JoHn BEnJAMins PuBLisHing coMPAnyAMstErDAM/PHiLADELPHiA

edited by

DougLAs A. KiBBEEUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

History of Linguistics 2005

sELEctED PAPErs froM tHE tEntH intErnAtionAL confErEncE on tHE History of tHE LAnguAgE sciEncEs

(icHoLs X), 1–5 sEPtEMBEr 2005, urBAnA-cHAMPAign, iLLinois

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American na-tional standard for information sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Ansi Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

History of Linguistics 2005 : selected papers from the tenth international conference on the History of the Language sciences (icHoLs X), 1–5 september 2005, urbana-champaign, illinois / edited by Douglas A. Kibbee. p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. series iii, studies in the history of the language sciences, issn 0304-0720; v. 112) includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Linguistics--History--congresses.P61 .i57 2007410.9-dc22 2007037110isBn 978 90 272 4603 5 (alk. paper)

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V.no part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

John Benjamins Publishing company • P.o. Box 36224 • 1020 me Amsterdam • The netherlandsJohn Benjamins north America • P.o. Box 27519 • Philadelphia, PA 19118-0519 • usA

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix

Douglas Kibbee

The Natural: Its Meanings and Functions in the History of Linguistic Thought 1 John E. Joseph

On Grammatical Gender as an Arbitrary and Redundant Category 24 Marcin Kilarski

Penser l’espace, penser l’espèce: Modélisation des affinités linguistiques 37 Carita Klippi

On the Origins of the Participle as a Part of Speech 50 Pierre Swiggers & Alfons Wouters

Grammar as a Liberal Art in Antiquity 67 Anneli Luhtala

Priscian’s Pedagogy: A Critique of the Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo 80 Daniel J. Taylor

L’horizon de retrospection du Mithridate de Conrad Gessner (1555) 89 Bernard Colombat

Montaigne’s View of Skepticism and Language in the Essais 103 Danilo Marcondes

Competing Models for a 17th Century Universal Language: A Study of the Dispute Between George Dalgarno and John Wilkins 112 Joseph L. Subbiondo

La notion d’unité sonore dans les grammaires françaises des 17ème et 18ème siècles 120 Jean-Marie Fournier

Une “Grammaire générale et raisonnée” en 1651 (1635?): Description et intérpretation d’une découverte empirique 131 Sylvain Auroux & Francine Mazière

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CONTENTS

vi

‘Analogy’: The History of a Concept and a Term from the 17th to the 19th Century 156 Gerda Hassler

Une écriture de l’histoire: La Lettre à M. Pinglin sur l’histoire de la science grammaticale 169 Valérie Raby

Quels facteurs (linguistiques ou historiques) considérer dans l’accord en français? Étude de certains cas dans le Journal de la langue française (1784) d’Urbain Domergue 183 E-Jung Choi

Nicolas Beauzée: La clé inexploitée de la phonétique française 197 Christophe Rey

Colonialism, Scientific Expeditions and Linguistics in 19th Century Brazil 212 Cristina Altman

The Concept of Civilization in Historic Brazilian Linguistics 228 Eduardo Guimarães

The European Linguistic Tradition and Early Missionary Grammars in Central and South America 236 Manuel Breva-Claramonte

Steinthal and the Limits of Etymology: The Special Case of Chinese 252 T. Craig Christy

An Epistemological Assessment of the Neogrammarian Movement 262 Jean Leroux

Privileged Languages and Others in the History of Historical-Comparative Linguistics 274 Hans Henrich Hock

The Nationalist Turn: Dutch Linguistics and German Philosophy in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 288 Gijsbert Rutten

Représentations de l’autre: L’italien et les Italiens dans quelques dictionnaires bilingues des XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles 308 Nadia Minerva

L’utile et l’agréable dans les méthodes familières et autres ouvrages utilisés pour l’apprentissage du français aux Pays-Bas (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles) 321 Marie-Christine Kok Escalle

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CONTENTS

vii

La reformulation dans la lexicographie des XVIe-XIXe siècles: L’emergence de la syntaxe française 333 Rachele Raus

Words and Concepts for Child Language Learning in Late Nineteenth versus Late Twentieth Century America 344 Margaret Thomas

La lexicologie, un savoir scolarisable? 356 Sonia Branca-Rosoff & Dan Savatovsky

Aspects de la linguistique prescriptive: Les perceptions des vocabulaires de specialité à travers des dictionnaires français (XIXe et XXe s.) 372 Danielle Candel

Semantique et analogie dans la tradition grammaticale arabe: La valeur des formes verbales 386 Georgine Ayoub

Meaning by Collocation: The Firthian Filiation of Corpus Linguistics 404 Jacqueline Léon

Kristeva on the Encyclopedists: Linguistics, Semanalysis, and the Epistemology of Enlightenment Science 416 Katherine Arens

La preuve de Gaifman: Réflexions sur la méthode de construction des grammaires catégorielles 432 Beatrice Godart-Wendling

Name Index 441

Subject Index 447

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KRISTEVA ON THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS LINGUISTICS, SEMANALYSIS, AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF

ENLIGHTENMENT SCIENCE

KATHERINE ARENS University of Texas at Austin

ABSTRACT

This essay ties Julia Kristeva’s linguistics into the general postwar critique

of the Enlightenment and western knowledge production, most familiar from Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. These voices critique today’s academic disciplines as fundamentally anti-humanist and formalist, thus overdue for a critique of their inherent ideological biases. In Language, The Unknown: An Initiation to Linguistics (1981), Kristeva offers a paradigmatic critique of the Encyclopedists’ linguistics as an emergent rationalist and “scientific” discipline. Kristeva’s own linguistics, aligned with psychoanalysis rather than the natural sciences, emerges as a critical challenge to this linguistics, questioning “master” academic disciplines and their norms for production of truth and knowledge. Kristeva stages her critique by returning to the discipline’s history, with the goal of renovating linguistics as a new kind of human science, systematic without being formalist, and thus more aware of the epistemological limits of its own knowledge and authority.

This essay ties the work of Julia Kristeva (b.1941) on linguistics into the general postwar critique of the Enlightenment and western traditions of knowledge production, but not in the form of the Enlightenment project so familiar to the Anglo-American world. Instead, I take up a more technical, disciplinary critique of the Enlightenment most familiar from the French postwar intellectuals surrounding Foucault, but also shared by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Together, these voices critique the rationalism of the Enlightenment disciplinary practices that have been naturalized in today’s academy as truth-producing narratives. They argue these disciplines as fundamentally anti-humanist and formalist, thus as overdue for a critique of the ideological biases pervading their strategies of producing “scientific” knowledge.

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KRISTEVA ON THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS

417

To make this case, I take up Kristeva’s account of the Encyclopedists’ linguistics, from Language, The Unknown: An Initiation to Linguistics (1989; 1981 in French), as a paradigmatic critique of an emergent discipline based on a rationalist system. She argues how the alignment of that (and much current) linguistics with philosophy naturalizes a discipline constructed as if it were a natural science, with its attendant, very specific epistemological gains and losses. Against this background, Kristeva’s own linguistics, aligned with psychoanalysis rather than the natural sciences, emerges as a critical challenge to linguistics as an Enlightenment discipline, designed to heighten awareness of disciplinary ideologies. In other words, Kristeva’s work on linguistics challenges the hegemony of “master” academic disciplines that the Enlightenment has naturalized as (abstract and rationalizing) norms for production of truth and knowledge.

Kristeva’s redefinition of linguistics thus follows postwar critiques of technologies of reason to question the naturalized legacy of Enlightenment disciplines, exercising against twentieth-century linguistics the kind of institutional and epistemological critiques more familiar from Foucault’s work (particularly The Order of Things [1966]). Speaking from the heart of the critical project espoused by the so-called poststructuralist generation of French theorists and philosophers, Kristeva stages her critique by returning to the discipline’s history, as we shall see, with the goal of renovating linguistics as a new kind of human science, systematic without being formalist, and thus more aware of the epistemological limits of its own knowledge and authority. The Enlightenment and Its Science

Kristeva’s putative textbook, Language, The Unknown, “initates” her readers not just into the sciences of language, but more importantly also into the strategic critique of disciplines that Kristeva shares with her contemporaries. Outwardly a history of linguistics as a discipline that has had various theory bases over history, this volume reappropriates various aspects of that science and its assumed (post-Enlightenment) relation to human society and subjectivity, in order to offer a new theoretical basis for contemporary linguistics. As she discusses the eighteenth century, she contextualizes the French Enlightenment’s emerging linguistics in a larger context in a way that most of today’s accounts do not.1 In so doing, Kristeva focuses on the social ideologies conditioning theory-formation rather than on the theory logic itself.

1 The common discussions of the Port-Royal linguists stress their work on language and ideas in different contexts. The most extensive such accounts are those by Sylvain Auroux. In La sémiotique des encyclopédistes (1979), Auroux begins with discussions of signs and signification and then moves on to the structure of the language, ultimately accounting for linguistic meaning as correlated with formal logic; his introduction to a reprint of the Encyclopedia’s entries on “Grammaire” and “Langue” offers a less developed but succinct

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KATHERINE ARENS

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Kristeva discusses Port-Royal linguistics to question the purportedly value-neutral methodology of the modern natural sciences at the moment when it infested linguistics. Such value-neutrality has been naturalized by long practice as the prime characteristic of any scientific discipline, but that assumption obscures how each discipline’s knowledge production depends on its history and conforms to ideological social practices. Assuming “scientific” neutrality of disciplinary formations circumscribes, if not proscribes, our ability to trace the specific ideological relationships between the discipline’s subject of knowledge and the more general social field in which it operates.

Thus Language, the Unknown teaches not only the formalisms of science, but also the ideology of the human sciences. In this sense, Kristeva’s “initiation into linguistics” traces a genealogy of the power relations hidden behind the modern discipline’s appeal to science and its authority. Encyclopedist linguistics, in her account, is a scientific discipline that asserts such authority, and so she uses a historical exposition to outline the specific power relations inherent in the theory formalism that is recognized as a key ancestor of today’s dominant linguistics. Kristeva sees Encyclopedist linguistics as based on the limiting ideological and theoretical configurations favored by Enlightenment rationalism, thus as an epistemological system privileging formal logic systems rather than, for example, social uses of language.

In Chapter 16 of Language, the Unknown Kristeva takes up the Port-Royal grammar as the exemplar of the early modern era’s rule-bound grammars. Its origin was very precise, in ideological terms: the Port-Royal grammarians sought to have French, a vernacular, compete with the perfection of the Latin language—in essence, to describe French with a terminology that would grant it social and intellectual parity with Latin (Kristeva 1989:159). In creating this system, they relied on Descartes, who had divorced “things” from “ideas” and thus made language subservient to ideas (Kristeva 1989:160). The solution found at Port-Royal and expressed in its Grammar and Logic retained a strong bias toward ideas:

[…] they reintroduced the medieval theory of the sign that the humanists-formalists had forgotten, or at least silenced. La langue was indeed a system, as Sanctius had demonstrated, but a system of signs. Words and linguistic expressions clothed ideas that referred back to objects. The logical or natural relation, which revealed the truth about things, was at work at the level of ideas: the logical level. Grammar would deal with an object, la langue, that was only the sign of this logical and/or natural dimension. In this way, la langue would depend upon logic, while having its own autonomy. This was the methodological coup de force that allowed a common and necessary ratio to be posited as the core of la langue. On this ratio, in relation to it but

overview of his approach (1973). Scholars like Bernard Colombat (1996) begin more directly with logic.

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KRISTEVA ON THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS

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also at a distance from it, the interplay of specifically linguistic signs—forms—would operate, and the laws of a new linguistic construction would be specified. (Kristeva 1989:161)

In almost theological terms, the Grammar’s first lines designate speaking as language’s main component; grammar studied the reason, ratio, behind the system of spoken signs of language, with the spoken word, logos, as its revealed form.

In Chapter 17, “The Éncyclopédie: La Langue and Nature”, Kristeva offers a fairly standard account of how this first systematic grammar equated language with logic (a langue). She adds as her own critique of disciplinary origins that this adaptation responded to a very specific ideological context in which new models of human nature evolved: “Language was seen as a variety of idioms based on the same logical rules, which constituted a kind of constant, human nature […] [They sought to free language] from the impact of Latin […] and from its dependency on logic” (Kristeva 1989:172). That is, construed as part of a spoken logic, language now claimed more than a tie to abstract logical form, it acquired a “natural” foundation, anchored in the materiality of creation and human nature.

Not surprisingly, the origin of language also emerged as a central theoretical interest: “The variety of language had to be taken back to a common, natural source where linguistic universals were articulated. In order to establish the relation between natural language, real objects, and sensation, a theory of the sign was proposed” (Kristeva 1989:172). Thus the eighteenth century made its own linguistics a parallel to philosophy, but not its interchangeable equivalent:

On the grammatical level, which was, by the way, inseparable from the philosophical one, since every philosopher in the eighteenth century tackled language and every grammarian was a philosopher, the particularity of specifically linguistic relations, differentiated from the (logical) laws of thinking, was brought to light, and led to a syntactic description of sentence and inter-sentence relations. (Kristeva 1989:172-73)

Kristeva’s account then pursues how these grammarians claimed their own ground in evolving its particular theory formation relationships.

The genesis of this new paradigm lay in Vico (1668-1744) and his assumption that speech is mental (and thus divine) language that emerges in different historical forms, such as the hieroglyphs, “poetic”, or “heroic” language (Kristeva 1989:173). The Encyclopedists, however, considered this historicist account lacking in scientific rigor, and so they subjected Vico’s analysis of language to “the spirit of classification and systematization that invaded the sciences of that century” (Kristeva 1989:174). They drew in other sources, such as Leibniz’ (1646-1716) discussion of Adamic language (a sensationalist approach), which hoped to recreate the purity of the origin of

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KATHERINE ARENS

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language in an artificial language; and James Harris’ theories in England, which extended Berkeley’s philosophy to outline the roots of a general grammar. The result was a theory of language (represented in works by De Brosses [1709-1777], Abbot Pluche [1688-1761], and Nicolas Beauzée [1717-1789]) which stressed structure: “Language appeared to be an operational system, a mechanics whose rules could be studied like those of any physical object” (Kristeva 1989:175). At the same time, the Encyclopedists also tried to accommodate a sensationalist, more constructivist, account of mind and knowledge, in addition to the earlier a priorist ones. As they saw it, Locke had taken words as marks of ideas, but noted that the signs also had apparent relations to history (Kristeva 1989:176). Leibniz followed in this vein, keeping language attached to ideas.

To this point, Kristeva’s account is familiar. But then she turns explicitly to a critique of the emerging disciplinary formation. As she sees it, the new French accounts transformed these more common philosophical impulses of the era into a special language for talking about language, creating a new discipline (Kristeva 1989:177). Their new linguistic terminology is designed to represent universals as “natural” variations of underlying logical forms, emerging due to concrete influence of social conditions and history (Kristeva 1989:179): “Condillac maintained that the original language named what was directly given to the senses: first things, then operations; first ‘fruit,’ then ‘to want,’ and lastly ‘Peter’” (Kristeva 1989:180). Still showing the discipline’s proximity to philosophy, its metalanguage still presents logical relations as the “natural” ground of all linguistic expression, one

[…] that began sentences with the subject and ended them with what one wanted to say about his subject. Evolution and change were likely with both these categories of language for two reasons: climate and government. The idea that social conditions influenced the character of a language seems to be creeping in here, but Condillac exalted the role of the inspired individual much more than that of the social organism. His theory was, nonetheless, materialistic. (Kristeva 1989:180)

In drawing such analogies, language is seen as a system of signs, each “dressed” according to real experience, and with meaning affected by syntax (its position in an utterance). In such moves, this new scientific empiricist linguistics draws on another period source: Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) and his study of ideologies. In this move, Kristeva shows, the inheritance of Port-Royal decisively joins that of the Ideologues.

In this connection, Kristeva now relates Port-Royal quite explicitly to what seems its logical opposite. She considers it not at all surprising that the “rational and deterministic sensationalism” that resulted from this first break between did not satisfy all new materialists (Kristeva 1989:181). For instance, Rousseau (1712-1778) tried to tie language more closely to the user, when he

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stressed not ideas, but passions as the true seat of language. In Kristeva’s account, it took Diderot (1713-1784) to complete a “materialistic conception of language” which posited language as a logic and as a sensationalist system (Kristeva 1989:181):

Diderot took up the major themes developed by the Sensationalists and Ideologues: the sign and its relation to the idea and perceptible reality; the types of language in history; the development of language; alphabetism and hieroglyphy; types of signifying systems that were like languages (the arts: poetry, painting, music), etc. He definitely and resolutely placed the rough drafts of the Ideologues and Sensationalists on a rigorously material base, by proposing one of the first modern materialist syntheses dealing with the theory of knowledge, and consequently, of linguistic operation. (Kristeva 1989:182)

This is the linguistic thought that comes to fruition in the Éncyclopédie in articles by Turgot (1727-1781) and Voltaire (1694-1778). The formalist grammars of the older generation yielded to a new technical terminology and analysis strategy “that still goes on in traditional grammar teaching,” where the “‘natural order’ of a sentence becomes its anatomy” (Kristeva 1989:186). The logic on which grammar description was based became more physical-social than formalistic. Thus, for example, the genitive “marks the relation of one thing that belongs to another by production, or by use/possession, or by any other manner” (Kristeva 1989:185-186). Such theories also had the effect of making the clause, defined syntactically (as a system of complementation), as the discipline’s unit of analysis (Kristeva 1989:187). The science that emerges will thus combine two levels of analysis—one grammatical (in a more or less traditional sense) and the other logical-situational (Kristeva 1989:188).

In the era’s critical grammatical works, such as those of the Abbot Girard [1677-1748] (1747) and Du Marsais (1676-1756), declensions on the Latin model disappeared, and syntactical elements like prepositions became important evidence of language’s own logic. Beauzée provided the final methodological innovations in his articles for the Encyclopedia (“Régime” and “Gouverner”). These exemplified the methodological center of the new science, later formalized in his Grammaire generale (1767 [Kristeva 1989:189]):

The descriptions wandered from logicism to semanticism or went back to Aristotelian categories, but the framework of the syntactic study was fixed and has remained so for scholastic grammarians up to the present. The bourgeoisie had succeeded in forging a sure ideological weapon for itself: it surrounded language with the logical framework classicism had bequeathed it, while granting it suppleness and relative autonomy when it turned the analysis slightly toward linguistic “facts.” Universalism and empiricism, interpenetrating one another, modeled this conception of sentence construction that the grammar of the eighteenth century had been able to elaborate on the foundation of a “natural” conception of language. (Kristeva 1989:189)

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Language now had to be described in terms of its own logic—an ideological break that helped to naturalize its object as available to the individual mind.

The later nineteenth century will move further away from describing “mechanism” and “systematization,” towards a more explicit historicism of language, thus casting it as imminent rather than ideational:

While the grammarians of Port-Royal had demonstrated that language obeyed the principles of the logic of judgment, and while the Encyclopedists wanted to see in it the logic of perceptible nature and the confirmation of the influence of material circumstances (climate, government), the nineteenth century wanted to demonstrate that language itself also had an evolution, so that on this evolution they could base the principle of the evolution of the idea and society. (Kristeva 1989:194-95)

No matter how empiricist this shift may seem to today’s historians of linguistics, Kristeva still classifies this science of language as abstract and on a continuum with that of the eighteenth century, stressing methods to organize reproducible data into systems.

Kristeva’s results are not so much intended to offer insights into language as to demonstrate what ideological stakes are present in the modern language sciences, exposing how scientific description force into being certain conclusions about their object. In one sense, Kristeva’s account of this linguistic theory-formation starts as a Foucauldian archaeology of a historic rupture, outlining how a linguistics based on logic purportedly yields to one based on natural attributes, privileging different images of mind and linguistic meaning. Yet where Foucault was interested in “technologies of the self”—the ways in which individuals are themselves rationalized into the framework of a state apparatus (to borrow a term from Althusser)—Kristeva is interested in more than a historical archeology. She wishes instead to move beyond the Enlightenment’s legacy in the language sciences and take up a whole different epistemological strategy. As she sees it, the result would refound linguistics as a human science (Geisteswissenschaft, science humaine), as a systematic study of language as communication (not as a syntax system, whether logical or natural).

Kristeva is thus interested in remapping the formal science of linguistics, a science that in her view has not moved appreciably beyond its Enlightenment roots. Her goal is to produce a new science, a sémanalyse or semanalysis, as a decisively interdisciplinary and humanistic critical discourse analysis, resisting the trends of analysis of knowledge and power in place since the Enlightenment.2 This semanalysis represents a new disciplinary paradigm,

2 For more detailed discussions of this point, see Katherine Arens, “The Linguistics of French Feminism: Sémanalyse as Critical Discourse Practice” (1998b) and “Discourse Analysis as Critical Historiography: A Sémanalyse of Mystic Speech” (1998a).

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apart from the traditional orthodoxies of linguistics. Most critically, establishing such a new science would also uncover new facets of language as an object of knowledge, just as it would redefine the discipline’s subjects: being a linguist—a scientist—would take on a whole different meaning. Language, The Unknown

Kristeva’s project aims at showing profound limits to existing linguistics and how the discipline’s root paradigms limit vision about the nature of language itself. Enlightenment linguistics purported to be a science of communication (based on the spoken language rather than on logic), but Kristeva’s sémanalyse demonstrates how a linguistics discipline might stake a broader theoretical claim. Kristeva thus hopes to force linguistics to “refound itself in a general theory of signification” (Kristeva 1989:328) and transcend its very clear contemporary limits. A semanalysis will be more than a science of logic and communication, it will emerge as a science of human signifying practices.

The act of “signification” (signifiance) thus becomes the key to this new science because it sets into the center of its analytic formalism the user of language, rather than language’s structure. “Signification” refers to a set of practices used by individuals in the act of communication, some of which are language-based, some more social, physical, traditional, or semiotic in nature. Her new analysis thus does not start with postulates from logic (pure or communicative), but rather with the social stratification of signifying practices in concrete historical space, a study of ideology-marked acts in social-historical context. Semanalysis privileges not the language system, but rather the subject who uses language and other signifying systems (acts or signs). It outlines how an individual acquires (occupies, defines) a “subject position” or social identity within the field of signifying practices through which a group articulates its values, identities, and goals. That is, Kristeva’s post-Enlightenment linguistics becomes not the science of language structure, but the science of how a subject is established as a “speaking subject,”3 as a social subject of knowledge who possesses agency within the communication community.

Crucially, the sémanalyse of a speaking subject is much more than a sociolinguistic analysis, which would focus more straightforwardly on how available language structures allow individuals to mark their belonging to specific sociological groups. Kristeva’s new science of signification is much more radical and of greater scope, since she will not discuss “users” of “forms,” but rather how usages (speech acts, acts of constructing knowledge,

3 The term is featured most prominently in Kristeva’s essay, “The System and the Speaking Subject” (1975).

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acts of self-assertion) are configured and occupied by speakers and writers within the group. She will study not only how linguistic forms correlate with users’ intended results, but also the users’ (subjects) social and psychological identities as correlated with group ideology and agency.4

This analysis of the Encyclopedists’ linguistics is critical grounding for Kristeva’s remapping of linguistics’ theoretical paradigm, her sémanalyse. Her textbook begins by borrowing terms from Saussure, to note that the study of langage (the complex phenomenon of language in theory and practice, competence and performance) has been reduced to the study of la langue (the formal properties of language). The user of that language, the speaker and her parole, have traditionally been elided in the history of linguistics, in which language “was made the privileged object of thought, science, and philosophy” (Kristeva 1989:3). The Enlightenment’s science of language, for instance, studied human language as a logical or natural system in itself, rather than as a system of human purposes. In a real sense, then, they described la langue as an artifact system and granted it primacy and authority over individual uses of language, paroles. She describes her new analysis differently:

[…] it hopes to find the general principles and elements [of that system], which one can call the linguistic universals. La langue therefore appears to be not an evolution, a family tree, or a history, but a structure with laws and operational rules that must be described. The separation langue/speech (parole), paradigm/syntagm, synchrony/diachrony […] indicates very well this orientation of linguistics toward la langue, paradigm, and synchrony rather than toward speech, syntagm, and diachrony. (Kristeva 1989:218)

This formal paradigm for a language science (the one inherited from the Enlightenment) is exhausted, she believes, because, perhaps unwittingly, it has reduced the social world to an abstract system. Today’s psychoanalysis and semiotics highlight that reduction by accounting for other dimensions of language in use, beyond formalist paradigms. Just as importantly, the exhausted linguistics is ideologically intertwined with modern technocratic society and its focus on rationalized, abstract structures. In contrast, a

4 As an aside, Kristeva’s semanalysis also differs from the functionalist approach associated with the Prague School, as well, in that she draws from Émile Benveniste the link between the functions of language and the empowerment of the subject/speaker. The Prague School linguists, including Jan Mukařovský and Roman Jakobson, still studied language as a logical system, albeit much more in tune with the users than today’s transformational-generative grammar does. Kristeva (like her contemporary Tzvetan Todorov) clearly knows the work of the Prague School and draws on their descriptions of interactions between language systems and readers, yet she bases her semanalysis around the subject/speaker in a way that moves far beyond their work. See also Kristeva and Coque (1972), “Sémanalyse: Conditions d’une sémiotique scientifique (enretien)”, for more details on semanalysis.

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sémanalyse would represent a different ideology, tying affect, power, and status into the knowledge and communication potential conveyed in language.

Kristeva’s semanalysis veers away from the study of abstract systems: “it will take into account the subject, the diversity of modes of signification, and the historical transformation of these modes” (Kristeva 1989:328). This new linguistics will thus interpret language systems as part of human activity, as part of a greater set of social signifying practices supporting communication:

Whoever says language says demarcation, signification, and communication. In this sense, all human practices are kinds of language because they have as their function to demarcate, to signify, to communicate. To exchange goods and women in the social network, to produce objects of art or explanatory discourses such as religions or myths, etc. is to form a sort of secondary linguistic system with respect to language, and on the basis of this system to install a communications circuit with subjects, meaning, and signification. (Kristeva 1989:4)

Kristeva will retain a scientific dimension to her proposed sémanalyse (its systematicity), while correcting linguistics’ privileging of logical systems over the users of language, which has divorced language forms from their realizations in media (speech, writing systems, sign systems) that all serve the purpose of communication.

Defining a new approach to science also redefines an object of study. Where linguistics studies language systems, semanalysis studies discourses in use in individuals’ acts within a communication or speech community:

Discourse implies first the participation of the subject in his language through his speech, as an individual. Using the anonymous structure of la langue, the subject forms and transforms himself in the discourse he communicates to the other. La langue, common to all, becomes in discourse the vehicle of a unique message. Without being aware of it, the subject thus makes his mark on la langue […] The term “discourse,” on the other hand, designates any enunciation that integrates in its structure the locutor and the listener, with the desire of the former to influence the latter. (Kristeva 1989:11)

In this sense, Kristeva is accounting not for language’s empirical existence, as the Enlightenment defined it, but rather for the “materiality” of language (Kristeva 1989: Chapter 3 title): the “concrete matter and the objective laws of its organization […] laws that organize the different subsets of the linguistic whole, and that constitute phonetics, grammar, stylistics, semantics, etc.” (Kristeva 1989:18). This will include the materiality of the communication situation, as well: its historical setting, the users involved, and the like.

This redefined object of study thus immediately demands a new science, one of greater scope than previous language sciences have had. Kristeva incorporates into the traditional subfields of formal linguistics (logic, lexicon, grammar, syntax) other ways of elucidating language phenomena, especially

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studies of writing and speech as communication. Thus Kristeva includes as part of semanalysis disciplines like rhetoric and stylistics that have not traditionally been part of linguistics, but which are necessary to describe how individual subjects are produced in and produce sets of language acts—discourses. After all, language is more than langue and parole; it includes social-signifying “practices” in many forms, permeating human lives and subject to discrete investigation. Such forms of “language” are still largely alien to formalist linguistics, but they need not be, since they are available to study as an archive of material data, in documents of social functions and subjects’ social identities.

Kristeva’s theoretical move changes not only the objects and methods of linguistics, but also the ideological and truth-producing functions that it serves within the domain of science. To use a term from Jean-François Lyotard,5 she has changed the regime of truth produced by the sciences’ practices and signifiers. Semanalysis becomes a science studying historically attested forms of human subjectivity at play in communication—a science of embodied discourse rather than of language abstracts. Its goal is to study historical forms of discourse as they answer to particular needs of its speech community:

A discourse bears and imposes an ideology, and every ideology finds its discourse. One can then understand why every dominant class pays particular attention to the practice of language and controls its forms and the means of its distribution: the news, the press, literature. One can understand why a dominant class has its favorite languages, its literature, its press, its orators, and why it tends to censor any other language. […] Literature is no doubt the privileged realm in which language is exercised, clarified, and modified. (Kristeva 1989:287)

The study of language, then, becomes the study of social ideology in play in communication and of its material forms, as they condition individual identities within a community, as epistemes of practice and knowledge.

Kristeva’s redefinition of linguistics from a formalist tradition into a sémanalyse in a more humanist-critical mode enacts a double move within a history of the human sciences.

First and foremost, it works within the tradition of linguistics to renovate what she considers an antiquated science model inherited from the Enlightenment. What up through Noam Chomsky and the transformational-generativist schools of linguistics has been conducted in the mode of natural science is remapped in Kristeva’s work as a science humaine. More than an abstract Geisteswissenschaft, it models a systematic approach to analyzing communication within social groups. That new “human science” uses as its data a set of materially attested acts of communication through which

5 See Lyotard, The Differend (1988:xii), for a discussion of phrase regimes. Venner (2003) provides a detailed discussion of Deleuze’s contribution in this light.

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individuals enter into the group as subjects of knowledge and achieve psycho-social identities constructed in response to the ideologies embedded in that group’s communication and knowledge systems. Kristeva has thus redefined the scope of the linguistic sciences, to make what has been a range of relatively discrete disciplines, each claiming aspects of value-neutral natural sciences, into a more comprehensive and coherent discipline that takes as central to its charge the analysis of forms that produce and reproduce ideologies, identity, and power, each time they emerge in acts of communication.

Kristeva’s second important theoretical move in defining a sémanalyse points beyond linguistics itself to reclaim a new approach to epistemology in historical context. Her redefinition of the speaking subject also redefines the knowing subject, what Lacan calls the sujet supposé savoir—the subject not only authorized as a producer and purveyor of knowledge, but also instantiated and interpolated into a material form within a system of knowledge which creates that subject as its author/authority.6 In this model, the analyst does not consider the subject of knowledge as creator, but rather as an authorized subject/producer of knowledge within a communication community.

Kristeva is alone in the post-structuralist generation in taking on linguistics (and, by extension, the linguistic turn in philosophy) in a critique of disciplinary power as it has evolved since the Enlightenment. However, the link between the social-psychological and critical linguistics posited as a semanalysis connects her work with that generational project, no matter how it is labeled. “Pure science” emerges as implicated in epistemologies and social formations of power that may be considered the material forms of ideology in historical contexts. Her critique of formalist linguistics clearly parallels her contemporaries’ critiques of the Enlightenment project in Europe, especially now-familiar critiques of power, disciplinary knowledge, and their subjects or agent. Social Critique of Language and Knowledge: The Cant of Philosophy

That Kristeva has critiqued linguistics by no means implies that her critique has been heard. The reason may be found in Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Kant’s Conflict of Faculties, which enacts a very parallel critique of philosophy to what Kristeva has done for linguistics. Derrida discusses how disciplinary terminology contributes not only to knowledge formation, but also to the administration of that knowledge—to what Foucault long ago called the disciplinary acts of an institutionalized discipline. That is, he follows Kant in showing how specialized “scientific” terminology may facilitate research, but at the same time further the politics of professionalism, clearly marking who

6 This discussion is explicated in Jacques Lacan (1998).

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within a group is authorized to enact “politico-administrative responsibility” for knowledge within the group (Derrida 1992:20):

Declared or clandestine, such a proposal [for interpreting a unit of knowledge] calls for the politics of an interpretative community gathered around the text, and indeed of a global society, a civil society with or without a state, a veritable regime enabling the inscription of that community. I shall go further: every text, every element of a corpus reproduces or bequeaths, in a prescriptive or normative mode, one of several injunctions: come together according to this or that rule, this or that scenography, this or that typography of minds and bodies, and form this or that type of exchange or hierarchy to interpret me, evaluate me, preserve me, translate me, inherit from me, make me live on (überleben or fortleben in the sense that Benjamin gives to those words in Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers). Or inversely: if you interpret me (in the sense of decipherment or performative transformation), you shall have to assume one or another institutional form. (Derrida 1992:21)

The more technical a discipline’s language, the clearer the professional status bestowed on its scientists and the greater jurisdiction she exercises over the production, reproduction, and circulation of knowledge7—all part of its scientific method.8 Knowledge produced in acts of judging will be adjudicated as valid if it conforms to the technical signs and practices enforced by the discipline. In What is Philosophy? (1994; 1991 in French), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari move these critiques forward in another way, modeling how a discipline’s preferred meaning units create a world peopled by particular agents of knowledge. That is, each system of knowledge contains within it a definition or description of the agent empowered to use it—what Deleuze and Guattari define as a “conceptual persona” of that system, and Kristeva its “speaking subject”.

What post-Enlightenment linguistics has not done, then, is critique its own logic of privilege. Linguistics deals in meaning units like morphemes (structural forms of words), phonemes (sound units), and syntagmemes (structural units within sentences or other complete utterances). These units of meaning intend (in the phenomenological sense) a world of logical structure and relations, with “language” as the name given to its horizon of expectations, its plane of meanings. And as Kristeva has shown, the definition of language in use in contemporary linguistics is limited in fundamental ways. The linguist dealing with that language is interested in formal relations of language data.

Kristeva’s semanalysis, focusing on semes, units of signification that each extracts a different kind of knowledge from the data on the plane of the discipline’s practice, will necessarily understand language differently,

7 Derrida, note, makes this argument in the context of a plea to his government to continue the requirement that philosophy remain part of state examinations for degrees (each baccalaureate still contains a philosophy segment, no matter the field). 8 See Lyotard, “Judiciousness in Dispute” (1989) for a discussion of this point.

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especially by highlighting social relations as well as logical ones, personal-psychological intentions as well as meanings, their forms, and the logical relationships among those forms.9 Kristeva’s semanalysis thus emerges as a science accounting for speakers and signifiers, signs and their agents, meanings and the power relations affecting their transfers. Semanalysis includes agents in a way that linguistics does not, given the latter’s persistent insistence on form. In consequence, Kristeva’s new discipline espouses a new ideology—it has a new scheme or organization of knowledge, its own style and language, because it has taken on a new historical form, like a dialect of a language.

Kristeva had inserted a new attention to the agent/speaker in creating her semanalysis; her new discipline emerges out of an act of critique, as an earlier discipline’s potential for power and for creating agency or passivity in the subjects who engage in them are redefined and reevaluated. In this sense, she argues her semanalysis in terms familiar from the postwar generation of French intellectuals, who engaged in a deep-seated critique of today’s human sciences and their power—a critique of epistemology itself, beyond the governmental structures and overtly political ideologies restricting individual subjectivity and agency. Yet in her version of this critique, Kristeva particularly focuses on modern linguistic science’s ability to naturalize historically relative concept formations as value-free; she critiques how linguistics, purportedly the science studying human language, has remained a largely mechanistic disciplinary formation, and thus how it has anaesthetized its agents (linguistics) against the discipline’s inherent ideologies and their potential (ab)uses.

What her critique shares with those of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault is their sensitivity to disciplinary ideologies and to the fact that science and the knowledge it produces do not exist apart from the historical and local ideology of its plane of imminence, from the professionals it posits as the agents of its distinctive style of knowledge production. The French theory establishment (including Kristeva) that has turned back to the Enlightenment in this way has done so in order to turn its back on today’s dominant Western legacy of discipline formation and knowledge production. The goal of that rejection is to call into question the formalist master narratives of knowledge that characterize modernity. They hope to reclaim our awareness of the role and responsibility of the subject of knowledge and of professional communication communities in producing knowledge. As they see it, the project of the post-Enlightenment era will be a theory of knowledge that valorizes humanity rather than the empty formalism that modernism has stressed for a century.

9 These focuses would correspond to more traditional semantics, morphology, or syntax, respectively.

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