-Tu*n-liclh.

- Cqvr-frwY L ' * "'l t l'e uz 'l

olTTv. H. \Je-rlton lf
Jv'(: i+. |164r'nr Pss., f,8
Smiotics lBl
180 Posr-srRUcruRALtsM AND AFTER
where neither shows any awareness of the linguistic and, at a more
entiiesand the internal sPheres'
a text into the.sPhere general level, semiotic, logic of the sociality in which the (speaking,
Moreover, historical) subject is embedded
of art sijni language of literarY
And yet semiotics, by its attempt to set itself'up as a thcory
PercePtion, o[ practices using language as its model, restricts the value of
its discovery to the eld of practices which do no more than sub-
serve the principle of social cohesions, of the social contract. In
other words, in so far as linguistics has establislred itself as the
Julia Kristeva: 'The System and the Speaking scicnce of an object ('language','speech' or'discourse') so obedient
Subject' to the necessity for social communication as to be inseparable from
sociality, any semiotics which adopts this linguistic model can
speak only of those social practices (or those aspects of social
practices) which subserve such social exchange: a semiotics that
records the systematic, system4tizing, or informational aspect of
signifying practices. . . .
. . . Semiotics must not be allowed to be a mere application to
signi$ing practices of'the linguistic model - or any orher model, for
that matter. lts raison d'tre,if it is to have one, must consist in its
identifying the systematic constraint within each signifying practice
(using for that purpose borrowed or original 'models') but above all
in going beyond that to specifying just what, within the practice,
* falls outside the system and characterizes the specificity of the
l practice as such.
c-:t One phase of semiology is now over: that which runs from
Saussure and Peirce to the Prague School and structuralism, and
has made possible the systematic description of the social and/or
symbolic constraint within each signifying practice. To criticize this
phasc for its 'ideological bias'- whether phenomenological or more
specifically phonological or linguistic - without recognizing the
truth it has contributed by revealing and characterizing the
immanent causality and/or the presence of a social-systematic
constraint in each social functioning, leads to a rejection of the
symbolic and/or social ,srs (in Husserl's sense of the word)
indispensable to every practice. This rejection is shared both by
idealist philosophy, with its neglect of the historical socializing role
of the symbolic, and by the various sociological dogmatisms, which
suppress the specicity of the symbolic and its logic in their anxiety
to reduce them to an 'external' determinant.
In my view, a critique of this 'semiology of systems' and of its
phenomenological foundations is possible only if it starts from a
theory of meaning which must necessarily be a theory of the
speaking subjcct. It is common knowledge that the linguistic revival
which goes by the name of Generative Grammar - whatcver its
ReprintcdfromThcTimsLitrarySulcmcnl,l2octoberl973,pp.l249-50.
 182 posr-s'l'RUcruRALtsM AND AFTER
variants and mutations - is based on the rehabilitation of the
Cartesian conception of language as an acl carried out by a subjccl.l
On close inspcction, as certain linguists (fromJakobson to Kuroda)
have shown in rccent years, this 'speaking subjcct' turns out in fact
to be that transcendcntal ago which, in Husserl's view, underlies any
and every predicative synthesis, if we 'put in brackets' logical or
linguistic externality. . . . Yet this transcendental subject is not the
essential concern of the semiological revival, and if it bases itself
on the conception of language ProPer to Generative Grammar,
semiology will not get beyond the reduction - still commonly
characteristic of it - of signifying ractices to their systematic aspect.
In respect of the subject and of signifying, it is the Freudian
revolution which seems to me to have achieved the definitive
displacement of the western pistcn from its presumed centrality.
. . - The theory of meaning now stands at a cross-roads: either it
will rcmain an attempt at formalizing meaning-systems by
increasing sophistication of the logico-mathematical tools which
enable it to formulate models on the basis of a conception (already
rather dated) of meaning as the act of a transcmdcnlal c'go, cut ol
from its body, its unconscious, and also its history; or else it will
attune itself to the theory of the speaking subject as a divided
F subject (conscious/unconscious) and go on to attemPt to specify the
c-r I
c.r)
production, etc.).
In following this latter path, semiology, or, as I have suggested
calling it, scmanasis, conceives of meaning not as a sign-system but
as a signiing proccss. Within this process one might see the release
and subsequent articulation of the drives as constrained by the
social code yct not reducible to the language system as a gno-texl;
and the signifying system as it presents itself to phenomenological
intuition as a pheno-tcxl; describable in terms of structure, or of
competence/performance, or according to other models. The
presence o1 the gcno-lc is indicated by what I have called a scmiolic
disposition. In the case, for example, o[ a signifying Practice such as
'poetic language', the smiolic disposilion will be the various deviations
from the grammatical rules of the language: articulatory ffects
which shift the phonemative system back towards its articulatory,
phonetic base and consequently towards the drive-governed bases
of sound-production; the over-determination of a lexeme by multiple
Smiotics 183
meanings which it does not carry in ordinary usage but which
accrue to it as a result of its occurrence in othcr texts; syntactic
irregularities such as ellipses, non-recoverable dclctions, indefnite
cmtrcddirrgs, ctc.; thc replacemcnt o[ the rclationship bctwecn thc
protagonists of any enunciation as the;r function in a locutory act -
see here the work ofJ. L. Austin and John Searle - by a system of
relations based on fantasy; and so forth. . . .
The moment of transgression is the key moment in practice: we
can speak of practice wherever there is a transgression of
systematicity, i.e., a transgression of the unity proper to the
transcndcnlal cgo. The subject of the practice cannot be the
transcendental subject, who lacks the shift, the split in logical unity
brought about by language which separates out, within the
signifying body, the symbolic orderfrom the workings of the libido
(this last revealing itself by the semiolic disosition). Identifying the
semiotic disposition means in fact identifying the shift in the
speaking subjcct, his capacity for renewing thc ordcr in whiclt hc is
incscapably caught up; and that capacity is, for thc subjcct, the
capacity for enjoymen t.
It must however, be remembered that although it can be
describcd in terms of opcrations and concepts, this logic of shifts,
splits, and the infinitization of the symbolic limit leads us towards
operations heterogeneous to meaning and its system. By that I
mean that these 'operations' are rc-mcaning and. prc-sign (or lrans-
mcaning, lrans-sign), and that they bring us back to processes of
division in the living matter of an organism subject to biological
constraints as well as social norms. Here it
seems indispensable
that Melanie Klein's theory of drives should be refined and
extended, together with the psycholinguistic study of the acquisition
oflanguagc....
The point is not to replace the semiotics of signifying systems by
considerations on the biological code appropriate to the nature of
those employing them - a tautological exercise, after all, since the
biological codc has bccn modelled on thc languagc systcm. It is
rather to postulate the hctcrogcneilT of biological operations in respect
of signifying operations, and to study the dialectics of the former
(that is, the fact that, though invariably subject to the signifying
and/or social codes, they infringe the code ir the dircction of
allowing the subject to get pleasure from it, renew it, evcn endanger
it; where, that is, the processes are not blocked by him in repression
or'mental illness').
But sincc it is itself a meta-language, semiotics can do no more
than postulate this heterogeneity: as soon as it speaks about it, it
 I

Scmioti 185
184 posr-srlucruR LISMANDArrEn
homogenizes the phenomenon, tinks it with a system, loses hold of
it. lts-specicity can be preserved only in the signifying Practices
which ict off the hcterogeneity at issue: thus poetic language
making free wit
. . . lt is onl the basis of a theory of the
speaking subje heterogeneous process, that
smiotics can s utside its metalinguistic mode

NOlE

l.tEd.]SeeNoamChomsky,CarksianLinguistics:AChatctinthcHttotT
We can now grasp all the ambiguities ol sananasis: on the one of Raiionalist Thoaght (New York, I 966).
hand it demystifies the logic at work in the elaboration of every
transcendental rcduction and, for this purpose, requircs thc study

Morse Peckham: 'The Problem of

Interpretation'
be genuinely materialist since it recognizes the matnialiq - the
lutcmgduitt - of that negativity whose concrete base Hegel was
unabie to see and which mechanistic Mandsts have reduced to a
merely economic exterrrality. . . .
As 'classical' semiotics was already awae' discourse receives its

of discoune (from positivist e no Kx)m

for it, and to go into volun called an
'indicible qui ment', for thc that shall
remain silent.

s, Sollcrs.
inspire by a concern to make intelligible,
, what rocks the foundations of sociality.
In this respect sananasis carries on the semiotic discovery of which
t
ousands of times what is meant by some
s . When we shift to literary interprctation,
t why there are different intcrpretations of
Reprinted from Collcgc Likratutc,6 (1979)' pp'l-17'