ree on kristeva

8/7/2019 Ree on Kristeva

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Revolutionary Archeology: JuliaKristeva and the Utopia of the Text

The main thing about the work ofJulia Kristeva-

for me at least-

is

that it is open: open to experience, open to modification, open to

question, and often, I'm afraid, open to serious criticism as well. But

at least

and this is one of the reasons she remains an inspiration formany of us

-

it always stays open. In fact you might say that it keepsopening itself up, by running against its own sharply enunciated

principles. For instance, in spite of Kristeva's frequent invocations oflinguistic instability, she has often conducted her polemics by mere

labelling: semantic indeterminacy may be everywhere, but words like

'idealism', 'metaphysics', or 'humanism' have been treated as if theywere absolutely unequivocal terms, designating, with disgust, abso-

lutely unambiguous phenomena. This inconsistent habit of dismissive

name-calling is closely connected with the ways in which, despite heravowed hostility to Hegelian historicism (idealist, metaphysical, hu-

manist), Kristeva has repeatedly resorted to a blatantly historicistrhetoric ofher own, frequently distorting the historical record in order

to make out that arguments which she rejects are ridiculously out-of-date, while her own positions, by contrast, are yoked with everythingup-and-coming.

Kristeva cannot seriously believe that these are valid theoretical

procedures, of course. She cannot suppose that positions can be

captured by labels, or that each position belongs unilaterally to one

epoch. She cannot think that denunciation is better than dialogue. Shecannot imagine that punting on the doctrines of the future is an

adequate substitute for critical evaluation of those of the past. But shedoes it all the same. She did it, for example, in Le langage, cet inconnu

-

which appeared in 1969, offering a universal illustrated history of

language and linguistics, aimed at a popular market. Its burden was thatthe time was up for classical or structural linguistics, which must now

make way for 'a new science, semiotics', which 'impregnates all the

human sciences: anthropology, psychoanalysis, theory of art, etc'.Philosophy was just now becoming 'linguistic or logical', she said;psychoanalysis had recently located 'the real objects of its investigation'in language; while literature was in the process of transforming itselfinto an 'implicit research into the rules of literary language', and



Revolutionary Archeology 259

painting was being 'pulverized' to reveal 'components and laws' thathad previously been hidden.1

The book is vehement in its caricatural condemnation of such old

modes as phenomenology, structuralism, and generative grammar.Chomsky, for instance, had based all his analyses on a rotten andold-fashioned 'ideological foundation'. They were merely a variation

on an 'ancient' and 'obsolete' conception of language, and in addition

they were 'nothing but the apogee ofpositivism, since he has acknow-

ledged Descartes as his father'. What, after all, could Chomskyanlinguistics 'mean today after Marx and Freud?'2

This was not really such a difficult question for a Chomskyan to

answer, though. Marxist, Freudian and Chomskyan inquiries are not

easily brought to bear on each other, and each has ambiguities of its

own. And if it were really a question ofpriority-

ofwhich came 'after'which

-

then it would manifestly make more sense to reverse the

question, and ask: what could Marxism and Freudianism mean, after

Chomsky?And one may go on to wonder how far Marx and Freud really are

the reigning authorities of Le langage, cet inconnu. It is clear that the one

thing they agreed in was their hostility to the kind ofnegative thinkingor utopianism associated emblematically with Rousseau and Plato: the

projection, into the past or the future or both, or into an underworldor an overworld or both, of an image of things as they are not, but

might be; or of things as they essentially are, but do not appear: at anyrate of a timeless truth that can never be fully expressed as a historical

phenomenon. And that is the main inconsistency of Le langage, cet

inconnu: the message it offered its readership was that semiotics uncov-

ers a creative but elusive force that civilization seeks to repress. Despiteits surface up-to-datism, therefore, the book has the courage of some

convictions that are older than Marx and Freud: it is filled with a

boisterous faith in the negative that would have been outrageous to

them both. Kristeva's accusation against Chomsky returns against her:she herselfwas reviving an archaic theme, and the stubborn persistenceof archaic themes is, after all, what the book is all about. The semiotics

of Le langage, cet inconnu did not really belong 'after Marx and Freud'.

And perhaps one could add: so much the better.Le langage, cet inconnu was originally published under a pseudonym.

Nevertheless, it was republished under Kristeva's own name in 1981,which authorizes us to regard it as a proper part of the Kristevan

corpus. What is more, the book is cited, still under its pseudonym, atthe beginning of La revolution du langage poetique? La revolution was



260 Paragraph

published in 1974, and is surely by far the most comprehensive and

worked-through of Kristeva's works: everything she wrote before led

up to it, and everything she wrote later leads back, so that nothing willbe properly understood apart from it.

But La revolution du langage poetique was marked by the same

astonishingly incautious historicist rhetoric and dismissive name-call-

ing as Le langage, cet inconnu, though it invoked the additional authori-ties of Lenin, Mao and 'dialectical materialism', which had been leftunmentioned in the more commercial book of five years before. 'A

form of discourse, together with the subject that has supported it for2000 years, are on the point of breaking up', as she says in her

peroration; the birth ofsemiotics signalled the end of a cycle in which

'the transition from feudalism to capitalism is only a passing moment'.4But behind this rhetoric of revolutionary crisis there is the same

archaic negative thinking as before, in which a free and unconstrainedworld (the chora and the semiotic) is conjured up as a reproach and a

threat to the forces ofcivilization and everyday life that jealously policeand oppress it ('the social' and the 'symbolic').5Of course everyone knows that Kristeva is not meant to be read like

that. Such dichotomous thinking is exactly what she is against.All this

pre-Freudian and pre-Marxist utopianism is supposed to have beenleft far behind. Everyone knows that the reader who imagines thecreative prelinguistic pre-Oedipal and pre-identitarian world as a kind

of tropical rain forest of the mind, under threat from the slash and burnof linguistic syntax and logic, is thinking in ways that are expresslyforbidden, and sliding back into the oppressive 'binarism' from whichsemiotics is supposed to have broken free.

Clearly, the relationship between the pre-linguistic and the linguisticis not meant to be understood on the model of an original meaningand a subsequent deformed expression; and Kristeva signals the pointby using the language of'textuality' instead of that of'signification',and using it on both sides of the divide between the semiotic and the

symbolic. La revolution du langage poetique is full of the word 'text',together with related coinages such as intertextuality and, especially,pheno-text and geno-text, corresponding to symbolic and semiotic

processes respectively.6But what exactly is achieved by this wide deployment of the term

'text'? Kristeva stated on several occasions that the term 'text' means

the same as 'signifying practice' ('pratique signiftante'), and that 'intertex-

tuality' is to be understood as another word, or a successor word, for

'intersubjectivity'.7 But in that case, one may wonder what is achieved




by putting the point in terms of textuality: would it not have beenmore straightforward to have spoken of inter-signifiance,pheno-signifianceand geno-signifiance? Why should Kristeva want to associate herselfwith

all the dreary universitarian and clerical connotations borne by therather ugly word 'text', in French as much as in English, instead of themuch more flexible, defiant and anarchic ones of signifiance?

Clearly one attraction of the word 'text' is the way it conveys an ideaof a tissue made up ofmany threads: to think of signification in terms

of textuality is to be attentive to the ways in which meanings are alwaysunsaturated, always capable ofabsorbing more interpretations. It is also

characteristic of a 'text', according to Kristeva, that it cannot beenclosed in a chronological period: even though it is 'of its time'

-

she

goes so far as to say that it 'represents' it

it is also always both too

early and too late.8 Again, she explains that she has defined her units

of semiotic analysis as 'texts'in order to keep her distance from its two

terminological neighbours, 'discourse' and 'art'.9 Discourse and art

suggest delimitable units of meaning controlled by a commandingsubjectivity, whereas 'texts' will always waltz away from any attempt to

nail them down.Another reason why the word 'text' resonates through La revolution

du langage poetique was that it eased the otherwise somewhat riskypassage between the exposition of a general semiotics in the first partof the three-part book, and the analyses of works by Mallarme andLautreamont in the second. One might say that the whole point of thebook was to argue that subjectivity itself ought to be analysed in thesame painstaking way that the works ofMallarme and Lautreamont

-

which are texts in the most conventional and uncontentious sense ofthe word

demand to be read. Extending the language of textualityto the field of pre-linguistic subjectivity was simply an astute and

strategic way ofmaking the point.But in 1974, when Revolution appeared, there was another reason for

harping on the word textuality: it indicated an alliance with theestablished tradition of the journal Tel Quel. Kristeva referred, forexample, to Derrida's De la grammatologie, published in 1967, whose

concept of ecriture, she said, captured at least 'one essential aspect' ofthe chora as a 'rhythmic but non-expressive totality', and of thesemiotic as a process which is 'logically and chronologically prior to

the institution of the symbolic and its subject'.10 She also appealed to

the 'Programme' published by Philippe Sollers, also in 1967, which

spoke of the foundational function of'the theory of textual writing's



262 Paragraph

history', where 'textual writing' meant a kind of writing that was

unconfmable and disruptive, and therefore 'irreducible to the classical

(representational) concept of "written text" V1It always puts the reader in a difficult position, to be confrontedwith

a key term, but warned off interpreting it in a traditional, classical,vulgar, everyday or naive sense. Whenever you think you have cottoned

on, it may always turn out that you have slipped back into the mire ofclassical familiarity. But the strange thing is that when Tel Quel talkedabout textuality (in a special sense), the everyday sense was alwaysdangerously close: indeed the textuality ofwhich they spoke was, forthe most part, indistinguishable from that which formed the object ofacademic routines of literary explication, namely portions ofwriting,embodied as visible marks on the surface of a page.

Textuality, understood in this deceptively non-traditional and per-

haps surreptitiously traditional sense, was definitely in the air at Tel

Quel; and the person who had done most to put it there was RolandBarthes. 'I know the word is fashionable', he said in 1971, adding: 'Iam myself often led to use it'.12 He suggested that we live in the epochof Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism, and that this meant that,in literature, a kind of'Einsteinian science'was required to help us cope

with the 'relativization of the relations ofwriter, reader and observer(critic)'. Tradition must therefore be set aside: 'over against the tradi-tional notion of the work [oeuvre], for long

-

and still-

conceived in

a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement of a new

object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories'.And 'that object', Barthes concluded, 'is the Text'PIn some ways this idea of a relativistic approach to interpretation is to

be applauded, however specious and inaccurate Barthes's appeals to the

authority of natural science; but the way Barthes promoted it was

tendentious, to say the least. He tried to make it sound challenginglyup-to-date, and even if he could pass off Einstein, Marx and Freud as

emblematic young contemporaries, the key proposition-

that authorsand readers are never masters of the processes in which they are engaged

-

had been worked over endlessly inside the traditions that Barthes was

ungratefully trying to put in the shade: it was a commonplace ofGerman

romanticism, it is one of the main points behind Saussure's insistence that

a sign cannot function on its own, but only as part of a system; itsimplications had been deepened in Heideggerian hermeneutics andSartrian existentialism. It is, in other words, a position with a longpedigree; and it is dismaying to see these traditions being dismissedwitha curt label, when really they are those on which Tel Quel was drawing.




Barthes dramatized his struggle for the supposedly anti-traditional

conception of textuality by contrasting textuality with a supposeddiametrical opposite, namely vocality As he explained in 1968, in an

article on Japanese puppet theatre, textuality is essentially a rejectionof 'modernity', 'modern society' and 'the West', all of which were

compromised by their commitment to the classic dualisms ofanimateand inanimate, inner and outer, and their captivation by its 'stickyorganicism' and 'illusion of totality'. All of these bad things, Barthes

thought, stemmed from an unhealthy obsessionwith the Voice. Tradi-tional Japanese puppetry, according to his freewheeling orientalism,demonstrated a different set of priorities, showing that

the voice is what is really at stake in modernity, the voice as specific substance of

language, everywhere triumphantly pushed forward.Modern society (as has been

repeated often enough) believes itself to be ushering in a civilization of the image,but what it actually establishes overall, particularly in its leisure activities which

are massively spoken, is a civilization of speech.14

Of course, Barthes is right to be interested in the vast differences itmakes whether

linguistictransactions are

spokenor written, or

whether they are handwritten or printed.Written forms can make use

of layout and, especially in print, they can be integrated with non-lin-guistic representations like maps and diagrams, and they are therefore

uniquely adapted to the development ofmathematics, logic, geography,lexicography, and systematic scientific thinking in general. The com-

parison ofspeech and writing is an important historical topic therefore;and historians like Clanchy, Chaytor, Eisenstein, Chartier, and

McLuhan, or literary historians and anthropologists like Milman Parry,Walter Ong and Jack Goody have been investigating them for quitesome time.15But these empirical investigations cannot be quite what Barthes had

in mind. They do not contain revelations about the nature of languageitself: they concern, rather, the social implications ofdifferent linguistictechniques and technologies. They leave untouched the fundamentaltruth that the objects of linguistic perception are essentially linguistic:that when you understand a language, what you see or hear are words

and sentences of the language, not visible shapes or audible sounds.Linguistic perception abstracts from empirical forms, and it is onlywhen you cannot understand it that you start perceiving language as

either spoken sound orwritten shape. When you have learnt somethingthrough words, you often enough won't remember whether you read



264 Paragraph

it or heard it, or how it was printed, or in what accent it was told; andit makes no difference anyway. If you are shocked or elated by a pieceof news, it will be the same shock or elation either way: there is no

difference between a spoken and a written shock.

I know that many people think otherwise. They have sought to makethe contrast between writing and the voice philosophically resonant

by connecting it with doctrines (very traditional doctrines) about thedifferent senses, conceived as so many 'channels'or 'conduits'by whichinformation comes into our minds from the external world. On that

model, one can try to explain the contrast between speech and writingby contrasting the auditory with the optical route, and start describingfor instance how hearing is an incorporative sense, since sounds must

physically enter your body in order to be perceived, whereas reading,being based in images addressed to the eye, is something on which one

can take, both literally and metaphorically, a distant perspective.There is a lot wrong with this argument, though. For a start, no

theory ofperception is tenable which regards the perceiver as collating'information'from different sources (one for each of the supposed 'five

senses') in order to build up a picture of an external world: it is onlyifwe already have a sense ofourselves as inhabiting a world containingperceptible objects that we can construe our experience at all. And

secondly, the relation of writing systems to spoken languages is not

essentially a matter of making them visible. The difference between

listening to someone tell a story and reading it silently to oneself is

nothing like the difference between hearing rain pattering on the roofand seeing it. A writing system is essentially an analytic notation for a

spoken language: there is no essential reason why it should be visible.

Touchable is just as good, though not so common, and the elementsofspelling, after all, are normally learned by chanting the alphabet and

spelling out words in speech, not by simply writing them down. And

sign-language, as opposed to finger-spelling, is a purely visual means

of communication, but it has nothing in common with writing: it is a

primary language, not a notation.

Despite these rather elementary facts, there has been a whole area

of cultural theory that has attempted to reduce the difference between

writing and speech to that between the sense of sight and the sense ofhearing. Martin Jay's recent book Downcast Eyes, though not particu-larly concerned with language, goes so far as to say that differentnational traditions 'privilege', as he puts it, different sensory modes: theGermans are utterly absorbed in the ear; whereas the French, formany




centuries in thrall to vision, have spent the twentieth century'denigrating'it. 'German thinkers have tended to privilege aural over

visual experience', he says, 'as indicated by their tendency to draw on

poetry and music rather than painting'.15Jay goes on to assume that the difference between auditory andvisual experience is the same, essentially, as that between space and

time-

the eye, it is assumed, gives us space, whilst the ear gives us time.

It should have been obvious that this is a mistake, though: time is a

form of visual as much as of auditory experience (you can see thingschange as well as hear them) and auditory experience has spatial formas well as temporal. The blind do not lack a sense ofspace, and the deaf

still have asense

of time.If we

must analyseour

experience interms

of the several senses, then our senses all equally provide us with waysofperceiving the same spatio-temporal world. Still, for those who want

to make a large philosophical issue of the difference between writingand speech, the temptation to link it to the themes of space and timeis seemingly irresistible. Spoken language consists ofsequences ofsigns,after all, so it may seem tempting to connect it directly with the passageof time, while writing can be aligned with the extension of space.

These connectionsturn out to

be extremely troubling for MartinJay's description of twentieth-century French thought as a 'denigrationof vision'. The inflation of textuality, especially in the milieu of Tel

Quel, looks more like a turn towards space and vision, not away fromthem. It is not surprising, therefore, that Jay gets into difficulty in his

chapter on 'Phallogocularcentrism'. Here he notes, but does not

critically discuss, the idea that there is something essentially visualabout the passage through the Oedipus complex (an idea with some-

what implausible implications for the psychic formation of those bornblind), but instead of entering into theories of sexual difference, hecomes back, fatally, to the authority ofDerrida. Derrida reacted againstphenomenology,Jay says, because of its thralldom to 'visual presence';but then again, Jay claims, he also rejected its 'faith in the primacy ofthe voice over writing'. Derrida, according to Jay, is 'unhappy withocular immediacy', but he is also, to Jay's evident consternation, 'noless critical of similar effects produced by other senses'. Poor Derrida,itseems,

isunable

to

make up his mindon

the elementary questionofwhich is more harmful: the all-seeing eye or the sympathetic ear.17

But before getting worried about Derrida's supposed indecisiveness,it is perhaps worth recalling that the argument of Grammatology was

not that we stand in need of a science ofwriting, but, on the contrary,



266 Paragraph

that the whole idea ofsuch a science is a complete absurdity. The bookwas an exposition of the impossibility of any science of language,whether written or spoken, visual or auditory, spatial or temporal. But,as Derrida remarked in his 1992 lecture 'Pour l'amour de Lacan', it

was sometimes subject to misunderstanding, and one of the chiefamongst the many victims of 'ce grave et tenace malentendu was Lacan

and his circle, and therefore the milieu of Tel Quel as a whole.18 Derrida

wearily explains that ideas like trace, gramme and differance were never

'graphic rather than phonematic, never spatial rather than temporal',and then he has some fun at the expense of those who thought theywere doing something clever by 'this sudden substitution of the

graphematic for the phonematic'. (One thinks ofall those anglophone

journals which gave themselves pompous titles like Glyph, Diacritics,or Paragraph as a mark of their loyalty to this misconception.) 'Thishabit of substituting writing for speech around 1970 deserves a

separate history of its own', Derrida says, recalling Francis Pongepretending to revise his works by substituting 'ecriture' for 'parole' inorder to escape the charge ofphonocentrism, and describing how theunfortunate Maurice Blanchot actually did it.19But to get back finally to Julia Kristeva: her early work undoubtedly

went along with the excessive metaphorization of 'writing' (or 'in-scription') that went with Tel Quel's devotion to an idea of'textuality'conceived as the opposite of voice or speech.20 In 1966 and 1967, for

instance, she flirted with the idea that textuality was in some ways a

victim of Western bourgeois power. Despite the overwhelming evi-

dence of the prestige accorded to written forms within Western

civilization, she claimed that the 'entire history of the novel' involveda 'devalorization ofwriting', that the trouble with bourgeois novelists

was that they were in love with the 'phonetic' as opposed to the'scriptural',with 'utterance'as opposed to 'text'. The 'realist'novel, sheclaimed, was an expression of' the p/zoneric consciousness'which

'fromthe Renaissance to our time'

had been submerged in an 'ideology ofvalorization of the work [ceuvre] (as phonetic, discursive) to thedetriment ofwriting (textual productivity)'.21But these claims for textuality made no difference to the progress

of her work. Kristeva's analysis of signifying practices in terms of

geno-text and pheno-text in La revolution du langage poetique includespersuasive descriptions of the pressure exerted by vocal effects withinwritten discourse, especially in the form of'rhythmic' patterns, rootedin 'semiotic details ofdifferences ofsound', that belong to pre-linguis-tic levels of language.22 The outstanding essay on 'Rhythmic Con-




straints', published two years later, traces these effects back to patternsof pre-linguistic experience

developing either innately or in thechild's relation to its 'ambient microsociety', especially the mother

and tries to show how these patterns are re-activated and re-visited inpoetic uses of language.23That idea of 'adult' language as marked by patterns

-

the dispositifssemiotiques

that express conflicts between linguistic constraints and

prelinguistic ones is, I believe, the most fruitful of all Kristeva's specifictheoretical proposals. Or perhaps I should say: the most potentiallyfruitful. For it has itself been severely constrained by the rhetoric of

textuality and revolution which have crowded round it both in its

presentation and in its reception. In retrospect it is clear that Kristeva'sattention to infantile vocality was incompatible with Tel Quel's foolishdream of a science ofwriting

-

of writing as against speech, of vision

against audition, and ofspace against time. It was also quite out ofkeepingwith the rhetoric ofradical novelty inwhich Tel Quel was always involved.Its achievement was not so much that it came 'after Marx and Freud'

(which it presumably would have done willy nilly) as that it takes

possession of older traditions, ofRousseau, Augustine and Plato: revolu-

tionary traditions, not in the sense ofproposing an absolute escape intothe future, but of evoking a realm that is more archaic than the obviousand eye-catching cycles of history, past, present or future. What distin-

guishes it, in short, is not its novelty

which after all is a virtue that soon

fades

but its utopianism: a virtue that may well endure.

That, it seems to me, is the real meaning of those ways in which

as

I said too bluntly at the beginning-

Kristeva's work is strikingly and

obviously open to question: its urgent sense of the need to break with

tradition, and its willingness to resort to caricature and abuse in order tomake 'traditional' concepts seem unequivocally absurd. These features are

connected, I think,with another disconcerting feature ofher work, takenas a whole: that positions which are affirmed at one point as if they were

quite beyond challenge, are abandoned shortly after without notice,without apology, and without apparent regret

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one example being herattitudes to vocality and another, her Maoism. She never goes back, itseems, and never says sorry. I have always been struck by a phrase she used

in 1992, to redeem her apocalypticism of twenty years before: 'It wasan

archeology', she said. 'An archeology in search ofUtopia'.241 recommendthat as a heading for reading her works as a whole.

JONATHAN REE

Middlesex University




18 'Of Grammatology was the title of an article and a book which had appeared a

few years earlier and which

this was one of the numerous misunderstand-

ings and misrecognitions of Lacan and so many others

never proposed a

positivescience or

discipline called "grammatology", buton

the contrarywent to great lengths to show the impossibility, the essential absurdity of anyscience or philosophy bearing such a name. This book which dealt with

grammatology was everything but a grammatology' (Jacques Derrida, 'Pourl'amour de Lacan', in Resistances (Paris, Galilee, 1996), p. 71. My translation).

19 'This habit ofsubstituting writing for speech around 1970 deserves a separatehistory of its own and was not confined to Lacan. Ponge laughingly said to

me one day that he was re-reading his texts to see whether he hadn't givenin too much to phonocentrism and whether in certain places he couldn't

replace speech by writing. Roger Laporte drew up a list, which I found as

penetrating as it was merciless, of all the instances in which our friendMaurice Blanchot, when republishing around the same time a collection ofold texts, simply replaced speech with writing.' ('Pour l'amour de Lacan',p. 80. My translation).

20 Perhaps she also misinterpreted Derrida s Grammatology in the ways ofwhichhe now complains. See La revolution du langagepoetique,pp. 128-33; Revolution,pp. 140-6.

21 See Julia Kristeva, 'The Bounded Text' (19667), first published in Semiotike

(Paris, Seuil, 1969). Translated in Desire in Language, edited by Leon S. Roudiez

(Columbia University Press, 1980); see pp. 589. See also 'Word, Dialogue,and Novel' (1966), ibid., p. 89.

22 La revolution, pp. 21213, 2245, etc.; not included in Revolution.23 Julia Kristeva, 'Contraintes rythmiques et langage poetique' (1974), in Poly-

logue (Paris, Seuil, 1977), pp. 43766.

24 Julia Kristeva, interviewed byJonathan Ree for Wall to Wall TV, 20 February1992; see partial transcript in Talking Liberties (London, Channel 4 Television,

1992), p.19.

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