Word Outward

Medieval Perspectives on the Entry into Language

Corey J. Marvin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9781136742637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Using a combination of formalist and psychology-based approaches, this work examines the triple knowledge of subjectivity, body, and language in medieval imaginative literature.

CHAPTER 1

Entry into Language

Medieval Literature and the Poetics of Julia Kristeva

“It was at the threshold of a world such as this that I stood.”

—Augustine, Confessions

Broadly speaking, the work of Julia Kristeva accounts for the triple relation among material language, physical body, and a sense of selfhood.¹ Her central notion is that the body itself, an envelope of diverse and fluctuating drive-energy, provides a fundamental distinctiveness which underlies both a subjective sense of self and signifying systems based on difference.

SEMIOTIC CHORA

The body at its most concrete level is shot through with tumultuous surges of drive-energy. These surges, emerging from various “sources” and directed towards various “objects,” arise from within the materiality of the body itself. Although drives move organisms in several directions at once (hunger, sex, and blushing all qualify as drives), they can nevertheless be reduced, says Kristeva (following Freud), to two fundamental and contradictory compulsions, a “positive” drive of assimilation, gathering, and holding together; and a “negative” drive of destruction, dispersal, and dissolution. These two compulsions are in constant struggle and they make the interiority of the body a place of tumult and conflict.²

Nevertheless, this struggle is essentially rhythmic. As drive-charges contend with each other and with various biological and social constraints, they rise and fall in what can be described as great oceanic surges of ebb and flow. The rhythmicity is noted by Freud: “one group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey... it is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm.”³

These rhythmic surges wash over the interior of the body and up against their point of impact, the psyche. Here they articulate what Kristeva calls the semiotic chora. The chora is the most primitive level of ordering in the psyche: nothing more than a rhythm. Kristeva, in fact, calls it a “rhythmic space”; “a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated”; an “essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases” (Revolution 15, 40). Situated on the border between body and mind, the chora might be said to be the “turning point” at which carnal pulsations become available to the higher level order of consciousness, thought, and representation. The distinguishing characteristic of the chora is its ambivalence. It is at once essentially dichotomous— that is, comprised of “positive” and “negative” drives—and also “heterogeneous,” both biological and yet affected by various social and psychical “constraints.” Rhythmic and ambivalent, the chora is only provisional. It is not yet a “thing” that can attain a “position” in an open combinatorial system. No boundaries stable enough to allow the formation of enduring identity can exist in the chora. Yet in its oceanic rise and fall there is a fundamental distinctiveness that lends itself to the formation of a proto-symbolic space which Kristeva labels the “semiotic.”⁴

Within this distinctiveness there is as yet no possibility for subjectivity or signification. Both subjectivity and signification are products of established differential systems based on clear-cut separations among clearly separated units. For a subject to exist, an “I” must be differentiated from “others.” For signification to exist, syntactic and grammatical positions must be differentiated from other syntactic and grammatical positions (nouns from verbs, subjects from predicates, signifiers from signifieds, etc.). Because the chora is differential only in the most enigmatic way—an “ebb” and “flow” rather than a “this” and “that”—the systems permitting the elaboration of subjectivity and signification are as yet impossible. That is to say, the chora exists prior to models or paradigms which require “things” to be set over against other “things” in specifiable relationships. The whole vocabulary of things, each, other, is foreign to the chora because the chora is distinctive, not differential: “neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal and kinetic rhythm” (26).⁵ Nevertheless, the rhythmicity of the chora makes it possible to talk about signification and subjectivity in the process of taking shape: “the semiotic chora is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated, the place where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him” (28). The chora must be understood to precede the “positing” of both signification and subjectivity: “previous to an ego thinking within a proposition, no Meaning exists, but there do exist articulations heterogeneous to signification and the sign: the semiotic chora” (36).

Entry into language

Although prior to subjectivity and signification—and their sharp-edged differences—the chora’s distinctiveness is a crucial stage in their formation. The sense we have of ourselves as autonomous and coherent subjects opposed to equally autonomous and coherent objects is not an innate psychic capacity. We are not born, that is, able to tell “this” from “that”—including “us” from “others.” To newborn babies there is no “me.” Rather, the capacity to differentiate is gained only through a complex developmental process which ends with “entry” into language—or more precisely, entry into a logic of difference, the most powerful expression of which is language. For Kristeva, the ebb and flow of the chora acts as a threshold to this entry: “the theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read into this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which signifiance is constituted” (26). The body’s drive-energy, in its ceaseless processes of gathering and dispersal, contain an enigmatic difference which, upon entry into language, is shattered into the differential “this” and “that” of more sharp-edged systems.

This “entry into language” signifying the moment of a child’s coming-to-awareness of a logic of difference that permits the establishment of subjectivity and signification—and their correlatives, system, structure, and the social contract—is broadly conceived in relation to castration, the “cutting off” constitutive of the “Father’s” world of law, system, and language. In terms of this narrative, the most archaic state of self-development is a space of utter indistinguishability; senses and impulses come into the mind in an incessant flow; there are as yet no impressions of inside/outside, 1/Other, conscious/unconscious. Castration is the act that ruptures this space, introducing a logic of difference into what before had been only a space of non-difference. In her elaboration of this narrative, however, the concept of the chora allows Kristeva to posit a third, middle space between the two end-points of “castrated” and “not-castrated.” For Kristeva, what moves the child out of the space of non-difference is not the sudden cutting-off of castration but rather the internal pulsations of the body’s own drives forming the chora. The child is swayed into its first impressions (as yet only impressions) of difference. That is, for the suckling infant not yet aware of any discontinuity between its and its mother’s body, the breast cannot be elsewhere, yet it is sometimes here, sometimes there. When the child is hungry, the breast is sought; when sated, it is spit out. By means of these primitive, drive-based distinctions, the child gains its first dim awareness of difference.

These first inklings of otherness are powerfully connected with the mother, and Kristeva calls the ambivalent subjectivity associated with this phase the maternal space. The maternal space is the chora regarded backwards from the perspective of what will eventually become subjectivity. It is called the maternal space because the mother’s body is the prototype of the chora emerging into symbolic law: “the mother’s body is what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the chora” (27). To the child at this time, the mother’s body is an unstable and fluid “non-object”: not yet a “thing” understood to be different from the child but rather a “not-quite-thing” on the way to separation. Thus the child is “in the process of separating from this non-object so as to make that non-object One’ and posit himself as Other’: the mother’s body is the not-yet-one” (47, 241 n21). Consequently, stable selfhood is as yet only a promise in this stage, an ambivalent “me” continually constituted and washed away in flickering surges of drive-energy.

Castration, however, ruptures this immediacy of the maternal space; the Law of the Father intervenes in the mother/child dyad, bringing about their separation. At one fell swoop subjectivity and signification are accomplished. The child is separated and introduced into a logic of difference.⁶ Contrary to the oceanic flow of the semiotic, this new symbolic phase is structured by means of breaks or theses. Capable of perceiving “itself” now different from objects set over against it, the child (which only emerges as such in the aftermath of castration) realizes itself to be just one discrete thing among many. Not only does it recognize that there are other things out there besides itself (and there is, for the first time, an out there out there), but also that these other things are, in fact, other to each other as well as to it. The result is the pervasive—and dramatic—recognition of an entire brimming constellation of discrete identities (“things” of the world) clearly separated from one another and capable of attaining to positions in an open combinatorial system.

In coming to terms with the fragments of its now-shattered universe, the child adopts language. In fact, the events are inextricable and simultaneous. The semiotic motility characteristic of the chora emerges as a symbolic order, where it is given expression as well as subjected to the boundedness of separation and constraint. In castration, the “subject, in finding his identity in the symbolic, separates from his fusion with the mother... and transfers semiotic motility onto the symbolic order” (47). Signification in the symbolic phase, just like subjectivity, is structured by means of theses. The symbolic is what we commonly think of as the language system—a differential network. In order for signs to perform as such, they must be upheld by a general law of separation at all levels of functioning. In order for a sign to “work,” that is, it must be a different “thing” than its referent. Subjects must be different from predicates, “signifiers” from “signifieds,” this word from that word, nouns from verbs, etc. “All enunciation, whether of word or sentence, is thetic” (43). There is no signification that is not thetic—that is not, in other words, established in and through breaks that create discrete identities at the time they position them in a network of relations.⁷ Since language differentiates, divides, demarcates, it itself must be capable of differentiation, division, and demarcation. In this respect, there is only one signification: that constituted by castration and the thetic phase.

The symbolic thus represents the emergence of ruptures and boundaries within the rhythmic space of the semiotic chora. The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms, the semiotic realm of drives and their articulations and the symbolic realm of position and difference. As the chora emerges into language it becomes shattered, parceled out. But the breaks in signification that structure the symbolic do not cancel out the drive-based articulations of the chora: “once the break instituting the symbolic has been established what we have called the semiotic chora acquires a more precise status” (68). Drive-energy re-emerges in signifying practices as material and articulatory effects skirting the border between body and language.⁸ This return of semiotic functioning within the symbolic cannot be over emphasized. The drives and their articulations are not eliminated in the journey through the thetic phase, but re-appear—within the symbolic matrix—as musical and poetic effects on the threshold between body and signification.

Kristeva calls this aspect of language the semiotic, and its manifestation in language testifies to the archaic origin of language in the oceanic processes of the chora. Broadly considered, the semiotic emerges in the materiality of embodied language: in the accumulations and repetitions of sounds in alliteration, consonance, sibilants, assonance, rhyme, and other poetic effects; in the pulsations produced by accents, beats, breaks, and percussions of all kinds; and in intonational surges of volume, rhythm, tempo, timbre. But the semiotic is also evident in places where the clear-cut separations of the language system are infringed by articulation—in puns, for instance, where multiple meanings arise out of a single utterance. In this category are undecidabilities and intertextual ambiguities of all kinds, such as ellipses, puns, pronomial instabilities, even eyeskips in manuscript copying. All these affirm the presence of an embodied, drive-based distinctiveness running under a chain of symbolic differences. It is the nature of these articulatory devices to be “mobile”—that is, to bear in and out of language a sense of movement and motion, pressure and process. To the extent we talk about linguistic and poetic affect, we are talking about the semiotic.

The symbolic and semiotic are not mutually exclusive. They are two modalities of a single signifying process: “the text offers itself as the dialectic of two heterogeneous operations that are, reciprocally and inseparably, preconditions for the other” (66). Without the symbolic, the return of semiotic motility would be impossible, for every text, in order to hold together as a text, requires a completion, a structuring, a totalization. What the symbolic guarantees is the expression of language, its “sayableness”; “there can be no signifying practice without the thetic phase” (64). By the same token, no signifying practice would be possible without the semiotic, for every act of language takes place phenomenally, within a material “text” (whether by speech, writing, or gesture). Every instance of textual practice is thus a “twisted braid of affect and thought,” a “rhythm made intelligible by syntax” (30). Moreover, to the extent the semiotic is “segmented” (without, however, being “differentiated”) it already looks forward to a symbolic logic and thus cannot properly be said to oppose it: “the second,” says Kristeva, meaning the symbolic “includes part of the first”: “as a precondition of the symbolic, semiotic functioning is a fairly rudimentary combinatorial system, which will become more complex only after the break in the symbolic” (68).

Nevertheless, the semiotic and symbolic are distinct modalities of the signifying process and are heterogeneous to each other. As an articulatory motility in a realm of positions, the semiotic can be said to “infringe” the symbolic—that is, distort it, pluralize it, destabilize it: “the semiotic, which also precedes [the thetic phase), constantly tears it open” (62). The semiotic “destabilizes” the symbolic by loading into it the movement of skittering drive-energy refusing to remain in place. It tends to appear within it as musical and poetic distortions, disturbances, and deviations. Any time a clear boundary in the symbolic is transgressed or “sutured over” by an articulatory effect—in a pun, for instance, when two (or more) semantic differences are generated by a single articulation, or in rhyme, when the meanings of two words are brought forcefully together because of their similarity of sound—one can see the tension between symbolic and semiotic at work.

The return of the semiotic, however, must not be considered a “failure” of the symbolic. Because the semiotic returns, it does not mean the thetic break has not been posited...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Original Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Original Half Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Entry into Language: Medieval Literature and the Poetics of Julia Kristeva
• Chapter 2 Castration: Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and John of Garland’s Stella Maris
• Chapter 3 Mourning: Semiramis of MS Paris B.N. lat 8121A and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice
• Chapter 4 Ecstasy: the Wakefield Shepherd plays and Offering of the Magi
• Epilogue: Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index