Page 193 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

182 IDEOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVITY

structures of language and thought arrange themselves through the same process
as the construction of the unconscious. Thus, consciousness itself is affected by
the movement in which signifiers are altered, disturbed or put into crisis by the
contradictions between the superstructure and the relations and/or forces of
production, when they become antagonistic. This experience is one of
consciousness encountering an external process which it has not yet organized
into language, has not yet symbolized.
Faced with the laws of a developing historical process, for example with the
structure of capitalist society, the rejected drive either invests and recognizes
itself within these laws, making symbolic theses from them and blocking itself; or,
by a violence that no theses can hold back, it rejects all stoppages and produces a
symbolization of the objective process of transformation, according to the
constraints which impose themselves on the movement of the drive: it then
produces a revolutionary ‘discourse’, which only testing (cf. Mao’s practice-
truth-practice) puts in correspondence with objective movements and necessity. 11
It is necessary to explain certain terms: the practice of ‘making symbolic
theses’ from a historical process means constructing a conscious understanding
in the terms given by the process itself (that is, in conformity to its ideological
practice); this is opposed to an energy which has been constructed in such a way
that it can no longer be organized by the web of symbolic theses, an energy
which goes on to produce new concepts, whose validity is then shown in practice.
In explaining the way in which this production of new ideas takes place,
Kristeva uses the term ‘rejection’ (le rejet), which indicates the drive which
meets the external organization of language and has to structure itself
accordingly or restructure that external system. The result is an internal
disorganization in which the subject is thrown into process, into questioning and
crisis. This state of the subject-in-process comes about because of the impact of
social contradictions. The subject, hitherto able to think himself unified, feels
disoriented. Social contradictions articulate themselves within the composition
of the person by an investment of drives; but these drives are themselves formed
by both social and personal history, and this investment throws into flux the
composition of the conscious and unconscious.

Ex-centring the subject, the rejection brings about a confrontation between
the atomization of the subject and the structures of the natural world and of
social relations, runs up against them, repulses them and is displaced. At the
moment of this rejection, which implies the period of the annihilation of an
old objectivity, a linkage component which is symbolic, ideological and
therefore positive intervenes in order to constitute in language the new
object which the subject in process, whilst rejecting, produces across the
moment of rejection. So practice contains, as its fundamental moment, the
heterogeneous contradiction which places a subject thrown into process by
a natural or social exterior that is not yet symbolised, in struggle with old