[Ad]dressing Methodologies.
Tracing the Self In Significant Slips: Shadow Dancing.
Volume 2
Addendum
Jill Schostak
2005
Contents
Intertextuality: the birth of a term.
From Kristeva, Barthes to Derrida.
‘Determination’ of différance.
Of two: of a and e before they are two.
.Introduction.
Addendum reviews the literature on “intertextuality” and “meaning-slips” with, beside and against Jacques Derrida’s notion of “écriture” to open up a space to address the doing, the theorising and the effects of the performativity of ‘intertextuality’ and “meaning-slips”. It thus elaborates one of a number of exploratory resources for the reading and re-writing of Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips that constitute the experiment in writing. However, this elaboration is not at all to suggest a) a preface/pre-figuration function of Addendum, nor that b) a review of intertextuality and meaning-slips is the only approach – others will be alluded to as appropriate and picked up again in the concluding discussion of Addendum and finally nor is it c) to suggest it is the Lastword on the experiment in writing. Like Derrida ‘I absolutely refuse a discourse that would assign me a single code, a single language game, a single context, a single situation; and I claim this right not simply out of caprice or because it is to my taste, but for ethical and political reasons’ (Derrida. 1996: 81).
Firstly then, an initial brief look at écriture is helpful before turning to review and discuss intertextuality and meaning-slips. Écriture is writing in a broader sense than the script produced on paper by whatever means, hand or other. It is a metaphor, a figure for ‘an entire structure of investigation, not merely “writing in the narrow sense,” graphic notation on a tangible material’ (Spivak. 1976: ix-lxxxix). Rather it is ‘the constitution of a thick space where the play of hiding/revealing may take place’ (Lyotard. 1971: 75) , the space of the secret and the imperceptible. Neither irreducible to a series of rules on the investigations of graphic systems nor a simple opposition to speech in order to invert a binary opposition, it announces a rhetoric of identity situated in some physical context (Wolfreys, 1998). Not only does the notion of writing refer to speech and thought as forms of writing, but it is also expanded along further horizons to include the writing, the written-ness, of the subject’s identity (Wolfreys. 1998).
Applying this the academic/writer has to distance her/himself and others not just from a language, a particular discourse, but from the language itself, as a pre-existing classification of the world. Thus to intervene in the world through writing is not to just add to the existing mass of linguistic production. Rather a working-over of language will detach it from prevailing codes and stop it from reproducing a pre-given structuring of the world, and thereby set going a certain indirectedness, since the world is intervened in only through an intervention in language itself. Thus, Barthes views the intertext as
What comes to me, not what I summon up; not an “authority,” simply a circular memory. Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text.
Barthes. 1976: 36
The issue then is not that of “authority”, but rather that of ‘a circular memory’ and of ‘the impossibility of living outside’ of context. Instantly within this ‘infinite text’, echoes between Barthes’s comments in the citation above and Derrida’s ‘il n’y a pas de hors de texte’ [see Addendum: 67] are set circulating. What-is-more, the English Oxford Reference Dictionary interestingly ascribes to the word ‘cite’ meanings of ‘frequent’ and ‘set moving’. Barthes himself employs a phrase incorporating a notion of set moving [see Endnote 15] and I deploy this as a Kristevan-like minimal textual unit [see Addendum: 13] to mark the iterability of Barthes’s circular memory in Derridean fashion: as inter-text, no less and the impossibility of ‘living outside’ of context. Thus Barthes’s statement provides a kind of ‘preface’, a parergon as Derrida might call it, a Lyotard-like thick space for the work of Addendum which focuses on four key “primary” authors, namely, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida and Michael Riffaterre. Some additional reference is made to the work of Jean-François Lyotard as a resource for discussing issues of meaning-slippage and to further explore what is at stake in the debates within the review. Each author is the occasion of a circular reading, as Barthes’s ‘circular memory’ comes into force illustrating the circularity, in the sense of circulation/set going rather than circling, involved in reading and hence in writing.Various organising themes for the review of intertextuality and meaning-slips are possible. The particular framework chosen here will take its cue from those historians of ideas who have recently thrown light on the contexts within which such concepts as 'intertextuality', (Worton & Stills [eds] (1990); Clayton & Rothstein [eds] (1991); Plett [ed] (1991); Oliver (1997); Allen (2000); Orr (2003); McAfee (2004)), 'post-structuralism', Foucault (1970); (Bouchard [ed] (1977); Deleuze (1977); Foucault (1977); Descombes (1980); Young [ed] (1981); Lavers (1982); Foucault (1983); Rabinow (1984); Lacan (1985); Carroll (1987); Waters & Godzich [ed] (1989); Readings (1991); Haber (1994); Komesaroff [ed] (1995); Cixous (1998); Rodowick (2001); Malpas (2003)) ‘postmodernism’, (Hutcheon (1988); Hutcheon (1989); Grimshaw (2001); Diprose (2002)), and ‘deconstruction’ (Macksey & Donato [eds] (1970); Spivak (1976); Norris (1982); Culler (1983); Eagleton (1983); Kearney [ed] (1984); Lecercle (1985); Ulmer (1985); Gasché (1986); Llewelyn (1986); Melville (1986); Norris (1987); Dasenbrock [ed] (1989); Lacoue-Labarthe (1989); Silverman [ed] (1989); Silverman & Aylesworth [eds] (1990); Johnson (1993); Madison (1993); Gasché (1994); Royle (1995); Mouffe [ed] (1996); de Nooy (1997); Hobson (1998); Wolfreys (1998); Bennington (2000); McQuillan [ed] (2000); Dunkelsbuhler (2002); Patton & Protevi [eds] (2003); Rapaport (2003); Royle (2003)) have emerged.
Moreover, it is also informed by the works of Roth (1988), (Buchanon, (2000), Rabaté, (2002), Baugh, (2003) and Davis, (2004), who point out that, for the most part, the work of French post-structuralists can be viewed as a response or reaction to Hegel, and also to structuralism which eschewed Hegelianism in its search for a scientific model. In referring to Hegel within the context of Addendum, I speak of a “French Hegel” who emerged from the interpretations given to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by Kojève in his famous lectures and also by Hyppolite, both of whom, incidentally, might be described as primary “authors” for the career trajectories of many of the French post-structuralists (for Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, to name but three). These post-structuralists respond and react by reading with, beside and against a) the works of Hegel, and also b) that of structuralism and scientism both of which are totalizing systems.
Despite the diversity of the projects of the various post-structuralists, commonly held purposes and strategies can be identified. Their collective avant-garde intention was to undermine and disturb Authority and to challenge any form of totalizing system that might give rise to Absolute Knowledge and Absolute Reason or Science. They set out to develop revolutionary ways of thinking that would keep systems open-ended, heterogeneous and dynamic, thus clearing the way to alternative playful interpretations, alternative ways of seeing, being and working. This led to notions of reading/writing undergoing significant changes. Traditional notions of the Author, of the reader, and of the Text, and thus by implication of truth and body, were called into question. For example, Kristeva comments in Oliver’s The Portable Kristeva,
For us, structuralism … was already accepted knowledge. […] From the outset, however, our task was to take this acquired knowledge and immediately do something else.Oliver. 1997: 9
Setting out to ‘do something else’ led to strategies involving
- Desire/ intent to disturb, disrupt, destabilize, unsettle, to shock
- Desire/ intent to create and maintain the fluently elusive and/or the fluidly ephemeral
- Desire/ intent for open and dynamic systems
This challenge, this doing of something else, in whatever form it took and by whomsoever, was viewed as essential to counter the tendency through which theory becomes institutionalized as “Theory” (Roth, 1988; Rabaté, 2002, Davis, 2004), or undergoes ‘domestication’ (Norris, 1987). ‘[A] Doxa (a popular opinion) is posited, intolerable; to free myself of it, I postulate a paradox; then this paradox turns bad, becomes a new concretion, itself becomes a new Doxa, and I must seek further for a new paradox’ (Barthes. 1977: 71). The danger Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida and others sought to avoid was that of “interiorizing” conflict in order to reduce it and stabilize it, which in turn, thus effectively opposed and resisted change. In other words, all three set out to do something other than sign up to following the model of a Hegelian strategy which led to Absolute Reason. It is thus within this set of concerns that the key terms of this Addendum take their significance. Intertextuality is one way of thinking how to undermine the totalitarian grip of Reason.In Barthes’s words, every text holds the intertextual, itself being ‘the text-between’ of another text, quite different to its “sources”, but nevertheless, marking the “influences”, falling in with ‘the myth of filiation’, even whilst of and in citations that are ‘anonymous, untraceable and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas’ (Barthes. 1977: 160). Earlier echoes between Barthes and Derrida were made [Addendum: 3]. Similarly with Riffaterre who posits a hidden inter-text which gives meaning to the (poetic) text currently being read, as will be discussed in detail later [Addendum: 73-81]. The ‘circular memory’ is already at play (Barthes. 1976: 36). But first, a distinction is required in order to describe further what is at stake in intertextuality.
Is intertextuality distinct from source studies and from influence studies? Traditionally, in literary studies, the scholar had continued to search after the ‘reliable text’ despite knowing that there is no fixed meaning since the historical appropriation of meaning cannot be halted. Indeed, the drive for ‘actual’ meaning remains over-ridingly powerful and insistent (Mai, 1991). Kristeva, however, envisioned a ‘new kind of hermeneutics’ (Mai. 1991: 43), one which propogated numerous conceptual frameworks and models (Ruprecht, 1991), through the juxta-position of its intertexts, which create forces of tension and conflict between the “source” and the new (Muller, 1991). Kristeva is adamant that intertextuality is distinct and does not elide/compete with influence or sources, not by imitation nor by quotation. In fact, so keen is she to avoid the reduction of intertextuality to the traditional notions of influence, source-study and simple ‘context’ that, for these very reasons, she introduced the term ‘transposition’ (Kristeva. 1984).
Thus relationality is at the heart of intertextuality with its many interactive networks, none able to dominate the others as Master signifier. As a ‘galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds’, it has no beginning. Reversible and accessible through several entrances, none surpassing the other, ‘the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, [they] are indeterminable’ (Barthes. 1979: 5-6). Neither comparison of one text with others through mere juxta-position, nor mere ‘static phenomenological accountancy’ (Plett. 1991: 4), intertextuality, Kristeva argues is quite another ‘positionality’,
The term inter-textuality denotes the transposition of one (or several) sign system[s] into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of “study of sources”, we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic – of enunciative and denotative positionality.Kristeva. 1984: 59-60
It is during transposition that slipways [catwalks] open up for meaning-slips to emerge. That said, for this review, for the most part I will continue to use the term ‘intertextuality’ but I will employ the term ‘transposition’ after Kristeva wherever I intend to stress the trans-postionality function of the concept of intertextuality/transposition.Intertextuality: the birth of a term.
Julia Kristeva coined the critical term ‘intertextualité’ in 1967, (Kristeva, 1984; Stills and Worton, 1990; Plett, 1991; Mai, 1991; Allen, 2000; Orr, 2003).
Accepting that we are unable to live ‘outside the infinite text’, from whence did the term emerge (Barthes. 1975: 36)? Kristeva’s 1966 doctoral thesis introduced Bakhtin’s work on dialogism to the French intellectual scene. Her Bulgarian heritage was a veritable god-send in overcoming the Russian/ French language bar and Bakhtin’s work on literary theory, formerly inaccessible, was soon opened up to this particular intellectual scene. Focusing on the ‘social significance’ and the ‘historical’ ‘performance’ of language and linguistic interaction ‘utterance’ was a critical term for Bakhtin, (Bakhtin/Medvedev 1978: 120 as cited in Allen. 2000: 17). Not one to engage in ‘the static hewing out of texts’ Bakhtin visualizes a literary structure that ‘does not simply exist, but one that is generated in relation to another structure’ (Kristeva. 1980: 64). He thus arrives at a concept of ‘the “literary word” as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings’ (Kristeva. 1980: 65).
Bakhtin’s emphasis on the historical and the social aspects of the utterance opens up a space for the reader/writer and stands in stark contrast to the sign system of Saussure’s structural linguistics. Saussurean structuralism effaces the writer/reader through a system of arbitrary signs that are also differential ‘without positive terms’ (Saussure, 1974: 120 cited in Allen, 2000). This linguistic system pre-exists any speaker signalling that the social focus of language simply does not exist for Saussure, for whom words are only relational with respect to their position within abstract systems.
For Kristeva, a speaking being is crucial for ‘understanding oral and written literature, politics, national identity, sexuality, culture and nature’ (McAfee. 2004: 1). Thus it is crucial for a Kristevan understanding of intertextuality. Far from being separate domains, ‘the speaking being is a “strange fold” between them all’, where inner drives interject with language, sexuality plays with thought, where body and culture meet, (McAfee. 2004: 1). Kristeva calls this speaking being the “speaking subject”. It is split between the conscious and the unconscious, reason and desire, the communicable and the incommunicable. Such a positioning begins to open up that magical milieu, invoking that mystical space wherein ‘a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively’ (Barthes. 1977: 142). This milieu, this sudden transformative space, wherein writing does not act directly on reality, since it is ‘the very practice of the symbol itself’, sets going a disconnection, voice loses its origin, and ‘intertextuality’ later emerges (Barthes. 1977: 142). Saussurean language after Kristeva is ‘as a system’ that is ‘articulated through the signifier which exceeds the consciousness (and therefore systematization) of the speaking subject’ (Kristeva. 1985: 210).
Wherever ‘the subject is implicated, whether body or history, or symbolic order, reason, intelligibility’, desire arises (Kristeva. 1980: 116). Kristeva borrows the symbolic order from Lacan, but then turns aside from the Lacanian Imaginary, looking instead to Freud’s work on ‘primary process’ and the pre-symbolic stage of the child. A notion ‘of the semiotic emerges, characterized by pre-symbolic drives, impulses, bodily ‘pulsions’ (rhythms and movements). Kristeva’s semiotic is ‘an articulation of unconscious processes which fracture the common idealisation of those images and signs which secure the status quo, and guarantee the establishment’ (Smith. 1998: 16). It constantly and subversively threatens ‘the symbolic order of things which Kristeva herself stresses’, in case we should have assumed otherwise, ‘is no monolithic structure, but an illusion of stability’ (Smith. 1998: 16). Although Kristeva’s semiotic is inextricably linked to the body it is at the point of the thetic phase that the human subject enters the social world/the real/the symbolic/father/ phallus.
Already the theoretical and practical space is more complex and intricate than the classic definition of intertextuality (Mai, 1986; Orr, 2003) as a ‘mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva. 1980: 66), [as cited In-Between Slips: Fig 2: 247]. Absorption and transformation occur in ways that implicate a speaking, desiring subject. Moreover, transposing utterance and the significance of society and culture on the notion of ‘linguistic dialogue’, after reading Bakhtin and after reading the Russian Formalists, word, for Kristeva, comes to occupy a significant place within the space of texts and with reference to the subject [see ‘subject-on-trial’ below].
Bakhtin locates the logic of the literary word in what was called ‘carnivalesque discourse’ (Kristeva. 1980: 65). The carnival, with both a serious side and a kind of parody side, unsettles the law of language with its grammatical and semantic rules and disturbs the social and political status quo. Furthermore, it involves a dream-like logic, plus, I would suggest, a hystericization and a signifiance, [see Addendum: 28], adamantly refusing existing hierarchies be they social and/or political. The effect is of ‘drama in three dimensions’ but yet located in language’ where drama is of a different order to the staged or the theatrical, enveloping ‘life, game and dream, discourse and spectacle’ (Kristeva. 1980: 79) as is played out both in the personal narrative and ‘Primitive Streak’ of Figs 1, 2 and 3 of In-Between Slips.
The picture is a complex one that weaves intertext with, beside and against subject, utterance, word and discourse. One way of looking at it is to define ‘word’ as a signifier for different modes of (literary) ‘intellection’, locating ‘poetic analysis as the sensitive center of contemporary “human” sciences’ emerging at ‘the intersection of language with space’ (Kristeva. 1980: 65) and intimately linked with the speaking subject.
Poetic analysis.
And it is here at this very intersection that I anacoluthonally locate the parerga-figural [see Endnotes 1, 5, 6] of a) the ‘Fig’ with, beside and against the other ‘Figs’ of In-Between Slips, b) Covers – in the de-signer space with, beside and against In-Between Slips and c) In-Between Slips with, beside and against Covers – in the de-signer space and therein/of set going an “oblique translation”, a SlanTr a poetic analysis – an enmeshing, the experiment in writing, no less. Hence poetic analysis and its relation to intertextuality and meaning-slips is central to Addendum in its function as one of a number of exploratory resources reading with, beside and against Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips.
Poetic language then forms a dynamic intersection of textual surfaces, a force for dialogue between several writings that would include those of the writer and of the addressee, implicating word as the minimal textual unit. For Kristeva, within this very intersection, word thus comes to occupy ‘the status of mediator’ (Kristeva. 1980: 66) there by opening up ‘space for her own concept of intertextuality’ (Moi. 1986: 37). As mediator word opens up the dialogical, semic elements, and as regulator, it opens up ambivalent elements ‘within the dialogical space of texts’ (Kristeva. 1980: 66).With Kristevan semiotics and her subject split between two signifying fields, (the semiotic and the symbolic [to be elaborated below]) the mediation at work here through the dynamic and through heterogeneity transforms and transposes, opening up rather than forcing closure. The semiotic is likened to pre-speech infant babble that continues with us even though on another level we [apparently] lose [sight of] it when we enter the symbolic signifying field. A central focus of the semiotic is the chora, and through it, our ‘infant’ pre-speech fluidity of self and poetic language bubble up to ceaselessly disturb the monologic order of the symbolic. Poetic language whilst sited in the symbolic thus remains forever shot through with traces of the semiotic. Kristeva argues for more than grammar, syntax, or vocabulary, since ‘sensation will leave its indelible stamp and that this imprint of the body in language is readable’ (Smith. 1998: 14). What might such an event look like? A brief recourse to Lyotard’s notion of a reading event is helpful here.
Reading as event for Lyotard raises up/[ad]dresses ‘the figure against discourse, the libidinal skin against the organic body’ invoking a materiality of an in-betweeen~ness of tensions between reading and seeing (Readings. 1991: xx). This notion of reading which incorporates the figural force thus goes beyond the flat ‘textual space’ - that ‘space of pure opposition’ of structural linguistics, to one of ‘depth and opacity’ as required by the introduction of ‘motivation and continuity between the linguistic elements’ (Readings. 1991: 18). Analogies between Kristeva’s notion of word-joining and Lyotard’s of phrase-linking lead both to conceptualise reading/writing with, beside and against the materiality of bodies. But each takes a different approach. Kristeva turns to psychoanalysis whereas, in his early work, Lyotard turns to phenomenology à la Merleau-Ponty.
The semiotic, Kristeva insists, is not an extension of the language system but transversal to and coextensive with it. It is through the semiotic that we can connect language as a formal system to something outside this, in the realm of the psycho-somatic, to a body and a bodily subject structuring and de-structuring identity’ (Smith. 1998: 18).
In other words, notions of inside/outside are unsettled as slippage and meaning-slips may pass, or traverse or transform. But are there times when they may crash? Are meaning-slips now trapped in performing closure or are they keeping the system open? What about the imprint of language in body? Aware that her theory of semiotics is a paradox, an aporia, as is her notion of the speaking subject, I turn now to Kristeva’s notion of the subject on trial/in process - the sujet-en-procès - in order to explore further the possible implications for the effects of such slippages.
Since discourse, for Kristeva, is a practice between speaking subjects and a system (language), ‘the field of sense and signification beyond linguistics’ is opened up towards the sociological and the psychological such that systems of meaning emerge based on the socio-historical and the intersubjective (Kristeva. 1985: 211). For the most part, we are locked into a semiotics of “ideologies” – as myths, rituals, and moral codes become sign systems comprising the law governing any social practice. Every social practice is therefore embedded in an order of language and thus has a double articulation (signifier/signified), a duality which stands in an arbitrary relation to the referent (R) such that ‘all social functioning is marked by the split between the referent and the symbolic and by the shift from signified to signified coextensive with that’ (Kristeva. 1985: 212). In other words, the speaking subject is now a process, ‘simultaneously a unity and the transition to zero of this unity’ (Kristeva. 1985: 213). Moreover, for Kristeva, the speaking subject is always already in a state of crisis as this ‘is a permanent state of functioning’ (Kristeva. 1989: 37). Not as anarchist in a negative or pejorative sense as it seems at first glance, Kristeva explains that, for her, the word ‘anarchy’ can have creative possibilities and that is exactly what is in play here.
This state of crisis between unity and zero of that unity then, is inherent in the speaking subject and necessary to postulate that the position of conscious mastery of meaning by the subject constitutes and guarantees the subject’s unity, not so much as a fixed totalizing totality but rather an ‘if only’ for the moment. The notion of mastery pre-supposes a relativity between various types of signifying experiences and the limit of this is the zero state. However, the relationship between the referent (R) as object/situation and the signifiable ‘is never a relation of identity, but rather one of displacement’, of ‘contradiction’ (Kristeva. 1985: 214). Indeed, this is a ‘relationship of emptiness, of the unnameable, of non-sense and of opaque experience which we would designate by the word increasingly haunting semiological theories – the body’ (Kristeva. 1985: 214). Inevitably some-thing falls out, remains, is left over as remnant from the processes of signification and enunciation, and this is the body. Nevertheless, since we have seen that the sign and the predicate synthesis guarantee the unity of the speaking subject, it follows that any attack against either sign or syntax marks a re-evaluation process vis-à-vis the speaking subject’s unity. Kristeva thus insists that ‘the particularities of poetic language designate a sujet-en-procès (Kristeva. 1985: 215). Poetic language, operating ‘at the margins’, where ‘syntactic chains are disturbed by ellipses or indefinite embeddings of grammatical categories’, ‘best affects the never-ending process of the rapprochement between the signifiable and the referent (R)’ (Kristeva. 1985: 215). In somewhat similar fashion the subject in Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips fades in and out of sight in an impossible rapprochement between language and the unspeakable real.
Since all these loose threads fall together as ‘symptoms’ [in the Greek etymological sense of the word: Endnote 1] in Kristeva’s work, as circulating inter-texts, they are very pertinent to the discussion in this review on ‘intertextuality’ after Kristeva. Symptomatic, then, for transposition, the chora, closely associated with the [maternal] body, sets going that which is ‘not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e., it is not a sign)’ nor ‘a position that that represents someone for another position (i.e., it is not yet a signifier either)’, ‘it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signifying position. The chora therefore precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, not as model nor as copy but rather as analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm’ (Kristeva. 1984: 26). It is an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases and thus informs the doing and the theorising of intertextuality.
Intertextuality, understood as ‘the passage from one sign system to another’, thus involves ‘an altering of the thetic position – the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one’, forever in flux, (Kristeva. 1984: 59). Whether it is a word or a sentence, all enunciation is thetic. An identification has to occur as the subject separates from and through his/her image, from and through his/her objects, which is to say image and objects are posited in a space which becomes symbolic in that it connects the two separated positions. These positions are either recorded or they are redistributed in an open combinatorial system with the semiotic force (the genotext) disrupting communication. The genotext, which stems from the ‘drive energy’ emanating from the unconscious is one of two neologisms that Kristeva introduces to mark the split nature of texts. Phenotext is the other and relates to the language of communication.
Thus intertextuality is not just a recognition that one text informs another text, rather it is an acknowledgement that one text transforms another text; a transposition whereby
If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality), then one understands that its “place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated.Kristeva. 1984: 60
Significantly, once ‘word’ as intersecting textual surfaces emerges, ‘word’ as Master signifier breaks down.Thus the Kristevan speaking subject is a traversal beyond both the bounds of the Saussurean abstract system, and those aspects of Bakhtin/Volosinov, which privilege the social specificity of language and thus view it ‘always in a ‘ceaseless flow of becoming’, (Allen. 2000: 18). Invested with poetic language, Kristevan intertextuality embodies otherness and thus situates itself against monologism, rejoicing in the poetic.
However, given the discussion so far, it is clearly evident that intertextuality/ transposition raises three issues around the conceptualisation of the role and nature of: i) the author; ii) the reader; iii) the text. If one person’s work ends and another’s begins, where and when does that author[ity] of the text drift away from the one to the other, if it does at all? What are the elements of the reader domain? What part in the reading and writing process does the text play, and vice versa? Due to limited space in Addendum, I intend to respond to these issues with some taster excerpts from an interview conducted by Margaret Waller with Julia Kristeva in 1985 since they throw an interesting light on such questions.
In this Waller-Kristeva interview the notion of signature and of identity as impure, as already discussed in the introduction of Addendum returns as ‘circular memory’ thus continuing to haunt us unsettling notions of Proper and of author[ity] (Barthes. 1976: 36).
Beginning her story of coining ‘intertextualité’ Kristeva explains that she was at the beginning of her research, writing a commentary on Bakhtin, commenting that ‘his notions of dialogism and carnival’ provided a crossroads, or rather an ‘intersection’ for ‘moving beyond structuralism’ (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec 2003). Adopting a broad sweep application to the Kristevan notion of word as minimal text unit to these web-site excerpts I focus in on pronouns and the tenses of the verbs being used. It thus foregrounds Kristeva’s use of ‘he’/’his’ rather than ‘I’, and also the use of the past tense all pointing to her view of Bakhtin as author[ity] at this point in the interview, although, of course author as seen through her own eyes.
When she discussed her reading with Roland Barthes, her supervisor, he was ‘quite fascinated’ and invited her to do a seminar on Bakhtin in 1966, (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec 2003). Thus Bakhtin is eliding gradually but ineluctably into a Kristevan Bakhtin. Which is not the same as saying the meaning slips have reached monumental proportions, whatever that might mean, rather it is to say that Bakhtin-as-reading/writing undergoes a transposition. Stating she believes she remains ‘faithful’, Kristeva moves the story on to her ‘attempts to elaborate and enlarge’ upon Bakhtin’s ‘ideas’ such that ‘the concept of intertextuality’ emerged (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec. 2003). Kristeva’s use of the subjective pronoun ‘I’ and of ‘my’ is seen to be more frequent in this excerpt, illustrating that Bakhtin is losing his Author[ity] status, thereby becoming an author[ity] to whom she is still ‘faithful’ and from whose work she has ‘with as much intellectual honesty as possible’ deduced her concept of intertextuality, whilst being able to underscore its difference from dialogism. The question then for Addendum is, given that the semiotic bubbles up and disturbs the symbolic, given Kristeva’s propensity towards poetic analysis, given the transposition from Bakhtin’s writing to her own, given the meaning-slips inherent in the transposition, what is the nature of this being ‘faithful’? It can not be a faithful copy, but rather of the ilk of one of Dunkelsbuhler’s SlanTrs and/or ‘wandering translation[s] [traduction errante]’ (Dunkelsbuhler. 2002: 59), constituting a parergon as creating a framing - boundaries of honouring and paying homage to a master, whose work is worthy of being elevated to a position deserving of due care and attention. Yet also within this ilk is Derrida’s ‘la tournette d’une derive interne’ – the letter which does not always arrive at its destination and the fact that it holds to this possibility as part of its structure afflicts it with an internal misdirection (Derrida 1987) or destinerrance (see In-Between Slips: Fig 2: 286). And yet, as seen already above, intertextuality problematizes the notion of Author and of origin.
The boundaries continue to blur. Thus, after Bakhtin, and located now in the ‘otherness of language’ how does his work on ‘dialogism’ flow becoming[ly] into Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality? Au fait with the ‘accepted knowledge of structuralism’ (Kristeva. 1997: 9), recognizing the potential, yet secret body of signifiers within the hidden corpus of Bakhtin’s text, what was the something else that Kristeva could do? Kristeva warms to her theme. Although Bakhtin’s work exhibits two axes, ‘dialogue and ambivalence’, these are not ‘clearly distinguished’ (Kristeva. 1980: 66). The horizontal axis, dialogue, refers to the subject-addressee; the vertical axis, ambivalence, to the text-context, and it is here that the intersection for transposition opens up to a Kristevan poetic analysis. The tensions of author-reader/reader-writer remain clearly evident.
Kristeva begins to further draw out the distinctions between what she sees as her transpositions. From her change to talking in the present tense, it would appear that she recognizes the margins between Bakhtin as author as seen in her eyes, and herself as author, are muddied, at least in the context of this interview as represented on this web-site. Her use of the pronoun ‘I’ is restricted and whilst she categorically says ‘I think that what is new’ is ‘at the level of syntax and phonics too’ (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec. 2003), her seeming reluctance to engage with the personal pronoun still hints strongly at the tensions that exist between the author and the addressee. The question for Addendum still remains hauntingly, now rephrased as who is/are being raised up, elevated, to taking a stand/utter[st]ance/stutter[st]ance in all the flows, transformations and transpositions?
However, Kristeva would maintain that what she brings to the reading of Bakhtin is psychoanalysis. Indeed, she confirms that psychoanalysis – ‘the only continent that we had never left’ (Oliver. 1997: 19) - remains at the heart of her project. Thus, in the Waller interview, Kristeva comments that ‘the notion’, her notion that is, ‘that the participation of different texts at different levels reveals a particular mental activity’ was ‘unique’ (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec. 2003).
Picking up the loose thread of the carnival à la poetic word, the ‘carnival participant is both actor and spectator’ passing ‘through a zero point of carnivalesque activity’ and splitting into ‘a subject of the spectacle and an object of the game’, and ‘sees itself created as self and other, as man and mask’ (Kristeva. 1980: 78). Signifiers refer to signifiers in the Saussurean system of language, such that ‘this empty and yet significant place called the zero degree of the sign’ (Kristeva. 2000: 214) where writing has become ‘absence’ is called ‘the zero degree of writing’ (Barthes. 1967: 11). However, in the process of signification, as if in a game of chess, signifier checks signified to zero point, and the body falls out as a remainder – the letter kills. Via flows and transformative forces the game/play unfolds where-in/of designs form the basis of evoked self/other relationships. Or to take a Barthesian slant ‘the pleasure of writing’ makes its debut mediated by the body that desires thereby opening up ‘the infinite pleasure of the text’ as discussed later in Addendum (Kristeva. 2000: 215).
The transition to zero and thus ‘loss of identity, afflux of drive and a return of symbolic capacities’ marks the collapse of the unified “Transcendental ego” (Kristeva. 1985: 217). This shift allows the speaking subject the capacity to renew the order in which s/he is trapped and for the subject this constitutes the capacity of enjoyment.
Hence Kristeva views a text not as ‘a vehicle of information (‘the that which it signifies’), but rather as so many forms of reflexive (and hence ‘poetic’) language (including science) in a dynamics of cooperation’ (Orr. 2003: 30). Thus, it follows that analysis should not limit itself simply to an identification process of citation, influence or source, but ‘should understand that what is being dealt with is a specific dynamics of the subject of the utterance’ (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec. 2003). Such an individual is not an identity-cum-individual in the etymological sense therefore. Rather, intertextuality announces ‘an intrapsychic or psychoanalytic finding’, ‘concerning the status of the “creator,” the one who produces a text by placing himself or herself at the intersection of this plurality of texts on their very different levels’ (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec. 2003). Kristeva has moved from recognising Bakhtin as author[ity] to Bakhtin-reader to Bakhtin-rewriter. But is she reader-rewriter-cum-author[ity] of her own conceptualisation?
Continuing her story, she explains, ‘I myself speak of a “subject-in-process” which makes possible my attempt to articulate’ ‘a logic’ ‘between identity and unity’ mediated through ‘its reduction to zero’, that ‘moment of crisis, of emptiness’ that is the pre-lude to ‘the reconstitution of a new plural identity’ – this dynamic holds for both writer and reader (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec. 2003) [my italics].
Kristeva’s citation of an ‘intrapsychic’ or the ‘psychoanalytic’ clearly resonates resoundingly with her notion of the “subject-in-process”, with its ‘moment of crisis’, that ‘zero’, that ‘emptiness’ yet-not-void, all of which stem from the hystericization of the taken-for-granted tradition, of expertise. Resoundingly, it reverberates to the interlacing of the telling space of words, in its many guises, as celebrated in Covers – in the designer space and In-Between Slips as ‘sequinned becomings of me/you-selves’ ‘both-or-[h]and’ ‘if only’s’ where allure-with-alongside-intrigue elided into the Barthesian ‘erotic’ of extravagant repetition and/or unexpected succulent newness to ‘glisten’ and susurrate ephemerally (Barthes. 1976: 42).
The intertextual intersection sets in motion (‘open[s] [it] up, set[s] [it] going’ à la Barthes (Barthes. 1977: 163)) a sense of the dynamic, the ephemeral and elusive, the invoking-ing, the becoming other, becoming nomad. ‘[A]ll the while implying an idea of rupture (of opposition and analogy) as a modality of transformation’ (Kristeva. 1980: 89) and a focus of productivity, the concept of relation announces itself always already, juxta-posed with, beside and against in-citing the solidified, the fixed, the communicating, the subjugated Proper[ty]. This traversal of the dynamics of zero, that moment of crisis puts-in-place extravagant repetition and succulent newness gesturing toward erotic indirectedness and does ‘something else’ (Oliver. 1997: 9) whereby my notion of the telling space glistens with sparkling sequins. Her reference to ‘reconstitution of a new plurality’ resonates with the pluralities of my thesis intertextually resisting closure under Addendum as “Lastword”.
Intertextuality is not simply a decoding activity. It is a condition of the text – semantically, linguistically and structurally (Wood, 1991; Allen, 2000; Orr, 2003) and thus, as ‘readers of intertextuality, we must be capable of the same putting-into-process of our identities’, and thus able to face ‘a reduction to zero’, and that ‘state of crisis’, even to ‘the point of speechlessness’ à la Freud and ‘loss of meaning’, indeed, perhaps as a necessary pre-condition of ‘a process of free association, reconstitution of diverse meanings’ to what is ‘almost undefinable – a process that is a re-creation of the poetic war’ (Waller. 1985: web-site: 19 Dec. 2003). Thus ‘[i]t goes without saying that subjects, addresses and exterior texts are all very alive in Kristeva’s Bakhtin’ (Moi. 1986: 37). Addresses were an integral feature of Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips too. Here, in the experiment in writing, they both embody and theorise poesis – the French verb ‘dresser’ intriguingly translates into ‘to set up’, ‘to raise up’, ‘to erect’ indicating a Riffaterrean-like hidden inter-text to my motif of [ad]dressing up.
Thus along with Kristeva, I cannot ignore the implications of intertextuality/ meaning slips and as she, whether reader-writer and/or writer-reader I celebrate ‘the complexity of the text’ with its ‘formal aspects’ and its intrapsychic dimensions. However, the experiment in writing goes beyond Kristeva’s speaking subject in the fashioning of the telling space with its sur-faces and embody-ings and revels in the play - not so much on both levels at once, but rather thinking the two before they become two. Think then, of the self born of ‘inter-est’ (Wolfreys. 1998: 12) and of self self-ing – i.e., me- and you-selves in Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips.
Reference to Freud’s speechlessness constitutes the very heart of Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips, with the emphasis on reading, on writing, on the written mark rather than the phonetic mark, tracing a sensate shadow dancing in its undecidability both-or-and as-open[ing]. ‘Open’, its link to the Barthesian body and/or desire is palpable. Kristeva writes of how ‘Barthes threw himself into interpretative writing’, ‘with a sense of going against the natural’ thereby revealing ‘the body beneath meaning’ which, for him, ‘always shimmered on the horizon’ as glistening ‘mirage’ (Kristeva. 2000: 190). In a society driven by capitalist notions, production and consumption are separated, hence author and reader became divided. But Barthes adamantly proclaims bodies desire to write, and in particular they desire to write the scriptible, not least because the ensuing nausea from the reading of lisible scripts shows one how things could be otherwise. Closed, ‘oppressed in the order of sign itself’, vomit spews forth (Barthes. 1975: 139). Nevertheless, the body is not unproblematic, since as will be discussed later a notion of warfare in language is a central motif for Barthes. The relation of the body to culture is thus highly complex. To desire or to be desired is always to be trapped in a process of repetition and quotation – ‘[w]ithout Book, without the Code … no desire’ (Barthes. 1975: 73). Desire is always already compromised. Desire where dictated by culture as doxa results in nothing but a strangulating process of repetition, suffocation by the stereotype. The body collapses the anti-thesis of the symbolic, divorces desire from culture, but in so doing pays the price of death of the subject – ghost-like, it falls out as remainder as in Kristeva’s game-play.
Such an account also clarifies how intertextuality differs from the historically traditional stable model of ‘text’ and ‘context’. Kristeva accounts for this through stressing that there is no end to the text’s signifiance - meaning produced through the semiotic in conjunction with the symbolic, that inside and outside are just products of any particular reading of the text, which of course can proceed further or not arbitrarily, ‘woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?) antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony’ (Barthes. 1977: 160).
Kristeva’s work, whether it is located in psychoanalysis, semiology, writing novels, in intertextuality, or whether she is speaking publicly, cannot be considered apart from this concept of the psychological/psychoanalytical. It both permeates and constitutes all her thinking. As a key Kristevan concept it cannot be ignored from any critical enquiry into intertextuality. Once brought into play the sophistication and rich complexity of the concept emerges in ever-unfolding intricacy. Its necessary inclusion leads unerringly to the conclusion that the definition of intertextuality as ‘a mosaic of quotations’ remains but a gloss and no gloss-ary can thus lick a text into a final shape or impose an authoritative meaning/ Lastword.
Hence in Kristeva’s eyes, the intellectual revolution was aimed at infusing theory with the dynamics of change, of doing something different; and, for her, the “speaking subject” is indispensable to such a project. Intent on challenging ‘God, authority, and social law’ (Kristeva. 1980: 79) Kristeva and others within Tel Quel take Bakhtin’s polyphony of each utterance and his carnivalesque profanization of all that is sacred and possessed of an authority further to the edge of Absolute Reason. They engage intertextuality as a ‘linguistic and semiotic lever to unhinge all bourgeois notions of an autonomous subject’ thus deconstructing subject and text (Pfister. 1991: 212). And in so doing, they deconstruct Authority, thereby calling into question the notion of a canon that can be reviewed as a basis for defending one’s academic position. Tensions arise immediately of course. How can one justify seeking legitimation of one’s work through referencing canons when one is problematizing the very nature of author and authority, of subjectivity, of insidedness and outsidedness? One can thus only write differently and also read differently – Barthes and others were thus passionate in refusing a reduction in reading that renders it of the order of mass-consumption that would result in boredom, located in the trap of the Lastword, no less. Rather they aspired to an open system in order to produce the text, open it out, set it going’ (Barthes. 1977: 163). Furthermore, in order to keep open the dynamic heterogeneities of texts, Barthes and others were united in the viewpoint that ‘nowadays only the critic executes the work (accepting the play on the words)’ (Barthes. 1977: 163), firing off the final bullet/word as Lastword. Criticism is reading ‘in cross-section’, discovering within the work some intelligibility that is both decipherable and interpretable, but it ‘cannot reveal a signified [signifié] (for this signified retreats endlessly right up to the void of the subject), but only chains of symbols, homologies of relations’ and thus a ‘new flowering of symbols [that] constitute the work’ (Barthes. 1987: 86-7).
Circular memories and ‘the impossibility of living outside the infinite text’ (Barthes. 1976: 36) in play, Kristevan intertextuality thus opens the space both for struggling against and for attempting to subvert Absolute Reason, Truth and unity of meaning and privileges belief in the human subject, countering reduction to “any-one” as well as to my notion of no-body. It is therefore anti-thetical to all ideas of the logic of binaries and of the unquestionable gesturing towards Lacanian hystericization, and as such resonates to anti-thesis as used in Covers – in the de-signer space: xxxi.
In fact Barthes as Kristeva’s doctoral supervisor in the mid 1960’s and fellow member of Tel Quel, strongly agrees with the anti-thetical traits of intertextuality as discussed above, as I now intend to show. Using a psychoanalytic discourse, he comments that ‘Julia Kristeva changes the place of things’ always destroying ‘the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by’, displacing ‘the already-said […], i.e., the instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity’, and thereby subverting ‘the authority of the monologic science, of filiation’, always forcefully (Barthes. 1986: 168).
Stable meanings or concepts (Barthes’s ‘signified’) so beloved of authority are under siege, threatened by the pluralities of sumptuous ‘if only’s’ of In-Between Slips set going for the reader’s delectation, or as an ‘hors d’oeuvre’. Any stable relationship between signifier and signified bolsters the power of the dominant ideology and represses unorthodox thinking frameworks. Challenges to author[ity], reassurance, pride, knowledge and meaning seem to be explicitly on the agenda and worthy of praise by Barthes as already discussed above in Addendum.
Given ‘the impossibility of living outside the infinite text’ (Barthes. 1976: 36) Barthes writes one reads the text ‘not in its ‘truth’ but in its ‘production’ – which is not its ‘determination’ (Barthes. 1977: 129), such that ‘the rustle of language forms a utopia’ (Barthes. 1986: 77).
Sidelining “communication” because of its reductionist (Moriarty, 1991) overtones, Barthes envisages a utopia ‘of a music of meaning’ (Barthes. 1986: 77), where language forms ‘a vast auditory fabric’ wherein ‘the phonic, metric, vocal signifier would be deployed in all its sumptuosity’ yet in such a way ‘without meaning being brutally dismissed’ and ‘dogmatically foreclosed’ (Barthes. 1986: 77). I refer you to the textual delectation of the orchestrated choreography of sequinned “bodies” shadow dancing both and/or of the exquisite [ad]dress of Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips wherein words glisten sumptuously within a sensate fabric[a[c]tion]. The visual, the auditory and the sensual are celebrated therein, interlaced with, beside and against ever-opening horizons of slippages of meaning, my ‘if only’s’.
Given that ‘intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power’ since ‘the idea of their responsibility for “consciousness” forms part of the system’, the intellectual should no longer be expressing ‘the stifled truth of the collectivity’, Foucault writes, lending his support to the above Barthesian avant-garde act (Foucault. 1977: 208). Rather, s/he should be struggling against ‘the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in its sphere of “knowledge”, “truth”, “consciousness” (Foucault. 1977: 209). Continuing the Foucauldian slant here, some might read that Barthes is doubly generous in his support of Kristeva, given the imbalance of power between his Hegelian transcendental supervisory ego as the one who knows and the supervisee as the one who is yet to know within traditional frameworks, that is.
Nevertheless, the citation signals what is at stake in undertaking a critical review of the literature of the primary authors presumed to legitimate the ‘method’ of foreclosing and castrating intertextuality. ‘What can it mean today to ‘practice intertextuality’’ (Mai. 1991: 30). What is pertinent here is that given Barthes’s eloquent account of how Kristeva’s work unsettles, the words ‘method’ and ‘practice’ become instantly problematized. Indeed, Kristeva and Barthes thus can be read in terms of Lacan’s discourse of the hysteric setting out to perturb and disrupt the Name of the Father, the Law, the Institution, the status quo, and the taken-for-granted which constitute Lacan’s concept of the master discourse.
Continuing this tracking after a master discourse, although Kristeva coined the term intertextuality, Barthes, and not she, produced the entry ‘Texte (théorie du)’ for, what must be considered one of the most ‘authoritative’ sites, the Encyclopédie universalis. Barthes writes, [note I refer here to Orr’s translation (2003)], and thus with, beside and against Dunkelsbuhler’s ‘SlanTr’, ‘the text is a productivity’, it is ‘the very theatre of a production where the producer of the text and the reader come together’, where ‘every text is an intertext’, ‘a new tissue of recycled citations’ (Orr. 2003: 33).How ironic that the author[itative] producer of the author[itarian] textual site for ‘Texte (théorie du)’ is other than the author/coiner of the critical term, namely intertextuality, whose name, in fact, fails to receive even a token reference. Set this in apposition and opposition to the fact that one major contributory factor to Barthes’s notoriety can be traced back to a seminal text entitled The Death of the Author and the irony stakes are significantly doubled. Notions of author seem to be an ideal starting point to set [us] going in the middle of the review.
An author is somebody who writes, (which is not to say that anyone who writes is an author), and so any notion of author is inextricably interwoven with notions of writing. ‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (Barthes. 1977: 142). Kristeva’s notion of zero and loss of identity are echoed here, as is Dunkelsbuhler’s notion of ‘SlanTr’ (Dunkelsbuhler, 2002) whilst, as will be seen later [Addendum: 59], this particular minimal textual unit of ‘oblique’ gestures towards possible links with Derrida’s tympanum. And the ‘circular memory’ (Barthes. 1976: 36) keeps circulating as without too much stretch of the imagination Bloom’s ‘poetic images’ and Riffaterre’s matrix [see Addendum: 40] are haunted by notions of the oblique.
Signification and communication depend upon a concept of the sign (signifier and signified). Its traversal through the Text promotes a secure authentic meaning completely in contradiction to the struggles over interpretation where ‘each jargon (each fiction) fights for hegemony’, and that with ‘power on its side’ becomes ‘doxa’ such that language is always already ‘a warrior topos’ (Barthes. 1976: 28). Circling in the ‘impossibility of living outside that infinite text’ (Barthes. 1976: 36), the spectres of the poetic warfare of Kristeva, Derrida and Bloom appear.
Since Barthes sees communication riddled with the commercial exchange of ideas and doxa, war, - often in quite a literal sense - is declared (Barthes. 1981: 33-4). ‘The signified is the sinew of war, war is the very structure of meaning’, Barthes writes (Barthes. 1977: 127). Barthes’s strike and counter-strike strategy, then, and, already, we have witnessed ghostly inklings of it, is to set going a pattern of contrasts and thereby ‘do something else’.
Text is not so much a concept as a process of writing, to be approached through a process of writing. Defining it in the normal sense of the word, would put it at the mercy of a metalanguage, putting an end to the process, filtering out all its voices, except the one that the selected metalanguage is equipped to register. To re-turn to the above entry into Encyclopédie, Text, being productive works on language, disrupting and unsettling the perception of communication/ expression. At the level of the signified contests for position are set up between a single signifier and different and incompatible signifieds, thus leading to undecidability. Text can work on the signifier directly as in neologisms such as ‘if only’s’ and ‘sequinned me-selves’ for instance, illuminating productivity through exploiting the elements that comprise verbal signs. And yet reading is an act of violence – given the contests for position, any one judgement ties a single signifier, rightly or wrongly, properly or improperly, to a particular [set of] signified[s]. No wonder Barthes advocates read slowly and with patience (Barthes. 1976).
Yet as seen already in Addendum, binaries, polarities, opposites all traditionally hint at ‘a point (a fixed meaning)’ (Kristeva. 1980: 65). Yet, as ‘plaything’ in Barthes’s hands, these jargon points operate as ‘an intersection of textual surfaces’ (Barthes. 1976: 65). In reading/writing/textual analysis Barthes uses a heterogeneous (thus non-structuralist) symbolic code notation in order to keep meaning and interpretation circulating. Barthes’s codes are not closed sets of oppositions, not a system or langue operating in the parole of the text but rather they are perspectives opened up by the text. Barthes is concerned to ‘not manifest a structure but to produce a structuration’ (Barthes. 1975: 20). One such structuration involves dynamics between the seme, the proairetic, the hermeneutic and the symbolic (Barthes, 1975). The symbolic is the one to resist classification, the rebel, ‘adrift, he is the joker in the pack’ (Barthes. 1975: 35). It is ‘a space of desire (or repulsion), power, meaning, exchange, substitution’ and typically structured in antithetical form’ (Moriarty. 1991: 124). ‘Symbolic power relationships are unstable: the partners change places and the form of the relationship alters’ (Moriarty. 1991: 125). ‘Each line is a snare, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by a code’, such that ‘codes are hurled back and forth’ to create the “scene” (Barthes. 1975: 154). Recalling his entry in the Encyclopédie universalis, for Barthes the ‘Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term)’ (Barthes. 1977: 164). It is precisely in this way the text is not reduced to ‘a signifier, whatever it might be (historical, economic,)’ but rather its signifiance is held ‘fully open’ (Barthes. 1977: 141). Signifiance is thus not work in the sense of mastering a language, of style for example, rather its that radical process, that point zero, that loss of identity, worked by language such that is ‘is ‘the without-end-ness of the possible operations in a given field of language’’ (Barthes. 1981: 38).
In other words, signifiance announces the opening up of vast horizons with no end in sight. Barthes’s riposte is subtle: possibilities are endless too. Thus Barthes’s term ‘without-end-ness’ has a double-edged point to make but one that opens up to point zero and is thus not communication, nor representation, nor expression; rather ‘it puts the (writing or reading) subject into the text, not as a projection, not even a fanstasmic one (there is no ‘transport’ of a constituted subject), but as a ‘loss’’ as if one finds the text erotic even though it is not representing any erotic scenes (Barthes. 1981: 38).
Without doubt this ‘loss’ problematizes traditionally held concepts of author and reader. We now turn ‘to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover’, and thus to read the words from the defining entry on ‘Texte, (théorie du)’ in Encyclopédie universalis, particularly, from the perspective that any text keeps on working and producing, not merely existing but elaborating itself in relationship to another structure (Barthes. 1976: 13). We will consider the notion of author first.
If the writing subject enters the text as ‘loss’ it follows that traditional notions of Author are no longer tenable. Since writing is ‘the very practice of the symbol itself’ a disconnection occurs, ‘the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins’ (Barthes. 1977: 142). Is this even possible for such an authoritatative site as the Encyclopédie universalis?
In fact, the seismic change for the author is set going twice over, in a doubling stemming from enunciation and from the arbitrary since ‘language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’’; it is this subject that ‘suffices to make language ‘hold together’, which is to say ‘exhausts it’ (Barthes. 1977: 145).
Latterly, the Barthesian author, a modern scriptor’, is ‘born simultaneously with the text’, not ‘the subject with the book as predicate’ since ‘there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now’ (Barthes. 1977: 145). The scriptor, who succeeds the Author bears within him an ‘immense dictionary’ from which s/he draws a without-end-ness writing (Barthes. 1977: 147).
No ‘single ‘theological’ meaning’ is given/handed down by the ‘Author-God’, and thus no ‘limit’ is imposed on it in the form of ‘a final signified’ which would therefore close ‘the writing’ (Barthes. 1977: 147). Rather a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ opens up (Barthes. 1977: 146).As already argued above in Addendum the problematization of author and author[ity] renders the position of the critic untennable. Traditionally criticism allots ‘itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyché, liberty) beneath the work’ (Barthes. 1977: 147). With the Author dead, the act of deciphering a text is ‘futile’ (Barthes. 1977: 147). ‘[T]he space of writing’ now is ‘to be ranged over, not pierced’, it ‘ceaselessly posits meaning to evaporate it’; decipherment is no longer required, rather a disentanglement is called for (Barthes. 1977: 147). Thus, casting aside ‘a play of normative predicates’, which foreclose and castrate, the Barthesian critic has elided into reader, a reader of multiple readings, no less, no one of which is “superior”. Given that there is always another reading criticism has lost its traditional hold.
Reading after Barthes.
We read with different intensities, establishing ‘a rhythm’, ‘unconcerned with the integrity of the text’ (Barthes. 1976: 11).What is not read and what is read in this ‘warrior topos’, where readings contest with readings, sets up a rhythm forming the pleasure of reading. Anxious to reach the warmer spots in order to find one’s secure footing, we hasten the ritual of reading to get to the point, to foreclose on savouring and to limit the lived experience of the sumptuous. Exploiting the potential gaps in the text, the reader disentangles the hermeneutic from the rest of the text. If this is to discard the other strands, the reading flouts the integrity of the text, the reader’s pleasure focusing on the part rather than the whole is fetishistic and perverse (Barthes, 1976). The ‘work of reading: a slow motion, so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis; it is, finally, in the very writing of the commentary’ ‘of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text’, and thereby ‘avoids structuring the text excessively’, and thus ‘instead of assembling it’ ‘it stars the text’ (Barthes. 1975: 12-3). This sets beating the very heart of the ‘circular memory’, and ‘the impossibility of living outside the infinite text’ (Barthes. 1976: 36). Therefore no external position, no full/complete judgement can be made. Hence, each decision point within the thesis is ‘incomplete’ by its very position inside the infinite text’ and, thus by keeping the master signifiers at bay, resists a single reading.
The act of reading is one of consuming, but it ‘is far from playing with the text’; ‘the reader plays twice over’, once as if playing a game, and secondly in the musical sense’, whilst ‘the text itself plays’ (Barthes. 1977: 162).
Not a ‘plaything’, not a ‘writer’, the ‘reader’ ‘transcribes’ (Barthes. 1975: 190). Barthes likens this notion of reading-transcription to contemporary music where one often becomes some sort of co-author of the score, since here what is needed from the reader is ‘a practical collaboration’ (Barthes. 1977: 163). An interesting slant-‘SlanTr’ occurs once the word ‘transcription’ is read with, beside and against translation setting going notions of the Barthesian scriptor and the vast auditory fabric of Text that emerge through the experience of an ‘iridescent exchange’ mediated through multiple voices (Barthes. 1975: 41). The Barthesian ‘reading eye’ and ‘tonal ear’ assume a vanguard position in the anti-totalitarian stakes (Barthes. 1975: 30).
Thus reading a modern text, if there is such a thing – given this critical discussion in Addendum - is not about receiving, knowing or feeling that text, but ‘writing it anew, in crossing its writing with a fresh inscription’ (Barthes. 1977: 153). The Barthesian reader is a strange and sophisticated complex, wherein s/he is the ‘destination’, ‘the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost’, not ‘person’ but rather ‘that someone who holds together’ ‘all the traces’ of writing (Barthes. 1977: 148) – a kind of [ad]dress.
Once again, as if on an anti-totalitarian war footing, privileging one reading over the other is ‘to silence one of the voices of the text, thus betraying its constitutive plurality and sacrificing to the homogenizing influences of mass culture’ (Moriarty. 1991: 134). Here is the realm of doxa, of domestication and interiorization that turn “theory” into “Theory”. Like Kristeva, Barthes fully intends to ‘do something else’ (Oliver. 1997: 9).
Barthes talks of ‘a sudden dissolve’ such that the ‘utterance’ shifts from one point of view to another, without warning’, thereby creating a ‘tonal instability’ fashioning ‘a glistening texture of ephemeral origins’ (Barthes. 1975: 42). ‘The Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term)’ (Barthes. 1977: 164). Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips goes beyond, announcing the flows and dynamic forces through the poetics and poetic analysis of the Figs – the Figs as a Lyotardian-like figural both-or-[h]and Derridean-like différance and parerga, not to mention the enmeshing of a Riffaterrean-like matrix nor even the notion of anacoluthon. Thus the Text, and I include Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips here, is plural - multi-voiced, multi-tonal - not because of ‘the ambiguities of its contents’ but rather ‘because of the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers’ (Barthes. 1977: 159).
Hence now I turn to conceptualisations of the social space of the Text. As seen already, the Barthesian ‘text’ comprises that which can be potentially released within a ‘work’ together with that which exists in-between that text and other texts. Barthes’s notion of ‘connotation’, (not to be confused with ‘association of ideas’) (Barthes. 1975: 8) therefore requires some consideration. Thus Barthes proposes that analytically speaking, ‘connotation is determined by two spaces’ (Barthes. 1975: 8). One space is sequential and herein ‘meaning proliferates by layering’; and the other is ‘an agglomerative space’ whereby certain parts of the text relate to other texts for their meanings, thus ‘forming “nebulae” of signifieds’ (Barthes. 1975: 8). Echoes of Kristeva’s phenotext and genotext could well be at work here. Meanings are thereby disseminated, ‘spread like gold dust on the apparent surface of the text (meaning is golden)’, (Barthes. 1975: 9). However, the double space of connotation produces ‘a deliberate “static”’ ‘in short, a countercommunication’ (Barthes. 1975: 9).
For Barthes, therefore, connotation together with denotation comprise ‘two supposedly different systems’ and thereby each in concert with the other enable the text to function like a game, each establishing the other, albeit in an illusory sort of way. Already in Addendum we have seen Barthes refer to an author as language’s ‘plaything’, whilst the reader plays the text like a game, as well as orchestrating it in the musical sense, becoming a producer of the text, in a sense. The Text itself plays too. In this ‘warrior topos’of Text or rather ‘Tissue’, ‘an hyphology’ in fact, worked out in ‘a perpetual interweaving’, whose ‘texture’ is such that the subject unmakes himself’ (Barthes. 1976: 64), determination plays with production, boredom with jouissance as already discussed. A brief look at the lisible text and the scriptible text is thus helpful here.
The lisible text leads the reader towards a meaning, whilst creating the illusion that it is itself produced by a singular voice, and thereby significantly backgrounds intertextual forces and positions the reader/reading as relatively passive. ‘This path brings narrative very close to the rite of initiation’ by implying a ‘return to order’ (Barthes. 1975: 76). Determination is the order of the day as ‘access to the magic of the signifier’ is denied’ (Barthes. 1986: 4). However, that is not to say that there are clear-cut distinctions between lisible and scriptible texts, rather it is to say any one text will contain a mixture of each and this is the variable, and the reason why the text is not totalizable. There are apparent lisible-like subject positions in the ‘Figs’ of In-Between Slips are always already undermined by the absence of a ‘centre’ from which to ‘master’ the text [see Endnote 6].
I turn now to Barthes’s S/Z since it illustrates two modalities of this particular opposition. Firstly, writing [in] S/Z to mark his reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine, Barthes “performs” his concept of a reader who consumes the readerly lisible text as well as illuminating the active reading which is required of a reader of a partially scriptible text, in this instance, Barthes reads Balzac. Secondly, in writing S/Z Barthes “performs” his concept of writing a text which is partially lisible and partially scriptible, i.e., Barthes writes S/Z. The choreographed fabric that is the ‘language of S/Z evades categorization in respect of any one written norm: too ‘literary’ to be ‘academic’, drawing attention to its figures of speech (metaphor, rhetorical question, antithesis, maxim), too academic with its ‘ugly’ neologisms and technical terms to be literary’ (Moriarty. 1991: 141).
Its stylistic procedures, unlike those of the classical text, unsettle the establishment of a continuous and apparently natural frame of reference. Barthes’s S/Z does not seek to describe the structure of Sarrasine. Nor is it claiming the status of a metalanguage standing outside and above the language of the Balzac text. Moriarty claims that it veers between treating Sarrasine as example and an allegory of realism. A tension is set going to unsettle framing/framed, playing the resulting score of undecidability exquisitely in that vast ‘stereographic space’ that is a scriptible text (Barthes. 1975: 15). Furthermore, he [Moriarty] suggests Barthes’s strategy was deliberate such that S/Z would occupy ‘an unstable position between a theoretical discussion (the problem of realism) and the critical interpretation of an individual text’ (Moriarty. 1991: 138). Yet criticism is problematic in view of the Barthesian position vis-à-vis the author’s demise, and the plurality of meaning for any Text, which is to say those spaces uncontaminated by doxa. Of necessity these factors must be taken into account and thus the dynamics between a mimetic representation and its critique are further destabilized. In actual fact, S/Z is not delivering an argument, but seeking precisely to avoid being placed within the domain of argument. A radical undecidability as to its own discursive status is thereby effectively produced. I call this ‘an experiment in writing’. Similarly in Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips - see for instance Slipping into Beginnings: 8-9 on what I will call here the four “R’s”, where I write about undertaking an experiment as follows:- ’: ‘the revealing body that constitutes data’; ‘the ravishing body of methodology comprising the manipulated and provisionally possessed […], a body of argument […], a body of rhetorical discourse vibrant with spins on running metaphors […]’; ‘a radiant body of stylish presentation in the form of: collage […], calligraphy […]’; and ‘a resplendent body of razzle-dazzle analysis interwoven in methodology’s bodily embrace, shadow dancing, intent on becoming something other’). Rather like Barthes – after Moriarty (1991) – eschewing the use of expositions of arguments, I typically interweave motifs in order to set meaning ‘trembling’, ‘becoming double’ and ‘wandering’, shadow dancing, no less (Barthes. 1981: 33).
Barthes’s S/Z thus eloquently illustrates that reading is not the junction between text and self, each an independent entity. The reading self is a plurality of other texts or codes, a ‘someone at a loose end’ who ‘strolls’ through and in the Text’ encountering its de-centred pluralities (Barthes. 1977: 159). So it is for the text, ‘fragment’ rather than ‘unitary’, ‘shards’ rather than ‘architectonic’, with its ‘movements and inflections a vast “dissolve”’ (Barthes. 1975: 20), ‘an overcrossing’ answering not to an interpretation/decipherment, but to ‘an explosion, a dissemination’ (Barthes. 1977: 159).
Thus after Barthes, in an attempt to avoid solidifying the text as a determinate object, despite the fact that Addendum is quite a different animal from Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips, I am trying to deploy the signifier to set going [a] space[s] wherein ‘the Text often dramatically argues with the signified’, ‘the recrudescence’ of the signified is avoided and text is therefore set going as Text (Barthes. 1976: 18).
In these spaces thus uncontaminated by doxa, Barthes introduces his notion of the ‘third meaning’ (Barthes. 1977: 52-4). That is to say, it is ‘the one ‘too many’, the supplement’ that fails to be absorbed in total, that is ‘at once persistent and fleeting, smooth and elusive’ that he proposes to call ‘the obtuse meaning’ (Barthes. 1977: 54). Split up in and of itself, it stands in opposition to what he calls ‘the obvious meaning’ (Barthes. 1977: 54) and causes meaning-slips in reading since it ‘seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely’ (Barthes. 1977: 55). Split up in and of itself yet again, Barthes revels in ‘obtuse’ with its pejorative connotations of ‘analytically’ having ‘something derisory’ about it, coming ‘through as limited in the eyes of analytic reason’, being on the ‘side of the carnival’ (Barthes. 1977: 55). Echoes of Bakhtinian/ Kristevan carnivalesque and of Derrida’s tympanum (to be discussed later in Addendum) mediated by Dunkelsbuhler’s ‘SlanTr’ and wandering translation are implicated here.
However, this is no image sustained through a ‘pictorial ‘rendering’ of words’, no mere painting with words. That would be impossible since it transgresses by virtue of the condition whereby it ‘does not represent anything’ (Barthes. 1977: 61). Thus we can only agree on a meaning ‘over the shoulder’ or ‘on the back’ of articulated language’ (Barthes. 1977: 61).
As such it can never enter the critic’s metalanguage, ‘in short, what the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism)’ (Barthes. 1977: 61). ‘[N]ot directed towards meaning (as in hysteria)’ nor theatricalizing, ‘it outplays meaning – subverts not the content but the whole practice of meaning’ (Barthes. 1977: 62). Elusive, ephemeral, flee[t]ing, ‘obtuse meaning can only come and go, seemingly appearing – disappearing’ (Barthes. 1977: 63), doing something different.
Thus as ‘a production of signifiance’ it is not a ‘philological object’ (Barthes. 1976: 64). No ‘ready-made veil’ of ‘meaning (truth)’ (Barthes. 1976: 64), it is not a ‘custodian of the Letter’ (Barthes. 1977: 126). Rather ‘the Text is plural’, accomplishing ‘the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural’, and, since it is ‘not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing’, ‘it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one’, but to an explosive dissemination (Barthes. 1977: 159). It is thus a positionality ‘spoken from a politically and ideologically uninhabitable place’, that is ‘interstitial’, ‘oblique’ and ‘traverses’, ‘panoramizes, and offends’ (Barthes. 1986: 171).
Such Text ‘reads without the inscription of the Father’ (Barthes. 1977: 161), its signifiance ‘meaning in its potential voluptuousness’ (Barthes. 1977: 184). And yet even so, once more I am violating the text in the critical process of writing about its radical undecidability as to its own discursive status. I am jeopardising a fall to doxa, to ‘the word repeated without any magic, as if it were ‘the solidification of old metaphor of Nietzschean “truth”, ‘the canonical, constraining form of the signified’ (Barthes. 1976: 42-3).
No ‘repetition that comes from the body’, then, but rather ‘dead repetition because it comes from no one’s body – except perhaps, indeed, from the body of the Dead’ (Barthes. 1977:71). Inevitably, boredom results vis-à-vis the ‘conformism and disgust with repetition that establishes’ the lisible texts (Barthes. 1975: 139). Hence this is not the Derridean repetition/iterability, with its Latin “iter” (again) and its Sanskrit “itera” (other) (Derrida. 1981: 7) and notion of the third way, but a mimeticism stemming from an inner language (logorrhoea) which Zen disciplines strive to dry up, in order to set going inner forces/ spirit/soul (Moriarty, 1991) along the lines of the spirited ‘r’/Ah of Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips. Words fail to ‘glisten’, do not distract, pleasure is absent, boredom and nausea prevail (Barthes. 1976: 42). But where the floating signifier drifts – a frayage gesturing towards a space of pleasure - that is quite another realm. Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips shadow dance there.
Textual pleasure circulates around signifiance and jouissance. Jouissance is violent, orgasmic pleasure and appears when consciousness is interrupted, when the mirror world of the Imaginary shatters, when our internal monologue jams. An erotic text is one which, whatever the nature of its subject-matter, has an effect comparable to an erotic experience, namely, the ‘Ah’/spirited ‘r’ of the inter-course [see In-Between Slips: Fig 3: 387-8] invoked by reading/writing under the Covers between the spell-binding sheets of In-Between Slips shadow dancing. The Text, like the erotic, decentres us, confronted as we are with never-ending possibilities of the production of signifiance exploding in a vast stereophony for Barthes, (Barthes, 1977), choreographed ‘if only’s’ of the ephemeral shadow dance for Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips.
And in this explosion, Barthes’s choice of the word ‘plaisir’ is a deliberate one. It means both plaisir and jouissance and thus prevents the opposition becoming rigid. Meanwhile, split up in and of itself yet again, the deliberate exploiting of its ambiguity marks [out] – to use a Derridean-like phraseology - the instability of the plaisir/jouissance opposition. Think of the ‘grain’ as the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the eye as it reads, the limb as it performs, think not of signification but rather of the signifiance of the Text[ual], think of the pleasure pertaining to jouissance – is this not to feel alive?
From Kristeva, Barthes to Derrida.
Barthes has a notion of ‘a mobile play of signifiers with no possible reference to one or several fixed signifieds’ (Barthes. 1981: 37). On the verge of ‘irregular action’ the form of the distinction is what counts, not the position of the text on one side or the other of the dividing line (Barthes. 1986: 171). Yet this is not the same as merely registering a multiplicity of signifieds, as Rabaté points out explaining American students can mimic the canons in their written assignments but they cannot surprise (Rabaté. 2002: 100) [see Endnote 77]. Indeed, language after Barthes embraces ‘the ‘surprises’ of meaning’ (Barthes. 1977: 47). Resonances with Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips are intertextually implicit given the motifs, such as my notion of the imperceptible and of indirectedness and so on [see Endnote 6]. Deprived of explicit connective [t]issues [see Riffaterre section: Addendum: 73-81] in order to disturb the narrative logic and the doxai on which narrative expectations-cum-assumptions are based, subtle ‘edges’ are created, to surprise meaning in the body where the [ad]dress gapes.Derrida’s écriture.
As already discussed, the intentions of Kristeva and Barthes, is to unsettle the totalizing closure of systems, and to surprise and shock. Derrida is no different in this respect – what is different is how he orchestrates this. His work provides a further array of terms as resources for interrogating texts, reading and writing and the implications of these will now be discussed.I [re]turn now to Derrida’s notion of écriture, and that figure/metaphor which names ‘an entire structure of investigation’ as outlined at the beginning of Addendum. There I discussed how speech becomes a writing and how Derrida expands the notion of writing to include the writing, the written-ness, of the subject’s identity (Wolfreys. 1998: 68). Explication of the principle of identity as it is traced by difference is set going. Identity is not conceived of in pure abstract terms, rather it is always and only to be identified as identity of some one or some thing. Writing, as already discussed in Addendum, suggests absence, delay, deferral, by the fact that its mark is both iterable and not the sign of presence – it slips from one’s grasp, elusive and ephemeral, fluently fluid. Identity, whatever it is, is only recognized through the play of writing, text différance – by a Lyotardian-like hiding/revealing thick space: by the telling space of Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips, no less. I turn now to Derrida’s neographism of différance in order to re-view “play”, “identity”, intertextuality and meaning-slips.
Deferral – différance.
Firstly, though, an explorative detour of différance is necessary. Although différance is not a word or concept, an 'attempt [at] a simple and approximate semantic analysis' will reveal what is at stake (Derrida. 1982: 7). Has criticism been quietly upstaged by deploying a notion of what is at stake – is that what is going on here? Barthes certainly suggested it was in decline. Does this also explain why Derrida, Bennington, Royle, Wolfreys and others present a case for deconstruction as political stance? Bennington corroborates this, referring to ‘an irreducible conceptual politics’ since deconstruction ‘generalizes the concept of politics so that it includes all conceptual dealings whatsoever’ (Bennington. 2001: 206-207). Indeed the political theorist Laclau draws on Derridean deconstruction for his project of plural democracy (Laclau, 1996). So, rather than a traditional critical exercise to construct the true meaning of a text, the stakes are political and ethical in that a decision for one reading suppresses other possible readings. Nevertheless, two questions still need to be asked, haunted by criticism as we are – who is revealing the stakes and for what purpose[s]? In other words, a closer look at the ‘composition’ of difference is required as it slips towards or away from différer creating the conditions for both the possibility and the impossibility of decision making and thus of a ‘stake’ that impacts politically and ethically.The French verb différer has two meanings. Firstly, it means 'temporization' itself a bifurcation of becoming-time of space and becoming-space of time. Thus the accomplishment or fulfilment of "desire" or "will" is suspended by a detour, spatially and/or temporally (Derrida. 1982: 8). Secondly, and more commonly, it is taken to mean “not to be identical”, “to be other”, to be “discernible”. The experiment in writing – Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips – re-weaves the relations and spaces between philosophy and literature, between notions of the physical body and textual bodies, making and unmaking the traditional distinctions between the real and the fiction/imag[in]ing, the historical and the political. The Figs of In-Between Slips embody and [ad]dress various forms of undecidability in that each Fig suspends, deferring a final judgement even though local judgements are possible and may be expressed. Furthermore, inasmuch as each judgement is only ever ironic in its stance/dance step, no totalization of meaning for the totality/Lastword of [Ad]dressing Methodologies. Tracing the Self In Significant Slips: Shadow Dancing is possible. Thus the Figs of In-Between Slips both-or-[h]and embody and [ad]dress undecidability. That is a spacing must be produced, and it must be repeatable, the element's other, '[t]he noun différance suspends itself between two senses of différant - deferring, differing.. Moreover, the verb ending of -ance splits in and of itself yet again to remain undecided, between the active and passive’ (Derrida. 1982: 9). Thus différance 'recalls something like the middle voice' (Derrida. 1982: 9), thereby, in some part, echoing Barthes’s ‘third meaning’ (Barthes. 1977: 54).
Like signifiance, whether “Kristevan” or “Barthesian” , différance ‘governs nothing, reigns over nothing, nowhere exercises any authority (Derrida. 1982: 22). It is impossible: 'the trace beyond that which profoundly links fundamental ontology and phenomenology. Always differing and deferring, the trace is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in resonating’ like the a writing itself, inscribing its pyramid ‘in différance’ (Derrida. 1982: 23). However, this is not the erasure of negativity, but one that ‘makes it disappear in its appearance’ (Derrida. 1982: 24), rather than negativity it puts ‘affirmation into play’, Nietzchean-like with ‘a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance’ (Derrida. 1982: 27). In other words, ‘erasure belongs to its structure’ (Derrida. 1982: 24).
However, différance is not unnameable because our language has not found/received this name; or because we are required to look in another language outside this system. Rather there is 'no name for it at all, […] not even that of "différance", which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions' (Derrida. 1982: 26). Any notion of “identity” then is always paradoxical, fraught with contradictions which render its unity ‘a certain experience of the impossible: that is, […] of the other’ (Derrida. 1989: 36). Derrida interests himself repeatedly with how the illusion of unity/univocity comes to be constructed showing how it is always already divided in and of itself, self and other. That said, I can now turn to look at how différance relates to écriture and to decision making.
Différance and écriture.
The act of writing, reading and thinking is ‘always in some sense a response’, to the other (Wolfreys. 1998: 5). The otherness of non-correspondence, of the manifestation of the other in the same, haunts identity and thereby splits it, bringing about a transformation between a certain act of looking or gazing and a certain event in writing. For instance, when interviewed by Henri Ronse, speaking as “reader-writer”, Derrida speaking as “writer-reader”, calls into question the ‘unity of the book’ gesturing towards anti-totalitarianism, shattering the sense of there being a single book that would exhaust its meanings. The identity of his book is now transformed between a particular act of looking/gazing and a particular event in writing. No longer a given unity, where there was one, now there are two, and so on in deferral.Traditional concepts of unity, of origin, of beginnings, of middles, of endings, and of author[ity], of sources in fact, are all called into question. This lack of single authoritative meaning derived from an author’s intention opens the text up to interpretation and resonates with previous discussions pertaining to the writings of Kristeva and Barthes.
Thus one can choose to call the stakes differently and do something else. Consider instead, then, sources ‘set aside’, glimpsed ‘only on the bias’ as if in a foreshortened mirroring, an about-face almost (Derrida. 1982: 275). To avoid putting things into boxes – coffins (Derrida, 1987) - ‘[i]t is necessary to defer, to take one’s distance, to tarry; but also to rush in precipitately’ Derrida explains in an interview (Derrida. 2000: 533), speaking of the nature of decision-making, and of experiencing the undecidable. He carefully distinguishes between ‘undecidability’ and ‘indeterminacy’, arguing that the latter is a ‘negativity’ or ‘nothingness’ (Derrida. 1988: 149). However, that is not to say that undecidability is pure. Impure and always incomplete undecidability haunts decision making endlessly. ‘The moment in which the decision is made is heterogeneous to knowing’ – it thus remains forever an enigma (Derrida. 2001: 61). ‘Because the structure is undecidable, because there is no possibility of algorithmic closure, the decision cannot be ultimately grounded in anything external to itself’ (Laclau. 1996: 52). On this very point Derrida writes that ‘the undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it is of obligation that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process’ (Derrida. 1992: 24) – an Intentional System à la algorithmic system in other words. In fact, Derrida’s articulation of this is succinct – ‘the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical moment, of this reflection or this deliberation, since it always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. The instance of the decision is a madness, says Kierkegaard’ (Derrida. 1992: 26).
‘Effects’ of différance.
Already it is clear that Derrida’s notion of ‘text’ does not equate to any conventional one; texts are the ‘chains, the systems of traces emerging out of and constituted by differences’ (Derrida. 1976: 65). Lacking ‘a master-word’ ‘différance finds itself enmeshed in the work that pulls it through a chain of other “concepts” […] other textual configurations (Derrida. 1981: 40). Thus Derrida’s texts uncover chains of signifiers such as ‘deconstruction,’ ‘trace,’ ‘arche-writing,’ ‘text,’ ‘spacing,’ ‘supplement,’ ‘dissemination,’ ‘undecidability,’ ‘hymen,’ ‘pharmakon,’ ‘iterability’ and so on. Despite their surface appearances, these are not terms in the sense of something final, self-enclosing, teleological, rather they are what Derrida calls an open ‘chain of substitutions’ (Derrida. 1981: 14).These chains/writing are constructed and articulated by both temporal and spatial deferment and by differentiation as will be discussed later in Addendum. ‘In the face of a textual energy that sets itself against congealment’, ‘Derrida’s vocabulary is forever on the move’ (Spivak. 1976: lxxi). Forever in a vocabulary on the move, and weaving in the movement of supplementarity of Derrida’s identity with the Saussure of differences without positive terms, for Derrida ‘[s]pacing designates nothing,’ but yet ‘of a movement, a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity’ (Derrida. 1981: 81).
‘[F]eet on a tight-rope’ (Cixous. 1998: 57), well aware of running the risk of “mastering” ‘deconstruction’ and/or différance and/or spacing and others in the nonsynonomous chain of substitution Derrida suggests the ‘concept of spacing by itself thus cannot account for anything, any more than any other concept’ (Derrida. 1981: 81). Thus through the play of writing and of différance, Derrida’s dividing line splits and splits again; strands spin apart and then together, and weave in other threads; threads of other binaries such as presence/absence, inside/outside, same/other, us/them are called into question. ‘Forever unable to saturate a context, what reading will ever master the “on” of living on?’ (Derrida. 1979: 76-7). ‘This is not word play, not on your life’ (Derrida. 1979: 77). A choreography of presencing/absencing, of spell-binding spaces and lace-ings shadow dancing - splitting, spinning apart, spinning together, self-ing - enmeshes the telling spaces of Covers – in the de-signer space and In-Between Slips – ‘“I” hold life in my hands’, I write in Slipping into Beginnings: 38.
Derrida has thus disturbed what formerly seemed a simple opposition: same/other, known/unknown, inside/outside, us/them. The other is marked ours, it reflects us, but also calls us into question. And in that momentary instant there is just a chance that the other is heard fleetingly, before we lose it, assimilating it into thought-as-language. The other emerges from the play of other in the same. However, these are the stakes that shatter and rewrite our identities in challenging, non-traditional ways. A ‘circular memory’ (Barthes. 1976: 36) of a Kristevan inter-text surfaces immediately. Although we are still “same” and “self” as previously, suddenly, apparently same and self are uncertain, foreign and other, inaccessible to ourselves. How are we now positioned in relating to the other when, in fact, we discover we are foreign to ourselves?
Derrida suggests lending an ear and listening to the other such that one is taught/attempts ‘“to hear with [one’s] eyes” too’ (Derrida. 1982: xiii). Physiologically speaking, the tympanic membrane, that ‘figure of the oblique’, positioned between the outer and middle ear functions as both limit and passage for transmission of vibrations (Derrida. 1982: xiv). The fact that it is oblique significantly increases the surface area for drumming thereby facilitating the act of listening. The effect is to render one available-yet-vulnerable since the other’s drumming will resonate within us or fall on deaf ears.
Ultimately any binary opposition, irrespective of how ‘apparently rigorous and irreducible’ is seen as a ‘theoretical fiction’ (Derrida. 1982: 18). ‘At the point at which the concept of différance’ interrupts, ‘all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics’ ‘become nonpertinent’ (Derrida. 1981: 29). A play between it is some “thing” that does not exist, (i.e., not a present-being), and of ‘every thing that it is not, that is everything’ (i.e., ‘it has neither existence nor essence’) choreographs the dance of différance in all its special effects (Derrida. 1982: 6). Effects that may be viewed as an impression of the magical, an illusion of the mystical in an invoking of self self-ing, no more, no less.
Habitually repetition is thought to be more of the same, but no longer is this tenable. Différance sets going an unsettling of sameness; and sameness becomes as an effect of the play of différance, which is not to say that repetition is unable to now make a difference. Repetition, in fact, signals an exit from identical to the same through ‘imperceptible difference’ (Derrida. 1978: 295). It announces 'the structure of the double mark: (caught - both seized and entangled - in a binary opposition': ‘one mark inside and the other outside the deconstructed system’ (Derrida. 1981: 4).
The former unified system, now equivocal, suggestive of hierarchical configurations, undergoing incessant struggle, gives rise to a double reading and a double writing, thus a-voiding any fencing-in dialectically constructed synthesis as “One”. Pirouetting, it ‘turns around the points of a ballerina, analyzes “the syntax of point [none] and step [not] [la syntaxe du point et du pas]’ to tell ‘how “each pair, in this circuit will always have referred to some other, signifying too the operation of signifying”’ (Derrida. 1987: 264).
‘Determination’ of différance.
I turn now to set différance working to illustrate its ‘determination’. Différance, neither word nor concept ‘is not, does not exist’ having ‘neither existence nor essence’ (Derrida. 1982: 6), being ‘neither simply active nor simply passive’ (Derrida. 1982: 12), ‘is no more an effect than it has a cause’ (Derrida. 1982: 12). Différance thus announces itself as ‘unthinkable’ (Derrida. 1982: 19), and ‘unnameable’ (Derrida. 1982: 26) since any words which could conceivably describe it already involve concepts such as being and presence, and these are the very concepts it seeks to undermine. ‘[A]rchi-themes’ (Culler. 1983: 212), that are not so much a structure of a theme, but rather pertain to a textual structure/process/ a structurality emerge parergonally. Thus a theme of supplementarity cannot itself be substituted because ‘it happens that this theme describes the chain itself, the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitution’ (Derrida. 1976: 163; underlined in the original). Elevation to totalization is thus impossible – différance lacks a ‘master-word’ as previously discussed (Derrida. 1981: 40) being a middle but no halfway house (Llewelyn, 1986, Gasché, 1986).Gasché (1986) refers to the chain of substitutions as an ‘infrastructure’ as well as to différance, supplement, arche-writing and so on. However, the term ‘infrastructure’ has connotations of ‘hierarchy [which] detract[s] from its pertinence’ (Hobson. 1998: 239n: 31). Gasché, himself, (1986, 1995) notes the difficulties that follow from his choice of term. Yet other words such as ‘quasi-transcendentals (Derrida, 1988, 1991, 1996; Gasché, 1986) and ‘lexemes’ (Hobson, 1998) also seem inappropriate. In Addendum, however, I am continuing to use the word ‘infrastructure’ keeping to its sense of ‘structurality of structure’ rather than its sense of ‘basic’ structure. Infrastructures are ‘instances of an intermediary discourse concerned with a middle in which the differends are suspended and preserved’ (Gasché. 1986: 151). This signifying structure, structure signifiante (Derrida. 1976: 158), knots together the discrepancies and differences in question toward their synthesizing infrastructure that is intrinsic to the text, whatever that might be. Thus there is ‘an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to separate again, as being ready to bind others together’ (Derrida. 1973: 132).
Infrastructurally, Derrida’s dividing lines then, divide, deferring, differentiating spatially and temporally. ‘To each his Other, which is his Same. Or the I is two: by definition’ (Derrida. 1982: 288). Deferring, differentiating, rather like an ekphrastic impulse, a rhythm drives Derrida’s thoughts, textual through and through, ‘the figure is never one. Not only is it the Other, but there is no unity or stability of the figural’, the ‘subject desists’ and ‘its only chance of ‘grasping itself’ lies in introducing itself and oscillating between figure and figure’ (Lacoue-Labarthe. 1998: 175), appearing/disappearing, hiding/revealing.
A textual system then is always already contaminated by the traces of other discourses and languages. Already the discourse resonates with previous discussion in this review of intertextuality and this resonance continues to build in strength. The system is one of difference rather than one of presence. Infrastructurally, différance makes possible not only binary opposition and the double but also determines oneness since ‘the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself’ (Derrida. 1981:29). For instance, let us take as our subject the present moment, which is neither present to itself, but related to a past or a future. For the present to be present to itself, an interval must separate present from itself dividing it in and of itself (Derrida, 1982). This interval of différance is the singular moment of presence; thus the supposedly singular is always already divided. The movement which produces seeming unity is the same movement as that effecting binary oppositions. Différance works repeatedly to count as the same. It also receives the double mark becoming différance of différance, the ‘trace of the trace’ (Derrida. 1982: 24).
Thus in order for a meaning to emerge there must be the movement of difference or rather différance within the linguistic system, as has been argued here. The presentation of self to self, and to others, is always that representation marked by the movement of difference. The truth or presence of the subject is not revealed at all. What comes to be revealed is the writing which marks and is traced in textuality, speech, the subject. The notions of presence, truth or meaning thus rely on structures of concealment and the concealing of their written structures.
At this point it can be recalled that Derrida draws on the Saussure of the linguistic system of differences, (Bennington, 2000; Baugh, 2003), rather than following the more traditional route of adopting the model of the Saussure of the sign. Derrida believes that no comprehensible communication is possible unless it can be repeated or cited: the graphic mark needs neither author/ audience: ‘by definition’ ‘a written signature implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer’ (Derrida. 1988: 20). Take the signature for instance. Despite being unique, my signature must be repeatable to function, to be readable. The signature functions in a way particular to all forms of writing (this functioning erases its singularity) and all acts of signification. Thus the act of citation, in and of iterability and alterity, which involves detaching an utterance from its context, is a characteristic of any sign and not an aberrant use of language. In other words, the act of citation is neither parasitic nor unusual but rather an explication, in the sense of explication de texte, that any text is inevitably quoting and quotable, a criss-crossing intersection. Echoes of Kristeva’s and Barthes’s emphases on the ‘intersection as crossroads’, of ‘crossovers’ and of ‘circulating memories’ as intertexts are evident here. This is also mirrored in the ‘fig’ of the chi/?, as figure, and what-is-more it is a ‘figure of the double gesture, its intersection’ that which ‘interests’ Derrida ‘a great deal’ (Derrida, 1981: 70). This site of transposition/ intertextuality raises issues of univocity/plurivocity, of sameness/difference and of presence/absence to name but three binaries that always already haunt Derrida’s writing, and whose contours are disturbed by reading from the margins, the textual scars, the blanks, the between [entre], glimpsed on the bias, about-face.
Such issues are critical in addressing the stakes for identity and otherness. Otherness is inaccessible – ‘an experience which would not be lived as my own’ is ‘impossible and unthinkable’ (Derrida. 1978: 131). To relate to it, to understand it, we are obliged to give it our form. Realising that we are hampered by the language of reason, which is all that we have with which to think and describe the opening towards the other, Derrida turns to follow in the footsteps after Levinas for notions of the other. ‘[E]very reduction of the other to a real moment of my life, its reduction to the state of empirical alter-ego, is an empirical possibility, or rather eventuality, which is called violence’ (Derrida. 1978: 128). The need therefore arises to ‘gain access to the meaning of the other on the basis of its “face”’, on the basis of ‘its appearing-for-me-as-what-it-is’ (Derrida. 1978: 128). The language of reason struggles indeed. ‘Incoherent’ ‘without systematically resigning ourselves to incoherence’ (Derrida. 1978: 84) the ‘questions of language’ (Derrida. 1978: 109) close down our thinking to an other of present that is ‘impossible-unthinkable-unstatable’ (Derrida. 1978: 132). Experiencing the other lies somewhere between language and silence. Thus meaning-slippage is not just that words are unstable and open to ambiguities, but rather that the fixing of a meaning is at this point impossible and any attempt to make it stick is a violence. The dilemma, then revolves around language which tends to explain the other in terms of sameness and silence. Such sameness, however, perpetrates a violence towards the other, whilst the silence, that nonrelation, does little other than suppress alterity. If one is limited by language and limited by silence what remains?
Derrida recommends examining possible courses of action from within. He argues for receptivity rather than an attempt to achieve a balance between activity and passivity. Receptivity requires opening our thoughts to as yet unformulated questions. Rather than explaining away the other one could perhaps allow one’s vulnerability to emerge aiming for reciprocity. Close to breaking outside the questioning circling around the philosophy of otherness as we are ‘can make us tremble’ (Derrida. 1978: 82) because here we are ‘designating a space or hollow within naked experience’ where what is beyond traditional philosophical concepts ‘must resonate’ (Derrida. 1978: 83). Of course this is alterity without the presence of the other, the other as traces – or almost - left in the form of echoes. Vibrations of the other resonate within sameness in such reciprocity, transmitted from one space or body to another. These sympathetic vibrations reproduce otherness, doubling it. This re-calls the drumming of the tympanum, ‘if only’ the reading of it above in Addendum has not fallen on deaf ears.
Meaning and value are therefore never intrinsic or imminent in the written sign; they only become possible by the chance of their representation in ways that allow a glimmer of the other. Inscription precedes meaning (Wolfreys, 1998). That is to say that thoughts, ideas and concepts are all impure, haunted, contaminated and infected. ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (Derrida. 1976: 158). Or rather ‘there is no outside-the-text’ or ‘nothing outside context’ (Derrida. 1988: 136) or even ‘there are only contexts without centre or absolute meaning’ (Derrida. 1988: 32). Meaning appears as an effect of text relating to text without reference to an external real unlike mimesis. Thus all readings are circumstantial for Derrida (de Nooy, 1998; Bennington, 2000). Identities of ‘we’, of ‘text’ and of ‘Derrida’ are constructed for ourselves and others through the structures of rhetoric that we use (Wolfreys, 1998). Each can and is only constructed out of, or contaminated by, groups of other thoughts, ideas and concepts. No idea exists which is not textual through and through. It is this very textuality that enables the deconstructive strategy of disturbing the assumptions of binaries, such as presence/absence, identity/sameness and univocity/plurivocity and so forth, upon which Reason is founded and thus allows the glimpse of Otherness.
In particular, glimpsed on the bias, boundaries between reading/writing we saw previously are not at all clear and that is still the case. That which I name ‘my discourse’ is being read by you, this places ‘me’ in the position of the other. ‘I’ is plac