Kristeva and Irigaray

Q & A, and Some Examples

Q & AWhat is feminine writing according to Irigaray? Examples?What is the semiotic for Kristeva? How about genotext? Examples? How do we relate Kristeva’s ideas of genetext/phenotext to Barthes’ notions of writable/ readable text, text/work or Bahktin’s idea of novel? What do you think about their connections of feminine writing with women’s bodies? Is it “essentialist”? Is it a kind of utopianism?

Georgia O'Keeffe

Black Iris

Pollock, Jackson Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952

Pollock, Jackson Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952

Context:

1. existentialism ("existence precedes essence"); alone in the void (alienation);

2. the Cold War: post-Hiroshima; the Soviet Union gets the bomb in 1949;

3. the 50's beat generation (pushing to the edge of one's consciousness.)

4. Jungian analysis (the collective unconscious; the archetype; mythic structures embedded in everyone's unconscious).

5. Inspired by jazz improvisation; listened to records by Charlie Parker while he painted. Also influenced by Native American sand painting and the idea that painting could be ritualistic, a rites of passage. (source: http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/20thcwebsite/439mid/ah439mid-Info.00011.html )

Mimicry: Cindy Sherman (1) Untitled Film Stills (1977)

Lois Lane in the 1950's television program Superman 

Cindy Sherman: (Staniszewski 281)

Mimicry 2: Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills (1977)

Marilyn Monroe Cindy Sherman: Untitled 

film still (Staniszewski 282)

Cindy Sherman (2) work in the 80’s –critique of portraits

Body and the semiotic

Chora -- The space of the drives;

The semiotic -- the bodily drive as it is discharged in signification (signifiance). The semiotic is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As the discharge of drives, it is also associated with the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being since we all have resided in that body.

The semiotic disposition

The emergence of the semiotic in the symbolic, or the genotext in the phenotext.

E.g. rhythm, ambiguity and over-symbolicity, the switches and multiplicity of locutionary position.

The Symbolic & the Semioticelement of signification is associated with the grammar and structure of signification. The symbolic element is what makes reference possible. Without the symbolic, all signification would be babble or delirium. But, without the semiotic, all signification would be empty and have no importance for our lives. Ultimately, signification requires both the semiotic and symbolic; there is no signification without some combination of both.

source

feminine writing according to Irigaray

Sexuality – plural; clitoral activity + vaginal passivity + multiple erogeneous zones; p. 28-29 “She” is definitely other in herself. . . .”she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids. . . For in what she says, too, at least when she dares, woman is constantly touching herself.

feminine writing according to Irigaray

“an ‘other meaning’ always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. . . . What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And when it strays too far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at ‘zero’: her body-sex.” P. 79 of our chapter