Page 143 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 134

Contemporary Cultural Theory

but it was much less pertinent to the kind of argument advanced
by Cixous and Irigaray than it appeared. What was at issue was
not biological determinism, as Showalter supposed, but rather the
nature of writing and of female sexuality, and of their possible
connections, given the undoubtedly mediated ways in which the
body finds cultural expression. A more serious objection was that
directed by Juliet Mitchell at Julia Kristeva, but which could easily
also be turned towards Cixous and Irigaray: that insofar as femi-
ninity is indeed like this, then it is so only by virtue of the effects
of patriarchal oppression. This ‘is just what the patriarchal
universe defines as the feminine’, Mitchell wrote, ‘all those things
that have been assigned to women—the heterogeneous, the
notion that women’s sexuality is much more one of a whole body,
not so genital, not so phallic. It is not that the carnival cannot be
disruptive of the law; but it disrupts only within the terms of that
law’ (Mitchell, 1984, p. 291).
Interestingly, Mitchell and Kristeva shared a common interest
in Lacan. The key Kristevan text was almost certainly Revolution
in Poetic Language, first published in 1974, the central analytical
framework of which is clearly Lacanian. Kristeva renamed
Lacan’s ‘Imaginary’ the ‘semiotic’ and insisted that it persists into
adulthood as an alternative mode of signification. She borrowed
from Plato the term chora, meaning womb or enclosed space, to
refer to the pre-Oedipal pulsions with which the semiotic is
linked. ‘Our discourse—all discourse—moves with and against
the chora’, she wrote, ‘in the sense that it simultaneously depends
upon and refuses it... The chora . . . is not a sign...it is not yet
a signifier either...it is, however, generated in order to attain to
this signifying position... the chora precedes and underlies fig-
uration... and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm’
(Kristeva, 1984, p. 26). Once the symbolic order is entered, she
argued, the semiotic is repressed, but not thereby superseded.
Rather, it continues to constitute the heterogeneous and disrup-
tive aspects of language. Where the symbolic is masculine, the
semiotic is akin to, though not identical with, the feminine—it is
repressed and marginal. The semiotic is thus culturally subver-
sive, insofar as it deconstructs the binary oppositions that are
fundamental to the structures of symbolic language.

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