Week 3 - Kristeva and the language of Silence

Julia Kristeva was born in 1941 in Bulgaria, a communist state at the time. I believe the infuence of Russian communism on her country may have had some influence linguistic studies, which informed her views on the structure of language. After studying under Bahktin, Bart and Golding, she then moved to Paris to further her studies, producing a multi-lingual theory of linguistics.

Kristeva's work on the 'vitality' of language is interesting, and yet somewhat troubling. In the same way as we have seen Kant talking about our interactions with the outside world being limited by our sensory apparatus, I found Kristeva's view of language as a finite, flawed form of communication thought-provoking. This was heightened further after finding out that the second half of Kristeva's book has not been translated due to its emphasis on and usage of the structure of the French language.

From my reading, I considered Kristeva to be making the point that language and reason are not interlinked, and that language is appropriated for our own ends that may deviate from the message to be conveyed. This reminded me slightly of Harold Pinter's use of pauses in his plays. Sir Peter Hall famously said of them that 'a pause in Pinter is as important as a line. They are all there for a reason. Three dots is a hesitation, a pause is a fairly mundane crisis and a silence is some sort of crisis'. 


Perhaps what Pinter was attempting in his pauses was communication sans language. Silence, sensory deprivation and lack of audible stimulation is recognisable no matter what language has been appropriated along the way. I wonder whether Pinter had indeed imported Kristeva's notions of 'appropriated language' and symbolism into a 'semiotic' experience, devoid of grammar or syntax, communicated without language per se.


[1] Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margret Waller, New York, Columbia Press

Week 2 - Lacan's Mirror Stage

Jacques Lacan deals with the language of the world - how we understand the world around us from a linguistic viewpoint. He looks at the signified [an image] and the signifier [a concept] and theorises on the arbitrary relationship between the two. He tells us that there is no natural connection between the signified and the signifier - this is established simply by 'convention of language [1]'.
It is, however, impossible to step outside of language, to scrutinise the image or concept, since we are bound within this binary completely by our own visual and verbal apparatus - there is no transparency between the signifier and the signified.

I found the idea of the 'mirror stage' as an interesting way of breaking down this quite difficult concept. Lacan describes it as occuring between the age of 6 and 18 months, and that it is the moment at which the child recognises itself and realises it is an 'independent' being. However, this causes a rupture in the child's persona, splitting the self from the realm of images. This, Lacan tells us, marks the development of the subconscious, since the split is repressed and not reconciled.

[1] Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, Hogarth Press 1977

Week 1 - The Learning Journal

We began Semester 2 with an introduction to the Architects learning journals, in which we are supposed to record our interactions with the texts and how we associated with them outside of the lecture environment. It is supposed to represent 'personal academic reflection', so I decided to use a 'blog' format to record my musings on the subject.

The plan for the next 10 weeks is to observe and read critics focused on 'modernity', dealing with issues such as -

• dominance of technology
• nationality
• secularisation
• moral relativism 
• localised and emergent modernities
• western and eurocentric concepts

We have previously had a grounding in the works of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, in order to build up to these more modern critics. During our lecture we also looked at how analytical psychology had largely emerged after defining historical events, showing that Hegel was inspired by the French Revolution. We therefore established the Holocaust as the most contemporary epochal event of the 20th Century, and discussed what ramifications this might have for the relevance of the works we're currently reading. Marx, for example, was once associated with 'freedom', but is now instead a symbol for totalitarianism.  

Hopefully in this blog I will be able to compare the contemporary message of the writers with a more modern interpretation. 200 words is, of course, a limiting factor, and for the weeks in which I found the reading a struggle I'll focus more on the text itself than alternative interpretations. However, I do want to apply these thoughts and ideas to a modern psyche, in order to see how the chronological progression of human consciousness has altered their meanings.

nb - I have decided that in most, if not all, of the posts, I will try and add a little graphic of my own representing the work/s read that week