INTERTEXTUALITY Graham ALLEN Origins: Saussure, Bakhtin, Kristeva

Tel Quel: Production: Kristeva Tel Quel Tel Quel was a french avant- garde literary journal published between 1960 and 1982. It was founded by Philippe Sollers. Many essays on post- structuralism and deconstruction inspired by Saussurean linguistics were published in this journal. As Allen points out in his book “Intertextuality” 1960’s in France was “ a time of theory” quoting Patrick Ffrench’s definition. (Allen, 2000: 30)

The political turmoil that took place in France during May, 1968 was a series of student protests againts capitalism and consumerism led by the left rank of the country. This political unrest and its aftermath accelerated the post- structuralist critiques of methodology, traditional values and authorship.

Tel quel The role of literature and literary language was pivotal to the rise of post-structuralist theory which was mostly seen in the journal Tel Quel. Major theorists of the time suuch as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Micheal Foucault and Julie Kristeva took part in Tel Quel’s investigation of literature’s relation to political and philosophical thought. (Allen, 2000: 31) Barthes pinpoints Kristeva’s unorthodox nature among these theorists that constitute what Tel Quel is and expresses that she is paradoxically both a “L’etranger” (a woman, a literal foreigner) and a major textuality theorist.

Tel quel “Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could take pride in; what she displaces is the already- said, the déjà-dit, i.e., the instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity; what she subverts is authority – the authority of the monologic science, of filiation.” (Barthes, 1986: 168)

Tel quel Semiotics in mid 1960’s France yearned to achieve objectivity by puting Saussurean semiotics to stabilize the signifieds they studied. Any cultural text can be scientifically analysed since signifiers exist and function within a synchronic system which provides determinable signifieds for those signifiers. Such objectivity cannot be achieved since the human object makes the utterance under his or her own judgement based on his or her values and beliefs.

Tel quel Kristeva along with the other Tel Quel theorists view the notions of a stable relationship between the signifiers and the signifieds as a means with which the dominant ideology at rule maintains its power and suppresses other revolutionary thoughts. The Tel Quel society attack the very foundations of meaning and communication which in marxist terms have become tradable. (Allen, 2000: 32-33)

Tel quel The notions of stable signifiers/signifieds relations, meaning and communication presents knowledge and inttellectual work as an object of value that can be bought or sold placing them into the capitalist market system which triggers one to think that ideas are only valuable if they can be purchased or sold.

Tel quel “Semanalysis represents a synthesis of the apparently disparate disciplines: psychoanalysis, philosophy, logic, linguistics, and semiotics in general. Quite paradigmatically, it points to the central role of psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on interpretation of symbols and dreams, in semiotics. In fact semanalysis is a portmanteau word referring to both semiotics and psychoanalysis.” (Semetsky, 2005: 25)

Tel quel Kristeva, with this new mode of semiotics trys to capture a vision of texts that are always in a state of production rather than being products to be quickly consumed.(Allen, 2000: 34). “A signifying practice, reading, and interpretation constitute the textual productivity. This Kristeva’s concept focuses on the dynamical character of the process of generative activity – productivity – rather than on some final actual product..” (Semetsky, 2005: 26) The author, reader and the critic enter into a process of constant production over the text. Ideas in texts are not finished tradable products but a means to encourage the readers and critics to take part in the process of producing those “unfinished” texts.

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality Kristeva coined the term intertextuality by combining Bakhtin’s dialogism which asserts that there is a constant dialogue between other works of literature and other authors and Saussure’s understanding of semiotics through how signs derive their meaning within the structure of the text. (Irwin, 2004: 228) The two translated versions of Kristeva’s work Desire in Language clearly show the influence of Bakhtin on Kristeva.

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality She especially takes Bakhtin’s The Bounded Text and Word, Dialogue, Novel and reconstructs them in her own view of intertextuality. In The Bounded Text, Kristeva points out that the text is built out of an already existent text. Authors do not create new authentic texts and ideas but blend a series of them that are already existent in other older or more recent texts. So, she comes to the conclusion that text is “a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text, in which several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.” (Allen, 2000: 35-36)

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality The ways of speaking, the structure and the system of texts make up what is called culture. So, the text is not an individual, totaly unbound by any boundaries but a compilation of cultural textuality. Individual texts and cultural texts are all made up of the same textual material and cannot be seperated from one another. As Irwin indirectly points out in his work “Against Intertextuality”, while Bakhtin focuses on human subjects employing language in social structures, Kristeva disregards the human subject and focuses on the more abstract terms like text and textuality. Yet they both agree that text cannot be seperated from the cultural and social context that they are made up from. Therefore all texts consist of idealogical and political discourses and social conflicts exposed in that specific culture and society.

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality The structure of words and utterances in texts have existed before and will exist in the future and it is therefore “double-voiced”. If the text is made up of idealogical, political discourses and conflicts that constitute language, then these idealogical, political discourses and conflicts will contine to exist in the texts themselves. Texts do not render clear and stable meanings but embody within themselves the society’s dialogic conflict over the meaning of the words.

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality Intertextuality concerns a text’s emergence from the “social text” and its continued existance along with society and history. A texts structure does not specifically refer to itself but to structures that are pre- existent from that specific text. In order to lay stress on this issue, Kristeva views a text or parts of that text as ideologeme.

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality “Ideologeme resolves the dynamics of a semiotics, positioning a text within the text of society and history. The ideologeme of a text is the centre where the comprehending rationality grapples the alteration of utterances in which the text becomes a totality encompassing the historical and social text.” (Elmo Raj, 2015: 78)

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality Kristeva refers to our tendency to accept texts as having unique, stable meanings. Kristeva however, yearns to study texts as having double meanings. Meaning within the text itself and a meaning bound to the social and historical context.

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality “England, seated far North in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves.”

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality What distinguishes Bakhtin’s Novel or Kristeva’s poetic language is the dynamic, ongoing, unstable notion of the “literary Word” rather than a fixed stable meaning. Kristeva combines Bakhtin’s dialogism and his view of “double-voiced” nature of language and puts forward her own semiotics theory. She illustrates a textual space which has horizontal and vertical axes. In the horizontal axes, the word belongs to both the wrting subject (author) and the addressee (reader). In the vertical axes, the word in the text oriented towards an older, pre-existing text.

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality Kristeva brings a focus on the subject position which may be the author, the main character in a novel and the pronouns “I”, “We” , “They” that the subjects use to refer to themselves and to those they address. Subjects of enunciation and Subject of utterance. “When I speak directly to someone else my words are, apparently, linked to me as a subject (of utterance); when I write those words down and they are read, perhaps years later, by someone else, my position as a subject is no longer directly involved. ‘I’ have become merely a subject of enunciation. (Allen, 2000: 40)

From Bakhtin’s Dialogism to Kriteva’s Intertextuality The subject in writing is always double because the words that subject utters are intertextual (already written, said), and the pronoun signifiers which refer to that subject are always changing as the subject of utterance changes. For instance, I refer to myself when I am verbally uttering something to someone other than me. However, when someone other than me utters something to some other subject refering to me, the subject uses the pronouns “he” or “she” on my behalf and pronoun signifier changes from “I” that I myself used to “he” or “she” that the other subject used for me. Therefore they have no stable signifieds.

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition The speaking subject is a split subject between the conscious and the unconscious, reason and desire, the rational and the irrational. The speaking subject consists of a conscious mind restrained by social boundaries such as family and rules imposed (symbolic order) as it acquires language and an unconscious mind consisting of bio-physiological processes, during early infancy when the infant percieves the components of the body in a largely symbolic way (imagery).

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition Kristeva devises her own terms naming Lacan’s “Imagery” process as the semiotic which is a state of the subject with pre-symbolic drives, impulses maintained from the infant stage after which the human subject enters into the social world with norms and rules that impose singularity and unified meaning of things as the subject acquires language more and more. Like the behavioral sets imposed on male and female teenagers. Kristeva calls this entry stage as the “thetic phase”.

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition Lacan’s “symbolic order” turns to the symbolic field in Kristevan terms which involves socially signifying language functioning under the boundaries of reason, communication and of singularity and unity. “The subject, for Kristeva, is thus split between two signifying fields.” (Allen, 2000: 49)

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition The semiotic gives rise to, and challenges, the symbolic. Kristeva describes the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic as a dialectic oscillation. Without the symbolic we have only delirium or nature, while without the semiotic, language would be completely empty, if not impossible. We would have no reason to speak if it were not for the semiotic drive force. So this oscillation between the semiotic and the symbolic is productive and necessary. It is the oscillation between rejection and stasis, found already within the material body, that produces the speaking subject. (Groden & Krieswirth, 1997: 2)

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition “What is the relation between intertextuality and Kristeva’s description of the subject between the symbolic and the semiotic fields?” The texts brought out by these subjects, show the same split characteristics as the subjects themselves. They follow the same split path from logical to illogical.

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition “Phenotext” for symbolic field and “Genotext” for semiotic field. The phenotext is the part of the text that is shaped by the language of communication with a unified and singular meaning. The genotext is the part of the text that comes from unconscious drives, emotions and erotic impulses which are the remainings from the infant stage. It is not abatable to the language system.  The genotext exists within the phenotext, which is the perceivable signifying system.

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition Genotext Example: “…I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.(Joyce, 1971: 704). The Phenotext on the other hand is exactly the opposite of Genotext, where we have sentences set by grammatical rules.

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition Kristeva views intertextuality as a means to pass from one sign system to another, destroying its old position to form a new one, a semiotic one. Considering this constant shift or in other words unstableness, Kristeva, shifts her term from intertextuality to transposition, in an effort to prevent the trends of reducing intertextuality to a traditional notion of simple and stable context. Texts do not only exploit pre-existent texts but they also transform them and give them new sign systems.

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition The texts are trying to be as clear as possible and they are phenotexts. Kristeva’s work Revolution in Poetic Language, is a complex with extremely difficult signifiying systems. Kristeva’s work is a common type of the genotext. Allen’s analysis is a phenotext, as he trys to transpose Kristeva’s complex, genotext into a more communicable phenotext for us to understand clearly. So, he basically transforms the pre-existent text of Kristeva as well as exploiting it.

Intertextuality Revised: Transposition The subject position which any speaker or writer takes up is largely dependent upon the context in which that subject speaks or writes. The ‘I’ that Allen uses in his work as a pronoun for himself is not the same ‘I’ in other texts written by Graham Allen. “For I have a great number and that’s the plague. One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christian – [only people call her socialist and communist], another of my mes is a wife and mother, and highly delighted at the delight of everyone else in the house .... Now that’s my ‘social’ self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience whh [sic] is pleased on its own account.” (Allen, 2000: 55)

Conclusion: Bakhtin v.s. Kristeva Bakhtin with his theories of dialogism, heteroglossia, focuses more on the human subjects operating language in social contexts. Kristeva omits that human subject and dwells on the more abstract concepts like texts and textuality. She makes use of Bahktin’s view “double- voiced” texts, enhances it but totaly abandons his notionts of dialogism due its nature of accepting a simplified, unified and stable meaning.

Conclusion: Bakhtin v.s. Kristeva Kristeva’s conception of intertextuality opens several lacunae not in Bakhtin. The first involves a vagueness about the relation of the social to the literary text. Kristeva does not discuss what happens to a fragment of the social text when it is “absorped” and “transformed” by literature, not does she account for how specific social texts are chosen for “absorption”. (Clayton & Rothstein, 1991: 20)

Conclusion: Bakhtin v.s. Kristeva Kristeva is guilty in explaining literary transpositions in non-literary terms and therefore she cannot generaly display that the transpositions of literary genres and forms within the literary system reflects literature’s response to society and history. She ends up making literature a cultural context and loses the ability to describe literature, its history and its response to social and cultural conflicts. (Allen, 2000: 57-58)

Conclusion: Bakhtin v.s. Kristeva Jill Felicity Durey views Kristeva’s work as a misrepresentation of Bakhtin that corrupts the author-writer bond into a plain and abstract linguistic and textual processes. (Allen, 2000: 57) Our focus should not be on deciding whose theory is the correct one and whose theory is not. Instead we should study the term itself unbound by the theorists particular views and understand it in its specific historical and cultural aspects.

Conclusion: Bakhtin v.s. Kristeva Intertextuality with its complex history, drags us to series of oppositions which leads us to an instable manner. Our goal should be to deal with this concept in its split, contradictory, and most importantly “unstable” nature rather than seeing it as an informative tool, an asset that can be bought and sold or a model for interpretation. As Kristeva adequately put herself with her semianalysis, we must enter into the process of practice and productivity with the author, reader, analyst and the critic over the text not expect a finished and ready text.

THANK YOU!!! Prepared and Presented by: MÜLTEZEM BOYDAŞ