Yan Levchenko. Demon of tongue

Julia The role of Kristeva in the creation of one of the most influential languages ​​of humanitarian reflection of the 20th century is not a debatable issue. You can deny the language itself, but this is a matter of taste, ideological preferences, etc. Of course, the post-structuralism that is meant for some is a natural communicative medium, for others it is “a dirty word (or rather, it would be dirty if it weren’t so long, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to swear like that).” In any case, complete indifference to this phenomenon in the humanitarian community was unimaginable until recently. The affirmation of poststructuralism in the archive turns it into an object of historical description, reconstruction and possible revaluation. Kristeva's early works in this sense are a self-evident example, and the published collection is a good reason. For history, this is already interesting, fraught with transformations, on which so many theoretical hopes were pinned in other times.

” alone If Kristeva had coined the term “ intertextuality , it would have sufficed for a chapter in the history of critical theory. This word almost immediately left the boundaries of literary criticism and exists as an ideological category. It reflects the fatally boring, but still strong and widespread idea of ​​​​any statement as a combination of quotes, it implies the disappearance of the author in the anonymity of mass culture, it actually equalizes the rights of the manager and the artist, and legalizes the open parasitism of modern art on the past.

Entering French intellectual life in the mid-roaring sixties, Kristeva came up with a host of influential and enduring concepts in about a decade. This is “signification” as a process of continuous generation (formation) of meaning, this is “phenotext” and “genotext”, which are contrasted on the model of phenotype and genotype in biology, this is a “paragram” borrowed from the linguistic concept of Ferdinand de Saussure , and then effectively interpreted. those. a specific way of organizing a literary text as a network of exchanges of writing-reading and encryption-decipherment. Finally, there is "hora" - a concept taken from Plato's dialogue "Timaeus" and subjected to further transformation. Already in Plato , this word (Greek: “country”, “place”) appears as a neologism denoting primordial matter, which gives life to everything that exists, but itself lies outside the sphere of sensations. For Kristeva, the “chora” represents the “non-expressive totality” that is present in any utterance, in other words, it is semiotic energy in its purest form - that which awakens desire and thereby provokes communication.

The extreme nature of the concept of “chorus,” introduced by Kristeva in her book “The Revolution of Poetic Language” (1974), in turn indicated the desired limit of theoretical research, which, by inertia, continued until the end of the 1970s, which only more clearly revealed their exhaustion. One way or another, the words invented by Kristeva met with a happy fate. They were not only heard, but learned. It was this success that turned into misfortune for the author, who, having finally moved into the camp of essayists with great poetic aspirations, lost the remnants of clarity inherent in her first book. Even if this clarity was the manner of her life-building at that time.

Translations of early works with a semiotic orientation are published in Russia under the same cover for the first time. This is funny, considering that in the context of research into sign systems, Kristeva was remembered not much less often than, say, Lévi-Strauss or Barthes , who at the very least began to be translated back in “those” times. And Barthes’s student, who later had a decisive influence on her teacher, Julia Kristeva, was a hundred times more harmful for the Soviet reader than the French with progressive views. A runaway Bulgarian is not so bad; her no less dubious fellow tribesman, Tsvetan Todorov, squeezed into the collection “Structuralism: Pros and Cons” (M.: Progress, 1975) . But Kristeva was from the very beginning a lady with obvious political ambitions, a lady who was generally inconvenient.

Naive radicalism, universalization of the category of text, cynical enthusiasm for the cultural revolution in China, supposedly materializing the theory and artistic practice associated with the critique of representation - all these are the slogans of the magazine "Tel Quel", with which Kristeva was connected with her entire being until her marriage to editor-in-chief, had a decisive influence on its reputation. Even the book “Semiotics”, included in this edition, is read more like a political manifesto, and not just as a landmark work in the science of the same name, combining pure formalistic “structurality” and “content” in the spirit of Bakhtin , whom Kristeva rightfully presented to the Western world greater cultural proximity.

She was rightly considered not only the voice of the new science of ideologies, but also the direct bearer of ideologies. From Russia, she is still seen, no more, no less, “ the diva of French postmodernism, distant and inaccessible .” Until a certain time, her project of politically engaged semiotic analysis (more precisely, semanlysis ), which thematically developed Barthes’s revealing “Mythologies,” was quite adequate to its object. The infusion of grumpy feminism on unbridled psychoanalysis that replaced it in the mid-seventies looked like a very pathetic self-parody, a desperate attempt to stay in the field of relevance, to continue its life's gesamtkunstwerk. Feminism as a collective disease is, of course, not Kristeva's doing, but she is revered as an important offshoot of this frighteningly ramified, in some sense cavernous, "theoretical body." Those curious can read paranoid meditations on feminist themes in the recently translated book " Powers of Horror "(St. Petersburg: Aletheya, 2003).

Published at the end of winter this year, the collection of Kristeva’s works includes three texts - the article “The Destruction of Poetics,” which is a preface to the French edition of M. Bakhtin’s “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” (1970), the book “Semiotics. A Study in Semantic Analysis” (1969), with which began the publication of the famous Approaches to Semiotics series edited by Thomas Sebeok in the Dutch publishing house Mouton, and finally, the dissertation "The Text of the Novel", prepared in 1966-67. under the direction of Lucien Goldman and published as a separate book in 1970.

The book "Semiotics" is a classic example of that "bird" language that reliably protected its speakers from dusty academics, both in France and, as is known, in Russia. By the way, the book will be useful to the interested Russian reader in that it will unwittingly expose the myths about the originality of Soviet semiotic scientism as a form of resistance. Scientism turns out to be a natural consequence of rearrangements within the paradigm, a change of guidelines, a scientific revolution, which is very weakly connected with the social situation, although sometimes it comes close to it, provoking hasty generalizations. The heroic attempt to construct a comprehensive and scientifically oriented text description language came at a heavy price. Only a dedicated enthusiast will voluntarily read the chapter entitled “Red Narrative as Sphagistics. Leap. Verticality. Double Function.” Only a reader experienced in philosophy, linguistics and logic will be able to understand, at least to a first approximation, what has been presented. And having understood, he will shrug his shoulders: is it really worth such efforts? Here is how, for example, text is characterized as a device for storing, transforming and transmitting information:

The uniqueness of the organization of the text - and its importance for the analysis of our culture - lies in the fact that it represents the only continent capable of uniting infinite combinatorics and an external body in a broken space; This is a combinatorics that needs a body only as a point (and the body is enclosed in brackets), and a body that needs a combinatorics only in order to ensure its representation. Textual infinity, impossible without a place that represents it, uses this place (“you”) to compose its anamnesis, that is, to show it its biological, logical, metaphysical, political genesis, which it represents to itself in the form of a kind of memory.

With this, the author seeks to once again reinforce his well-known idea that a text is not a finished material object, strictly delimited from its own kind, but a kind of impersonal “productivity”. This is an immaterial energy that transforms itself and is deposited in transient forms - something similar to which Wilhelm von Humboldt and Pavel Florensky spoke about in a dull and very cautious manner . However, there is no time for them now. The above quotation may cause justified dissatisfaction of the reader, because it is necessarily taken out of context. In response, I urge you to turn to the entire chapter “Generation of the Formula,” which supposedly describes semantic analysis in action.

It is easy to see (although not easy to read) that nothing is stated there other than what this semantic analysis should be and, finally, what kind of science semiotics should be. Kristeva talks a lot about the modalities by which the utterance is organized, least of all focusing attention on the deontic modality of her own presentation, on its unsupported, arbitrary normativity. Kristeva writes that semantic analysis finally liberates our analytical abilities, allowing us to get rid of the tyranny of a single point of view on a text. As if this tyranny really existed at the time of writing the book Semiotics.

Unable to apply the utopian project of semantic analysis to even one text (if only because it would result in something reminiscent of a test of limits in the spirit of Roland Barthes’s book “S/Z”), Kristeva puts forward beautiful, albeit secondary hypotheses about the text as a relationship between the existing structure and its dynamic disruption. generative grammar, In Noam Chomsky’s this is the relationship between competence and performance , which is important for constructing language models and further for its automatic synthesis, which has purely practical tasks (making work easier). But Kristeva is interested in this very creation only as an effective metaphor that helps to take some place in literature. This is a way to join the writers, to make up for your lack of creative energy by exposing it in others. That’s why the book is so thick, choking on text, bursting with “productivity.”

“The Text of the Novel” and “The Destruction of Poetics” are built into the paradigm of “dialogical research”, first of all, appealing to the works of G. Lukács and M. Bakhtin. The value of these works, which not only had a huge influence on the modernist theory of the novel, but also hastened its happy demise, lies in the fact that their author managed to fit the tradition of dialectics after Hegel into the initially purely linguistic (in extreme cases, logical) context of the study of sign.

The “Text of the Novel” attempts to provide a detailed analysis of the novel “Little Jean de Center” by a French writer of the 15th century. Antoine de La Salle. Drawing in part on the poetics of the Russian formal school, Kritseva attempts to describe this novel using the concept of polyphony that Bakhtin developed and applied in his study of Dostoevsky's Poetics. It is this first major text by Kristeva in French that reveals the greatest clarity and concreteness of presentation. And the concentration of fruitful ideas here is so great that “Semiotics” and even “The Revolution of Poetic Language” in some cases seem to be nothing more than a development of the plan outlined here. It is enough to mention the idea, taken from Bakhtin and effectively refined, that the real ending of a story is always “an intrusion into the finished novelistic utterance of the very work that produces it - an intrusion here, on this page. Speech ceases with the death of its subject , and it is in the instance of writing (work) that its killing takes place" . That is, it is the bodily equivalent of Hegelian sublation, expressed in the act of final resolution of contradictions, or absolute liberation, the death of the subject. In general, it is the author’s interpretation of the notorious dialogism in its textual dimension (perhaps the interpretation is not entirely adequate) that provokes, after this book, to turn again to Lukács and Bakhtin, in order to see in the first one of the sources of classical deconstruction and in the second - a version of radical hermeneutics.

At one time, Clive Thompson, in a review of French-language studies of Bakhtin , pointed out that Kristeva’s attempts to generalize her impressions of books about Dostoevsky and Rabelais relied more on intuition than on knowledge of the context and were subordinated to ideology. Simply put, Kristeva had not read Bakhtin’s other works and had no idea of ​​the considerable time distance that separated the texts she loved. Suffice it to say, Thompson argues, that in her 1967 article Kristeva treats Bakhtin as a continuator of the formalist doctrine, in particular, “establishes a closeness between Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson from the point of view of “discourse.” <...> According to Kristeva, Bakhtin should be contrasted Hegel and Aristotle; she constantly repeats that Bakhtin is a structuralist close to Saussure." The word (only homonymous to what Bakhtin wrote with a capital letter) was thrown onto the intellectual market, with the result that, as one of the main Soviet structuralists would put it, Yuri Lotman , there has been an “avalanche-like growth” of aberrations. At the same time, Kristeva herself rather quickly fell into revisionism - this is how falling in love turns into irritation - and already in 1970 she wrote a critical preface to “The Poetics of Dostoevsky” - the article “The Destruction of Poetics”.

Here she complains that Bakhtin did not develop a comprehensive and internally consistent theory of dialogue, and ultimately declares it unproductive precisely because of her self-imposed combination of arbitrary psychologism and structuralist claims. Of course, Bakhtin is brilliant in some ways; from the darkness of his denseness he saw the same thing as the brilliant Freud, and even an analysis that was rudimentary from a linguistic point of view was redeemed by his erudition in the field of exotic Russian literature. And so, of course, nothing outstanding. One can only be touched by this elegant manner of reacting to the ringing heard, and also pay tribute to the French scientists. A. Meshonnik and M. Pierrette-Malkuzinskaya already in the first half of the 1970s criticized Kristeva’s capricious and hasty generalizations, which were mainly engaged in self-promotion, and not in “opening” or “closing” Bakhtin for European theory.

Later, Ken Hirschkop, in his polemical article “ Is There a Western Approach to Bakhtin? ” will write that Kristeva was not a Western researcher of Bakhtin at all, but dragged him to the West as part of her intellectual baggage. "Few scholars today view Kristeva's papers favorably. They are usually perceived as naive and tendentious, although Kristeva is probably the most significant and original thinker to have shown an interest in Bakhtin . " On the one hand, she doesn’t seem to have figured it out, but on the other, thanks to her misconceptions, she has become a classic of poststructuralist semiotics. This is a monument to scientific error.

In conclusion, I would like to note that the restorers of the monument broke down: the translation of multi-page, unreadable texts took all the strength from G. Kosikov and B. Narumov, which is why the book does not have a preface. And that’s where he belongs. Fifty pages. The phenomenon, after all...