Kristeva, Julia. “The Semiotic and Symbolic” Revolution in Poetic Language. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: London, 2001.

•         From Revolution in Poetic Language

From Part I. The Semiotic and the Symbolic

2. THE SEMIOTIC CHORA ORDERING THE DRIVES

(2169)We understand the term “semiotic” in its Greek sense: onueiov = distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof, engraved or written sign, imprint, trace, figuration. This etymological reminder would be a mere archaeological embellishment (and an unconvincing one at that, since the term ultimately encompasses such disparate meanings), were it not for the fact that the preponderant etymological use of the word, the one that implies a distinctiveness, allows us to connect it to a precise modality in the signifying process. This modality is the one Freudian psychoanalysis points to in postulating not only the facilitation and the structuring disposition of drives, but also the so-called primary processes which displace and condense both energies and their inscription. Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body—always already involved in a semiotic process—by family and as “psychical” marks, articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as t is regulated.

     We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote and essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition, and gives rise to a geometry. Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality. Our discourse—all discourse—moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form.

     The chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (2170)

(2170) (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 precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm. We must restore this motility’s gestural and vocal play (to mention only the aspect relevant to language) on the level of the socialized body in order to remove motility from ontology and amorphousness where Plato confines it in an apparent attempt to conceal it from Democritean rhythm. The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal, not yet unified in an ordered whole because deity is absent from it. Though deprived of unity, identity, or deity, the chora is nevertheless subject to a regulating process [reglementation], which is different from that of symbolic law but nevertheless effectuates discontinuities by temporarily articulating them and then starting over, again and again.

     The chora is a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic. We emphasize the regulated aspect of the chora: its vocal and gestual organization is subject to what we shall call an objective ordering [ordonnancement], which is dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints such as the biological difference between the sexes or family structure. We may therefore posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora not according to a law (a term we reserve for the symbolic) but through an ordering. What is this mediation?

     According to a number of psycholinguists, “concrete operations” precede the acquisition of language, and organize preverbal semiotic space according to logical categories, which are thereby shown to precede or transcend language. From their research we shall retain not the principle of an operational state but that of a preverbal functional state that governs the connections between the body (in the process of constituting itself as a body proper), objects, and the protagonists of family structure. But we shall distinguish this functioning from symbolic operations that depend on language as a sign system—whether the language [langue] is vocalized or gestural (as with deaf-mutes). The kinetic functional stage of the semiotic precedes the establishment of the sign; it is not, therefore, cognitive in the sense of being assumed by a knowing, already constituted subject. The genesis of the functions organizing the semiotic process can be accurately elucidated only within a theory of the subject that does not reduce the subject to one of understanding, but instead opens up (2172) (2172) within the subject this other scene of pre-symbolic functions. The Kleinian theory expanding upon Freud’s positions on the drives will momentarily serve as a guide.

     Drives involve pre-Oedipal semiotic functions and energy discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother. We must emphasize that “drives” are always already ambiguous, simultaneously assimilating and destructive; this dualism, which has been represented as a tetrad or as a double helix, as in the configuration of the DNA and RNA molecule, makes the semiotized body a place of permanent scission. The oral and anal drives, both of which are oriented and structured around the mother’s body, dominate this sensorimotor organization. The mother’s body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora, which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity, and death. For although drives have been described as disunited or contradictory structures, simultaneously “positive” and negative,” this doubling is said to generate a dominant “destructive wave” that is drive’s most characteristic trait: Freud notes that the most instinctual drive is the death drive. In this way, the term “drive” denotes waves of attack against stases, which are themselves constituted by the repetition of these charges; together, charges and stases lead to no identity (not even that of the “body proper”) that could be seen as a result of their functioning. This is to say that the semiotic chora is the place where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him. We shall call this process of charges and stases a negativity to distinguish it from negation, which is the act of a judging subject (see below, part II).

     Checked by the constraints of biological and social structures, the drive charge thus undergoes stases. Drive facilitation, temporarily arrested, marks discontinuities in what may be called the various material supports [materiaux] susceptible to semiotization: voice, gesture, colors. Phonic (later phonemic), kinetic, or chromatic units and differences are the marks of these stases in the drives. Connections or functions are thereby established between these dicrete marks which are based on drives and articulated according to their resemblance or opposition, ether by slippage or by condensation. Here we find the principles of metonymy and metaphor indissociable from the drive economy underlying them.

     Although we recognize the vital role played by the processes of displacement and condensation in the organization of the semiotic, we must also add to these processes the relations (eventually representable as topological spaces) that connect the zones of the fragmented body to each other and also to “external” “objects” and “subjects,” which are not yet constituted as such. This type of relation makes it possible to specify the semiotic as a psychosomatic modality of the signifying (2173) (2173) the semiotic as a psychosomatic modality of the signifying process; in other words, not a symbolic modality but one articulating (in the largest sense of the word) a continuum: the connections between the (glottal and anal) sphincters in (rhythmic and intonational) vocal modulations, or those between the sphincters and family protagonists, for example.

     All these various processes and relations, anterior to sign and syntax, have just been identified from a genetic perspective as previous and necessary to the acquisition of language, but not identical to language. Theory can “situate” such processes and relations diachronically within the process of the constitution of the subject precisely because they function synchronically within the signifying process of the subject himself, i.e., the subject of cogitation. Only in dream logic, however, have they attracted attention, and only in certain signifying practices, such as the text, do they dominate the signifying process.

     It may be hypothesized that certain semiotic articulations are transmitted through the biological code or physiological “memory” and thus form the inborn bases of the symbolic function. Indeed, one branch of generative linguistics asserts the principle of innate language universals. As it will become apparent in what follows, however, the symbolic—and therefore syntax and all linguistic categories—is a social effect of the relation to the other, established through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures. Genetic programmings are necessarily semiotic: they include the primary processes such as displacement and condensation, absorption and repulsion, rejection and stasis, all of which function as innate preconditions, “memorizable” by the species, for language acquisition.

     Mallarme calls attention to the semiotic rhythm within language when he speaks of “The Mystery in Literature” [“Le Mystere dans les letters”]. Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax. As evidence, we could cite “The Mystery in Literature” in its entirety. For now, however, we shall quote only those passages hat ally the functioning of that “air or song beneath the text” with woman:

And the instrument of Darkness, whom they have designated, will not set down a word from then on except to deny that she must have been the enigma; lest she settle matters with a wisk of her skirts; “I don’t get it!”

…………………………………………………………………………......—They [the critics] play their parts disinterestedly or for a minor (2174) (2174) gain: leaving our Lady and Patroness exposed to show her dehiscence or lacuna, with respect to certain dreams, as though this were the standard to which everything is reduced.

To these passages we add others that point to the “mysterious” functioning of literature as a rhythm made intelligible by syntax: “Following the instinct for rhythms that has chosen him, the poet does not deny seeing a lack of proportion between the means let loose and the result.” “I know that there are those who would restrict Mystery to Music’s domain; when writing aspires to it.”

What pivot is there, I mean within these contrasts, for intelligibility? A guarantee is needed—

Syntax—

          …an extraordinary appropriation of structure, limpid, to the primitive lightning bolts of logic. A stammering, what the sentence seems, here repressed […]

…………………………………………………………………………

The debate—whether necessary average clarity deviates in a detail—remains one for grammarians.

     Our positing of the semiotic is obviously inseparable from a theory of the subject that takes into account the Freudian positing of the unconscious. We view the subject in language as decentering the transcendental ego, cutting through it, and opening it up to a dialectic in which its syntactic and categorical understanding is merely the liminary moment of the process, which is itself always acted upon by the relation to the other dominated by the death drive and its productive reiteration of the “signifier.” We will be attempting to formulate the distinction between semiotic and symbolic within this perspective, which was introduced by Lacanian analysis, but also within the constraints of a practice—the text—which is only of secondary interest to psychoanalysis.

5. THE THETIC: RUPTURE AND / OR BOUNDARY

We shall distinguish the semiotic (drives and their articulations) from the realm of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions. This positionality, which Husserlian phenomenology orchestrates through the concepts of doxa, position, and thesis, is structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality. We shall can this break, which produces the positing of signification, a thetic phase. All enunciation, whether of a word or of a (2175)

(2175) sentence, is thetic. It requires an an identification; in other words, the subject must separate from and through his image, from and through his objects. This image and objects must first be posited in a space that becomes symbolic because it connects the two separated positions, recording them or redistributing them in an open combinatiorial system.

     The child’s first so-called holophrastic enunciations include gesture, the object, and vocal emission. Because they are perhaps not yet sentences (NPVP), generative grammar is not readily equipped to account for them. Nevertheless, they are already thetic in the sense that they separate an object from the subject, and attribute to it a semiotic fragment, which thereby become a signifier. That this attribution is either metaphoric or metonymic (“woof-woof” says the dog, and all animals become “woof-woof”) is logically secondary to the fact that it constitutes an attribution, which is to say, a positing of identity or difference, and that it represents the nucleus of judgment or proposition.

     We shall say that the thetic phase of the signifying process is the “deepest structure” of the possibility of enunciation, in other words, of signification and the proposition. Husserl theologizes this deep logic of signification by making it a productive origin of the “free spontaneity” of the Ego:

Its free spontaneity and activity consists in positing, positing on the strength of this or that, positing as an antecedent or a consequent, and so forth; it does not live within the theses as a passive indweller; the theses radiate from it as from a primary source of generation [Erzeugungen]. Every thesis begins with a point of insertion [Einsatzpunkt] with a point at which the positing has its origin [Ursprungssetzung]; so it is with the first thesis and with each further one in the synthetic nexus. This “inserting” even belongs to the thesis as such, as a remarkable modus of original actuality. It somewhat resembles the fiat, the point of insertion of will and action.

In this sense, there exists only one signification, that of the thetic phase, which contains the objects as well as the proposition, and the complicity between them. There is no sign that is not thetic and every sign is already the germ of a “sentence,” attributing a signifier to an object through a “copula” that will function as a signified. Stoic semiology, which was the first to formulate the matrix of the sign, had already established this complicity between sign and sentence, making them proofs of each other.

     Modern philosophy recognizes that the right to represent the founding (2176) (2176) thesis of signification (sign and / or proposition) devolves upon the transcendental ego. But only since Freud have we been able to raise the question not of the origin of this thesis but rather of the process of its production. To brand the thetic as the foundation of metaphysics is to risk serving as an antechamber for metaphysics—unless, that is, we specify the way the thetic is produced. In our view, the Fr4eudian theory of the unconscious and its Lacanian development show, precisely, that thetic signification is a stage attained under certain precise conditions during the signifying process, and that it constitutes the subject without being reduced to this process precisely because it is the threshold of language. Such a standpoint constitutes neither a reduction of the subject to the transcendental ego, nor a denial [denegation] of the thetic phase that establishes signification.

12. GENOTEXT AND PHENOTEXT

In light of the distinction we have made between the semiotic chora and the symbolic, we may now examine the way texts function. What we shall call a genotext will include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic. The former includes drives, their disposition, and their division of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The latter encompasses the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of meaning involving categories: semantic and categorical fields. Designating the genotext in a text requires pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm), in the way semantic and categorical fields are set out in syntactic and logical features, or in the economy of mimesis (fantasy, the deferment of denotation, narrative, etc.). The genotext is thus the only transfer of drive energies that organizes a space in which the subject is not yet a split unity that will become blurred, giving rise to the symbolic. Instead, the space it organizes is one in which the subject will be generated as such by a process of facilitations and marks within the constraints of the biological and social structure.

     In other words even though it can be seen in language, the genotext is not linguistic (in the sense understood by structural or generative linguistics). It is, rather, a process, which tends to articulate structures that are ephemeral (unstable, threatened by drive charges, “quanta” rather than “marks”) and nonsignifying (devices that do not have a double articulation). It forms these structures out of: a ) instinctual dyads, b) the corporeal and ecological continuum, c) the social organism and family structures, which convey the constraints imposed by the mode of production, and d) matrices of enunciation, which give rise to discursive “genres” (according to literary (2177) (2177)history), “psychic structures” (according to psychiatry and psychoanalysis), or various arrangements of “the participants in the speech event” (in Jakobson’s notion of the linguistics of discourse). We may posit that the matrices of enunciation are the result of the repetition of drive charges (a) within biological, ecological, and socio-familial constraints (b and c), and the stabilization of their facilitation into stases whose surrounding structure accommodates and leaves its mark on symbolization.

     The genotext can thus be seen as language’s underlying foundation. We shall use the term phenotext to denote language that serves to communicate, which linguisticsdescribes in terms of “competence” and “performance.” The phenotext is constantly split up and divided, and is irreducible to the semiotic process that works through the genotext. The phenotext is a structure (which can be generated, in generative grammar’s sense); it obeys rules of communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee. The genotext, on the other hand, is a process; it moves through zones that have relative and transitory borders and constitutes a path that is not restricted to the two poles of univocal information between two full-fledged subjects. If these two terms—genotext and phenotext—could be translated into a metalanguage that would convey the difference between them, one might say that the genotext is a matter of topology, whereas the phenotext is one of algebra. This distinction may be illustrated by a particular signifying system: written and spoken Chinese, particularly classical Chinese. Writing represents-articulates the signifying process into specific networks or spaces; speech (which may correspond to that writing ) restores the diacritical elements necessary for an exchange of meaning between two subjects (temporality, aspect, specification of the protagonists, morphosemantic identifiers, and so forth.)

     The signifying process therefore includes both the genotext and the phenotext; indeed it could not do otherwise. For it is in language that all signifying operations are realized (even when linguistic material is not used), and it is on the basis of language that a theoretical approach may attempt to perceive that operation.

     In our view, the process we have just described accounts for the way all signifying practices are generated. But every signifying practice does not encompass the infinite totality of that process. Multiple constraints—which are ultimately sociopolitical—stop the signifying process at one or another of the theses that it traverses; they knot it and lock it into a given surface or structure; they discard practice under fixed, fragmentary, symbolic matrices, the tracings of various social constraints that obliterate the infinity of the process: the phenotext is what conveys these obliterations. Among the capitalist mode of production’s numerous signifying practices only certain literary texts of the avant-garde (Mallarme, Joyce) (2178)

(2178) manage to cover the infinity of the process, that is, reach the semiotic chora, which modifies linguistic structures. It must be emphaxized, however, that this total exploration of the signifying process generally leaves in abeyance the theses that re characteristic of the social organism, its structure, and their political transformation: the text has a tendency to dispense with political and social signifieds.

     It has only been in very recent years or in revolutionary periods that signifying practice has inscribed within the phenotext the plural, heterogeneous, and contradictory process of signification encompassing the flow of drives, material discontinuity, political struggle, and the pulverization of language.

     Lacan has delineated four types of discourse in our society: that of the hysteric, the academic, the master, and the analyst. Within the perspective just set forth, we shall posit a different classification, which, in certain respects, intersects these four Lacanian categories, and in others, adds to them. We shall distinguish between the following signifying practices: narrative, metalanguage, contemplation, and text-practice.