An incredibly beautiful photo of Julia Kristeva graces her book, ‘Desire in Language’. A feminist, literary theorist, turned psychoanalyst, turned philosopher, in this book she reviews literary works and incredible art by Giotto and Bellini, to bring us a semiotic understanding of expression and post-Heideggerian dialectic.
I’ve extracted these paragraphs below from Kristeva’s essay on ‘The Bounded Text’ for a few reasons:
1. She discusses the Western cultural shift between sign and symbol, which, as a 21st century member of an Order grounded on a spirituality birthed within Catharism, there is a historio-geographical link that I think is pertinent to understanding our initiation prayers;
2. There’s a paper by Susanne Cook-Greuter and Beena Sharma that is being presented this weekend at the Integral Theory Conference, called ‘Polarities and Ego Development’. I see a parallel-to-progression in what is charted as culturally historical by Kristeva, of the Mediaeval Period in this chapter, with developments that are available to us in this age, individually in adult development, as proposed by Cook-Greuter and Sharma. Core to understanding each trope (and they’re not from the same fields) is grasping an initiating dualism – an energetic rift, of a sort, birthing distinction, polarity, birthing language. We’re given to turn from symbol to sign, and from sign to nonlinear map, a healing of tensions, which shift to become unbounded from a given, finite hierarchy.
I think, far, far too much.
Inspired by Kristeva’s paragraphs:
‘The second half of the Middle Ages (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) was a period of transition for European culture: thought based on sign replaced that of symbol. A semiotics of the symbol characterised European society until the thirteenth century, as clearly manifested in this period’s literature and painting. It is, as such, a semiotic practice of cosmogony; these elements (symbols) refer back to one (or several) unrepresentable and unknowable universal transcendences; univocal connections link these transcendences to the units evoking them; the symbol does not resemble the object it symbolises; the two spaces (symbolised and syboliser) are separate and do not communicate.
The symbol assumes the symbolised (universals) as irreducible to the symboliser (it’s markings).
Mythical thought operates within the sphere of the symbol through symbolic units (units of restriction) in relation to the symbolised universals. The symbol’s function, in it’s vertical dimension, is thus one of restriction. The symbol’s function, in it’s horizontal dimension (the articulation of signifying units among themselves) is one of escaping paradox; one could even say that the symbol is horizontally antiparadoxical; within it’s logic, two opposing units are exclusive. The good and the bad are incompatible – as are the raw and the cooked, the honey and the ashes, et cetera. The contradiction, one it appears, immediately demands resolution. It is thus concealed, ‘resolved’ and therefore put aside.
The key to a symbolic semiotic practice is given from the very beginning of a symbolic discourse, the course of a semiotic development is circular since the end is programmed, given in embryo, from the beginning (whose end is the beginning) because the symbol’s function (ideologeme) antedates the symbolic utterance itself. Thus are implied the general characteristics of a symbolic semiotic practice: the quantitative limitation of symbols, their repetition, limitation and general nature.
From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, the transcendental unity supporting the symbol, it’s otherworldly casing, it’s transmitting focus – was put into question. Until the end of the fifteenth century, theatrical representations of Christ’s life were based on both the canonical and apocryphal Gospels or the Golden legend (I need to look up ‘The Mysteries’ dated c. 1400 published by Achille Jubinal in 1837. Hmm.) By the fifteenth century, scenes devoted to Christs public life – the transcendental foundation evoked by the symbol appeared to capsize. This heralds a new signifying relation, between the real and the concrete. In thirteenth century art, prophets were contrasted with the apostles, whereas by the fifteenth century, the four evangelists were no longer set against the four prophets, but against the four fathers of the Latin Church (Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory). The miniature replaced the cathedral, and the serenity of the symbol was replaced by the strained ambivalence of the sign’s connection, which lays claim to a resemblance and identification of the elements it holds together, while first postulating their radical difference. Whence the obsessive insistence on the theme of dialogue between two irreducible but similar elements (dialogue – generator of the pathetic and psychological) in this period of transition. For example, the fourteenth century abounds in dialogues between God and the human soul; the Dialogue of the Crucifix and the Pilgrim as one example. Through this movement the Bible was moralised.
The sign that was thus outlined retained the fundamental characteristic of the symbol – irreducibility of terms, of the referent to the signified, of the signified to the signifier, and of all the units of the signifying structure, itself. The ideologeme of the sign is like that of the symbol – it is dualist, hierarchical and hierarchising. A difference between sign and symbol can be seen horizontally as well as vertically – within vertical function, the sign refers back to entities both of a lesser scope and more concretised than that of the symbol. They are reified universals become objects. Put into a relationship within the structure of a sign, the entity under consideration is transcendentalised and elevated to the level of theological unity. The semiotic practice of the sign assimilates the metaphysics of the symbol and projects it onto the ‘immediately perceptible’. Valorised in this way, the ‘immediately perceptible’ is transformed into an objectivity – [I love this sentence, TN] the reigning law of discourse in the civilisation of the sign.
In horizontal function, the units in a signs semiotic practice are articulated as metonymical concatenation of deviations from the norm, signifying progressive creation of metaphor. Oppositional terms, always exclusive, are caught within a network of multiple deviations (surprises in narrative) giving an illusion of open structure, with arbitrary ending.
Art is thus programmed by a closed, dyadic process, whereby the referent-signified-signifier hierarchy is instituted and the oppositional dyads are interiorised. The articulation of the terms resolves the contradiction.‘
Kristeva, J. (1941) Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press
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