Linguistic Theory

Julia Kristeva's main interest is in discourse which confronts language and thinks it against itself. She focuses on the signifying process, trying to answer not only the question of exactly how language means but also what is in language that resists intelligibility and signification. She argues that structuralism, which focuses on the static phase of language and attempts to fix it and describe its details, sees it as homogeneous. Semiotics, on the other hand, which studies language as discourse articulated by a speaking subject, sees it as fundamentally heterogeneous. Influenced by Lacan and her study of psychoanalysis, she combined semiotics with analysis to create "semanalysis" which sees language as a "signifying process," at once a system and a transgression, coming from the drive-grounded basis of sound production and produced in the social space---the site of the speaking subject. "All functions which suppose a frontier (in this case the fissure created by the act of naming and the logico-linguistic synthesis which it sets off) and the transgression of that frontier (the sudden appearance of new signifying chains) are relevant to any account of signifying practice, where practice is taken as meaning acceptance of a symbolic law together with a trangression of that law for the purpose of renovating it" (The Kristeva 29).

For Kristeva, semiotics occupies a paradoxical position. It is a meta-language---a language which speaks about language and, therefore, homogenizes its object in its own discourse. But, at the same time, semiotics insists on the heterogeneity of language. The semiotician, thus, finds herself caught, forced to analyze her own discursive position while at the same time renewing her connection with the heterogeneous forces of language. These forces, in her view, make it a productive structure. ". . .thus poetic language making free with the language code; music, dancing, painting, reordering the psychic drives which have not been harnessed by the dominant symbolization systems. . .all seek out and make use of this heterogeneity and the ensuing fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (30). Semanalysis, then, is a way of thinking about language which has the potential to subvert established beliefs in authority and order.

"Word, Dialogue, and Novel" from her work entitled Desire in Language shows the particular influence of the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin on Kristeva's work. Actually, she was one of the first to introduce Bakhtin's theories to the West. Her insistence upon the importance of the speaking subject as the primary object for linguistic analysis is itself rooted in "dialogism" and her own active dialogue with Bakhtin's texts. According to Kristeva, Bakhtin saw the literary word as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than as a fixed point or meaning---as a dialogue among various texts: the writer's, the character's, and the historical cultural context. Each word (or text) is an intersection of words or texts where at least one other word or text can be read; the horizontal axis composed of the writer-character intersects the vertical axis composed of the text-context. Any text, therefore, is double---both "an absorption and a transformation of another." This reading of Bakhtin's dialogism led to her own idea of " intertextuality ," identifying writing as both subjectivity and communication---writing where "one reads the other." Poised between structuralism and post-structuralism, Kristeva was also interested in the way structuralism's "pure" categories break down in circumstances where language is ambivalent, subversive, and mocking as in the tradition of carnival which Bakhtin described in his work on Rabelais. In the space of carnival, the official text broke down when it confronted the text of carnival (and Rabelais' rabble-rousing). Great potential exists within carnival where prohibition (the monologic) and transgression (the dialogic) co-exist. Language both parodies and relevatizes itself, thereby repudiating its role in representation. Dialogism situates philosophical problems within language, language as a correlation of texts. It does not strive toward transcendence; it absorbs concepts within relationships, working toward harmony while implying the idea of RUPTURE as a way of transforming. In examining the "ambivalence" of spectacle and of lived experience itself, the potental for rupture between them becomes possible. Culture, thus, can forsake itself to go beyond itself. The novel and other ambivalent literary structures, then, provide the basis for new intellectual structures. Interest in the subversive effects of language grounded her later interest in the politics of marginality.