Text/Textuality

Perhaps because Julia Kristeva's earliest articulations of the theory of textuality are framed within the context of a more intimate dialogue with Marxism than Derrida's, the text's materiality receives more direct attention. Specifically, in several of the essays that comprise Séméiotiké (1969) Kristeva links the text with the concept of productivity. This term derives from her effort to rethink Marx's concept of the "mode of production" from the vantage points of linguistics and psychoanalysis, with the aim of capturing both how values (economic, linguistic, etc.) are effects of a system of relations, and how this system is defined by a heterogeneity of relations (social, psychic, etc.) that sustain themselves in a permanent state of crisis. In the essay "The Productivity Called the Text," Kristeva shows how the text, again as paradigm rather than as thing, allows one to think about how language is deployed in ways that undercut its communicative function, at once revealing and confounding the codes that organize the production of linguistic messages. Although it is impossible to designate the product of the productivity called the text, it is clear that what is at stake here is the subject in process/on trial (Kristeva's original formulation invites both). The text provides one with the conceptual means by which to theorize and thus analyze the formation and deformation of the human being that takes place in the circuits of symbolic exchange.

Crucial to her point about the systemic articulation of heterogeneous relations is the conceptual innovation of intertextuality. Derived from the semiological concept of substance (used by Louis Hjelmslev to track the plane of content from one sign system to another), intertextuality describes the transpositions that allow different semiological registers to engage one another. Kristeva's earliest characterizations of intertextuality—for example, "in the space of a text several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize each other"—associate it with the process of literary allusion. In Revolution of Poetic Language (1974), however, a much stronger accent falls on the dynamics of transposition—that is, the unstable process whereby differently realized texts collide in, say, a novel—and she goes out of her way to disassociate intertextuality from the "study of sources." Because intertextuality is identified in Revolution as a third primary process (primary processes were Freud's list of psychic activities that effect the form and content of dreams), it is equally clear that transposition is designed to give the analyst access to the permutation of subject positions undergone in the production of a work. Kristeva's emphasis on textual interactivity underscores the interdisciplinary character of the text paradigm. No doubt because her mentor, Barthes, drew heavily on Hjelmslev's substance in his influential studies of fashion, where clothing is photographed, written about, and worn, Kristeva's use of intertexuality deliberately engages the forms of textuality that arise both in different sign systems and in different disciplines. Not surprisingly, therefore, music and painting have mattered deeply to Kristeva's thinking about literature.

A final conceptual innovation must be mentioned. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Kristeva appealed to a distinction between the "pheno-text" and the "geno-text." Obviously modeled on the discourse of genetics (such as phenotype and genotype), this distinction was not about restoring the work's "organic" character. Instead, it sought to stress the continuum of effects that passed between the formation of the speaking subject and the works produced by him or her. In Revolution, this distinction is tied to one between the semiotic and the symbolic, and Kristeva uses it to analyze how the subject's relation to the maternal body and the social order manifests itself in the form and content of a poem. In designating different levels of the text, the pheno-text and geno-text serve to give the textual paradigm access to a field of literary production that reaches well beyond the poem without, however, renouncing any claim on its formal detail. In providing the analyst with the conceptual means by which to track the transposition of the semiotic into the symbolic, the pheno-text/geno-text distinction gives intertexuality its deep structure. In doing so it makes the process of transposition central to Kristeva's theory of the text, a theory that, among other things, calls the concept of the literary tradition deeply into question.