Julia Kristeva's concepts of the 'abject', 'chora' and 'semiotic' are associated with the pre-linguistic realm of bodily drives. Whilst they are typically ‘othered’ to enable a stable speaking subject and normative identity to emerge within prescribed socio-symbolic systems, Kristeva’s oeuvre enables a revolt to these dominant systems to enable 'otherness' in its many forms to be articulated. Although the semiotic possesses a non-representability and has been argued to be ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ symbolic signifying structures, for Kristeva it is never fully eliminated from discourse. Rather than representing the drives, the process of signifiance transgresses and renews the symbolic to create a new generativity in the subject-in-process and to enable a 'text' to signify what representative and communicative speech does not say.
Kristeva locates signifiance as related to the poetic dimension of language - and certain aesthetic practices such as ‘art-making’ and ‘artistic experience’ - as able to recover a former relation to the semiotic and mobilise the drive energies gathered in the chora. Signifiance also resonates with abjection: a heterogeneous space that exists towards the place where meaning collapses that “disturbs identity, system, order” [1] and escapes being inscribed into a socio-symbolic system to transform the subject into a new generativity.
Western Art History has been argued to be a hegemonic discourse, privileging the subject as white hetero-normative and male, marginalising those perceived as ‘other.’[2] Feminist art practice has indeed radically challenged these power structures by drawing on aspects of Kristeva’s thinking, most notably in relation to her concept of abjection. However, historically feminist art has tended to be a space privileged by white women artists, maintaining 'otherness'. Those visual art practices that have engaged with abjection and the semiotic also conform to hierarchies that priviledge ocularcentrism[3] by utilising representational strategies to literally, metaphorically and formally visualise abjection. Not only do these strategies risk universalism and essentialism, but such work is fashioned via the very symbolic signifying systems Kristeva seeks to disrupt which undermines the true possibilities of abjection.
Otherlands addresses these issues by interrogating the work of Kristeva in the context of the visual arts to understand the significatory potential of artistic practices that foreground materiality, performativity and affect associated with the semiotic and abject, in so doing reconsituting dominant epistemologies, linguistic codes and representational structures that marginalise the 'other'.
[1] Julia Kristeva. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (1982), New York: Columbia University Press, p2-4
[2] Griselda Pollock. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art, (1988), Oxon: Routledge, p9; Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. The Power of Feminist Art; Emergence, Impact and Triumph of the American Art Movement, (1994), New York: Harry N. Abrams, p8.
[3] Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, (1994), Berkeley: University of California Press