OS/Koll.: „Gender Studies“
CONTENTS
Introduction 3
The Subject in Process 4
Negativity and the Semiotic 8
Femininity and Masculinity as Effects of Language 10
Criticism of Kristeva's Theory 12
Conclusion 14
Works Cited 15
0. Introduction:
Julia Kristeva is rightfully regarded as one of the leading thinkers in the field of linguistics and semiology, though also as one of the most troublesome. Roland Barthes has credited her with always destroying "the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud."
Born June 24, 1941 in Bulgaria, Kristeva was schooled by French nuns before she received the teachings of the Communist Party's various youth groups. During her literary studies at Sofia University, she worked with a newspaper for communist youth and, in a period of general liberisation, got into contact with various ideas from the West, thus becoming familiar with the intellectual discussions ongoing in France at the time. In 1966, she went to Paris on a doctoral fellowship and stayed there.
She studied, among others, with Lacan, Barthes, and Lucien Goldmann, the latter becoming the supervisor for her doctorate thesis, Le Texte du Roman, which was published in 1970. At that time she also began writing for the avant-garde magazine Tel Quel, later joining the editorial board.
At first mainly involved with the current semiological debates, which she enriched by introducing the concept of "sémanalyse" in Semeiotiké, her first book to be published (1969), she was later influenced more and more by psychoanalysis, to the extent that she underwent the appropriate training and started a practice in 1979, in order to have a material basis for her studies.
The theories of Freud and Lacan are also the main foundation for her postdoctoral thesis, La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), with which this essay will be concerned. Kristeva's aim is to analyse the way in which the relation to language changed for several authors of the late nineteenth century; the main (but untranslated) part of the book is a detailed examination of the French writers Lautréamont and Mallarmé in that respect. More influential, however, were the "Préliminaires théoretiques", in which she adopts Lacan's theory of the genesis of the subject in a way which "permits her to broaden the area accesible to psychoanalytic insight and put into view such phenomena as have so far been pushed towards the border or overlooked - femininity, modern art, psychosis".
To do so, Kristeva does away with the Lacanian concept of language as homogenous and self-enclosed, structured by the paternal law. Kristeva's subject does not emerge from its genesis ready to carry out and pass on the `law of the father'; rather, it always remains a subject-in-process, split between the need to fulfill and the drive to subvert this law.
Such subversion, she argues, manifests in poetic language, in semantic nonclosure, the multiplicity of meaning, and predominance of sound over meaning, which made its way into literature with the dawn of the modern period - in the works of authors like Joyce or Lautréamont and Mallarmé, the objects of her analysis. By refusing to adhere to the conventions of communication, these texts recall the freedom before the law, and by recalling it, make it an option once more.
1. The Subject in Process:
Kristeva's base assumption is that even those linguistic theories which have not looked at language as something strictly formal, denying a subject altogether or acknowledging it only in the shape of Husserl's transcendental ego, have been overlooking the split nature - split, as Leon S. Roudiez sums it up, "between unconscious and conscious motivations, that is, between physiological processes and social constraints" - of the subject of enunciation. To take this split subject into account means to view any signifying process as the result of a dialectic between two inseperable modalities - the semiotic and the symbolic.
"Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he (sic) produces can be either `exclusively' semiotic or `exclusively' symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both."
The semiotic modality of the signifying process, according to Kristeva, is linked to what Freud called the primary processes, at work in facilitating and structuring the drives. To name the continuum in which these primary processes take place, she borrows the Platonic term chora, "empty space" or "receptacle". In the chora, the separation of subject from object does not yet exist; although there is articulation going on, and although the principles of transposition and condensation (metonymy and metaphor) are already at work in this articulation, it does not yet follow the `laws' of language.
"The chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e., it is not a sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for another position (i.e., it is not yet a signifier either); it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signifying position. Neither model nor copy, the chora [...] is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm."
The borders between within and without, subject and object, are established during the thetic phase of the development of the subject. This thetic phase, according to Kristeva, occurs at two points: that of the mirror stage, which produces 'spatial intuition', and the point of 'discovering' castration. It is essential for the construction of signification, as "[a]ll enunciation [...] is thetic. It requires an identification; in other words, the subject must separate from and through [...] his objects." In the mirror stage, the specular image becomes the 'protoype' of all objects - once the imagined ego is posited, the path for positing a separate object is cleared. Later, upon discovering the mother's castration, the phallic function which the mother's body occupied turns into a - or rather, the - symbolic function. Thus, identity is established in the symbolic, the subject "transfers semiotic motility on to the symbolic order." From this point onwards, the symbolic, paternal law will govern the development of the subject - but, in contrast to Lacan's theory, it will not reign supreme.
Kristeva follows Lacan in maintaining that the repression of the chora by the symbolic order is necessary so that language may happen - just as the symbolic laws that govern language itself - sign and syntax, grammatical and social constraints, explicitness and unambiguity - are needed for communication to work. However, where Lacan views the original pleasure of the time 'before the law' as lost in the realms of the 'imaginary', Kristeva ascribes to the semiotic a constant part in the dialectic of the signifying process, and a subversive aspect that manifests in poetic language, challenging the symbolic law by breaking the conventions of language: by putting sound over meaning, playing with ambiguities, recalling and recreating the pre-Oedipal bliss in the 'text'.
This struggle of semiotic and symbolic within textual practise, Kristeva argues, manifests in the two elements of any text, genotext and phenotext, the former describing the semiotic, the latter the symbolic processes occuring in the text. To designate the genotext, one has to look at
"the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices [phoneme accumulation, rhyme] and melodic devices (such as intonation and rhythm), in the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic and logical features, or in the economy of mimesis (fantasy, the deferment of denotation, narrative, etc.)."
The genotext, although it is visible in and through language, is thus not linguistic in the structuralist sense. Rather, it is "a process, which tends to articulate structures that are ephemeral [...] and non-signifying [...]."
The genotext forms the underlying foundation of that language (the phenotext) which serves communication and is linguistically described in terms of 'competence' and 'performance'.
Although Kristeva is convinced that "the process we have just described accounts for the way all signifying practises are generated", she admits that the degree to which they employ this process varies. Following from this variation, she defines four types of signifying practise, based on - yet distinguished from - the Lacanian types of discourse: narrative, metalanguage, contemplation and text-practise. Their differences lie mainly in the way the duality of drives (positive/negative, eros/thanathos) is dealt with - distinct, but not acknowleged as opposed, in narrative; reduced to positivity in metalanguage; interwoven into a ring like magnetic poles in contemplation - which can be differentiated via the structures in their language (their phenotext).
Text-practise (or simply, text) plays a particular role in Kristeva's classification, in that it alone allowes the dual drives to openly alternate in a rhythm of opposition. Negativity is predominant, engaging the signifying theses (and thus the thetic) into constant, dynamic struggle, transgressing and rejecting them, carrying them along to the next thesis only to be transgressed once more. This manifests in a wholly different phenotext.
"Rhythmic, lexical, even syntactical reconstructions attack the chain of signification and open the material melting pot of its creation. Mallarmé and Joyce are readable only if one ventures forth from the signifier, to the material, urge-driven social process it covers."
It is in such text-practise, disruptive and dynamic, that Kristeva sees the potential for social revolution, and her understanding of negativity plays a crucial part in her argument.
2. Negativity and the Semiotic:
Like Lacan, Kristeva views Freud's postulation of thanathos, the death drive, as an essential part of his theory. According to Freud, the energy which powers the drives is regressive, based on what in physics is called entropy, i.e., the universal tendency of all matter to strive for a balanced level of as much stability, and as little tension, as possible. Life in this model is a disturbance of that balance, which must be undone - as Freud put it, "The goal of all life is death." Even the energy spent on protecting the living organism is provided by the death drive: preventing death in the shape of a disturbance from outside, but only in order to attain it in its own inherent manner.
For Kristeva, the concept of the death drive is a materialistic use of the Hegelian term of negativity, the "fourth 'term' of dialectics". It has to be differentiated from both nothingness and negation, since it is "that means of solution which does not destroy, but rather causes new structures to sprout, and in that sense is affermative: logical period of transformance [...]". The importance of the negativity concept in Hegel's theory, she argues, has been neglected by dialectic materialism and only realised again in full scale by Freudian drive theory.
Negativity is thus a driving force in the signifying process of the subject, which becomes split upon entering the symbolic realm. The remaining effects and processes of the semiotic chora undermine the stability of the thetic position. Dreams are impressive examples of the semiotic's continuing power, because - as Inge Suchsland puts it in her 'introductory guide' to Kristeva's work:
"They remind us of the fact that something had to stay behind at [the subject's] leap into the symbolic order, that the breakaway from the maternal chora is a liberation coming with the price of an extremely painful separation, which thus demands acceptance of being separated, or - speaking in psychoanalytic terms - acceptance of castration. Of course, such pain of parting goes against the pleasure principle, which tries to undo the separation, by rebelling against the separating thesis and thus working in service of the death drive striving for dissolution. If the thesis cannot hold against this [rebellion], the slide into psychosis threatens."
The same rebellion, Kristeva argues, characterises poetic language, and there, too, psychosis is close by - a fearful, limiting assumption, as has been critically remarked (see the section on critisism of Kristeva below).
While emphasising the contribution of the term negativity for the "dialectic procedure in its materialistic turn", she propagates the term rejection for her argument, as it "directs our view at those ways in which the subject is constituted". Rejection to her is a kind of 'negation' different from that inherent in a judgement, in that it happens beyond logic. Rather, it is what creates logic.
Kristeva uses Frege's concept of the linguistic predicate as bearer of negation (in the predicative not ) to make plain why rejection is part of the semiotic realm: since negation (the kind which is inherent in judgement) is linked with predication - i.e. with syntactic competence - it prerequires adherance to the symbolic, is "a first sign of sublimation, of the thetic" even in its most simple form, that of an uttered 'No'.
Consequently, Kristeva argues, one has to look for rejection outside verbal functions, in the 'concrete operations' of the infant's 'pre-lingual gestures', the most well-known of which is the Fort-Da game Freud elaborated on. Its (the game's) negativity is "not yet symbolised, [...] it positions an object as separate from the body and [...] fixes it as absent, as sign". Rejection in this model is only recognisable through this positioning, it "exists only in the transsymbolic materiality of the process". In other words, it has to be a dialectic term.
In modern text practise, the norms of language, among them the norms of syntactic negation, are challenged and changed, and in these changes the 'original' rejection becomes visible once more. Since negation is, together with syntax, a guarantee for syntactic competence and thus "the bulwark behind which the unity of the subject entrenches itself", such changes are related to what can be observed in the utterances of schizophrenics, which often contain amassed negations. Kristeva states that, in psychosis, negation hints at "the fight between thesis and rejection, which [...] can end in the dissolution of symbolic capability itself".
Text is a 'borderline experience', which translates this fight by creating a 'new reality', commonly known as the 'world' of the 'author'. One might call it a controlled form of psychosis, and it is important for Kristeva that it remains indeed controlled; otherwise, it may become truly psychotic and lose its cultural legitimacy. The symbolic order must be challenged, but it must not be overthrown, as it is needed for language, and thus for culture, to work.
It appears as though Kristeva tries to limit the possible impact of the semiotic force of rejection, for fear of what it might do if used to full extent. This becomes particularly relevant with regards to women making use of this force.
3. Femininity and Masculinity as Effects of Language:
Although Kristeva does not explicitly say so - it has been critically noted that La Révolution du langage poétique tries hard to be gender-neutral - her account of how the modalities of the signifying process come into being assigns them to the sexes. The symbolic order is created by the introduction of the paternal law, it is masculine: shaped by the 'transcendental signifier' of the phallus, the castration anxiety it evokes and the incest taboo it enforces as the first law for the subject to submit to. As for Freud and Lacan, so for Kristeva, too, the law is the 'Law of the Father'. The semiotic, however, dates back to the time of undisturbed union with the maternal body and is thus linked with femininity (the term chora, after all, connotes 'womb'). Moreover, in a culture where the symbolic order is patriarchal, women are always partly outsiders (though, in her opinion, not more or less so than proletarians with regards to its capitalist structure, or foreigners because of its internal closure), and as such closer to the semiotic, which refutes and challenges this order.
The same assignation applies with regards to language, the medium in and through which both modalities work. If the symbolic order is patriarchal and masculine, then so is its ideal of clear, unambiguous denotation, adherence to the rules of syntax, etc.; if the semiotic is feminine, then so is semiotic writing: multiplicity of meaning, violation of rules and disruption of established structures. Again, this is something Kristeva does not say, which is probably why her semiotic has been received as a "bisexual way of writing" open to men and women equally. This also appears to be the way Kristeva herself wants her theory read, given the scepticism towards an idea of écriture féminine she expressed elsewhere:
"In other words, if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of signifiance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning and signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes."
However, semiotic subversion of the law seems to work for male authors only, or at least mainly - why else would the revolutionary writers she examines and mentions be exclusively men? Indeed, looking at other works of hers, it becomes plain that she views the endeavour of revolutionary poetic practise as more difficult, even dangerous, for women writers.
As mentioned above, the re-creation or recovery of the maternal body within poetic language constitutes for Kristeva an equivalent to breaking the incest taboo, which is precisely what makes it a revolt and thus possibly revolutionary. On the other hand, since she follows Lacan's thesis that "the prohibition against the incestuous union with the mother is the founding law of the subject", it is this closeness to incest which places poetic practise on the verge of psychosis. Women are more in danger in this respect, for two reasons.
Firstly, as Lena Lindhoff has pointed out, the "resumption of the functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language" which has to happen for text to work, in Kristeva's opinion, easier for men than for women, as they are able to "find narcistic support for their questioning of the paternal symbolic which protects them from a slide into chaos, phantasma, and despair". They have surrogate mothers in their sexual partners and in the 'fetishes' of their works and the recognition it earns them. Women, being less completely separated from the mother (and the semiotic), lack this option of substituting her with fetishes, which makes them more susceptible to psychosis, and their poetic practise less effective.
Secondly, the reunion with the maternal chora is for women not only incestuous, but also homosexual, which, looked at from the essentially heterosexual model of subject-genesis that she appropriates from the Freudian/Lacanian tradition, places it further outside cultural integration and increases the threat of psychosis. Poetic language can be one culturally sanctioned displacement of this homosexual desire; another one, interestingly, is the act of giving birth, when
"the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; [...]. She thus actualizes the homosexual facet of motherhood, through which a woman is simultaneously closer to her instinctual memory, more open to her psychosis, and consequently, more negatory of the social, symbolic bond."
It seems, then, given the reservations Kristeva expresses against women participating in poetic practise, that childbirth and motherhood should be their preferable way of engaging the semiotic. Not a very revolutionary way; rather, one which keeps them assigned to their oldest task. As innovative as Kristeva's approach may be for the evaluation of certain male poets, it does not really provide anything new for women - although it certainly would have the potential to do so if taken to the full extent of its inherent potential.
It is this failure to push her own approach to its limits which feminist criticism of Kristeva's theory has been focussing on.
4. Criticism of Kristeva's Theory:
While La Révolution du langage poétique and Kristeva's subsequent works met with great acclaim from fellow theorists, they have also given rise to critisism, particularly by feminist thinkers, who point out that her approach remains too attached to traditional Freudian/Lacanian theory to be truly effective.
In her introduction to feminist literary theory, Lena Lindhoff goes so far as to accuse Kristeva of being latently misogynist. For Lindhoff, Kristeva assumes the position of
"an exception: a woman writing for a male audience, orientated towards male models, and - all superficial anarchism notwithstanding - searching for paternal acclaim. Kristeva talks from a male perspective which, as usual, is made absolute as the human perspective. She is a star pupil of the 'master thinkers'."
Lindhoff attributes this to the fact that, when Kristeva began to tackle 'feminist' topics, she had already attained an influential position as 'head' of the Tel Quel group. She views Kristeva's distancing from feminism as an "attempt [...] to belatedly introduce a refletion on (her own) femininity into her (seemingly) gender-neutral theory, without having to revise it and risk the position of power bound up with it"
This is a harsh verdict, and not necessarily a justified one. That Kristeva has repeatedly expressed scepticism both towards the idea of écriture féminine, and the model of a female 'counter-force' of "a hysterical obsession with the neutralizing cave [...] the negative imprint of the maternal phallus", cannot be disputed; it seems doubtful to me, however, whether this has to be put down to such egotistical motives.
Judith Butler's reception of Kristeva is equally critical, pointing out the instances where her theory falls short of its potential. Her account of the possible reasons for these shortcomings, however, is based on a more fundamental problem, which makes them appear more 'forgiveable' than they seem to be for Lindhoff.
Like Lindhoff, Butler charges Kristeva with not really questioning the assumptions of her theoretical forefathers, particularly Freud. This concerns, first of all, her base assumption of the 'primary relationship' with the mother's body, which, according to Butler, may well be "an effect of culture rather than its secret and primary cause." Given the aim of her book Gender Trouble - to show the constructedness of gender identity as such - this doubt is more than understandable.
Even more problematic for Butler is Kristeva's appropriation of the Lacanian assumption that there can be no culturally sanctioned, nonpsychotic way of expression outside the symbolic order. Thus, the subversion of paternal law through poetic practise that Kristeva suggests remains self-limited by the fear of becoming psychotic. As the rebellion of the semiotic must always be kept in check, Butler argues, "a full-scale refusal of the Symbolic is impossible, and a discourse of 'emancipation', for Kristeva, is out of the question." For someone working from within psychoanalytic tradition, this may be the case, but for a radical practise of feminist deconstruction, it presents unacceptable restrictions.
This becomes especially evident with regards to Kristeva's view of the psychotic character of lesbian desire, which has to be displaced in motherhood or poetic practise (the latter also burdened with the threat of psychosis) in order to be culturally sanctioned and 'legible'. For Butler, though, Kristeva's "presumption [that] for women, heterosexuality and coherent selfhood are indissolubly linked" is a sign of the fears a "heterosexual culture produces to defend against its own homosexual possibilities", the fear of losing the privileges of being in the only sanctioned and sanctionable position. What would have been called for in Kristeva's theory, Butler argues, is to accept the fact that there is, indeed, an unmediated yet nonpsychotic way of expressing lesbian desire - as such an acknowledgement would seriously challenge the paternal order, and expose compulsory heterosexuality and motherhood for the cultural constructs they are, making way for the open, playful use of gender identity which Butler herself advocates.
5. Conclusion:
Julia Kristeva has doubtlessly made an important contribution to the incorporation of psychoanalytical thought into literary theory, providing a new means to look at texts, particularly modern ones, in terms of what they reveal about the 'subjects' of their authors. Moreover, her approach towards poetic practise as potentionally revolutionary, I think, had and has great merit - not only for the re-evaluation of the authors she mentions (it would be an interesting endeavour to look at how, for example, a text like Joyce's Ulysses has, indeed, helped to change cultural maximes by violating literary ones), but also as a guide, and probably a source of self-esteem, for those who strive to participate in such practise.
This merit, to me, is not really cancelled out by the shortcomings of her theory - to the contrary; I think that part of it lies in the deficiencies of her account, not only because the critical reception they instilled has propelled the discourse further onward, but also because the motivation to prove some of her presumptions wrong may well have been a direct or indirect cause of more than one 'subversive' text from women authors. I cannot present any evidence for this assumption, but I think it plausible that Kristeva's theory has been serving as a thesis to be challenged, changed, and again subjected to challenge - actually, well in accordance with the model she developed.
6. Works Cited:
Butler, Judith P. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Eagleton, Terry. Einführung in die Literaturtheorie. Trans. Elfi Bettinger und Elke Hentschel. Sammlung Metzler 246. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez et al. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia: Die Revolution der poetischen Sprache. Trans. u. Einl. Reinhold Werner. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1978.
Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Lindhoff, Lena. Einführung in die feministische Literaturtheorie. Sammlung Metzler 285. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995.
Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Suchsland, Inge. Julia Kristeva zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 1992.