Semiotic, Maternal (Kristeva)

Semiotic Aspect of Language as Maternal

Kristeva is informed by and models Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic explanations of the subject, language, and symbolic order. Kristeva is particularly interested in language and the “other side of language,” which is filtered by language and yet is not language. She summarizes the subject in becoming as expressed through the semiotic in relation to the symbolic. She develops the concept of the semiotic by distinguishing semiotic as a technical term different from semiotics: a linguistic discipline that studies signs and symbols to examine how meaning is constructed and understood. Kristeva refers to the semiotic as an element within the signifying process, specifically to describe the drives as they discharge within language. She suggests the drive process is associated with rhythm and tone, and because these sounds and rhythms are associated with the sounds and rhythms of the maternal body, the semiotic aspect of language is also often associated with the maternal and the feminine.

The bodily element in language, the tone and rhythm, for example, allows the speaker to discharge affects or drive forces in the process of signification and share them with another. Communication is thus material and corporeal. Kristeva considers this semiotic element of speech as existing from our very first interaction with the mother. As infants, we communicate our needs through the discharge of affect with the mother's body or between our body and the mother's body. Affect is exchanged partially through a dialogue with words, but also partially by tones of voice, body language, smiles, and tears.

Kristeva argues against and transforms the Cartesian unitary subject, positing that subjects are produced by culture and discourse. Kristeva believes that subjects are produced, but that they are not passive. Her theory seeks not to reject, but to redefine the subject and their revolutionary potential to depose subjects that precede them.

For Kristeva, agency is a product of discourse, and thus as each subject is constituted, transforms and revolutionizes the subject that precedes it. The basis for her theory on the subject is the distinction she articulates between the symbolic and the semiotic aspects of language. The signifying process that constitutes the subject is always already constituted by the dialectic relationship between the symbolic and the semiotic. The myriad possibilities created by this dialectical interplay account for the multiple forms of discourse which thus constitutes multiple subjects.

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