Collapsing the Signifier and Signified: Kristeva 1980

As a linguist whose undergraduate training is in anthropology and English literature, I’ve of course spent a good deal of time thinking about the signified/signifier distinction and the distinctions between lange and parole. Of course Bahktin’s commentary on whether or not linguistics should comment on what he refers to as “metalinguistics” seems interesting, especially since his work was concurrent with Labov’s groundbreaking work that formed the foundations of sociolinguistics. Thus for me one of the most interesting aspects of Kristeva’s work is her suggestion that the framework that Bahktin is creating ultimately collapses the distinction between signifier and signified, making both contextually dependent, and bringing to the fore the relationship between speaker and addressee, referred-to and referrer.

Also fascinating to me is Kristeva’s explication of the ways in which the speaker <> addressee relationships create the different levels of “person” we encounter in the texts of novels, first, second, third (or rather, third, first, second as she explains them) and then the ways in which a dialogical relationship between the writer and the text can create a layer at which the text questions itself. I actually find this to be more the domain of parody, and it is interesting that the writers like Norrick who have looked at parody haven’t necessarily used Kristeva’s explanations as a jumping-off point. It seems to be that parody and humor is in some ways a text looking at itself and commenting on itself; for example, in order for Tina Fey to portray Sarah Palin, she must not only create a performance which we recognize as invoking the text of “Sarah Palin,” she can only mark it as humorous parody by also drawing attention to the fact that it is parody by means of exaggeration—oftentimes of a features as nuances as simple prosody (I am reminded of a time when I saw Fey’s parody second and only later realized that her parody as created only by her intonation and pauses—the lack of semantic information and in and the circuitous nature of the answers which I originally perceived as being part of the parody it turned out were verbatim from the interview Palin had given the day before). This fourth level is one that I think is worth further probing—when does a text comment on itself, and how does it achieve this?

A Word about a Word: Bahktin 1984

One understands why Kristeva could spend so much of her career unraveling Bahktin. He is anything but a purely transparent writer. Also, I feel a bit lost in that my familiarity with Dostoyevsky is fairly nonexistent; a shame for a former English literature major, I suppose. Nevertheless, there are several aspects to the ways Bahktin is unraveling the concepts of dialogicality and intertextuality here that are worth further unpacking.

I was most fascinated in this article by Bahktin’s use of the term “metalinguistics” to encapsulate what all of us sociolinguists would consider our every day work: the work of parole, of “languaging,” of words embedded in their contexts. The more I study sociolinguistics, the less I am certain that Saussure’s distinction between lange and parole is a useful one, for what is language without its situation? Even Labov’s original classification of language use in the attention to speech model seems to come unraveled when we think about the ways in which people may use different styles quite consciously; the “vernacular” does not always arise from the least attentive speech (c.f. current work by N. Schilling). All linguistics, I think, is truly “metalinguistics”—how language arises and contrasts with other parts of language is much of its meaning. I am reminded of Gordon’s discussions of frames and repetition; for the denotative meanings of, “I’d like to order Chinese food” or “superior” can’t unravel their meaning as they appear in the texts that Gordon examines.

As a longtime writer of fiction myself, I also found the discussion of dialogicality with regard to the author’s voice and the character’s to be an interesting one. One of the most difficult things one learns as a fiction writer is how to bury one’s voice within the voice of one’s characters—how to make them talk about the things you want them to talk about and do the things you want them to do without tipping your hand to the reader that this is what you are doing. In this sense, all fiction is laminated with the author’s voice, but in good fiction, the author’s voice is a hidden presence—the hand guiding invisible marionette strings from above the stage. In this sense I both agreed and disagreed with Bakhtin; although the author’s voice is certainly present, the extent to which it is engaged with and actively contrasting with that of the characters in the text I believe is less readily apparent than Bahktin seems to think.

Also interesting in this article was the discussion of the ways in which a narrator casts speech toward an absent interlocutor. The creation of this sort of anticipatory text is quite relevant to my own research, as I believe that part of internet discourse is concerned with what Bell refers to as referee design: speech directed with a third, absent party in mind. This is what seems to be happening in the passage Bahktin cites from Poor Folk, in what he refers to as the “sideways glance” of the text. This idea of a text which glances sideways, which frames itself outside the domain simply of interlocutors to also encompass probable reactions of a third party is, I think critical to understanding how people communicate on the internet—in a way, anything posted on a message board, even when posted in direct response to another’s text, is incorporating this “sideways glance” at the third parties who are also privy to that text by means of the message board on which it is situated.