Choreographing the Borderline

Abstract

In this essay I investigate Kristeva's conception of dance in regard to trope of borderline. I will begin with her explicit treatments of dance, earliest of which occurs in Revolution in Poetic Language, in terms of (a) her analogy between poetry and dance as practices erupting on border of chora and society, (b) her presentation of dance as a phenomenon bordering art and religion in rituals, and (c) her brief remarks on dance gesturality.1 I will then follow this latter movement to 1969 essay Gesturality, to critically examine where Kristeva situates powers and limits of gesture (and thereby dance) in relation to language.2 Next, I will move to later text, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, where image of dance figures prominently in what I will term Kristeva's joyful re-choreographing of Freud's text Totem and Taboo? I will also see how her treatment of dance links more directly to Kristeva's feminist concerns, insofar as she understands process of choreography as a kind of maternal function neglected in most psychoanalytic thought.4 Kristeva opens Revolution in Poetic Language by defining her focus as process or production of language as opposed to finished product, a process laid bare by a poetic that is itself a of discourse which can display productive basis of subjective and ideological signifying formations - a foundation that primitive societies call 'sacred' and modernity has rejected as 'schizophrenia' .5 This linkage of poetry and art to religion or sacred should be noted, because it is one to which I will return throughout my investigation. Not only modern poetry, but various other types of discourse, fragmentary phenomena from the arts, religion, and rites play this shattering role according to Kristeva's analysis. Magic, shamanism, esoterism, carnival, and 'incomprehensible' poetry all underscore limits of socially useful and attest to what it represses: process that exceeds subject and his communicative structures. . . . We shall call this heterogeneous practice significance.6 The most important aspect of signifiance to understand is its dual modalities: semiotic and symbolic. As is frequently case with creative philosophers, it is difficult to find a clear and concise explication of these two crucial concepts in Kristeva's writing. A near-infinite number of allusions, illustrations, metaphors, and extended discussions, but no definitions; for this reason, turning briefly to secondary literature seems warranted. Kelly Oliver characterizes semiotic as drives as they make their way into language; associated with rhythm and tone, nonreferential.7 The semiotic is body becoming mind, soma meeting psyche, process that generates reference without itself being referential. The symbolic, in turn, according to Oliver, is position of judgment that makes reference possible; associated with grammar and syntax, referential.8 The symbolic is a kind of break in semiotic production of signification. Put differently, semiotic is natural bodily process that infuses symbolic's artificial, intellectual product. The semiotic is productive, creative, self-multiplying, and possesses a kind of temporal, musical ordering function. The symbolic is organizational, editorial, self-unifying, and possesses a kind of spatial, architectural ordering function. The semiotic is fire in symbolic blood. The process character of semiotic makes it impossible to freeze it into a sufficiently immobile state for analysis; this is probably main reason Kristeva never offers a simple definition of it. Additionally, editing function of symbolic makes it difficult, but not impossible, to see semiotic flow at work; opportunities arise, for example, in language at its most creative, as in poetry. It seems that dance, taken in three different senses of die word, could be understood to belong essentially to semiotic, symboUc, and borderline between them, respectively. …