"First of all, I am not sure what a ‘full-scale refusal of the Symbolic’ would mean, whether it is possible on [Judith] Butler’s own account, and whether it is even desirable. For Kristeva, poetic language is ‘the ultimate means of its (the symbolic order’s) transformation and subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution’. Subversion, for Kristeva, means transformation, not complete breakdown or erasure. And the aim of poetic language, as I read her, is not merely to destroy the symbolic order, but rather to allow it to survive – a term which I suggest that we must understand quite literally as the sustainability and injection of life and aliveness into discourse, as opposed to a kind of mechanical and dead discourse that would reproduce itself eternally and exclude alterity and alteration altogether.[21] In fact, Kristeva warns us of the potential danger inherent in the transgressive element of artistic creation, and calls for a ‘structurally necessary protection, one that serves to check negativity, confine it within the stases, and prevent it from sweeping away the symbolic position’.
[21] Kristeva asserts that, ‘only the subject, for whom the thetic is not a repression of the semiotic chora but instead a position either taken on or undergone, can call into question the thetic so that a new disposition may be articulated’. What is at stake here is renewal, not absolute destruction. Later in Revolution in Poetic Language she reminds us that while the thetic is ‘absolutely necessary’, it is nevertheless ‘not exclusive: the semiotic […] constantly tears it open, and this transgression brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice that are called “creation.” […] what remodels the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic’.
Despite the presumed impossibility to send something into nothing without a trace or memory, one must at this point wonder what is left in this symbolic order called modernity which anyone would want to save. But few consider the symbol by itself an arch-enemy, it's the ordered system it maintains and most now know by means of some induction that no structure can be indefinitely sustained. That word's itself a triple negative, three times absurd is always more than twice an oxymoron unless one leaves behind Euclid or forms all dialectical or jump off the butcher block beneath cadaver's come-on with his scalpel redirected toward the dripping adam's apple. Like, it's the corpse that's cutting you upon dissecting tables.
A newborn or one inside a period of gestation is no commercial product of either fathers or mothers. It's a self-creating symbiont of creatures once residing in them recursively and then later leaving and when they meet there's always an explosion: they call it "cell biology", without the jargon, "birds and bees" just to avoid that romantic word some once called 'love'. That very word is black magic when it causes moderns to get queasy and then vomit and think sex is property that must be taken. There's little doubt to history that a meeting's just a place and time for having, cutting, eating meat. but speaking prehistorically, that meter was just metaphoric for mothers giving milk, a reduced-to-liquid meat for infancy or hostess pouring mead for company where it's not a job but results from her interest, not necessarily in it but by chance instead? Aesthetics finds a difference between an interest and just more usery. We may just place too much emphasis on agendas, looking out for something really which is in and looking in for everything that's out, as if we couldn't shift or oscillate or even simultaneously experience a hyphenated in-out, in-out state without accusing or complaining or to find that something's always born from our wierd juxtapositions, never the same experience for anyone but commensurate like Alfred Jarry's "equivalence of all absurdities". Discovering them of old was called, by practice, "divination", now all chance encounter is eliminated or forbidden or excused "It was an accident! Who knows where that shit came from? Must have been the booze."
Like the trickster, maternity is no identity or destination except at the time and space when it's adorned, like a face-mask that does not change or cover anything. It's no secret, just a mystery how all those tiny molecules come together making trees and then sustain them. Maternity itself, in terms of semiotics or the building blocks of symbols, is a repressed line of thinking as it often leads us to contemplating chaos, crime and sin, not just in factories constructing parts for your replacement, never punching father's time-clocks, ever in containment. That's why ever since the first commander, we've been told we are the population problem. When there were only nine of us, someone didn't off the thug.
UTERO-SEMIOTICS: concerning signs in an indeterminate context, a random distribution, not in themselves as such (an sich) but without reference other than transitively transitive poetic, briefly pointed or provisional. The paradox for Jung is in this group of undirecting signs live ancient symbols, a foggy graveyard of undying archetypes some call vague memory, undisclosed history, mirrors of an eternity that Freud and others called "unconscious" brimming, less considerate name "oblivion", pessimists: "imagination", optimists: "hope" or source of curiosity and home to possibility, one thing's for sure: it's always misty. What it is for freaks that dreamers would call "beauty", sometimes "horror", this semiotic fluid linguists search semantics or for grammar, is just an academic's synonym for "psychedelic" (I call it "paisley"). It may be the site for resurrecting dead metaphors, it is also arsenal for detournement of the living. According to Julia Kristeva, it's a conservative force like maternal renewal and also box (think of the sweet Pandora) of revolutionary potential – it's subversive. Both rhythmic and metric, it is itself a symbol system repressed by symbolic stuff from grey matter as if (patrimetric) material emissions, it's contained not like a house, a bed or flower pot but like a prison. When it escapes (it always does) in dreams or art (when even as commodity) or other port-hole, windowpane or crack left open, Mr. Greymatter (self-repressed euclidean) assures "they're lies" or justifies the label called "neurotic" and the righteous parental types call "childish", everything unorthodox which priests call "sin". But this is the case only when greymatter thinks it's god inside a body that's a prison or a temple, an orphan never knowing nurture from a mother or ripped off from home for education or by slavers or just way too much time in front of father empire's big screen T.V., a window only looking out on corporate fabrications like all else is just the background of psycho-mystification.
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