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THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 199

which the Lacanian problematic is reversed. A concept of an essential
femininity, different from and superior to masculinity and founded in women’s
physiology, has led to attempts to develop a women’s language and an
alternative symbolic system through forms of separatist politics. We look now in
more detail at Kristeva’s work, since she has most to say about the area of
language and subjectivity.
Kristeva develops a notion of signifying practice, ‘significance’, that covers
both the symbolic order of rational language and the marginal, repressed,
feminine discourses of poetry, irrationality, art and so on, which draw directly on
repressed unconscious thought and which she calls ‘semiotic’. All signifying
practice involves both aspects of ‘significance’ but, depending on the type of
discourse, one side or the other will predominate. Thus, for example, rational
discourse is predominantly symbolic, whereas poetic discourse is governed by
the semiotic side of language and draws on repressed signifiers which, under
patriarchy, are predominantly feminine in character. Kristeva calls the
unconscious basis of language the ‘semiotic chora’. It results from the
organization of the drives prior to the acquisition of language, an organization
which Kristeva, unlike Lacan, insists is determined by historically specific
familial and wider social relations. The ‘semiotic chora’ poses a constant
challenge to symbolic communication. It makes itself felt through rhythm,
intonation and lexical and syntactical transformations.
The semiotic challenge to symbolic relations occurs on the site of the
individual subject. After entry into language, subjectivity is not constituted as
fixed and conscious to itself once and for all. It is constantly in process and is
differentially reconstituted within language every time an individual speaks.
There is no essential subjectivity, and the individual subject, as a function of
language, is as much a potential site for revolution as social structures. The two
sites are linked by the effective role of social relations in the organization, within
each individual, of the ‘semiotic chora’. In this way, Kristeva attempts to link
what she calls the mode of sign production with the mode of socio-economic
production. The problem with this theory is the assertive nature of the link made
between forms of psychoanalytically based theory of language and subjectivity
and wider social structures. Kristeva’s work is centred on textual analysis carried
out within an amended Lacanian problematic. It lacks the theoretical
underpinning of a detailed analysis of how desire is organized via historically
specific social relations, rather than (as in Freud, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss) via the
eternally given, patriarchal mechanism of the resolution of the Oedipus Complex.
It illustrates the fundamental problem involved in attempting to bring together a
psychoanalytic theory of language, in which desire is the founding principle, and
a materialist theory of social relations. If, as we would maintain, a theory of
language and subjectivity based on Lacanian psychoanalysis is intrinsically
incompatible with a materialist, feminist approach to language and ideology, on
account of the universal, patriarchal status of its concepts, which do not allow for
a historically specific perspective, this does not mean that we do not have much