Kristeva Reframed

Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts

Estelle Barrett

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857736949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

For Kristeva, in a world immersed in readymade images, art or aesthetic experience is a practice that constitutes both a subject (a sense of self) and an object that is able to transform meaning and consciousness. 'Kristeva Reframed' examines key ideas in Kristeva's work to show how they are most relevant to artists, and how they can be applied in interpreting artworks. With examples from the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the work of contemporary feminist painters, the photography of Bill Henson and the film and animation work of Van Sowerine, Estelle Barrett demonstrates how Kristeva can illuminate the relationships between artist and art object, between artists, artworks and audiences, and between art and knowledge. Through these relationships she explores what Kristeva's work reveals about the role and function of art in society and offers a smooth passage through Kristeva's ideas and her relevance to visual culture.

Chapter 1

Language as material process

Kristeva’s explanation of the relationship between language and the body is fundamental to understanding language as a material process and art as revolutionary practice. As will be demonstrated, her ideas, initially drawn from the analysis of literary practice, can be extended to visual language. Though ultimately irreducible to each other, these means of communication operate at least in part through socially agreed codes. This chapter will focus on Kristeva’s theory of language and her account of art as revolutionary practice that involves transgressing rules and codes of language and the prohibitions they articulate.

Language cannot be set apart from the speaking subject and/or the subject who hears or receives language. In other words, language can only have meaning insofar as it articulates with living beings, and hence with the material and biological processes that support the lives of such beings. It becomes clear, then, that there is something prior to language that attributes value and human valency to meaning and knowledge. In Western society, a world that is saturated with visual and verbal communication, Kristeva observes that there is a growing sense of meaninglessness, incidence of depression and absence of affirmation of social bonds. She views this crisis of subjectivity as an outcome of the way in which bureaucratic organisation depersonalises our everyday practices and interactions and how institutional discourses are increasingly removed from our lived experiences. In such a world, according to Kristeva, psychoanalysis and art are among the few means by which the symbolic world may be reconnected with the living body, our vital biological and psychic processes. Psychoanalytical theory provides the means for unravelling the complex relationship between body and mind and individual and society as a dynamic process of how we come to make meaning. Kristeva shows that as practice, psychoanalysis has some fundamental parallels with artistic practices. Both involve processes of revolution and renewal. The work of psychoanalysis and art is concerned with challenging institutional and other discourses that have become divorced from our vital feelings and therefore undermine our capacities for self-relation, relations with others and possibilities or motivations for agency. Initially, Kristeva looks to literature – creative textual practice – to explain how such practice involves reconnecting the symbolic and the semiotic dimensions of language. These key terms refer to what Kristeva has theorised as the heterogeneous dimension of language – that is to say, language as it signifies (the communicative function of language) and language as it is related to material or biological processes that are closely implicated in affect and emotion. In this chapter, I will explore how these and related concepts allow us to understand the revolution in Modernist art.

Central to Kristeva’s thought is the notion of the subject or self as a living and constantly evolving process. How does a feeling and thinking subject come to be? What underpins this most creative of all processes and how is this related to art or aesthetic experience? Something occurs or lies behind language and meaning that must be acknowledged if we are to arrive at an explanation. In her work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) Kristeva turns to the infant’s relationship with its mother prior to birth, and to its experience before language, in order show that the subject and language emerge from material processes; that material process is continuous with the life of the subject and has a dialogic relationship with language even after the child has separated from the mother and has developed the capacity for speech: the capacity to be a speaking subject.

The semiotic and the symbolic

The mother’s body is not a static container, but one that is experienced primarily as sound – voice rhythm, and prosody. This space or site of interactions and exchanges gives rise to what Kristeva calls the semiotic ‘chora’, which registers the first imprints of experience and is a rudimentary signal of language that is to follow. The chora is an articulation of bodily drives, energy charges and psychical marks which constitute a non-expressive totality, one that does not give way to form, but is known through its effects. The chora can be related to the dynamism of the body constantly in motion and perpetually seeking to maximise the capacities of the living organism. It is a complex of pulsations – intensities, tensions and release of tensions that occur through interactions with what lies beyond or outside the living system. Operations of the chora that precede the acquisition of language organise pre-verbal space according to logical categories that precede and transcend language. These operations or semiotic functions which are constituted through biological drives and energy discharges, initially oriented around the mother’s body, persist as an asymbolic modality that governs the connections between the body and the ‘other’ throughout the life of the subject. They articulate a continuum between the body and external objects and between the body and language (Kristeva 1984: 27). Since the body is necessarily implicated in our encounter with language, we may now understand the ‘semiotic’ as an alternative ‘code’ of language, a ‘bodily knowing’ that nonetheless implicates itself in relays of meaning that are manifested in social relations.

We can appreciate the effects of this non-discursive or pre-linguistic dimension by first considering interactions between the newly born infant and the mother. A mother’s smile or withdrawal of attention can be felt or apprehended by the infant without being able to be placed in linguistic categories or related to anything else. The baby’s response of crying or laughter sets up a series of interactions and effects both within the baby’s body and the child’s physical and social environment. New meanings and behaviours (practices) emerge through a combination of non-verbal events – the child’s physical responses and parental responses of nurturing which involve both linguistically or socially mediated behaviour (accepted mothering practices) and non-verbal and less mediated responses that might vary according to the pitch and intensity of the child’s crying. Let us take this explanation a step further and relate it to a child who has some command of language. Where the mother chooses to sing a lullaby to the child, the words of the song communicate shared social meaning: ‘Go to sleep little child’ constitutes the symbolic; the rhythm, tones and other auditory elements of the mother’s actual singing of the song, on the other hand, articulate the semiotic dimension. Now, imagine the mother reading the words of the song in a monotone instead of singing it with all the soothing modulations that would accompany her performance. This would be less likely to have any effect on the child. Alternatively, delivering the words as a loud and angry command would certainly have an effect. In this scenario the non-verbal dimension of the interaction – loudness and frequency of crying, tone and timbre of mother’s voice, for example – would articulate what Kristeva would term the ‘semiotic’. In the language of art, the semiotic emerges in more varied and complex forms as the result of the artist’s manipulation of rhetorical codes.

The semiotic is made up of articulatory or phonetic effects that shift the language system back towards the drive-governed basis of sound production. The choice and sequencing of words, repetition, particular combinations and sounds that operate independently of the communicative function of language also constitute the semiotic function, a function which has the capacity to multiply the possible meanings of an utterance or text. In visual language, the semiotic is made up of articulatory effects that shift the system back to the drive-governed basis of visual production. This functioning is related, for example, to sensations and affects evoked by colour, visual marks and formal elements that operate independently of figuration or iconicity.

What is predominantly at work here is the way in which drive or bodily impulses implicated in the performance of verbal and visual language result in variations and multiplicity of meanings that may be produced. The drives or impulses articulated by the semiotic always operate through and in language. In creative practice, elements of the genotext or semiotic disposition of language indicates a shift in the speaking subject and a capacity for play and pleasure that refuses total constraint by the symbolic law. The semiotic disposition establishes a relational functioning between the signifying code (the phenotext) and the fragmented or drive-ridden body of the speaking (and hearing/seeing) subject. This relational functioning supposes a notion of a ‘frontier’ and the transgression of a frontier. Practice can thus be understood as the acceptance of a symbolic law together with the transgression of that law for the purpose of renovating it (Kristeva 1986a: 29). Leon S. Roudiez suggests that the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic can be understood in terms of the texture of a piece of cloth interwoven from two different threads. Those that are spun by bodily drives and sensation relate to the semiotic disposition of language or what is also known as the ‘genotext’. Certain combinations of letters, particular sounds (think of alliteration and onomatopoeia in poetry) are also indicative of the genotext irrespective of the meanings of the words. Those elements of language that emerge from societal cultural constraints and grammatical and other rules articulate the symbolic disposition or what is referred to as the ‘phenotext’ (Roudiez 1984: 5). What makes language different to the static woven cloth is that language is fluid and constantly shifting as a result of individual, social and historical usage.

Two important points related to Kristeva’s work should be taken from this. The first is that for language to have any meaning or effect on us at all, it has to be spoken and/or ‘heard’ – it has to be put into process. Secondly, this putting-into-process of language must connect with our biological processes, affects and feelings in a vital way in order for language to take on particular meanings or to affect us. When the semiotic and the symbolic are insufficiently connected, language, communication, and hence social bonds, lose meaning and value. From this we can begin to understand how the subject and practice are crucial to Kristeva’s account of language as material process. Creative practice or ‘performance’ of language maintains the link between the semiotic and the symbolic, between language and our lived and situated experiences.

If the semiotic and the symbolic are two dimensions of language and subjectivity that need to be connected to make self-relation and relation with objects in the world and social others possible, does this imply any possibility of the two becoming disconnected? This is not possible in an absolute sense, since the notion of the materiality of language presupposes a living (material-biological) subject of language. Kristeva’s thinking, however, allows us to posit the idea of a tendential severance between the two. In contemporary life much of the language we encounter, the techno-speak and bureaucratised language of institutions has increasingly become abstracted from the particularities of lived experiences, drained of emotional valency. Kristeva contends that there is a tendency towards a further separation of the semiotic and the symbolic in conditions where modern institutions and discourse fail to provide everyday social and symbolic sites for practices that maintain an adequate connection of the semiotic and symbolic (Beardsworth 2004: 14).

The hypothetical positing of the isolation of the semiotic is necessary in order to explain material processes that are prior to language. It allows Kristeva to elaborate how the semiotic chora persists as motility or negativity that has the capacity to threaten the symbolic and subvert established rules and meanings. Although the semiotic chora is pre-linguistic, its effects can only be found at the symbolic level as a heterogeneous contradiction of the symbolic. Its workings are an indication of the instability of subjectivity and the way in which the body as material process operates through and in language as a subversive and revolutionary force.

What does this have to do with art? In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva draws on the work of a number of French symbolist poets, including Mallarme and Beaudelaire, in order to demonstrate why and how the semiotic dimension of language operates as the basis for the critique and renewal of discourse. Kristeva’s account of this in relation to poetry and literature can be extended to the visual arts as will be seen in a consideration of Modernist painting. But before we proceed to this, it is necessary to understand, in more specific detail, the material processes that underpin creative textual practice.

Negativity, rejection and signifiance

Kristeva’s analysis of particular types of literature reveals a signifying process that results from a crisis of social structures and capitalist discourses, and what she refers to as their ideological, coercive and necrophilic manifestations (Kristeva 1984: 15). Art as practice involves a confrontation between and across unconscious subjective forces and social relations, a kind of productive violence that shatters established discourse and in doing so changes the status of the subject, its relation to the body, to others and to objects (Kristeva 1982: 15). Art is different to psychoanalytic practice because the addressor and addressee are not just part of a familial or social structure, but of language itself. Kristeva contends, however, that a psychoanalytic understanding of the drives provides a means of explaining the negativity that is repressed by bourgeois society and its discourses.

‘Negativity’ can be understood as the processes of semiotic motility and charges, or ‘death-drive’, a force that impels movement towards an undifferentiated or archaic phase that precedes the subject’s entry into language. Kristeva draws on Sigmund Freud to explain negativity as a drive or urge, inherent in organic life, to return to earlier states that the living entity has had to abandon under pressure from eternal forces (Kristeva 1984: 160). This relates to Freud’s account of the subject’s entry into language, which produces the split subject made up of the unconscious – related to the id – that is governed by bodily drives, and the ego, which follows the reality principle in order to allow the subject to operate as a social being. In the human realm, institutional discourses and their disciplinary regimes may be counted among those external or repressive forces that impel negativity. Negativity underpins the material dimension of our encounter with language in creative practice. It operates dynamically and dialectically between the biological and social order, replacing the fixed categories and oppositions of language to produce what Kristeva refers to as an ‘infinitesimal differentiation within the phenotext’ (Kristeva 1984: 126). Kristeva uses the term ‘signifiance’ to distinguish this signifying process from signification, the conventional way in which words signify meaning. Signifiance is an alternative signifying process that is the result of the heterogeneous workings of language which articulates both symbolic and semiotic dispositions. This double articulation of language allows a text or artwork to signify what the communicative or representational function of the work cannot say (Kristeva 1980: 18). We have already touched on this in relation to poetry. In terms of visual art, consider for example the pointillist use of colour in the work of Georges Seurat. The impact of colour used in this way operates as a signifying process that transcends the representational content of a scene. Seurat drew on science to investigate the nature of sight and perception. He wanted to construct a theory or grammar of seeing, and his approach was therefore a departure from the spontaneity of the earlier Impressionists. Despite, the strong conceptual and positivistic basis of Seurat’s approach to painting, his practice nevertheless reveals the heterogeneous dimension of visual language and an alternative stratum of ‘reality’ operating beneath representation. His images emerge from harmonies of colour and light constructed by myriad tiny dots. Robert Hughes suggests that Seurat wanted to demonstrate the deeper transactions that occur between eye and mind – between biological process and thought – that occur in the construction of visuality or ways of seeing. Seurat’s work La Grande Jatte demonstrates these infinite divisions, infinite relationships, and the artist’s struggle to ‘render them visible – even at the expense of “real life”’ (Hughes 1980: 118).

Negativity is closely related to, and cannot be considered apart from, the related concept ‘rejection’. Kristeva uses the term ‘expenditure’ to explain how the operations of negativity and rejection work in unison to produce the movement of material contradictions that generate the semiotic function. If negativity is a motility or dynamism that seeks an undifferentiated state, rejection is what repeatedly interrupts this movement. Rejection moves between the two poles of drives and consciousness. Think of negativity and rejection working together as a kind of pre-linguistic pulse that sets up a constant rhythmic responsiveness to language and to other objects in the world. Rejection constitutes the shattering of unity or unified meaning. Kristeva describes it as a pre-logical and alogical function which cannot be thought of outside the unity of language, because its very function presupposes some kind of unity. It has a relation or connection to language, but only in terms of what Kristeva refers to as ‘scission’, or a separation that opens up an asignifying crucible where meaning is ruptured, superseded and exceeded (Kristeva 1984: 147). ‘Expenditure’,‘negativity’ and ‘rejection’ are related to ‘jouissance’, the erotic and psychic pleasure accompanying the movement of material contradictions that generate the semiotic functioning of language, a functioning that constitutes the excess or supplementary meanings that line or are enfolded in the signifier of the poetic text. Simply put, the jouissance of negativity-rejection can be related to the different feelings that the sound and combination of words evoke in different people. We can also understand jouissance in terms of what Roland Barthes has referred to as ‘the pleasure of the text’, a pleasure that comes from a movement away from the everyday and mundane meanings of language (Barthes 1975). In visual works, this can be related to colour, line, form and various patterns that operate beyond their communicative function. In her essay ‘Giotto’s Joy’, Kristeva’s analysis of Giotto’s use of blue in the frescoes that line the ceiling and walls of the Arena Chapel in Padua and those that can be found in Assisi and Florence explains how jouissance is related to transgression (Kristeva 1980: 231–2). In these works colour disrupts and exceeds the ideological dimensions of visual narrative and breaks with the chromatic codes operating in Christian iconography of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The decentring influence of Giotto’s blue carries instinctual drive into the unity of the symbolic, pluralising meaning.

Rejection is ambiguous in that it is a precondition for the emergence of new meanings and renewed or recuperated subjectivity. We can see from this how the perpetual rhythms and workings of material and biological processes that maintain the living organism – negativity-rejection...negativity-rejection – are continuous with processes that produce the subject, language and meaning. What is important to note at this stage is that aesthetic experience in both the production and reception of the artwork inscribes negativity and rejection by bringing the symbolic function into an encounter with the semiotic. This results in an unsettling and multiplying of meaning (signifiance) which puts the subject in process-on-trial. In this state, established meanings become uncertain and a struggle is set up between the conscious and unconscious forces (Kristeva 1984: 22). The ongoing renewal and production of the subject or subjectivity underpins the ongoing renewal and production of language and meaning.

Signifiance, as signifying practice, is heterogeneous because it indicates the operation of biological urges as both socially controlled, directed and organised and – at the same time – as able to produce an excess of meanings that challenge those contained in institutional or represent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Language as material process
• Chapter 2. Interpretation as practice
• Chapter 3. Art and affect
• Chapter 4. Abjection, art and audience
• Chapter 5. Research as practice: a performative paradigm
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Glossary