Julia Kristeva (1)

1. Julia Kristeva (1) Her Views of the Semiotics

2. 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 )

3. 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.

4. 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)

5. 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)

6. 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 )

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

8. “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

9. Semiotics as the Making of Models • What’s 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

10. Some Terms: 1) formalization & the Axiomatic • The characteristics of formalization in mathematics • 1. The axiomatic method: an existing set of proven axioms (公理) 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)

11. Semiotics and Production(three kinds of work) • Allied semiotics to Marx’s strategy –a classical semiotics of work (which presents an economy or society –signified—as a permutation of elements—signifier 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’

12. Some Terms: 2) gramma and grammé • And Derrida’s 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 is—as 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

13. Semiotics and Production(three kinds of work 2) • 3) dream-work (manifest content—hieroglyph + 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.

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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)