Transcript Kristeva and Irigaray Q & A, and Some Examples

Kristeva and Irigaray
Q & A, and Some Examples
Q&A
What 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 oversymbolicity, the switches and multiplicity
of locutionary position.
The Symbolic & the Semiotic
element 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