Page 83 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
plays with the structures of grammar and syntax: poetic
language.
Like Barthes, Kristeva places increasing emphasis on the rela-
tionship between the text and the body. She is especially concerned
with identifying different forms of language, characteristic of
distinct stages of human development, to demonstrate how the
nature of the link between textuality and physicality alters as
children grow into adults. The semiotic is associated with the pre-
linguistic moments of childhood in which the infant babbles the
sounds it hears to imitate its surroundings and to interact with
them. These sounds coexist with corporeal activity, through which
the infant gradually discovers its own body and its place in a
larger environment. There are no rigid linguistic categories or
meanings in the semiotic. Accordingly, the semiotic body is a fluid
entity without any clear shape or boundaries. Emotions are
expressed through variable noises, movements and gestures that
constitute a jumble of heterogeneous drives, or pulsions. Thus, the
semiotic yields fundamentally physical texts. The symbolic, by
contrast, refers to the signs prescribed by adult society. 6 It is asso-
ciated with dominant symbols of power, such as state, family, god
and property, and represses the body by subjugating its drives to
abstract laws. Above all, the symbolic strives to mould subjectivity
according to principles of separation and difference. Linguistically,
it enforces the rules of grammar, syntax and logic; sexually, it
establishes strict distinctions between masculinity and femininity,
heterosexuality and homosexuality; culturally, it subjects indivi-
duals to political, religious, familial, legal and economic structures.
Beside the semiotic and the symbolic, with their respectively open
and closed texts, Kristeva posits the thetic. This is associated with
the stage of human development in which we become aware of
our autonomous existence and begin to assert ourselves as inde-
pendent beings. Thus, the thetic is related to the symbolic: our
awareness of our separation from others enables us to enter the
adult sphere of language and the law. In becoming separate,
however, the subject does not only acquire an identity: it also

5 W Compare this idea with Jakobson's theories on the 'poetic function' discussed
in Part I, Chapter 2, The Sign'.
6 IV The concept of the symbolic, introduced by Lacan, is examined further in
Part II, Chapter 2, 'Subjectivity'.

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