical with itself qua
  totality, because writing contains an inside and
  outside within itself.
• Writing isas a fusion of grammé and gramma
  fundamentally an inscription.
• Grammé (the Greek for a line) the mark of
  writing, trace, the other of this mark
• Gramma letter

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Semiotics and Production(three kinds of work 2)

• 3) dream-work (manifest contenthieroglyph
  dream thought )? pre-representative production or
  the unconscious
• Problems of Semiotics re-defined
• Either formalized from the point of view of
  communication
• Or opened up to the internal problematics of
  communication the other scene of the
  production of meaning prior to meaning
• Another example 1968 demands to change the
  model.

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Semiotics and Productionconclusion

• Semiotics of production will accentuate the
  alterity of its object in its relation with the
  representable and representative object of
  exchange examined by the exact sciences (280)
• Examines a plurality of productions

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Semiotics and Literature

• Literature A particular semiotic practice which
  has the advantage of making more accessible than
  others the problematic of the production of
  meaning posed by a new semiotics.
• Irreducible to the level of an object for
  normative linguistics
• Production not reduced to representation

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Some Terms 3) semananalysis

• This project moves the orientation of semiotics
  away from the study of meaning as a static
  sign-system, and towards the analysis of meaning
  as a signifying process
• the critical analysis of the notion of the
  sign, a science constructed as a critique of
  meaning, of its elements and its laws. . .
• It goes beyond the sign (which is fixed, static
  and objective) in order to analyse what cannot
  be thought by the whole conceptual system which
  is currently the foundation of intelligence . .
  .paves the way for la sémiotique to give way to
  le sémiotique (the presymbolic) (L. 98-99)