IV
The archivist, archaeological and necrophilic methods on which the scientific imperative was founded – the building of arguments on the basis of empirical evidence, a systematizable given, and an observable object – in this case, language – are an embarrassment when applied to modern or contemporary phenomena. These methods show that the capitalist mode of production has stratified language into idiolects and divided it into self-contained, isolated islands – heteroclite spaces existing in different temporal modes (as relics or projections), and oblivious to one another.7
Julia Kristeva’s 1986 text Revolution in Poetic Language from which this quote is taken, sets out to explore the question of non-ordinary language across diverse realms of consciousness and pre-consciousness.8 Kristeva’s analysis in based around literary examples. Indeed her idea of a ‘revolution’ pivots on the idea of poetic language as a signifying practice; a semiotic system generated by a speaking or writing subject within a socio-historical field. The revolution for Kristeva has actually already begun: commencing in the 19th century with a conceptual revolution instigated by the post-Symbolist avant-garde mutation of literary representation. For Kristeva:
Literary practice is seen as an exploration and discovery of the possibilities of language; as an activity that liberates the subject from a number of linguistic, psychic and social networks; as a dynamism that breaks up the inertia of language habits and grants linguists the unique possibility of studying the becoming of the signification of signs.9
Clearly, Kristeva’s interest in literary/textual critique stands for a much broader concern with the psychic, social and political conditions of language. Against constrained language (phenotext), Kristeva opposes the idea of the genotext. In the genotext, language accepts partial unintelligibility, becoming, instead a sort of unmediated physical presence.
From this point it is easy to see how from Kristeva’s genotextual analysis we can derive a concern with non-ordinary language forms analogue to those briefly explored through the prism of anti-psychiatric theory. Indeed this is precisely a comparison that Kristeva herself makes in Revolution in Poetic Language where the anti-psychiatric agenda of Laing and Cooper is proposed alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus10 as exemplary in its liberating relation to the unconscious (and its language).
Laing and Cooper, Like Deleuze and Guattari, are right to stress the destructuring and a-signifying machine of the unconscious. Compared with ideologies of communication and normativeness which largely inspire anthropology and psychoanalysis, their approach is liberating.11
7Julia Kristeva, The Revolution in Poetic Language. 1984, 1
8 Indeed, the essence of her enquiry is located in the pre-conscious and comes in the form of an exploration of the role of pre-symbolic language in the Freudian account of human development.
9 Kristeva, Desire in Language. 1980, xi
10 Limited by time we have not been able to explore another crucially important analysis of psychotic language: namely Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic theorisation in Anti-Oedipus. For Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia takes on epistemological significance. Without explicating the complex structuralist account of Oedipization against which Deleuze and Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus, we can say this: to be with language is to be subject to a series of complex chains of signification that shackle originary Oedipal (Imaginary) desire under the sign of the Symbolic. Language literally locks us into a given order, limiting, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the truly productive and revolutionary potential of desire. The schizophrenic refuses to enter the symbolic dimension, however, and does not accept the standard epistemological relation of signifier to signified. By virtue of this denial the schizophrenic remains proximal to a more primal ordering of desire, existing amongst the pre-symbolic flux of forces the schizo becomes truly subversive.
11 Julia Kristeva, The Revolution in Poetic Language. 1984, 17.