absurdist monthly review

Absurdist Monthly Review—Issue 10

The Writers’ Magazine of The

New Absurdist Movement

August 2009 , Issue 10August 2009 , Issue 10August 2009 , Issue 10August 2009 , Issue 10 http://amr.obook.org

a note from the polycarp

Absurdist News Front

Osip Mandelshtam

Gregory Freidin

Narratology (excerpt)

Lucie Guillemette

The Anti-Art of Art

Pascal-Denis Lussier

The Age of Abjection

Inna Semetsky

Urban Fairy Tales

S. Bell

American Legacy

Kenneth J. Knoespel

http://amr.obook.org


M y stylish beard bids you all a hardy welcome to this, the 10th issue of AMR. This is,

of course, the jinx issue. When AMR came out in 2006, only 5 issues were built and then ZIP, nothing for 2 long years. Now this issue is the 5th issue of AMR’s return. Will it be the last for another 2 years? Only fate and my overly wide tie know the answer to that. But my guess is there will be plenty more coming in the future.

In fact, we’re adding staff faster

than you can (or should) actually add people to a magazine for which they are not paid: a regular columnist, a news editor and a staff cartoonist have all either arrived or will come on board for issue #11.

This issue, I am sorry to say, has

experienced problem after trouble after whatever comes directly after trouble. Several articles that were lined up did-n’t pan out and I’ve had to spend the last week (with the help of David Met-calfe & PD Lussier) racing about to

construct the deep, meaningful, glee inducing, theory magazine that the readers of AMR have come to expect. Here it is. It’s a bit thin and probably not as well proofed as some previous issues, but damn it Natalya Reshe-tovskaya, it’s here, it’s on time and it’s packed chewy, theoretical goodness.

This month we’ve pulled out a brief

biography of Acmeist poet Osip Man-delshtam, a quickie peek at Gérard Genette's theory of Narratology, TNA veteran headsfromspace unveils his Gaulkan Rider, columnist PD Lussier gives a thrill-packed exposé of Isidore Isou’s Letterist movement, a fascinat-ing look at Julia Kristeva’s semanaly-sis, cartoonist S. Bell’s first Urban Fairy Tale lovingly entitled Paperhead and we round off this month examining the American Legacy of Mikhail Bak-htin. Now that’s a whole lot joy-nuggets!

I want to thank the TNA & FB

groups who submitted original cover artwork and voted to choose this month’s cover, which by overwhelming count went to Séverine Moni’s Duck Girl . Applause all around!

That’s about it from me. Before I go

though, I would like to share a few lines from a song that I believe speaks directly to each of us as human beings:

If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends, Make it last forever, friendship never ends…

Until next time, cover your mouths before you sneeze. Don’t be Patient Zero!

- polycarp kusch

a note from the polycarp

Established 2006

Editor polycarp kusch

Art Director David Metcalfe

Columnist

Pascal-Denis Lussier

Cover Art Sonja Jankov

Cancer Screenings Dr. Oberon Mits

False Documents

John Smith

Fissionable Material Provided by: Jane Doe

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H opefully this is the last month of thin and sadly out-of-date news, as our

next issue will be constructed by our fabulously new news editor, Dr. Melissa Moler Beery. Until then, bear with the horrifically old and the marginally on point. Here is… The News.

In the Theatre

'The Hairy Ape': Scrappy, playful and unpredictable. By Jason Clark Buffalo News Review July 28, 2009

Moments before you walk into the Manny Fried Playhouse for Sub-versive Theatre Collective's bold, passionate and, in their own words, "wildly experimental perver-sion" of Eugene O'Neill's THE HAIRY APE, you are treated to a literal circus.

Balloon animals, a peanut

vendor, puppeteers, a hand-walker and even a man in a monkey suit -- this is cer-tainly not your father's

HAIRY A P E . Playing as part

of this year's Buffalo

I n f r i n g e me n t Festival, and one

of 26 theatrical productions to take

shape within this 11-day event, it

shrewdly embodies the fest's intentions: jagged,

scrappy, playful and unpredict-able.

The play, which opened Friday

night, is not as well known as other O'Neill works (A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT), likely because of its chilly critique of the upper classes and an unconventional structure that begs for unusual treat-ment.

Told in eight succinct scenes

in guttural, intense language, the play follows the Neanderthal-like Yank (commandingly played by Patrick Cameron, who often liter-ally throws himself into the pro-ceedings), a brutish steelworker prone to drinking bouts and self-doubt. He wanders the earth try-ing to find where he fits into

a capitalist society that doesn't value him. He is called a

"filthy beast" by a rich society gal (Candice

Kogut), which en-rages him, and his poorly laid plans to infiltrate rich soci-

ety go bust when he is arrested and even-tually banished from

joining an industrial un-

ion. This leaves him to seek sol-ace in the arms of an ape at the zoo in the play's chilling final scene.

All in all, the production's

conceit ultimately pays off and is acted with conviction by its 11-member cast, which includes lo-cal fave Betsy Bittar as a haughty socialite.

www.subversivetheatre.org.

Student production will either entertain or insult audience By Sara Petersen Kent State NewsNet April 30, 2009 Low budget 'Ubu Roi' premieres tonight. "Ubu Roi," which opens tonight, includes a drag queen teacher, peo-ple eating sausages from a man's crotch and a woman proclaiming a horse's ass is better than yours. "Lab shows are usually edgier and more controversial stuff that you really wouldn't see on the mainstage just because of the nature of the ma-terial," said Jason Leupold, sopho-more musical theater major. He plays Captain Mac'Nure in the play. Rick Coffey, senior musical theater major and director of "Ubu Roi," said the play is grotesque - but funny. "It insults the audience because they don't know how to feel," he said. French playwright Alfred Jarry wrote "Ubu Roi" to premier in 1896. "Shit" was the first word uttered in the play and the audience rioted,

Absurdist News Front

http://www.subversivetheatre.org


s h o u t i n g i n s u l t s a n d f i g h t i n g . "Nobody ever heard the word 'shit' on stage before," Coffey said. Coffey modified the play to a Catho-lic school setting."My adaptation is about a man (Ubu) who is convinced by his wife to kill the king and the royal family," Coffey said. "Ubu then kills all of the royal family ex-cept for one son, who seeks help from the Russians and eventually overthrows Ubu." As Coffey thought about adapting the characters from the play, he found that they all fell into a school stereo-type, such as a bully, a nerd and a secretary. "The play itself is written in a very childlike manner and that's when I first started thinking about 'Ubu' be-ing set in a school," he said. "By setting it in a classroom, the audience understands what is hap-pening, but the interpretation is up to them," Coffey said. "It gives (the audience) a place that they're famil-iar with."The action is so abstract, and the characters are so abstract (that) if there's one thing that they can cling onto as a part of their real-ity, it will kind of be a bridge to the abstract world."

"I guarantee most of the peo-ple coming to this show have not experienced anything like it, but that's the nature of Fringe Fest," Crowley said. "It's really obscure." "I'm really excited to just put it out there and see how people will react be-cause it's so different," Leupold said. "It'll be

really interesting to see what they do."

Journaly Things Cognitive Semiotics #3 published!

Cognitive Semiotics #3 is now

available from publisher, Peter Lang, and in its electronic form at

Metapress. It has been aptly titled “Semiotics as a Cognitive Sci-ence” and con-tains seven di-verse and wide-ranging contribu-tions by Elmar Holenstein, Marcel Hénaff, Jesper Sørensen, Robert E. Haskell, Claudio Paolucci, Svend Østergaard and Peter

Vuust & Andreas Roepstorff. Enjoy! http://www.cognitivesemiotics.com/

Text Play Eye Rhyme Restricting the rhymes in a poem to those that satisfy the eye but not the ear. Eye rhyme is a similarity in spelling

between words that are pronounced differently and hence, not an audi-tory rhyme. Some examples are slaughter and laughter. Many older English poems, particu-larly those written in Middle English or written in The Renaissance, con-tain rhymes that were originally true or full rhymes, but as read by mod-ern readers they are now eye rhymes because of shifts in pronunciation.

Other eye rhymes: sew : blew brow : crow said : laid their : weir dough : rough rouge : gouge fiend : friend hubris : debris derange : orange rugged : drugged love : prove

Miscellany Where’s Pt. 2?

My apologies for the lack of a conclusion on my last article Mind, Noise & Proto-Prose. Software con-figuration problems combined with a reevaluation of some fundamental concepts involved in correctly struc-turing the grammars has left Part 2 of this beloved and yet unending presentation without corporeal form.

I optimistically look forward to

completing the ideas for this project within the next few issues. �

Example: Young Dick, always eager to eat, Denied stealing the fish eggs, whereat Caning him for a liar, His pa ate the caviar And left Dickie digesting the caveat.

http://www.cognitivesemiotics.com/


Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich b. Jan. 3 [Jan. 15, New Style], 1891, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland] d. Dec. 27, 1938, Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now in Russia]

by Gregory Freidin

M andelshtam also spelled MAN-DELSTAM, major Russian poet, prose writer, and literary

essayist. Most of his works went unpub-lished in the Soviet Union during the Sta-lin era (1929-53) and were almost un-known to generations of Russian readers until the mid-1960s.

Mandelshtam grew up in St. Peters-

burg in a middle class Jewish household; his father was a well-off leather mer-chant, who abandoned rabbinical training for a secular education in Germany; his mother was a cultivated member of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia.. After graduating from the private elite Ten-ishev School in 1907 and an unsuccessful attempt to join a socialist-revolutionary terrorist organization, Mandelstam trav-eled to France to study at the Sorbonne and later to Germany to enroll at the Uni-versity of Heidelberg. After returning to Russia in 1911, he converted to Christi-anity (baptized by the Finnish Method-ists) and, thus exempted from the Jewish quota, went on to study at the University of St. Petersburg, He left it in 1915 be-fore receiving a degree...

His first poems appeared in the St. Petersburg journal Apollon ("Apollo") in 1910. In response to the early Futurist manifestoes, Mandelshtam, together with Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova,

and Sergey Gorodetsky founded the Acmeist school of poetry, an attempt at codifying the poetic practice of the new generation of Petersburg poets. They re-jected the vague mysticism of Russian Symbolism and demanded clarity and concreteness of representation, precision of form and meaning -- combined with a broad-ranging erudition (classical antiq-uity, European history, especially, cul-tural and including art and religion). Mandelshtam summed up his poetic credo in his manifesto Utro Akmeizma ("The Morning of Acmeism," 1913, though not published until 1919). In 1913, he underwrites the publication of his first slim volume of verse, Kamen ("Stone"), to be followed by the larger volume with the same name in 1916 and 1923. The title was emblematic of the Acmeist and especially Mandelshtam’s identification with the cultural essence of St. Petersburg, the classical tradition of Western European civilization and the architectural expression of its spiritual and political heritage. The first two edi-tions of Kamen (1913 and 1916) estab-lished Mandelshtam as a full-fledged member of the glorious cohort of Russian poets. His subsequent collections (Vtoraia kniga [Book Two], 1923, and Stikhotvoreniia [Poems], 1928) earned him the reputation of a leading poet of his generation.

In response to the early Futurist

manifestoes, Mandelshtam, together with

Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova,

and Sergey Gorodetsky founded the

Acmeist school of poetry, an attempt

at codifying the poetic practice of

the new generation of Petersburg

poets.


Disinclined to serve as a

mouthpiece for political

propa-ganda

(unlike Vladimir

Mayakovsky), Mandelshtam considered “a dialogue with

his time” a moral

imperative for a poet.

Disinclined to serve as a mouthpiece for political propaganda (unlike Vladimir Mayakovsky), Mandelshtam considered “a dialogue with his time” a moral im-perative for a poet. He responded to WWI and the revolution with a series of historical-philosophical, meditative po-ems that are among the best and most profound in the corpus of Russian civic poetry. By temperament and conviction a supporter of the Socialist Revolutionary party, he welcomed the collapse of the old regime in 1917 and was opposed to the Bolshevik seizure of power. How-ever, his experiences during the Civil War left little doubt that he had no place in the White movement. As a Russian poet, he felt he had to share the fate of his country and could not opt for emigration. Like many Russian intellectuals at the time (sympathizers of the Change of Landmarks movement or “fellow travelers”), he made peace with the Soviets without identifying himself wholly with Bolshevik methods or goals. During the Civil War (1918-21), Mandelshtam lived alternately in Petrograd, Kiev, the Crimea, and Geor-gia under a variety of regimes. In 1922, after the publication of his new volume of poetry, Tristia, he decided to settle in Moscow and married Nadezhda Yakov-levna Khazina, whom he had met in Kiev in 1919.

Mandelshtam's poetry, erudite, reso-

nating with historical analogies and clas-sical myths, set him on the outer margins of Soviet literary establishment but did not diminish his standing as a premier poet of his time both among the literary elite and the most astute readers of poetry in the Bolshevik government (Mandelshtam was patronized by Niko-lay Bukharin). After Tristia, Man-delshtam’s poetic output gradually di-minished, and although some of his most significant poems were composed in 1923-24 (“Slate Ode” and “1 January 1924”), it came to a complete halt in 1925. As he was turning away from po-

etry, Mandelshtam produced some of the 20th-century’s best memoir prose (The Noise of Time and Theodosia, 1923) and a short experimental novel (The Egyptian Stamp, 1928). During the 1920s, he also published a series of brilliant critical es-says (“The End of the Novel,” “The 19th Century,” “The Badger’s Hole: Alexan-der Blok,” and others). Included in a col-lection O poezii (On Poetry, 1928), these essays, along with his Conversation about Dante (1932, published in 1967)), were to have a lasting i m p a c t

on Russian literary scholarship (Mikhail

Bakhtin, the Formalists). Like many of his fellow poets and

writers, Mandelshtam earned his living in the 1920s by literary translation. In 1929, in the tense, politicized atmosphere of the Stalin revolution, Mandelshtam became enmeshed in a copyright scandal which further estranged him from the literary establishment. In response, Mandelshtam produced Fourth Prose (1930), a stream of consciousness monologue mocking the servility of Soviet writers, brutality of the cultural bureaucracy, and the absurdity of “socialist construction.” Fourth Prose was not published in Russia until 1989. In 1930, thanks to the Nikolay Buk-


The stress of the arrest,

Imprisonment and interrogations, which forced

Mandelstam to

divulge the names of the friends who had heard him recite the poem, led to a protracted bout of mental illness.

harin’s still powerful patronage, Man-delshtam was commissioned to travel to Armenia to observe and record the pro-gress of their Five-Year Plan. The result was Mandelshtam’s return to poetry (the cycle “Armenia” and subsequent “Moscow Notebooks”) and Journey to Armenia, a powerful example of modern-ist travel prose. Some of the poetry of the period, along with the Journey, were pub-lished in periodical press in 1932-33 and were to be the last publications in his lifetime. Cleansed of the earlier scandal, Mandelshtam settles back in Moscow as a prominent member of the writers’ com-

munity, a development facilitated by a brief thaw in cul-

t u r a l p o l i c y in 1932-

3 4 . However, M a n -

delshtam’s independ-

ence, his aversion to moral com-

promise, his sense of civic responsibil ity and the horror

he felt at the repression of the peasantry set him on a collision course with the Stalinist party-state. In November 1933, Mandelshtam produced a searing epigram on Stalin which he subsequently read to many of his friends (“We live unable to sense the country under our feet”). Aware of a mounting opposition to Stalin within the party, which reached its crescendo in January 1934 at the 17th Party Congress, Mandel-stam hoped that his poem would become urban folklore and broaden the base of the anti-Stalin opposition. In the poem, Stalin, “a slayer of peasants” with worm-like fingers and cock-roach mustachios, delights in wholesale torture and execu-tions. Denounced by someone in his cir-cle, Mandelshtam was arrested for the epigram in May 1934 and sent into exile,

with Stalin’s verdict “isolate but protect.” The lenient verdict was dictated by Sta-lin’s desire to win over the intelligentsia to his side and to improve his image abroad, a policy in line with his staging of the First Congress of Soviet Writers (August 1934).

The stress of the arrest, imprisonment

and interrogations, which forced Mandel-stam to divulge the names of the friends who had heard him recite the poem, led to a protracted bout of mental illness. While in the hospital in Cherdyn’ (the Urals), Mandelstam attempted suicide by jumping out of the window but survived and was re-assigned to a more hospitable city of Voronezh where he managed to regain some of his mental balance. An exile afforded the highest “protection,” he was allowed to work in the local thea-ter and radio station but the imposed iso-lation form his milieu was becoming un-bearable. Mandelshtam became obsessed with the idea of redeeming his offense against Stalin and transforming himself into a new Soviet man. This Voronezh period (1934-37) is, perhaps, the most productive in Mandelshtam career as a poet, yielding three remarkable cycles, the Voronezh Notebooks, along with his longest ever poem, “Ode to Stalin.” In a way a culmination of the Voronezh Note-books, it is at once a brilliant Pindaric panegyric to his tormentor and a Christ-like plea to the “father of all people” to be spared the Cross. Composed by a great poet, it stands as a unique monu-ment to the mental horror of Stalinism and the tragedy of the intelligentsia’s capitulation before the violence and ideo-logical diktat of the Stalinist regime.

In May 1937, his sentence served,

Mandelshtam left Voronezh but as a for-mer exile, was not allowed a residence permit within a 100 km radius of Mos-cow. Destitute, homeless, suffering from asthma and heart disease, Mandelshtam persisted in trying to rehabilitate himself, making rounds of the writers’ apartments and Writers’ Union’s offices, reciting the


“Ode,” pleading for work and a return to a normal life. The poet’s friends in Moscow and Leningrad took up a collection to save the Man-

delshtams from star-v a t i o n . In March 1938, the General Secretary of the Writer’s Union, Vladimir Stavksy, denounced Man-delshtam to the head of the s e c r e t police, Nikolay Y e z h o v , as someone stir-ring up trouble in the w r i t e r s ’ community. The denuncia- tion included an expert review of Man-delshtam’s oeuvre by a writer Peter Pavlenko who dismissed Mandelshtam as a mere versifier, with grudging praise but for a few of the “Ode’s” lines. A month later, on 3 May 1938, Man-delshtam was arrested. Sentenced to five years of labor camps for anti-Soviet activity, he died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on 27 December 1938. The “Ode” re-mained unpublished until 1976.

Perhaps more than any other poet of his glorious gen-

eration, with the exception of Velemir Khlebnikov, Mandelshtam was distinguished by a complete commit-ment to his vocation as a poet-prophet, poet-martyr. Without permanent residence or steady employment but for a brief interlude in the early 1930s, he lived the life of an archetypal poet, dispersing manuscripts among his friends and relying on their memory for “archiving” his unpublished poetry. It was primarily through the efforts of his widow, who died in 1980, that little of the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam was lost; she kept his works alive during the repression by memorizing them and by col-lecting manuscript copies.

After Stalin's death the publication in Russian of

Mandelshtam's works resumed, with the first volume of Mandelshtam’s poetry coming out in 1973. But it was the early American two-volume annotated edition of

Mandelshtam by Gleb Struve and Boris Filip-pov (1964), along with the books of memoirs by N a d e z h d a M a n -d e l s h t a m , that brought the poet’s oeuvre to the

attention of the new generations of readers, scholars, and fellow poets. In Russia at the turn of the twenty first century, Mandelshtam has remained one of the most quoted poets of his day.

Bibliography Osip Mandelshtam: Poems, chosen and translated by

James Greene ; forewords by Nadezhda Mandelshtam & Donald Davie. (1978). The Prose of Osip Mandelshtam: The Noise of Time, Theodosia, The Egyptian stamp. Translated, with a critical essay, by Clarence Brown (1965, 1989). The complete critical prose and letters / Mandelshtam ; edited by Jane Gary Harris ; translated by Jane Gary Harris. (1979) Nadezhda Mandelshtam (Nadezhda Mandelshtam), Hope Against Hope (1970, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1970), and Hope Abandoned (1974, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1972), memoirs by his wife, were published in the West in Russian and English. Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam (1976). Ronen, Omry. An Ap-proach to Mandel’shtam (1983). Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelshtam and His My-

Roberto’sRoberto’sRoberto’sRoberto’s

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InnerInnerInnerInner

VoiceVoiceVoiceVoice


Theory (exceprt)

by Lucie Guillemetteby Lucie Guillemetteby Lucie Guillemetteby Lucie Guillemette

2.1 ORIGINS AND FUNCTION

G érard Genette's work (1972 and 1983) fits into the Ger-man and Anglo-Saxon aca-

demic tradition, and is intended to serve as both a culmination and a renewal of this school of narratological criticism. We should point out that internal analy-sis, like any semiotic analysis, exhibits two characteristics. Firstly, it is con-cerned with narratives as independent linguistic objects, detached from their context of production and reception. Sec-ondly, it aims to reveal an underlying structure that can be identified in many different narratives.

Using a rigorous typology, Genette

has developed a theory of narratological poetics that may be used to address the entire inventory of narrative processes in use. According to Genette, every text discloses traces of narration, which can be studied in order to understand exactly how the narrative is organized. The ap-proach advocated here clearly addresses a level that lies below the threshold of interpretation, and as such, it constitutes a solid foundation, complementing other research being done in the social sci-ences, e.g., in sociology, literary history, ethnology and psychoanalysis..

NOTE: NARRATOLOGY: BETWEEN TEXTUALISM AND PRAGMATICS

As a typology of narrative, Gérard

Genette's theory of narratology is re-garded by many specialists in the field as a reading method that marks an important milestone in the development of literary theory and discourse analysis. By using narrative voice as a concept through which all the other categories are articu-lated, Genette engages the context of pro-duction as a fundamental element.

2.2 NARRATIVE MOOD When a text is written, technical

choices must be made in view of produc-ing a particular result in the story's verbal representation. In this way, the narrative employs distancing and other effects to create a particular narrative mood that governs "the regulation of narrative in-formation" provided to the reader (1980, p. 41). According to Genette, all narra-tive is necessarily diegesis (telling), in that it can attain no more than an illusion of mimesis (showing) by making the story real and alive. Thus, every narrative implies a narrator.

For Genette, then, a narrative cannot

in fact imitate reality, no matter how real-istic; it is intended to be a fictional act of

Narratology

Using a rigorous typology,

Genette has developed a

theory of narratological

poetics that may be used to

address the entire inventory

of narrative processes

in use.


language arising from a narrative in-stance. "Narrative does not 'represent' a (real or fictive) story, it recounts it – that is, it signifies it by means of language [...]. There is no place for imitation in narrative [...]" (1988, p. 43). Thus, in place of the two main traditional narra-tive moods, diegesis and mimesis, Genette contends that there are simply varying degrees of diegesis, with the nar-rator either more involved or less in-volved in the narrative, and leaving less room or more room for the narrative act. However, Genette insists that in no case is the narrator completely absent.

2.2.1 DISTANCE Any study of narrative mood requires

that we assess the distance between the narrator and the story. Distance helps us to determine the degree of preci-sion in a narrative and the accuracy of the information conveyed. Whether the text is a narrative of events (tells what the character is doing) or a narrative of words (tells what the character is say-ing or thinking), there are four types of discourse, each demonstrating progressively greater distance taken by the narrator with respect to the text (1980, pp. 171-172):

1. Narratized speech: The character's

words and actions are integrated into the narration, and are treated like any other event (-distant).

Example: He confided in his friend, telling him about his mother's death.

2. Transposed speech, indirect style: The character's words or actions are re-ported by the narrator, who presents them with his interpretation (- + distant).

Example: He confided to his friend that his mother had passed away.

3. Transposed speech, free indirect style: The character's words or actions are reported by the narrator, but without us-ing a subordinating conjunction (+ - dis-tant).

Example: He confided to his friend: his mother had passed away.

4. Reported speech: The character's words are cited verbatim by the narrator (+ distant).

Example: He confided to his friend: "My mother passed away."

2.2.2 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE NARRATOR

Using the notion of narrative distance as a starting point, Genette presents the functions of the narrator as such (1980, pp. 255-256). He lists five functions that also reveal the degree to which the narra-

tor intervenes in his narrative, based on the desired degree of

detachment or in-volvement.

1. The

narrat ive f u n c t i o n:

The narrative function is a

f undamen ta l one. Any time

we have a narra-tive, this role

(detachment) is assumed by the nar-

rator, whether present in the text or not.

2. The directing func-tion: The narrator per-

forms a directing function w h e n he interrupts the story to comment on the organization or articula-tion of his text (involvement).

3. The communication function: The narrator addresses the narratee directly (that is, the text's potential reader) in or-der to establish or maintain contact with him or her (involvement).

4. The testimonial function: The nar-rator affirms the truth of his story, the degree of precision in his narration, his certainty regarding the events, his sources of information, and the like. This function also comes into play when the narrator expresses his emotions about the

Any study of narrative

mood requires that we assess

the distance between the narrator and

the story. Distance

helps us to determine the

degree of precision in a narrative and the accuracy

of the information

conveyed.


A distinction should be

made between narrative voice

and narrative perspective;

the latter is the point of

view adopted by the

narrator, which Genette

calls focalization.

story, that is, the affective relation he has with it (involvement).

5. The ideological function: The nar-rator interrupts his story to introduce in-structive comments or general wisdom concerning his narrative (involvement).

The diegetic narrative mood, then, is

expressed to varying degrees, depending on the degree to which the narrator is effaced from or represented in his narra-tive. This distancing between the narra-tion and the story helps the narratee to evaluate the narrative information being presented, "as the view I have of a pic-ture depends for precision on the distance separating me from it [...]" (1980, p. 162).

2.3 THE NARRATIVE INSTANCE

The narrative instance is said to be the conjunction between (1) narrative voice (who is speaking?), (2) time of the narra-tion (when does the telling occur, relative to the story?) and (3) narrative perspec-tive (through whom are we perceiving?). As with narrative mood, by examining the narrative instance we can gain a bet-ter understanding of the relations be-tween the narrator and the story in a given narrative.

2.3.1 THE NARRATIVE VOICE

If the narrator lets signs of his pres-ence appear in the narrative he is re-

counting, he may acquire a particular status, depending on the way the story is rendered. "We will therefore distinguish here two types of narrative: one with the narrator absent from the story he tells [...], the other with the narrator present as a character in the story he tells [...]. I call the first type, for obvious reasons, het-erodiegetic, and the second type homo-diegetic" (1980, pp. 244-245).

In addition, if the homodiegetic narra-

tor is the hero of the story, he/she is called autodiegetic.

2.3.2 THE TIME OF THE NARRATION

The narrator is always in a specific temporal position relative to the story he/she is telling. Genette describes four kinds of narration:

1. Subsequent narration: This is the

most common temporal position. The narrator tells what happened in some past time.

2. Prior narration: The narrator tells what is going to happen at some future time. This kind of narration often takes the form of a dream or prophecy.

3. Simultaneous narration: The narra-tor tells his/her story at the very moment it occurs.

4. Interpolated narration: This com-plex type of narration combines prior and simultaneous narration. For example, a narrator tells what he experienced during the day (after the fact), and also includes his current impressions about these events.

2.3.3 NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE

A distinction should be made between narrative voice and narrative perspective; the latter is the point of view adopted by the narrator, which Genette calls focal-ization. "So by focalization I certainly mean a restriction of 'field' – actually, that is, a selection of narrative informa-


tion with respect to what was tradition-ally called omniscience" (1988, p. 74). These are matters of perception: the one who perceives is not necessarily the one who tells, and vice versa.

Genette distinguishes three kinds of

focalization: 1. Zero focalization: The narrator

knows more than the characters. He may know the facts about all of the protago-nists, as well as their thoughts and ges-tures. This is the traditional "omniscient narrator".

2. Internal focalization: The narrator knows as much as the focal character. This character filters the information pro-vided to the reader. He cannot report the thoughts of other characters.

3. External focalization: The narrator knows less than the characters. He acts a bit like a camera lens, following the pro-tagonists' actions and gestures from the outside; he is unable to guess their thoughts.

By examining the characteristics of a

narrative instance and the particulars of the narrative mood, we can clarify the mechanisms used in the narrative act, and identify exactly what methodological choices the author made in order to ren-der his/her story. The use of different narratological processes creates different effects for the reader. For example, one could have a hero-narrator (autodiegetic narrator) who uses simultaneous narra-tion and internal focalization and whose speech is often in reported form. This would undoubtedly produce a strong illu-sion of realism and credibility.

2.4 LEVELS Various reading effects result from

shifts in narrative level, traditionally known as embedding. Within the main plot, the author can insert other short em-bedded narratives, told by other narrators from other narrative perspectives. This is a rather common technique that adds di-versity to the narrative act and increases the complexity of the narrative.

2.4.1 EMBEDDED NARRATIVES

Narration of the main (first-level) nar-rative occurs at the extradiegetic level. The event-story being narrated on this first level fills a second-level position, known as intradiegetic. If a character found in this story takes the floor and tells some other narrative, his narrative act will also be on the same intradiegetic level. However, the events being told through the second-level narration are metadiegetic.

Example (fictitious): Today I saw a

teacher come up to a group of children at play. After a few minutes, she spoke: "Listen, children, I'm going to tell you an amazing story of courage that happened a few hundred years ago. This is the story of Marguerite Bourgeois..."

2.4.2 METALEPSIS Writers sometimes also use metalep-

sis, a process in which the boundary be-tween two narrative levels (which is nor-mally impervious) is breached so as to deliberately blur the line between reality and fiction. Metalepsis is a way of play-ing with variations in narrative level in order to create an effect of displacement

OBJECTS LEVELS NARRATIVE

CONTENT Main plot

Extradiegetic

Homodiegetic narration ("I")

Event-story

Intradiegetic

Story about the teacher and the children

Second-level narrative act

Intradiegetic

The teacher speaks

Embedded narrative

Metadiegetic

Story of Marguerite Bourgeois

Genette’s Narrative levels

Various reading effects

result from shifts in

narrative level,

traditionally known as

embedding.


or illusion. This would be a case in which a character or narrator from one level appears on the scene at a higher level, whereas plausibility completely excludes this possibility. "All these games, by the intensity of their effects, demonstrate the importance of the boundaries they [the authors] tax their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude – a bound-ary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells" (1980, p. 236).

To return to our previous example, if the homodiegetic narrator from the main story line intervenes in the meta-diegetic story of Marguerite Bourgeois, this would be a case of metalepsis. Mar-guerite Bourgeois is a 17th-century hero-ine who founded the Notre-Dame Con-gregation school for girls in Montreal. So it would be impossible for a contempo-rary ("current") narrator to appear on the scene, camping out in New France in this embedded story.

2.5 NARRATIVE TIME We have already seen that the time of

narration has to do with the relation be-tween the narration and the story: What is the narrator's temporal position relative

to the events being told? Genette also gave some thought to the question of nar-rative time: How is the story presented with respect to the narrative as a whole, with respect to the final result? Once again, several methodological choices are available to writers. In order to achieve the expected result, they can vary (1) the order of the narrative, (2) the speed of the narrative and (3) the frequency of events. Skillful use of these techniques allows the narratee to identify which narrative elements are being emphasized by the author(s) and what the structure and or-

ganization of the text is.

2.5.2 ORDER Order is the relation between the sequencing of events in the story and their arrangement in the narrative. A narrator may choose to present the events in the order they occurred, that is, chronologically, or he can re-

count them out of order. For ex-ample, detective novels often begin

with a murder that has to be solved. The events preceding the crime,

along with the facts leading to the killer, are presented afterwards.

The order in which the events actu-ally occurred does not match the

order in which they are presented in the narrative. This mixing of temporal order yields a more gripping, complex plot.

The term Genette uses to designate

non-chronological order is anachrony. There are two types of anachrony:

1. Analepsis: The narrator recounts

after the fact an event that took place ear-lier than the present point in the main story.

Example (fictitious): I woke up in a good mood this morning. In my mind were memories of my childhood, with Mum singing every morning, her voice ringing out.

2. Prolepsis: The narrator anticipates events that will occur after the main story

The term Genette uses to

designate non-

chronological order is

anachrony.


ends. Example (fictitious): How will my adventure in

Europe affect me? I will never be able to look at my fam-ily and friends in the same way; surely I will become con-tentious and distant.

There are two factors that can enter into analepsis and

prolepsis: reach and extent. "An anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either more or less far from the "present" moment (that is, from the moment in the story when the narrative was interrupted to make room for the anachrony): this temporal distance we will name the anachrony's reach. The anachrony itself can also cover a duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent" (1980, p. 48).

Anachronies can have several functions in a narrative.

While analepses often take on an explanatory role, devel-oping a character's psychology by relating events from his past, prolepses can arouse the reader's curiosity by partially revealing facts that will surface later. These breaks in chronology may also simply fulfill a dissenting role, if the author wishes to disrupt the classical novel's linear representation to some degree.

2.5.2 NARRATIVE SPEED Other reading effects may be obtained by varying the

narrative speed. Genette uses theatrical performances as his basis, in which the event-story ideally has the same duration as the staged narration. However, in literary texts, the narrator can speed up or slow down the narra-tion with respect to the events being told. For example, we can summarize someone's entire life in a single sen-tence, or we can take a thousand pages to recount events occurring over a 24-hour period.

Genette lists four narrative movements (1980, p. 94)

(NT: narrative time; ST: the story's time): 1. Pause: NT = n; ST = 0. The event-story is inter-

rupted to make room exclusively for narratorial dis-course. Static descriptions fall into this category.

2. Scene: NT = ST. Narrative time corresponds to the story's time. Dialogue is a good example of this.

3. Summary: NT < ST. Some part of the event-story is summarized in the narrative, creating an acceleration. Summaries can be of variable length.

4. Ellipsis: NT = 0; ST = n. The narrative says abso-lutely nothing about some part of the event-story.

Needless to say, these four kinds of narrative speed can be used to varying degrees. They can also be com-bined: A dialogue scene can contain a summary within it, for example. Variations in speed within a narrative can show the relative importance assigned to different events in the story. If an author passes quickly over a particular fact, lingers over it, or omits it entirely, there is certainly reason to ask why he made these textual choices.

2.5.3 FREQUENCY OF EVENTS One last concept remains to be examined with respect

to narrative time: the notion of narrative frequency. This is the relation between the number of times an event oc-curs in the story and the number of times it is mentioned in the narrative. "A system of relationships is established between these capacities for 'repetition' on the part of both the narrated events (of the story) and the narrative statements (of the text) – a system of relationships that we can a priori reduce to four virtual types, simply from the multiplication of the two possibilities given on both sides: the event repeated or not, the statement repeated or not" (1980, p. 114).

These four possibilities imply four kinds of frequency

relations, which can then be organized into three catego-ries (1980, pp. 114-116 ):

1. Singulative narration: 1N / 1S : Narrating once

what happened once. nN / nS : Relating n times what happened n times.

2. Repeating narrative: nN /1S. Recounting more than once what happened once.

3. Iterative narrative: 1N/nS. Relating one time what happened several times.

Credits: Lucie Guillemette and Cynthia Lévesque (2006), « Narratology », in Louis Hébert (dir.), Signo [online], Rimouski (Quebec), http://www.signosemio.com. �

At AMR, we understand the frustration, the sleepless nights, the loss of sexual appetite and our back issues are here to answer all those ques-tions and so much more. Collect them all. Read them. Sleep better.




The Anti-Art of Art Built on Un-Creating Past Creative Creations

Letterists AKA Lettrists, Isouians, Creatics, Loons, and Alcoholics…

By Pascal-Denis Lussier

H ow did I get myself into this? Easy; I like to inflict pain! But since I’m also an absolute paci-

fist who can’t stand to see others suffer, this leaves me with only one possible target on which to satisfy this perverse need: myself! So when asked, “Hey! You feel like doing an article on Letter-ism?” of course I answered with, “Yeah! Cool!” and then set about to write on the topic… Anybody who’s tried to get a clear grasp of the subject understands why this is self-flagellation at its best! Not only do the 30 or so texts I’ve read on the subject contradict themselves one way or another, they also offer different dates for many of the key events!!! And if that weren’t enough, members of the Letterist group them-selves promoted a confusing array of ideas and concepts which increasingly contradicted the initial, fundamental schemes which had launched the move-ment.

Before I get too far, allow me to clar-ify one aspect the more hardcore theory obsessed folks amongst you (all AMR readers?) are no doubt already sighing over: although ‘Lettrism’ is the accepted English spelling, the Lettristes them-selves prefer ‘Letterism’ for the Angli-cised term; since I’m me and always opt for the road less taken, I’ll employ ‘Letterism.’

Letterism; what is it? If you’re guess-ing that it has something to do with let-ters, then you’re entirely correct, but only partially so. Sounds contradictory? Well, yes and no and perhaps maybe. There! Now you’re up to par with most of the texts written about this movement established by Isidore Isou—born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein in Botosani on January 31, 1925 (yet many texts claim 1928 as the year of his birth!?!)—a Romanian Ashkenazi Jew turned Frenchmen who claimed in 1999 to have no hang ups about his name and who recoils at the idea of pseudonyms, yet signed his work under Jean-Isidore Isou and finally under Isidore Isou…

Infatuated with Dadaism and a great

fan of his fellow countryman, Tristan Tzara, whom he saw as the foremost ar-tistic creator and the sole originator of Dada, as well as being greatly influenced by the Surrealist André Breton, Isidore Isou was nonetheless displeased with the limited innovations these movements produced in the early 40’s; according to him, all other Dadaists that followed Tzara were mere plagiarists, and Surreal-ism was moving too rapidly towards mysticism and had reached a point of “stagnation and theoretical bank-ruptcy” (Isou, 1948). Building on these two movements (or rather chiselling to-

Letterism; what is it? If you’re

guessing that it has something

to do with letters, then

you’re entirely correct, but

only partially so. Sounds

contradictory?


wards a new amplic phase, as will be dis-cussed further on), Isou—who, no doubt, was a lonely teen—wrote his first Letter-ist Manifesto in 1942 at the age of 16, in which he makes the claim: Letterism = I s i d o r e I s o u … After the war, Isou relocated to Paris and befriended Gabriel Pomerand; the Letter-ist movement officially saw the light of day in November 1945. O t h -e r s s o o n joined t h e m a n d I s o u finally gained a great deal of respect i n F r a n c e in the 60’s.

It is interesting to note that

the 1942 manifesto seems to have been motivated by his misreading of a phrase by the German philosopher Hermann von Keyserling, who wrote, “The poet dilates vocals,” since ‘vocals’ in Roma-nian, signifies vowels.

Before delving into Letterism itself, it

is important to set the stage on which they were to make their entrance…

The Industrial Revolution and the

subsequent rise of fascism in some areas, along with the oppressive bourgeois dominance over the proletariat—seen as the real causes of World War I by left-wing idealists and the disillusioned youth who saw very little hope in their immedi-ate futures—fed the intellectual and artis-tic reactions that culminated towards movements and schools of thought whose very aim was the annihilation of social demoralization. The grip that was still firmly held by old world despotism

over the libertarian new world ideals and the technological advancements which had been delivered with the promise of offering a release from the daily drudgery and rampant destitution, especially in eastern European countries, created pro-pitious conditions for rebellious behav-iour of all sorts.

Is it really co-incidental that Dadaism offi-cially saw the light of day the same year, 1916, and in the same coun-try, Switzer-land, in which one of the most significant works of linguistics a n a l y s i s

was published: Cours de linguistic générale, by Ferdinand de Saussure (or rather, a posthumous collection of his class lectures compiled by two of his stu-dents)—a seminal work that not only revolutionized further approaches adopted in the field of linguistics, but which shed a tremendous light on the conforming, traditionalist-focused re-strictions imposed by the conventions inherent to all common languages.

It is true that most of the ideas put forth by Saussure had been voiced by various quasi-linguists and philosophers in the 19th century, Saussure was the first to truly formalise a systematic approach to the subject. As such, the identification and elaboration of the basal linguistic structural elements he proposed has had profound implications for the study of literature and has been a foremost influ-ence on nearly all literary developments up to today, including Existentialism and Absurdism. It is important here to em-phasize the fact that the Structuralist

...interesting to note that the 1942 manifesto seems to have been

motivated by his misreading of a phrase by the German philosopher Hermann

von Keyserling who wrote, “The poet dilates

vocals,” since ‘vocals’ in Romanian, signifies vowels.


movement was entirely made possible by Saussure's examination on the subject, and that from this point of view, the study of literature became focused not on the discovery or pursuit of mean-ing, but upon an analysis of the process of reading, upon an investigation of how meaning is experienced and ar-ticulated through the sign system de-ployed by a given text.

If you’ve taken the time to read Isou’s

original manifesto you’ve certainly de-duced that the name Lettrisme, from the French word for letter (lettre), is due to the fact that the movement’s early preoc-cupation was entirely centered on letters and other forms of linguistics signs. Isou described Letterism as: [“Art that ac-cepts the reduction of letters to their basal form (adding or entirely replacing poetic and musical elements) thus ena-bling them to surpass their usual linguis-tic conventions in order to mould new entities shaping coherent works”] (Isou, 1947). Breaking away from the con-ventions detailed by Saussure, which I will discuss below, is indeed the basis for all of Isou’s work.

Although Isidore Isou never refers to

Ferdinand de Saussure, the most promi-nent and influential member of the Ge-neva School of Linguistics, whose totally new, radical approach towards linguistic analysis served as the basis towards the ideas of Roman Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle (which Isou was aware of), and as well, that no other texts prof-fer this correlation—an AMR exclu-sive—it seems abundantly clear, from my point of view, that many of the ideas put forth in his manifesto (reprinted here as a prologue to this article) are directly influ-enced by Saussure’s writings. Isou, be-ing highly interested in the conventions imposed by language, surely came across Saussure in his quest for new modes of thought as these, namely Saussure’s pre-occupation with diachronic versus syn-chronic developments, syntagmatic ver-sus paradigmatic relations, along with his

observations and analysis of the linguis-tic sign—emphasizing a complex rela-tionship uniting a ‘concept’ with a sound-image—were considered highly radical, revolutionary ideas on the subject of communica t ion at the t ime.

This sound-image is not precisely an ac-tual sound that is spoken, but the "psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses" (Saussure, 1916). In Saussurian Linguistics, meaning exists iff (if and only if), the sound-image, or signifier, indicates a concept, or signified element that exists in the world of the speaker. The union of these two is what enables meaningful communication to take place, but only if the codification of a signifier with a signified is shared by the speaker and the auditor (or writer and reader). This breakdown of the linguistic sign led Saussure to posit the idea that this shared codification and the ensuing connection between the signifier and signified is not natural or intuitive; signs are not abso-lute, they are entirely arbitrary. There-fore, within this system, meaning is en-tirely dependent on a culturally agreed upon ‘conventions’

Two possible objections to the notion

of arbitrariness were also discussed in depth by Saussure, onomatopoeia and interjections; since these words are meant to imitate clearly identifiable sounds (e.g.

This sound-image is not precisely an actual sound

that is spoken, but the

"psychological imprint of the sound, the impression

that it makes on

our senses" (Saussure, 1916).


pow, bang, etc.) or spontaneous expres-sions (e.g. ouch), the signifier should therefore not be arbitrary. This idea was appropriated—whilst wilfully ignoring an important segment of Saussure’s view

on the subject—by members of the Futurist movement,

which, follow-ing F.T. Marinetti's

1909 Mani-festo of Fu-

turism, cre-ated Ono-

m a t o p o e i c Poetry, a po-

etic mode that wa s h i gh l y

popularized by Raoul Hausmann

after a 1921 reading of his poem ‘fmsbw’ in Prague.

Futurist influence on Isou and Letter-ists is somewhat evident in the early phase of the movement; poetry was the primary and very nearly sole focus of the Letterists who promoted a form of visual poetry that relied on new calligraphic techniques, superim-posed letters, and the introduction of new and changing letters, as well as oral performances that were entirely dependant on the reader’s recitation and use of inflections.

It is important to reiterate here that,

much like Absurdism, semantic content is of little importance to Letterists, who, by emphasizing the sound value of words to produce emotions, originally sought to demonstrate that beauty and worth lies purely in auditory sounds, thus placing a great deal of importance on phonetic ac-cents; they saw unuttered linguistic signs as fallacious entities, and a dependence on such signs as the hallmark of misinter-pretation and flawed, unsatisfactory com-munication, which has its roots in op-pressive ideals and failing societal re-gimes that offer very little hope for a bet-ter future through its promotion of misdi-rected delinquency by way of stifling true

creativity. However, both onomatopoeic words

and interjections, as Saussure argued, are only approximations of a sound-image since they are not universally the same across all languages; they therefore rely and conform to the broader linguistic system they are part of, hence the varied spellings across languages used to sym-bolize the same sounds. This notion be-came increasingly accepted by those seeking to destroy all formalisms, and so, by the time Isou immersed himself in these matters and was seeking an accept-able outlet and literary voice, Onomato-poeic Poetry was no longer perceived as the systemization providing the only vi-able poetry of the moment. The general loss of interest in this form and Isou’s initial reluctance towards it was partially due to his recognition of it’s adherence to the strict morphophonemic rules separately underlying all languages, and is also in part due to

the fact that, through its condemnation of all other l i t e r a r y forms, the ideals main-tained by Onomato-poeic Po-ets con-tradicted the core p r i n c i -

ples of Futurism, which sought to destroy all past artis-

tic forms in order to create new ones. It is important to remember that since after the First World War, the leading ten-dency of many intellectually-driven artis-tic communities still saw the creation of new forms of expression, in all fields, as the highest value of all human activity. And so, according to Isou and others (such as G.-E. Debord G. Wolman) that soon joined his Letterist movement, this new genre, although appealing, could

Futurist influence on Isou and Letterists is

somewhat evident in the early phase of the movement; poetry was the

primary and very nearly sole focus of the Letterists who promoted a form of visual po-etry that relied on new calligraphic

techniques, superimposed letters, and the introduction of

new and changing letters...


only lead to a new form of the very same artistic stagnation that had become a seri-ous setback to all revolutionary attempts aiming to rid post World War II society from the petit-bourgeoisie spirit and the weaknesses of the working class aes-thetic. However, thus creating the dis-dain which motivated Futur-

ism and their s h o r t - l i v e d popularity, this belief in formal evolution with-out cause or end other than in-itself was perceived as the basis of all bour-geois ideal-ism in the arts. As a side-y e t -

t o t a l l y -related note, reflection on

this discordant aspect of this branch of Futurism led Isou to posit his amplic and chiselling theory of art history, and in-deed of the history of civilization. His point of view is that there are periods of amplification (amplic phase), where new forms are discovered and applied, then periods of excision (chiselling phase), where superflu-ous forms are reduced and elimi-nated.

While Saussure argued that

signs are arbitrary, he also claims that signs lose that characteristic when pre-sented in a particular con-text. A signifier gains its meaning (signified) by the literary units, or other signifiers, that either precede it or come after it; language can only function in a tempo-rally restrained manner and is thusly de-pendant on the linear nature of a signi-fier, i.e. signification is dependant upon

the string of language in which it is em-bedded. This notion points to the cen-trality of the linguistic context to the experience of meaning. Although the relationship of signifier and signified is arbitrary, the meaningfulness of the sign is not: it is wholly determined by and contributes to the linguistic string of which it is a part.

In this sense, Letterists were trying to

break away from the obligatory syntag-matic principles governing communica-tion, as well as the diachronic develop-ments which automatically forged youth-ful modes of thinking as per previously established codes of conduct prescribed through grammatical rules, hence the reasons why, in Isou’s manifesto, the many references pitting youth against the elderly.

Ironically, despite all past efforts that

had placed a great deal of emphasis on vocal sounds, the bulk of Letterist activi-ties shifted towards visual manifesta-tions—this, of course, implies determi-

nistic reliance on symbols—and Letterists soon adapted

this approach to nearly all

fac -ets of

a r t , includ-

ing film, d a n c e ,

and archi-tecture.

This points to

a n important con-tradiction of sorts since Fer-dinand de Saussure was also the first to make the claim against any parallels

Ironically, despite all past efforts that had placed a great

deal of emphasis on vocal sounds,

the bulk of Letterist

activities shifted towards visual manifestations


New American Etiquette

In the not-so-distant future, all your needs will be cared for. Those needs will be limited to: a) a plastic bubble suit for breathing & b) a cheerful zombie companion.

being drawn between ‘signs’ and ‘symbols,’ a symbol, he argued, exists solely because they lack this arbitrary feature, and can only function, although couched in lan-guage, if a clearly accepted and culturally established meaning is attributed to it that isn’t open to varying inter-pretations. For example, a stick with 2 intertwined snakes denotes medicine, and nothing else.

Paradoxically, in light of certain statements appearing

in Isou’s manifesto, namely, “Words: Discern too con-cretely to leave room for the mind.” the Lettrist move-ment, while refusing to admit as much, not only at-tempted to counter the obscurity of meaning through the introduction of new symbols, but also aimed to reduce consonants—vowels were entirely superfluous (this dem-onstrates incredible foresight considering recent findings in the field of cognitive linguistics; I’ll explore this in greater depth in a future column)—to clearly emotionally-charged, sound carrying symbols. The group’s early, combined efforts was to produce the Lexiques de lettres nouvelles, which introduced a sonic alphabet of roughly 140 sounds meant to give rise to a new natural language; the use of such symbols become known as Hypergraph-ics.

Equally of interest, though no congruence has

yet been discussed in any printed texts—something to be explored in a future column—are several links which can be inferred between Isi-

dore Isou’s overall view of language and society and analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine’s epistemological empiricism, Semantic Holism, and his legendary thesis on the Radical Indeterminacy of Translation. From what has been discussed thus far—and which

will serve as the basis for further discussions on the sub-ject—it should come to no surprise that Letterists were considered dangerous anarchists, but perhaps less obvi-ous is the fact that this is the movement that would even-tually give birth to the Sex Pistols and to the punk move-ment.

However, this revolution produced a revolution inside the revolution, and Letterism spawned a group of radi-cals, led by Guy Ernest Debord, the Lettristes Interna-tionale (LI), whose prime goal was to bend the law…all in the name of art; the LI, which merged in 1956 with the International Movement For An Imagist Bauhaus, be-came known as Situationists. This group, Letterist in every sense, rejected Isou for his reluctance towards ille-gal acts and unadulterated debauchery for the sake of ex-perience (every single member who went on to form the LI spent some time in jail), as well as Isou’s insistence that past masterpieces should not be destroyed (a key point that separated Isou from the Futurist movement), is mostly responsible for the Paris uprising of May 1968—an truly important event that still has imprints on leftist ideals… �


KRISTEVA’S SEMANALYSIS FOR THE

REAL WORLD

By Inna Semetsky (2004)

S emanalysis is the term coined by Kristeva in 1969. She however rarely used it as an individual term

later on. As originally posited, semanaly-sis represents a synthesis of the appar-ently disparate disciplines: psychoanaly-sis, philosophy, logic, linguistics, and semiotics in general. Quite paradigmati-cally, it points to the central role of psy-choanalysis, with its emphasis on inter-pretation of symbols and dreams, in semiotics. In fact semanalysis is a port-manteau word referring to both semiotics and psychoanalysis and therefore – as will be seen later—is especially potent for the purpose of this paper.

According to Kristeva, the aim of se-

miotic analysis is the making of various formal models. We consider such a model to be a symbolic representation, that is, a certain system, the structure of which, in Kristeva’s words, “is isomor-phic or analogous to the structure of an-other system” (in Noth 1995: 322), the one that is being modeled or represented. Semiotics not only produces models, but also considers the latter to be its own ob-ject of research.

A central concept in semanalysis is

the text, which however is to be under-stood broadly as not only verbal or lin-guistic, but “as a translinguistic appara-

tus” (ibid). The crucial feature of the text, according to Kristeva, is that it is not re-duced to just representing or literally meaning the real. For Kristeva, whatever text “signifies […] it participate in the transformation of reality, capturing it at the moment of its non-closure” (ibid/noth)

I would like to make it clear that the

definition of the “text” can be ascribed to different modalities for as long as they serve a purpose of communication and fulfill a specific generative activity called by Kristeva a signifying practice. Thus, pictures as well as any cultural artifacts may be considered as “texts”, albeit extra-linguistic. The lengthy narratives can be composed by pictures due to the fact that “pictures have a continuous structure [which] induces the reader to … read the picture as if it were a written text” (Posner 1989: 276).

A signifying practice, reading, and

interpretation constitute the textual pro-ductivity. With this concept Kristeva wants to focus on the dynamical and processual character of productivity rather than on some final actual product. The production is seen as a process or work, however without any references to Marx’s social exchange. The concept of work is posited to be analogous to what,

THE AGE OF ABJECTION:

According to Kristeva, the aim

of semiotic analysis is the

making of various formal

models. We consider such a

model to be a symbolic

representation, that is, a certain

system, the structure of

which, in Kristeva’s words, “is isomorphic or analogous to the

structure of another system”


for example, Freud used to call dream-work. According to Kristeva, “Freud re-vealed production itself to be a process not of exchange (or use) or meaning (value) but of …permutation, which pro-vides the very model for production. Freud therefore opens up the problemat-ics of work as a particular semiotic sys-tem, as distinct from that of ex-change” (323). Etymologically, the posi-tion of “analysis” in semanalysis points to decomposition or dissolution of the sign and the text alike, which leads, by virtue of the process of work, to the em-pirical discovery in practice of some deep and hidden dimensions of meaning.

In her famous “Revolution in Poetic

L a n g u a g e ” ( 1 9 7 4 ) Kristeva further devel-ops the psychoanalytic significance of semana-lysis by specifically dif-ferentiating between two dimensions, the semiotic and the symbol ic . Roughly, the former may be related to what Freud called primary process and the latter –to his secondary processes. The primary proc-ess expresses itself prelin-guistically, at the level of drives and instincts; therefore it constitutes the semiotic di-mension by virtue of it being pre-symbolic. The non-verbal semiotic dimension precedes the symbolic (or linguistic) one; the two finding themselves related to each other dialectically. Following the exam-ple of Freud’s psychoanalytic “psycho-logic”, Kristeva posits a new dialectical logic of contradiction as a foundation for the signifying practice. The Hegelian dialectics with its logical operation of negation becomes a basis of any sym-bolic activity.

2. Abjection The dictionary definition of “abject”

and “abjection” is as follows:

abjection n. 1. the condition of being servile,

wretched, or contemptible. 2. the act of humiliating. 3. Mycol. the release of spores by a

fungus. abject adj. 1. utterly hopeless, miserable, humili-

ating, or wretched: abject poverty. 2. contemptible; despicable; base-

spirited: an abject coward. 3. shamelessly servile; slavish. 4. Obs. cast aside.

The meaning of ab-jection, as described by Kristeva in her “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Ab-jection” (1982), is “one of those vio-lent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or in-side, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the t o l e ra b l e , the think-

able” (1982: 1). We experience abjection as a sponta-

neous reaction that may manifest in a form of unspeakable horror, often ex-pressed at a physical level as uncontrolla-ble vomiting, when faced with a break-down in meaning caused by the generic loss of a habitual distinction. When the distinction – it being between subject and object, self and other, life and death – is destroyed, then the abjection takes its place. Abjection preserves what existed at the archaic level of pre-objectal rela-tionship, as Kristeva puts it, within the

abjection n. 1. the condition of being servile, wretched, or con-temptible. 2. the act of hu-miliating. 3. Mycol. the re-lease of spores by a fungus.

abject adj. 1. utterly hope-less, miserable, humiliating, or wretched: abject poverty. 2. contemptible; despicable; base-spirited: an abject coward. 3. shamelessly servile; slavish. 4. Obs. cast aside.


extreme violence as a condition of a body becoming separated from another body so as to be! Corpse serves as a primary example, traumatically reminding us of

our own finitude and mate-riality; but

so does Auschwitz as a symbol of a particularly destructive, violent, and im-moral event. Kristeva, describing abjec-tion, uses the infinitive 'to fall', cadere in French, hence cadaver, the corpse:

“[M]y body extricates itself, as being

alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my en-tire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. ... 'I' is expelled” (1982: pp.3-4).

The corpse indicates the breakdown

of the distinction between subject and object, that is, a loss of the crucial factor in establishing self-identity: it therefore exemplifies the concept of abjection.

In the psychoanalytic tradition, abjec-

tion is linked to the image of the splitting mother thus to one's desire for separation, for becoming autonomous –accompanied as such by the contradictory feeling of the impossibility of performing this par-

ticular act. Kristeva imagines a child who throws up trying to cleanse himself so as to construct “his own territory, edged by abject” (1982: 5). It is an attempt to re-lease the hold of the symbolic umbilical cord by means of the violent breaking away from the womb, as if guided by the logic of rejection, embedded in bod-ily structure. But because this body is the only and immediate life-world known by the “I”, the very act of the fall or sepa-ration leads to subject becoming a jetti-soned object in this process. That’s why Kristeva says, “it is no longer I who ex-pel, [but] “I” is expelled” (1982: 4). Kristeva borrows the notion of “the ex-cluded” from Mary Douglas thereby af-fording abjection a greater, social dimen-sion in terms of ritualistic prohibition based on binary coding and resulting in separation and segregation of gender, class, race, age, language, or culture.

3. Two Images 3a). Background:

I had a paper published in 2000, that is a year prior to 9/11, in Parallax (Leeds University, CCS). This paper was called “Symbolism of the Tower as Abjec-tion” (Semetsky 2000). The paper inter-preted the symbolism inscribed in “The Tower” card in the Tarot deck (see trans-parency) in terms of Kristeva’s theory of abjection.

The year after, in 2001, it was another

striking image that shook the real world: the events on September 11. This is a picture published on the Internet. Let us take a minute of silence to look at it (see transparency). So the start of the 21st Century appears to be marked by the ca-tastrophe that may be described as a mark of what Kristeva called the dy-namic of abjection, from paganism through the whole of Western culture. The Age of Abjection (as I call it) is per-meated with a confrontation with the Law where a symbolic child risks not only castration but also the loss of its whole being.

Corpse serves as a

primary example,

traumatically reminding us of our own finitude and materiality


I am going to interpret the meaning of the Tower image with the help of Kristeva’s semanalysis, at both textual (or rather, pictorial) level and at the level of social reality (see first transparency, content—1. Semanalysis etc). (for me, see Baudrillard, Requiem for the Twin Towers). I will then suggest that, in accord with semanalysis, the destructive moment is in fact embedded within a generative constructive process, which represents at once symbolic and real construction of col-lective subjectivity within a double process of negation and identification. There-fore the very same mo-ment is a marker of not solely abjection but of hope, this metaphysi-cal concept eluci-dated recently by a number of critical theorists, includ-ing Kristeva (2002) who called such a transformative change a joyful re-volt!

3b). Symbolism The picture of the Tower, which in

some decks is called The Tower of De-struction, is one of the most dramatic, horrifying and powerful images in the Tarot deck. The images on The Tower card, one of twenty-two major cards in a deck, represent two human figures being thrown out of a tower struck by lightning. It is a fall, but not a free fall; it is a vio-lent ejection. The figures' mouths are gaping in horror; their eyes look and see nothing. They are cast far into the deep. The tower stands erect — it is only its crown that has been knocked down by the blazing flames caused by lightning. The two beings on the card have built the tower – and sealed it at the top: there is no entry or exit. They have imprisoned themselves in their own creation – the

rigid, phallic, mental structure – and the only way out is through the agency of a threatening, violent breaking force that would necessarily bring along a trau-matic, abject, experience.

The two figures are neither sub-

jects nor objects. In the midst of a crisis,

they are in-between t w o

c a t e g o -ries, there-

fore “beset by abjec-

tion” (1982: 1) when liter-

ally positioned between the bi-

nary opposites of symbolic sky and

symbolic ground. Lightning pierces the

sky above, and the ground below is ruined

by earthquake. Or there is no ground at all: some

decks portray a tempestu-ous sea. The violent fall

from the tower, the feeling of the catastrophe amidst

thunder and lightning, brings t w o figures, in Kristeva’s words, to the “border of [the] condition as a living being” (1982: 3) barely withstanding the effect of a rapid and shocking change. The falling bodies approach the limits of human endurance; they seem in their suf-fering to exist between life and death be-cause in this fall “death [is] infecting life” (: 4). The symbolic fall is infinite and feels like eternity, signified by two figures caught up in a state of perpetual suspension, indeed within “the utmost of abjection”(: 4).

The mood of this image is permeated

with fear and uncertainty, confirming Kristeva's claim that “abjection is above all ambiguity”(: 9). The sense of “perpetual danger' (: 9) and an uncon-

The mood of this image is permeated with fear and uncertainty, confirming Kristeva's claim that “abjection is above all ambiguity”. The sense of “perpetual danger' and an unconscious anticipation of a shock


scious anticipation of a shock, when “I”, or subject — “the twisted braid of affects and thoughts” (: 1) - will eventually have to hit the ground, makes the existence of the still alive “I” unbearable. This part of self that is 'I' is so desperate and feels overwhelmed to such an extent that it becomes greater than the self: an autono-mous heavy body “which is dissociated, shattered into painful territories, parts larger than the whole” (kristeva 1998: 152—sub in pro). The violent force, sym-bolized by the image of a sudden light-ning, operates at the unconscious level: it “draws me toward the place where mean-ing collapses” (1982: 2). This force be-comes a sign of “the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders" (: 4).

Signification, according to Kristeva,

always functions as a fluctuation between stability and instability, or static quality and negation of a stasis. Symbolic light-ning from above, by breaking the order of things and so negating the stasis of one's identity within the existing order, simultaneously illuminates the way to the new order and new identity, albeit through abjection, an abject becoming an ambiguous sign, a deject, “a tire-less...stray” (1982: 8) situated in space specified as “essentially divisible, fold-able and catastrophic” (:8). The deject “never stops demarcating the universe. …[It] has a sense of danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him” (:8). A sense of dan-ger grows into the horror experienced by deject-abject whose psyche is threatened by the lightning aiming at the self-erected structure. The inevitable force of the thunderbolt threatens the stability of the structure. The abject is driven to “a downfall that carries [it] along into the invisible and unnameable... Never is the ambivalence of drive more fearsome than in this beginning of otherness” (black sun, 1888).

The Tower image is an embodiment

of ambivalence: at a symbolic level, this card may be identified with the Tower of

Babel (in fact, it is portrayed in this man-ner in some decks -- show another trans-parency from the Lovers tarot—and sec-ond transparency of destroyed towers, as a skeleton). “The Tower” is a symbol of false omnipotence and mistaken cer-tainty, a priori condemned to destruction during the most powerful and confusing instance amidst persistent contradiction when even an attempt to any meaningful communication breaks down and fails. Kristeva, speaking of contradiction, has stressed that its very conditions were “always to be understood as heterogene-ity... when the loss of unity, the anchor of the process cuts in [and] the subject in process discovers itself as sepa-rated” (sub in proc.: 149). Indeed, the Tower becomes a signifier of a sudden end in the status quo of the state of af-fairs, it being either individual, or inter-personal, or collective and social. The loss of identity, experienced in abjection, prevents the figures on the picture from being able to envisage or recognize the moment of lightning. But the lightning strikes nevertheless even if “I” remains unconscious of the upcoming event: in-deed, “the impossible constitutes its very being” (: 5) and “a brutish suffering that 'I' puts up with” (: 2).

Lightning may be identified with a

symbol of a sudden and totally overpow-ering change in one's psychic state lead-ing to a potentially overwhelming numi-nous alteration in consciousness. “A flash of lightning ... is discharged like thun-der”, says Kristeva, as though herself peculiarly narrating the Tower picture, and “the time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth” (: 9). The Tower card is an index of abreaction, taking the form of catharsis, that is, a dramatic and forceful replay of the unconscious material in ei-ther personal or collective consciousness, when indeed one's “fortified castle begins to see its walls crumble” (: 48). However, the enforced evacuation, breaking all de-fences, frees one from being incarcerated

Kristeva, speaking of

contradiction, has stressed that its very conditions

were “always to be

understood as heterogeneity... when the loss of unity, the

anchor of the process cuts in

[and] the subject in process

discovers itself as separated”


in the symbolic tower of one's own mak-ing, whether it be psychological, ideo-logical, cultural, or any other stagnant belief system. The Tower represents any unforeseen cataclysmic event, which sud-denly brings people down to earth by disturbing the existing norm and order of things, while simultaneously –by raising one’s level of consciousness – providing a set of conditions for a new order.

The change in one's consciousness –

via abjection – represents dialectics that constitutes a double process of both ne-gation and affirmation, which is embed-ded in the construction of identity. Nega-tion is characterized by a temporary in-terruption in the periodic dynamic proc-ess, within which a pause appears, as claimed by Kristeva, in a form of a sur-plus of negativity, which would ulti-mately destroy the balance of opposites. That is why “the deject is in short a stray. ... And the more he strays, the more he is saved” (: 8), that is constitution takes place via negation, ultimately contribut-ing to the organization of reality at a new level that would have taken place in one's construction of subjectivity. The break-down in existing order simultaneously creates conditions for the potential pro-duction of a new order. Thus both rejec-tion and stasis, or negation and identifi-cation, considered by Kristeva to be the essential elements of subjectivity, seem to precede the mirror stage, providing that the Lacanian mirror is taken meta-phorically and not as solely predicated upon a pre-oedipal infant. This means that the dialectical process exists in its semiotic, quasi-objective reality prior to having become an object of recognition when presented in a form of the iconic sign (as “the Tower” card, for example). The function of the sign thus becomes to amplify (am-pli-fy, or unfold, where le pli means the fold) the unconscious con-tents, so as to eventually permit the “recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language or desire is founded” (Kristeva 1982: 5).

Kristeva, acknowledging the presence of a gap that exists between her analy-sands' verbal expressions and the affects perceived by the analyst, points to the loss of meaning in contemporary life due to dissociation between affects and lan-guage: the words are meaningless be-cause the psyche is empty. But the un-conscious contents projected in the cards' imagery indicate that the psyche is never really empty even if unconscious of it-self: its contents are constituted by signs, which – never mind their existing prior to articulation – are semiotically real and informationally active because of their capacity to affect. (NB: the logic of af-fects) The pragmatics of interpreting Tarot images in terms of semanalysis is to carry the signs over to the level of cog-nitive awareness, to articulate them into readable symbols so as to bridge the said gap by returning the meaning to its bearer.

Kristeva emphasized “the working of

imagination [in] the experience of the want” (1982: 5) that is, the realm which is virtual, non-visible and “logically pre-liminary to being and object” (: 5) that would find its signification in nothing but the spoken language. Yet, by virtue of pictorial semiotics, it is an implicit signi-fication that appears prior to articulation in its iconic and indexical (cf. Peirce) mode. Respectively, this is signification of the higher order, or meta-signification founded upon interpretation: signs are translated into words thus assigning meaning to the imagery, permeated with affects. Kristeva considered the affective world to be enigmatic for the reason of it being irreducible to the verbal mode of expression. All affects exist only through signs that stand for the

Psychic representations of energy dis-

p l acemen ts . . . . [whose] exac t status ...remains, in the present state of psychoanalytic and semiological theories, very vague. No conceptual framework in the relevant sciences... has proven ade-quate to account for this apparently very

The change in one's consciousness via abjection represents dialectics that constitutes a double process of both negation and affirmation, which is embedded in the construction of identity.


rudimentary representation, presign and prelanguage (black sun: 192)

However (and such is the thesis ad-

vanced in my earlier paper) Tarot images when functioning in a mode of pictorial semiotics (cf. Sebeok 1994), do enable the shift of a subject-position from the infa-mous abstract view from nowhere to the contextual and concrete view from the here-and-now. Pictures function in the capacity of “a modality of signifi-cance” (b.s.: 193) for affects, moods and thoughts, which represent, as Kristeva says, “inscriptions [or] energy disrup-tions... [that] become the communicable imprints of affective reality, perceptible to the reader” (b.sun.: 193). Any semiotic system as part of the typology of cultures needs certain means for its i d e n t i f i c a t i o n within a field of communicative and social rela-tions. Culture itself could be seen as a set of texts in-scribed in collect ive m e m o r y ( L o t ma n 1990), and texts, as we said earlier, need not be exclusively linguistic.

3c). Social reality The symbolic Tower of Destruction

may be erected not only on an individual level but also on the collective one. In the feminist interpretation (Gearhart & Ren-nie, 1981) “The Tower” signifies radical intervention, revolution and the over-throwing of false consciousness, violent social conflict and change, destruction of the old order on a grand scale, and release from imprisonment in the patriarchal structure during the very process of its demolition. Jean Baudrillard (2002), in his analysis, or as he says, analogon, of the

spirit of terrorism, talks about the shift of the struggle into the symbolic sphere where an initial event – “as quite a good illustration of chaos theory” (2002: 23) –becomes subjected to unforeseeable con-sequences. Such a singular event – like the destruction of Twin Towers on Sep-tember 11 – propagates unpredictably, causing the chain of effects “not just in the direct economic, political, financial slump in the whole of the system –and the resulting moral and psychological down-turn – but the slump in the value-system” per se (2002: 31-32). The collapse of the towers represents the fact that “the whole system has reached a critical mass which makes it vulnerable to any aggres-sion” (2002: 33). Baudrillard points out that not only terrorism itself is blind but so were the real towers – “no longer open-ing to the outside world, but subject to

artificial conditioning” (2002: 43): air conditioning, or

mental con-d i t i o n i n g alike, – simi-lar to the Tower on the picture that was sealed at the top when s t ruc k b y lightning. The collapse of

symbolic Panop-ticon that was

founded on the meticulous organization of space, generates chaos out of the former order: the abjection in this case loses its phobic quality, becoming not only the power of horror, as Kristeva says, but the power of terror. It turns instead into the unleashed rage of violence against vio-lence when the long repressed emotions and implicit feelings concerning the state of affairs, when deprived of expression, explode and “spill out from their ... con-tainer” (Casey 1997: 323). No longer pro-jected inward, the released violence be-comes directed into the space where the

The collapse of symbolic

Panopticon that was founded on the meticulous organization

of space, generates

chaos out of the former order:

the abjection in this case loses

its phobic quality,

becoming not only the power

of horror, as Kristeva says, but the power

of terror.


abject “does not respect borders, posi-tions, rules” (kristeva 1982: 4). This is indeed “abjection [that] allows us to move beyond the Law of the Father” (Bogue & Cornis-Pope 1996: 10). In a sense, there is jouissance in this process: Kristeva states that subjects that are “victims of the abject are its fascinated victims” (1982: 9).

Quite significant is the fact that the

card immediately preceding “The Tower” in a deck is called “The Devil”, and is tra-ditionally interpreted in terms of fear, bondage, submissiveness, and sexual or economic dependency. (transparency). It represents the absence of freedom, the lack of hope, and the total powerlessness that tend to, as Baudrillard says, crystal-lize and then, at the critical level, begin to spread spontane- ously until reach-ing the climax in t h e consequent card, “the Tower”. P s yc ho lo g i -cally, the im-age of the Devil is the e m b o d i -ment of the powerful, e i t h e r individ-ual or c o l l e c t i v e , Shadow that lurks behind the scenes and may indicate, very much in Nietzschean sense, the ultimate slave morality in the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, even if the inter-play of forces involved in this interaction subsists at the unconscious level only. It represents a moment of psychological de-nial and implementing a scapegoat policy, while projecting onto “the other” one’s own inferior and “shadowy” qualities. It is only when a set of relations becomes to-tally unbearable for the psyche, infusing it with fears and phobias, then the next sym-bol, the Tower, comes forward. Or, rather vice versa, when the effect produced by “The Tower” crosses over the boundary between the Symbolic and the Real, then

the breaking down of the current status quo becomes unavoidable.

Revolt against may turn into revolt for:

ambiguity leads to appropriation of the other, that “Other who precedes and pos-sesses me, and through such possession causes me to be”, as Kristeva says (1982: 10). Jouissance? Yes, but one that borders on a violent passion. The joy is highly problematic indeed: it is only jouissance for as long as the power is distributed properly. The joy of destruction, if over determined, may contribute to erecting yet another Tower, to replacing one Symbolic Order with another. Baudrillard calls it a state of total control, a terror, which is now based on law-and-order measures (2002: 32). However, the historicity is in the place and in place: it is so inscribed in the genealogy of space that any tower at-tracts lightning and is destined, sooner or

later, to be blasted by a thun-derbolt. The sub-

ject, if not in process,

is spaced-out and, respec-

tively, is out of place both

symbo l i ca l l y and literally:

“the space of the subject collapses

in on itself and the subject without

psychic space is prey to a g g r e s s i v e drives and paranoid projections of the kind exhibited in misog-yny, nat ional ism, racism and war” (Kirkby 1998: 111).

4. From Abjection to Hope

One's sealed world was initially cre-ated due to the presence of the primary, unconscious, and narcissistic desire to imprison oneself in the Tower. The image of expulsion from the Tower seems to be, as Kristeva says, “the logical mode of this permanent aggressivity, and the possibil-

The subject, when

functioning in its capacity of

the abjective self, becomes

animated by expulsion, by abjecting the

abject (negating the

negation).


ity of its being positioned and thus re-newed. Though destructive, a 'death drive', expulsion is also the mechanism of relaunching, of tension, of life” (sub in proc: 144), that is, its function doubles to play a creative role in one's construction of subjectivity and transformation of real-ity. The subject, in a process of identify-ing with the meaning of the Tower image, is able to recognize its own shifting iden-tity as abject. The subject, when function-ing in its capacity of the abjective self, becomes animated by expulsion, by ab-jecting the abject (negating the negation). As Kristeva points out, “such an identifi-cation facilitates control, on the part of the subject, a certain knowledge of the proc-ess, a certain relative arrest of its move-ment, all of which are the conditions for its renewal and are factors which prevent it from deteriorating into a pure void” (sub in pro, 149) -- the zero degree of subjec-tivity.

Thus, although the interpretation of the

card when indeed “revelation bursts forth” (1982: 9) seems by itself to be a violent act, in a sense of its shattering one's set of privileged beliefs – such a violence of expulsion, a sort of the nega-tion of negation as experienced by the subject, “rejects the effects of delay” (sub in proc: 153) and hence – rather than breaking the subject – contributes to mak-ing the subject anew, to re-making it! For this reason, the image of “the Tower” card sometimes serves as a sign not of a break-down but a breakthrough, albeit in both cases necessarily indicating the abruptly terminated current psychological state or a break-up in a set of values privileged by a given culture. Significantly, the polyva-lence of the image that follows the Tower in a deck, “The Star”, (transparency) con-notes the field of meanings which include healing, hope, inspiration, and creativity therefore semiotically transmitting the message that no destruction is final. In fact, this card is sometimes called this way: The Star of Hope. Analogously, Kristeva points to the possibility “of re-birth with and against abjection” (1982:

31) following catharsis represented, as we said, by “the Tower”.

A semiotic significance of the iconic

signs is justified by their functioning in the mode of a site of a subject-in-process who, “instead of sounding himself as to his 'being', …does so concerning his place: 'Where am I?' instead of 'Who am I?' For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogene-ous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisi-ble, foldable and catastrophic” (1982: 8). This ambiguous space is called “a strange place, … a chora, a receptacle” (: 14): a subject-in-process being always already constituted by conflicting desires and per-verse “drives, which are 'energy' charges as well as 'psychical' marks” (Rev 1984: 25) creating an enfolded field of forces in action that need to be unfolded in semana-lysis. The term borrowed from Plato, chora's original meaning is a connective link between realms of the intelligible and the sensible, implying a quality of transi-tion or passage, a bridge – albeit invisible and in itself formless — between the two.

Chora is a site saturated by forces, it-

self a vital and “moving force” (Casey 1997: 324). By means of it being a space surrounding the Tower, the place where abject is supposed to stray, chora indicates the polyvalence of the Tower image. This card represents a container that is sealed yet open and having “an oxymoronic structure: it is an open/enclosure” (: 325). Kristeva, acknowledging the dynamic and even organizing character of chora, as “a ... totality formed by the drives and their states in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (Rev –25), stresses its provisional and nonexpressive quality within the limits of verbal dis-course. In the mode of pictorial semiotics, however, chora becomes effectively ex-pressive as the discursive boundaries ex-pand to incorporate the non-verbal, translinguistic mode of a paradoxical “semiotic articulation” (sub in proc 142)

On “the Tower” picture, a space occu-

A semiotic significance of

the iconic signs is justified by

their function-ing in the mode

of a site of a subject-in-

process who, “instead of

sounding himself as to

his 'being', …does so

concerning his place: 'Where am I?' instead of 'Who am I?'


pied by the subject in process is unstable and ambivalent: an archaic divided self, by virtue of its very (dis)placement in the chora, is represented by “a multiplicity of expulsions” (subj –134), the primary function of which is self-destruction or the death drive. Still, it is an amor-phous space, the rhythmicity of which resonates with the pulsations of labour when giving birth: ultimately, there-fore, chora fulfils its generative and creative purpose, as represented by the figure of the naked woman on the next card, “the Star”. Structure-less, chora can be designated solely by its function which is explicitly feminine: to en-gender, to provide the caring conditions – or rather, in its relational economy, to be the condition, the symbolic home – for regeneration, re-birth, and the genesis of new forms.

In her recent interview with Mary Zournazi (2002),

Kristeva present hope as a transformative, humanistic, and even religious idea. Pointing to the destruction of psychic space in the current ideological climate, she says that our hope for a positive and “joyful revolt” (Kristeva 2002: 64), that is, a transformation in our critical thinking up to the point of inventing new ways of living – is em-bedded in the economy of care. Care, as a type of psy-

choanalytic cure, is “a concern for others, and a consid-eration for their ‘ill-being’”(2002: 66). The loss of hope is what is feeding terror, and it was precisely on Septem-ber 11, 2001, when Kristeva re-defined her idea of revolt that enables one to move into a space of hope. She calls it a process of re-evaluation of the psyche that constitutes the renewal of the self, which embodies events that she calls “symbolic mutations” (:76). The fall of Berlin Wall, or the drama of the Russian Kursk, or the planes hitting the World Trade Centre – those singular events provide experiential conditions for transformation because they are embedded in the very “logic of symbolic change” (2002: 75). Revolt thus presupposes the very “necessity of the symbolic deconstruction, the symbolic renewal, which comes from creation – psychic creation, aesthetic creation, rebirth of the individual” (:76). In short – (de)construction means the expansion of con-sciousness in terms of healing, hope, and the flow of creativity, all these attributes represented by the imagery of “the Star”. The semiotics of pictures creates their own text, the semanalysis of which provides those “other means, symbolic or imaginary” (black sun: 391) that serve as an example of the economy of care and hope in the aftermath of destruction. �


Metamorphoses and the Practice of Cultural Theory (excerpt)

by Kenneth J. Knoespel

T his lecture considers the evolving status of Mikhail Bakhtin within American scholarship and gives

special attention to the reception of Bahktin’s work in the American academy in the past decades and what it both re-veals and conceals about the relations between literary scholarship in the United States and Russia.The first part of the lecture provides an overview of Bak-htin’s presence in the United States by giving particular attention to the ideolo-gies that should be recognized in his re-ception. The second part notices particu-lar elements of Bakhtin’s work and the ways they are contributing to the ongoing emergence of cultural studies in North America. The third part explores aspects of Bakhtin’s work that deserve further attention. Here I will ask how Vladimir Bibler and Anatoly Akhutin extend ques-tions raised by Bakhtin. Just as Bakhtin’s study of discourse structures within the novels of Dostoevsky provided a way of thinking about the cognitive bridging in the imaginary space of literature, an im-portant aspect of his work may also be applied to the study of scientific and technological texts. I will conclude by noticing how Bakhtin challenges readers to ask how we generate and use the socio-cultural constructions such as “epoch” and “period” used to bridge cultural rela-tions at the end of the 20th century and to

characterize history itself. I will suggest that Bakhtin capacity to ask how transcultural synchronisms work to both bring together and separate cultural ex-perience may be identified as a major feature of his extensive legacy.

How then are we to explain the “grotesquely anachronistic influence” of Bakhtin’s thought? How are we to ac-count for the position of a non Marxist, nonFormalist, nonFreudian, nonStruc-turalist, nonexistentialist, noncollectivist, nonutopian, nontheologian? In short, how can we account for a scholar who appears a non-modernist but who became the very subject of a post-modernist bakhtin-skii boom? The questions posed by Vitaly Makhlin for Russian colleagues in 1992 confront anyone who surveys the links between Bakhtin’s writings let alone their bearing in a post-modernist American landscape that seems to change under our feet as we speak.1 Although I hardly can begin to answer Makhlin’s questions from a Russian vantage point, I would like to venture a few observations of my own on the extraordinary meta-morphosis of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bak-htin within an American setting.

Since there are many Bakhtins, I

would like to clarify at the outset the frames that I am using to approach Bak-

Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy:

How then are we to explain the “grotesquely

anachronistic influence” of

Bakhtin’s thought? How

are we to account for the

position of a nonMarxist,

nonFormalist, nonFreudian,

nonStructuralist, nonexistentialist,

noncollectivist, nonutopian,

nontheologian?


htin. Russian and Euro-American schol-ars together now divide Bakhtin’s work and life (1895-1975) into five periods: 1) His early life as the son of a merchant family from the Orel region (gymnasium years in Vilnius and Odessa) to univer-sity studies in Petersburg and his degree in classical studies in 1918); 2) the time in Nevel’/Vitebsk (1919-1924) where he taught language and litera-ture and explored formalist linguis-tics; 3) his return to Leningrad ( P e t r o g r a d ) , ( 1 9 2 4 - 1 9 2 9 ) where he contin-ued his group work on formal-ism. (And when he lived for a short period of time with his wife at Peter-hof); 4) the period of be-ing on the margins: exile (Kazakhstan) and teaching (Saransk, Savelovo) from 1930 to the early 1950’s; 5) a late period be-tween 1950s and 1975 when he received a degree for his work on Rabelais and becomes reassimilated into Russian liter-ary culture. As the Bakhtin bibliography shows, the sifting and resifting through each of these periods has been a compli-cated task. (My single-handout offers a chronology of Bakhtin’s work as well as Russian and American publication dates.)

A detailed affirmation of Bakhtin’s

accomplishment together with an implicit prediction of its importance for the future appears in Caryl Emerson’s book, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. The 1999 book on Bakhtin by Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aes-thetic for Democracy carries special im-portance because of its meticulous re-view of the archival problems surround-

ing Bakhtin’s manuscripts and their Rus-sian publication. As both Emerson and Hirschkop know, it is hardly an exag-geration to talk about a Bakhtin industry. Bakhtin has become a scholarly equiva-lent of a Medieval poet whose texts have been so dispersed that one is continually confronted with questions of authenticity or chronology. Indeed Bakhtin’s legacy

hardly depends on the web sites or digital ver-sions of his work but on a painstaking assembly of a mass of material. This archival work per-tains not only to Bakhtin but to the complex dissemi-nation of intellec-tual activity during the Soviet period. From such a vantage po in t , Bakht in should not be iso-lated but taken as a mark of the impor-tant scholarship that took place during the Soviet period. My

r e - marks this afternoon will hardly create a “whole” Mikhail Bakhtin but will instead suggest that the legacy of Bakhtin in the United States has gone through several stages. Rather than simply providing a historical over-view, however, I will argue that the most important work on Bakhtin is our own contemporary work.

Ideologies of Reception

A fundamental mark of Bakhtin’s critical philosophy involves his challenge that we become aware that the language with which we work is never ours alone. In sharp contrast to poetic theory that would individualize the experience of language--a kind of Cartesian poetics—Bakhtin reminds us that we are in con-tinuous conversation with others. Such a

Bakhtin has become a scholarly

equivalent of a Medieval poet

whose texts have been

so dispersed that one is

continually con-fronted with questions of authenticity

or chronology.


cognitive and dialogical understanding of language requires us to acknowledge that the reception of Bakhtin is hardly neutral but that it is received into a developed intellectual network. Indeed in that even our discussions at this conference are hardly neutral but must be approached from our already being engaged.

Certainly it is necessary at the outset

to recognize that the Cold War has func-tioned as a filter of reception in the case of Bakhtin. If we wish, we may ask about the perception or distortion of the Soviet Union through the “lens” of the iron cur-tain. What was seen and what was not seen through this lens? Whether one con-siders the anti-communist work of gen-erations, the Soviet Union was often translated into a dangerous and some-times exotic landscape. Of course, the landscape was filtered again by a distinc-tion between the Soviet Union and the Russians. It is interesting that one finds no references to Bakhtin in the work of Isaiah Berlin who certainly functioned as one of the cultural filters of Cold War ideology. While the Soviets were evil, the Russians could represent an even greater ideal of humanity. The Cold War intensified the western romance of the Russian nineteenth century. Within such a setting, Bakhtin became first and fore-most a figure that followed the American discovery of Boris Pasternak, Nadezhda Mandelstahm, and Joseph Brodsky. But how then was Bakhtin read? Was it his intellectual work that was most signifi-cant or his figure as “another” Russian intellectual who suffered more than we can imagine? Intellectual or saint within a moral drama? Where should we place Bakhtin in our own academic carnivals?

Since I raise these questions allow me

to give an overview of my own engage-ment in Bakhtin. I think that I first heard the name Bakhtin at the University of Wisconsin where Professor Stephen Nichols, a student of Rene Wellek, talked about Rabelais and His World in a 1968 graduate seminar on the history of liter-

ary theory. For a more detailed encoun-ter, I needed to wait until I had visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1971. While teaching at the University of Upp-sala (1970-73), I often spoke with An-nika Bäckstöm, a Swedish scholar of Russian literature whose scholarship and translation of Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladi-mir Admoni, and Joseph Brodsky intro-duced names that I would never have encountered in the United States. When I returned to the United States and began my graduate studies at the University of Chicago in1974, one of my first encoun-ters with my professors in comparative literature was with the Russian Slavist Edward Wasiolek who was in the process of editing Dostoevsky’s notebooks. A year or so later when I first read Rab-elais, I approached it as a work related to my own work in Medieval and Renais-sance literature. Here, I thought, was a Russian Johann Huizinga. Almost at the same time I encountered the “novelistic” Bakhtin who challenged me to think about the polyphonic structure of Ovid’s

If we wish, we may ask

about the perception

or distortion of the Soviet

Union through the “lens” of the iron curtain.

What was seen and

what was not seen

through this lens?


What is so remarkable is that the scholarly figure of Bakhtin begins to be

assembled in the 1960’s by academic communities who were reading works that he had read decades earlier.

Metamorphoses and its relation to uni-v e r s a l history. From the

same time, I have a defined memory of meeting Anatoly Liberman, from the University of Minnesota, who talked about Bakhtin in re-gard to Gogal. In the later 1980s my encounters with Bak-

htin were closely re - lated to Tzvetan Todorov,7 Franticek Galan (another Wellek student) and Lindsay Waters, the visionary editor first at the University of Minnesota and now at Harvard University Press.

In 1991 another trip to Russia intro-

duced me to Daniel Alex-androv and ongoing Rus-sian work on Bakhtin. Discussions with Yuri Treyakov and Tatiana Treyakova brought the “Euro-American” Bak-htin closer to the Russian Bakhtin. My own work as editor for Configurations allowed me to organize a workshop with Michael Holquist, Daniel Alexan-drov, and Anton Struch-kov in Atlanta in 1993 and it was this workshop that led to the publication of a special issue of Con-figurations devoted to “Communities of Science and Culture in Russian Science Studies.” Since 1993 my work with Bak-htin has involved research into the scien-tific discourse as well as into the epochal dimension of dialogics.10 I have been struck in thinking about how my encoun-ters with Bakhtin are never simply en-counters with Bakhtin but encounters through teachers, colleagues, and stu-dents. Such mediated encounters are an

immediate reminder of the multiple voices that participate in the formulation of a single figure.

From the vantage

point of 1968, (the time of my own incidental encounter with Bak-htin) it is important to recall that Bakhtin was received by a generation that had studied Erich Auer-bach, Ernst Curt-sius, and Leo Spi tzer . Each scholar stands not only for a body of historiographic and philological criticism but for an often unacknowledged task of rebuilding and reaffirming the value of European and German humanities after the Second World War. Auerbach himself calls at-

tention to this in his after-ward to Mimesis where he describes a scholarship with-out access to a library. Auer-bach was read in thousands of classrooms from the 1950 - 1970’s. What is so striking is the way that Bakhtin’s rediscovery in the Soviet Union intersects with the rebuilding of the humanities in an American setting. More particularly, Bakhtin was received by a generation of American criticism influ-enced by pre-second world war scholarship. The recep-tion of Bakhtin within such a

setting in many ways affirms Bakhtin’s own reading of German criticism in the 1920’s and 30’s. What is so remarkable is that the scholarly figure of Bakhtin begins to be assembled in the 1960’s by academic communities who were reading works that he had read decades earlier. What draws the disparate groups together is not the Marburg School of German philosophy but the efforts to retain an identity of western culture during a cen-


tury that Hobsbawm has described a the century of war-fare. The work of Michael Holquist serves as a good example of Bakhtin’s integration with early twentieth-century German philosophy and since I can hardly re-view the connections here I must refer people to Hol-quist’s introduction to Art and Answerability.

But if American reception of Bakhtin is influ-

enced by German scholars, it is accomplished by Russian émigré scholars. It was Roman Jacobson and Kyrstyna Pomorska who supervise the publi-cation of Rabelais and Pomorska who writes the introduction. The formalist-interest of Jakobson and Pomorska deserves special attention. For Po-morska, Bakhtin offers an opportunity not only to review tenants of Russian Formalism but also to show how Bakhtin has extended its application.

The author is no longer confined to the verbal

language but investigates and compares different sign systems such as verbal, pictorial, and ges-tural. In the book on Dostoevsky Bakhtin had al-ready mentioned that his analysis of the dialogue/monologue structure actually belongs to a metalingual level. In the present study he has proved to be most consistent in this creative de-velopment. The critic presents Rabelais’ work in the richest context of medieval and Renaissance cultures, treating them as systems of multiform signs. What should be emphasized as well is that unlike

many Russian theorists, beginning in 1968, Bakhtin be-comes of interest not simply to Slavists but to a broad range of professors and students in the study of litera-ture. In reviewing recent research on Bakhtin for this lecture, I expected to be overwhelmed by articles and books that testified both to the Bakhtin industry in the United States and to multiple theoretical “personalities” that had been created for Bakhtin. In large part what I expected was true but I also discovered that it might be more realistic to speak not so much of a Bakhtin indus-try as a Bakhtin laboratory. While it is certainly possible to discover many instances of Bakhtin being torn away from a Russian intellectual setting and even more being torn away from Russian, it is important to see that Bak-htin’s migration has also challenged the often isolated position of Slavic departments in the United States. In effect, Bakhtin has become a “cross-over” figure that has brought Russian theory even in English Depart-ments. One reason may be located in the importance of Rene Wellek who drew such attention to the history of

cultural theory during the 1960’s. I think an even more important reason is found in influence of French phi-losophy and theory during the 1960s.

1968 marked the publication not only of Bakhtin’s

Rabelais but also of Jacques Derrida’s Grammatology. What is noteworthy is that in retrospect it is possible to see that the publication of one did indeed have a bearing on the other. Although there is no time here for great detail, it is important to recognize how the obscurity of “new” French criticism worked to bring together the formalist and neo-Kantian of Bakhtin’s reception. The integration of different methodology becomes reinforced by the challenges posed by the complex reception of French criticism at the end of the 1960’s. While many theoreticians may be cited, let me mention only three: Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. In contrast to formalist study of language, Derrida sought to detect the ways in which language functions self-referentially. Deconstruc-tion works through a practice of building neologisms or neo-logical sites from which logical order could be tested. In fact, in practice deconstruction is closely re-lated to mathematical analysis. If we wish, it is possible to see how deconstruction provides Anglo-American education tools with which it may decode unacknow-ledged logical structure that had become encoded in lan-guage. Even more simply, deconstruction provided Eng-lish speakers with a vehicle for revealing the ways that religious ideology shaped experience. If deconstruction offered a means for asking questions about the costs of unquestioned recourse to religion, Foucault’s work asked about the ways in which language may be used to conceal institutional power. Foucault’s work proceeds not as a commentary on Marxist sociology but develops a far more eclectic approach that seeks to gather tools from multiple disciplines. The psychoanalytic “turn” marked by Lacan represents another component of the setting in which Bakhtin was received.

The combination of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan

and the multitude of interpreters that explored their writ-ing provided (and still provides) a setting for the recep-tion of Bakhtin. Put in the simplest terms, the

American recognition of Bakhtin does not mark the

simple discovery of a great Russian theoretician, but also a strong reaction against or, at the very least, an interrogation of French theory. Contrary to the philoso-phical abstraction of French theory, Bakhtin offered a means of integrating formalist theory with German her-meneutics. Even more he located the focal point for re-search in literature. �

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