Force Over Form

Manifesto Incorporating Some Experiences

I’m looking for something. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for something. Something that is behind the smoke, down the street, between the lines, under the skin. I’ve been in search of the truth. Always I’ve suspected that the truth is just beyond my reach, that all I need is a little more information, that the secret will be revealed in the pages of another book, in the words of another lecture, in the lyrics of another song, in the scenes of another film. Sometimes I have felt close to it, only to find that it inevitably evaporates like the memory of a dream.

In my life, one truth has displaced another with such certain regularity that I no longer trust my certainties at all. Every truth can be critiqued, debated, rearticulated, and turned ‘round on itself. Through many years of higher education, I’ve moved from discipline to discipline in search of an enduring foundation that would let me get on with the my life. I’ve been looking for a place to call home, for stasis, for the chance to say, “Now I understand.” Just when I think I’ve found it, something shifts. The vision that was so close and in focus is covered by a veil of ennui. The promise that held my attention and fed my hope, and that drove me to do well, becomes a threat to my life. Each time this happens I suffer great pangs of regret, fear, and even self-loathing. I ask myself: “How can I abandon this thing which feeds me, these people I love so dearly, this trust I have acquired, all this hard work?” I fear the loss, the social loss, each time my attention is broken. I worry endlessly about how, when, and where I will be safe again, and with whom. I wonder why I can be doing so well at something only to lose interest the minute I succeed in the eyes of others. And I especially wonder how it is that I can do this over and over again, seemingly without closure. But none of these feelings ever has had the power to quiet my need to move on. I have never been coerced by my own fears or by the guilt I feel when I leave a sure thing behind. Part of me would gladly come to rest in the safe haven of certainty. That’s all I’ve ever wanted—to be able to say, “This is me, this is what I do, I love my life just as it is.” But it has never been that way. Just when things become most certain I am overwhelmed by an oppressive frustration with the inevitable and mind-numbing realization of how arbitrary and categorical are the truths and the language of disciplinary expertise. It’s as if (always as if, because I never know) I am only ever interested in learning the languages of certainty, of proving I can wear the mask of certainty, to pass for an expert (language as drag), to reap the rewards of single-mindedness. But I have no solid measure by which to verify the truth. My experience tells me that the truth is always already polyphonic, multivalent, in process, ultimately never fixed, never final, never present.

Philosophical Interlude

In Jacques Derrida’s language, the language of poststructuralism, signifiers (words) slide into other signifiers without ever reaching a signified (the concept of the referent, the thing itself). “Il nay a pas de hors-text.” There is nothing outside the text. In other words, we look to the authority of the dictionary for the meaning of a word, but the word is defined in terms of its difference from other words, which are in turn likewise defined, and so on, never to conclude with the meaning of the thing itself, the final, present, signified. Meaning, through difference, is always deferred, thus giving rise to Derrida’s word differánce. This is not to say that there is never meaning in language. Indeed, language is the arbiter of the social order through which each person enters subjecthood, as Kristeva’s materialist dialectic so expertly reveals.

Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria in 1941, where she attended French language Catholic schools. After this, she moved to Paris to study French literature. She also studied semiotics and structural linguistics with Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss in the 60s and early 70s. She also studied psychoanalysis and later began her own practice. ¹ In other words, she is a remarkable scholar and intellectual. She has written or edited more than twenty nonfiction books on subjects ranging from semiotics and literature to nationalism and psychoanalysis. None of which are anecdotal or by any stretch of the imagination easy to read. On top of this she has written two novels, all the while running a psychoanalytic practice and occasionally working as a visiting professor. Since much of her work involves the theoretical aspects of social change, even of revolution, she is also known as something of an activist both political and feminist.

For the sake of this article, I’ll confine my inquiry into some of the more pivotal aspects of her analytical theory as it relates to my study of theory, communication, and the imperatives of ethical action. I’m particularly interested in her psychoanalytic work on language and subjectivity, which can be read not only as an incisive critique of the chief paradigms of Western philosophy but also as an effort to articulate a truly revolutionary conception of the incredibly complex relationship of the individual to the social order. In Revolution in Poetic Language, she writes, “Our philosophies of Language, embodiments of the Idea, are nothing more than the thought of archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 13). Her theoretical and critical approach holds significant implications for the study of mass communication and the potential for political change as well as offering possibilities for a radical, embodied, ethics.

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva elaborates her theory of the revolutionary nature of modern literary practices as well as argues for an awareness of how the body and its drives makes their way into language as interruptions to the social order. According to Rudiez (quoting Kristeva, 1984), in the introduction, “Literary practice is seen as exploration and discovery of the possibilities of language; as an activity that liberates the subject from a number of linguistic, psychic, and social networks; as a dynamism that breaks up the inertia of language habits and grants linguists the unique possibility of studying the becoming of the signification of signs” (Kristeva, 1984, pp. 2-3). Here, I think it’s important to point out that for Kristeva, a literary scholar, the creative practices that are most accessible are poetry and the modern novel. I would extend this to include any creative practice capable of being considered as a site for the text, for resistance to the social order. Since my own growing interest is in documentary filmmaking, in all its collaborative, experiential, critical and narrative promise, I understand ‘literary practice’ in a broader sense than perhaps Kristeva intends.

The first half of Revolution in Poetic Language is dedicated to the exploration of the process of signification and borrows concepts from Freudian psychoanalysis “. . . in order to give the advances of dialectical logic a materialist foundation—a theory of signification based on the subject, his formation, and his corporeal, linguistic, and social dialectic” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 15). In order to come to terms with this complex, materialist theory of signification, Kristeva begins with the pre-Oedipal stages of the subject, around which the thetic phase plays a pivotal role in the beginnings of signification, or language.

According to Kristeva, the thetic phase of the developing subject marks (or is marked by, or is) the pivotal stage at which signification, and therefore language, becomes possible. Drawing upon Freud and Lacan, Kristeva argues, “. . . we find the thetic phase of the signifying process, around which signification is organized, at two points: the mirror stage and the ‘discovery’ of castration” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 46).

The mirror stage occurs when the (theoretically posited) child discovers that “in order to capture its image in a mirror, the child must remain separate from it . . .” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 46). In other words, the child, in order to recognize that he or she is distinct from the image in the mirror, while yet identifying with it, relies on the “spatial intuition” produced by the mirror stage. Until this stage, the subject is unified in, or within, the semiotic chora: “. . . a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 25). It’s a state of asyntactic nouns and verbs, all mixed together, signifying nothing, perhaps. At this point, “The child’s first so-called holophrastic enunciation’s include gesture, the object, and vocal emission. Because they are perhaps not yet sentences (NP-VP), generative grammar [and thus positivist, empirically oriented method] is not equipped to deal with them” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 43). However, the “spatial intuition” produced by the mirror stage is found “at the heart of the functioning of signification—in signs and in sentences” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 46). Nonetheless, the semiotic chora remains throughout. The differentiation of the (theoretical) subject from its image marks the first crucial step in the development of a separation of subject and object. According to Kristeva, this “Captation of the image and the drive investment in this image, which institute primary narcissism, permit the constitution of objects detached from semiotic chora.” Most important, she argues that “Positing the imaged ego leads to the positing of the object, which is, likewise, separate and signifiable” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 46). Thus, we proceed to language.

However, first “Castration puts the finishing touches on the process of separation that posits the subject as signifiable, which is to say, separate, always confronted by an other: imago in the mirror (signified) and semiotic process (signifier).” In this stage, the mother, whose body is “the receptacle and guarantor of demands, takes the place of narcissistic, hence imaginary, effects and gratifications; she is, in other words, the phallus” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 47). Here, according to Kristeva, the discovery of castration (in Lacanian discourse the awareness that the child himself or herself is not the sole source of the mother’s desire, cannot fulfill the role of the phallus for the mother) “detaches the subject from his dependence on the mother, and the perception of this lack [manqué] makes the phallic function a symbolic function—the symbolic function” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 47). Herein lies the most significant step in the process of signification, and the beginning of the thetic phase, as the pivot between the semiotic chora and the symbolic. According to Kristeva, “This is a decisive moment fraught with consequences: the subject, finding his identity in the symbolic, separates from his fusion with the mother, confines his jouissance to the genital, and transfers semiotic motility onto the symbolic order” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 47). The lack produced by the discovery of castration, then, becomes the bridge between the signifier and the signified. The phallus, now in the realm of the symbolic, then becomes the source of the signified; is the signifier, in Kristeva’s words; and exists as a “precondition of enunciation.” She continues, “For there to be enunciation, the ego must be posited in the signified, but it must do so as a function of the subject lacking in the signifier; a system of finite positions (signification) can only function when it is supported by a subject and on the condition that this subject is a want-to-be [manqué a etre]” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 48). Language, and symbolic order (if my yet tentative understanding serves), therefore, is a result of the tension, or the gap, between the “imaged ego and drive motility, between the mother and the demand made on her . . .” that is at the core of the thetic phase, and, according to Kristeva, “. . . is precisely the break that establishes what Lacan calls the place of the Other as the place of the ‘signifier’” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 48). This break with the mother produces the symbolic relation to the Other, which is, according to Kristeva, “constitutive of language.” The want-to-be subject produced by the thetic phase renders signification possible within the social realm.

Kristeva, in her formulation of a materialist dialectic theory of subjectivity and the processes of signification, also draws upon the Hegelian notion of “negativity” read through Freud. She attempts to navigate the impossible by codifying, signifying, the (dialectically) ineffable link between the embodied subject’s semiotic chora ² and the social, symbolic realm of signification and language. In other words, if I understand it, the concept of negativity within a dialectical materialism expresses the fluid, mobile tension between the body’s drives and the social order that together constitute the subject. Where the thetic phase is the moment of separation of the subject from the object that gives rise to the “want-to-be” subject (manqué a etre) and is the bridge between the semiotic and the symbolic through which the subject enters the social order and language, “negativity” is an analytical attempt to get at the semiotic drive that underlies the symbolic and yet is in constant tension with it.

Negativity, in its first, Hegelian, incarnation in the text, “. . . may be thought of as both the cause and the organizing principle of the process” (Kristeva, 1984, p. 109). She clarifies and grounds this somewhat ambiguous definition by writing that the concept of negativity “. . . reformulates the static terms of pure abstraction as a process, dissolving them and binding them within a mobile law” (p. 109). Negativity, then, could be understood to refer to Hegel’s attempt to find the connection between Being and Nothingness, between the conceptual and the real. For Hegel, it is in some sense the founding principle of the transcendental ethic through which “. . . a subject, the person, the free, has being” (Hegel, quoted in Kristeva, 1984, p. 111). For Kristeva, however, this freedom, while true, is constantly mitigated by the social order. Where Hegel finds unity as Self-Consciousness in the transcendent movement from Being into Nothing, Kristeva finds, in Freud’s discovery of drives, a materialist answer to the logical contradictions of the reunified subject inherent in the phenomenological conception of negativity. ³

For Kristeva, negativity, read through Freud’s conception of human drives, can be read as “the very movement of heterogeneous matter, inseparable from its differentiation’s symbolic function” (1984, p. 113). That is, negativity, understood by way of the materialist conception of drives and the tension between the semiotic and symbolic orders, signifies the continuous renegotiations of the difference between the subject and the social realm.

Kristeva writes, “A materialist reading of Hegel allows us to think this negativity as a trans-subjective, trans-ideal, and trans-symbolic movement found in the separation of matter . . .” which (recalling the thetic phase and the differentiation of the subject from the object, the child from the mother) is “one of the preconditions of the symbolic” (1984, p. 117). So, while negativity refers to (underlies, gives expression to) the semiotic order, it also “moves through the symbolic, and continues to work on it from within” (p. 117). Negativity is the body’s dialog with the symbolic. It is analogous to (or related to) the movement of signification back and forth through the subject’s semiotic chora. Or, better, in Kristeva’s words, “The concept of negativity registers a conflictual state which stresses the heterogeneity of the semiotic function and its determination, and which dialectical materialism, reading Hegel through Freud, will posit as instinctual (social and material)” (p. 118). Thus, in order to avoid the pitfalls of the idealist philosophy, and to shift the conception of negativity into the realm of the analytical and material, Kristeva calls on the Freudian notions of rejection, anality, and the death principle.

In order to better tie the materialist conception of negativity to the analytic theory that underlies her formulation of the nature of poetic language, Kristeva (1984) suggests that “expenditure” or “rejection” “. . . are better terms for the movement of material contradictions that generate the semiotic function” (p. 119). Here she is making the claim that negativity, in this sense, refers to the signifying practice that puts the unity of the subject “in process/on trial” (p. 119).

Working through Frege’s notion of negation, thought, and judgment, Kristeva finds logical motivation for postulating that negativity, as rejection, operates “on the border between ‘consciousness’ and ‘unconsciousness’.” According to Kristeva, the acquisition (or use) of negation takes place around the age of fifteen months “coinciding with the peak of the ‘mirror stage’ and with holophrastic language acquisition” (1984, p. 122). She then ties this to the thetic phase as an element of judgment and sublimation, completing the logical connection between negativity and instinct. In this movement, Kristeva (through Freud) perceives the rejection that is at the root of language acquisition. The infant’s separation from the mother in the thetic phase, and the objectification of the mirror phase result in this rejection, is “a basic biological operation of scission, separation, and division; at the same time, it joins the always already splitting body to family structure and to the continuum of nature in a relation of rejection” (p. 123). Thus, rejection is the initial separation of the body from the signifying process, which also returns it to the realm of social relationships. Although rejection creates a tension in lack within the subject, the production of language is also a movement toward embodied “jouissance.” Calling upon the Saussurian observation that language is only able to mark concrete differences within a fixed system of signification and meaning, Kristeva argues that this ineffable, fluid quality of negativity is observable only through the semiotic interruptions in the signifying order brought about by poetic language. Poetic language can be seen as the embodied jouissance that expresses itself, from time to time, through the operations of negativity. It is the realization, through language, through that split between the body’s instinctive drives and the symbolic order, of an interruption in the fixed, social, signifying order. It is at once an expression of grief and jouissance and, for Kristeva, is the visible trace of the invisible operations of negativity within the subject. It is the body doing the body’s work.

Continuance

So, I have learned something after all. But it isn’t the certain, irrefutable knowledge that I sought. In fact, the interpretive, analytic, or deconstructive philosophies of Artaud; Kristeva; Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari; and Foucault, among others, are ways of trying to use language to get at the very thing that gives rise to and also resists it: our embodiment as singular events moving through the world in time. They are complex, sometimes impossible, always engaging, inquiries into the experience of living in the human world. For Kristeva it’s poetic language. For Derrida it’s deconstruction. For Deleuze and Guattari it’s the relationship between capitalism and schizophrenia and the anarchy that resists it. Foucault works at uncovering the complex relations of power in discourse that constitute the social order and the divided subjects that we are. Levitch calls it cruising. For me, all these are vital, even epiphanic, insights into the world that I find myself in. Yet it would be absurd to say, as a statement of certainty, that I believe these are true analyses of the complex and continually mutable world I encounter every day. For, as I understand them, there is no fixed meaning in the world, only fluid processes of meaning making, always contingent and historical. But I do find them affirmative, in a very deep way.

Taken together, these philosophies are precisely what I have always hoped to find, but also precisely what I wanted to refute, hoped to avoid, tried to escape. Despite this contradiction, and even though my understanding of them is naïve and unprofessional, and I could never hope to explicate them in a pedagogically satisfying manner, I feel comfortable immersed in them. I love the sensation of moving through these texts that are impossibly complex but which speak to my experience in ways that I could never have imagined possible as a boy growing up in rural Oregon.

Since adolescence I have mourned the loss of that sensation of the new and wondrous that I knew intimately as a child, but which I could never recapture in any conscious way. I remember only a sensation, an eagerness to look, to touch, to smell, to listen. There must have been some desire to interpret and understand, but I was without the language to do it. I tried to explain my enthusiasms to others, mostly adults, and was well received for the most part. Nonetheless, as I grew better able to articulate each new experience, the frequency and delight in them became less intense, mediated by the very language I was acquiring in order to express them. This led to a frustration, and a desire to find ever more precise words with which to communicate my experiences, to myself and to others. I found various means, but was never wholly satisfied. At some point I remember realizing that contingency and contradiction infused every moment of my life. One evening as a teenager, probably in the late summer, I divided the world into three ways of being: good, evil, and chaotic. I took the metaphor from a role-playing game that my cousin was very interested in. These were the options you could choose for your character, and until then I had always chosen good for mine, when my cousin made me play. But this night I realized that it would be impossible for me to choose good because I could not define what it meant. Nor could I choose evil, not only because I loathed the idea of deliberately inflicting pain on others but also for the same reason that good was impossible. Only the chaotic seemed to leave open the possibility for action, for truth, for life. I didn’t know that by making this choice I would for a long time cling to a metaphor from a dull and nerdy role-playing game, but it gratified some deep need I must have had. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a choice as a realization that this metaphor was the only way I could frame my experience.

The scientist is ultimately divided from his or her subject. As Artaud puts it,

To analyze such a drama [life] philosophically is impossible; only poetically and by seizing upon what is communicative and magnetic in the principles of all the arts can we, by shapes, sounds, music, and volumes, evoke, passing by way of all natural resemblances of images and affinities to each other not the primordial directions of the mind, which our excessive logical intellectualism would reduce to merely useless schemata, but states of an acuteness so intense and so absolute that we sense, beyond the tremors of all music and form, the underlying menace of chaos as decisive as it is dangerous. (Artaud, 1958, p. 51)

I draw great inspiration from Bennett Miller’s film, not simply because Timothy “Speed” Levitch is the embodiment of Artaud’s affirmative anarchy, but for the fact that Miller himself took the chance of making the film in the first place. He and I are the same age. According to stories I’ve read, he found himself against the wall at NYU film school, and decided that, if he were ever to make a film, he had to do it on his own. He bought a video camera, a better microphone, and a supply of tape and began shooting “The Cruise.” He was willing to take the enormous risks that such a project involves for the sake of doing what he must have felt was the only thing possible.

I believe in the affirmative possibilities of the Artaud’s metaphor, if not in his specific designs. I believe in Levitch’s cruise, and in the risk that Miller was willing to take. Derek Jarman, in Blue, his last film before he died of AIDS, says that “we must fight the fear that engenders the beginning, the middle, and the end.” This is precisely the sentiment that I find in Artaud. Sometimes I feel very close to madness, particularly when I am immersed as I am in the language of madness. My single, enduring phobia has been that I may lapse permanently into this space between sanity and insanity, that I may step too far out over the abyss, that I may lose my connection to the symbolic realm. Such fear is no doubt unwarranted. After all, I’ve managed thus far to maintain a warm relationship with the social order, even while sometimes I rage quietly against it. Or rather, even while I sometimes rage quietly against myself for letting it slip from my grasp. But I have come to a place in my life where there is very little to lose in my relationship to the social order. I am secure in my ability to function in the adult world as a member of this society, at least in the middle-class world were I live. And I have acquired enough of the languages of authority to express my thoughts on a variety of subjects from fly fishing, carpentry, and the political economy, to postmodern social theory and French philosophy.

I am as alienated from the capitalist machine that threatens my life, our lives, as one can be in the safety of this place. I’ve argued over the verity of nonfiction and the values of poetic language. I’ve been eaten by voracious Amazonian mosquitoes and have seen violent Japanese films in the basement of a university library. I’ve danced wildly until morning in the company of the cleverest of folks, and walked sober and alone in the desert. I’ve sat in despair on the edge of my bed for nothing and wept aloud in a theater for the truth of a performance. I’ve discussed the finer points of digital video cameras in the midst of a riot and nursed newborn lambs by hand in a barn. All these things are true, and deeply meaningful to me. I believe that theory can be implicit in such experiences. It is the rich lining, articulated aloud or not, of movement and character. Explication need not be explicit or intellectual and reified. Teargas burning your eyes and nose can be a powerful, and immediate, textual lesson in the imperatives of the practice of life in the midst of global capitalism. So can the sound of the language Lachichio whispered in the mountains of Mexico, or the sight of a thousand fireflies rising and falling over the maize fields. Every moment is suffused with meaning.

To resist, then, is to engage the social order in all its richness, complexity, and contradiction. To tell a story is to move through the world. Poetic language (in any shape or form), in Kristeva’s sense, breaks through the codified and deadly social order that keeps us in quiet desperation. All I hope is that I will find a way to express this that I know to be true. There is no way for me to know what will come next. But I do know that I must move, that I must resist the temptation to fold in upon myself, that I must do the work that I know how to do. I must fight the fear that engenders the beginning, the middle, and the end. I no longer suspect that the truth is just beyond my reach. I no longer feel abject when I’m wrong or when what I know to be true fails to resonate with another. The truth is not something fixed in place, and my experience is all I have, ultimately, upon which to draw.

In the way that May of 1968 transformed the thinking of Certeau and his generation of left intellectuals, the November 30, 1999, WTO protests in Seattle transformed the way those present thought about the possibilities of resistance. The effect of more than 50,000 individuals, united together against the inhuman profit machine of global capitalism, was visceral and awe-inspiring—all those people alive and cruising! It was revolutionary on both a social and personal level for me. Everywhere I turned I saw the expression of the semiotic breaking through into the symbolic. I saw the theater of cruelty in the performance of protesters. Political action became an immediate and human experience for me. It was a Bakhtinian carnival—transgressive, festive, polyphonous, and dialogical.