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Pseudo-revolution in Poetic Language: Julia Kristeva and the Russian Avant-garde

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Clare Cavanagh
Clare Cavanagh*
Affiliation:
Slavic Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

It is important to stress that these peculiar pseudo-revolutions, imported from Russia and carried out under the protection of the army and the police, were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and their adherents experienced them with grand pathos, enthusiasm, and eschatological faith in an absolutely new world. Poets found themselves on the proscenium for the last time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious European drama and had no inkling that the theatre manager had changed the program at the last minute and substituted a trivial farce.

–Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere (1969)

In the preface to her 1980 collection Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva acknowledged her ongoing debt to the pioneering linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson, a scholar who, in her phrase, "reached one of the high points of language learning in this century by never losing sight of Russian futurism's scorching odyssey through a revolution that ended up strangling it." Kristeva's statement takes us in two directions at once, both of which I will explore in this essay: it draws attention to Jakobson's sustaining roots in the avant-garde experimentation in poetic language that flourished in Russia in the early part of this century; and it tacitly underscores Kristeva's own ties to Russian avantgarde theory and practice. For Jakobson, Kristeva has suggested, the brief, febrile period of artistic experimentation that Marjorie Perloff has called "the futurist moment" continued to inform his writing in vital ways long after its unnatural death at the hands of the Soviet state. Certainly Jakobson, like Kristeva, is preoccupied throughout his work— from his exploration of Khlebnikov's "transsense" in "Recent Russian Poetry" to his 1980 study of Holderlin's schizophrenia—with the relationship between abnormal or "trans-normal" language and poetic language that lay at the heart of formalist theory and futurist practice in early twentieth century Russia.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 283 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

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References

1. Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), ix Google Scholar.

2. Kristeva was born and educated in Bulgaria, where Russian language and culture was standard academic fare and her early work in particular bears witness to her first-hand knowledge of Russian literature and theory. For her graduate studies she went to Paris where she was, with her compatriot Tsvetan Todorov, one of the first critics to introduce Mikhail Bakhtin into western criticism. I will be dealing in this essay exclusively with Kristeva's work of the 1960s and 1970s, the work that is most concerned with the problem of poetic language. My chief text will, of course, be her monumental study La revolution du langage poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974), which has been abridged in English as Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

3. Jakobson, Roman, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia. Otbrosok pervyi. Khlebnikov (Prague, 1921)Google Scholar. Reprinted in Texte der Russischen Formalisten II, ed. Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Munich: Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993) Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 19-135. Abridged translation by Brown, E. J. in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 58–82 Google Scholar. Roman Jakobson, “The Language of Schizophrenia: Hölderlin's Speech and Poetry,” in: Jakobson, , Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 133–42Google Scholar.

4. Kristeva, , “From One Identity to an Other” in Desire in Language, 124 Google Scholar.

5. Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, AvantGarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 144–45Google Scholar.

6. The other studies of the avant-garde I refer to here are: Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. Kristeva's untranslatable pun on the French phrase en procès appears throughout Revolution in Poetic Language.

7. “The Ethics of Linguistics,” in Desire in Language, 27.

8. The very titles of two avant-garde journals with which Kristeva and the futurists were associated bear witness to their similarly monumental intentions. The journal Tel Quel carries the ambitious subtitle Literature, Philosophy, Science, Politics. This falls short of the futurists, however, who ran a short-lived publication entitled Tvorchestvo, literatura, iskusstvo, nauka i zhizn’ (creation, literature, art, science and life) in the early 1920s. Throughout my essay I use the pronoun “he” to designate the exemplary artists of both Kristeva and the Russian avant-garde because they themselves discuss male artists almost exclusively. Kristeva has been justly criticized for relying upon a male model of creativity in first developing her theories of poetic language; and the futurists, on whom the formalists based their early work, were notoriously misogynist. One futurist theoretician, Aleksei Kruchenykh, went so far as to propose that his comradesin-arms even ban feminine nouns from their verse.

9. Kristeva inadvertently has revealed her commitment to the avant-garde myth of a disposable, instantly obsolescent history by dismissing one of her own theoretical precursors, Jacques Derrida, as the practitioner of a now “outmoded avant-garde” in a 1977 essay on dissidence. This essay also informs us that dissidents who “attack political power” and, in particular, “exiles from the Gulag,” hampered as they are by an unfashionable hankering for “community and law,” are now passe. Their place at the “cutting edge of dissidence” has been taken by post-modern psychoanalysts and writers, much like Kristeva herself, who “attempt to bring about multiple sublations of the unnameable, the unrepresentable, the void” from their perilous outposts at Europe's and America's leading academic institutions. As the Church Lady says, “How convenient!” ( “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Leon S. Roudiez and Sean Hand [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 292-300).

10. Kristeva, “Ethics of Linguistics,” 27, 31.

11. Marjorie, Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), xvii Google Scholar.

12. Quoted in Perloff, , The Futurist Moment, 34 Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 34.

14. Quoted in Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 195 Google Scholar.

15. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 22 Google Scholar.

16. Nietzsche, , The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 419 Google Scholar.

17. Will to Power, 241; Birth of Tragedy, 37; Nietzsche, , On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 26 Google Scholar.

18. Will to Power, 537.

19. Nietzsche, , The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 241 Google Scholar.

20. 1 have taken the phrase “aesthetic activism” from Charles Russell's account of the literary avant-garde in Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 33Google Scholar. In his admirably skeptical recent study of the twentieth century's Prophets of Extremity, Allan Megill has placed Nietzsche's “world-building” aestheticism at the heart of postmodern philosophy and theory, and I have followed his lead in my own discussion ( Megill, , Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 Google Scholar]).

21. And of course, for the aesthetic avant-garde, “to destroy is to create,” as their spiritual grandfather, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin put it (my emphasis; quoted in Calinescu, , Five Faces of Modernity, 117 Google Scholar).

22. Revolution, 17.

23. Ibid., 61

24. Ibid., 81.

25. Kristeva, “From One Identity to An Other,” 132.

26. Markov, Vladimir, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 131Google Scholar.

27. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Deklaratsiia slova kak takovogo” (leaflet, 1913); reprinted in Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov, ed. Vladimir Markov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), 64. English translation in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928, ed. and trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 68.

28. Khlebnikov, Velimir, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Iu. Tynianov and N. Stepanov (Leningrad: Izd. pisatelei, 1928-1933), V: 259 Google Scholar. English translation in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Ronald Vroon, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987-1989), I: 338.

29. Sobranie sochinenii, V: 151, 232; Collected Works, I: 321, 380.

30. Sobranie sochinenii, V: 162; Collected Works, I: 333.

31. “The Word, Dialogue and the Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, 36.

32. Quoted in Barooshian, Vahan, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930: A Study in Avant-Gardism (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 95 Google Scholar.

33. Khlebnikov, , Sobranie sochinenii, V:225Google Scholar; Collected Works, I: 152

35. Grosz, Elizabeth, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Winchester: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 52 Google Scholar.

36. “The Ethics of Linguistics,” 32.

37. Iurii Tynianov, “O Khlebnikove,” in Iurii Tynianov, Arkhaisty i novatory (Priboi, 1929; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1985), 586. English translation by Charlotte Rosenthal in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 93Google Scholar.

38. Lev Iakubinskii, “Otkuda berutsia stikhi,” in Knizhnyi ugol: kritika, bibliografiia, khronika (Petrograd: Ocharovannyi strannik, 1921), 23.

39. Viktor Shklovskii, “Voskreshenie slova” (leaflet, 1914); reprinted in Texte der Russischen Formalisten II.

40. Shklovskii, Viktor, “O poezii i zaumnom iazyke,” Poetika: Sbornik po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka (Petrograd, 1919), 24 Google Scholar.

41. “The True-Real,” in The Kristeva Reader, 227.

42. Julia, Kristeva, “Phonetics, Phonology and Impulsional Bases,” Diacritics, Fall (1978): 35Google Scholar.

43. Ibid., 33.

44. In Kristeva's later work, the relationship between the chora, or the semiotic, as Kristeva has also called it, and the “Symbolic Order” becomes far less polarized, as Joan Brandt noted in a recent essay on Kristeva's Tales of Love. Brandt observed that Kristeva has “come to look at the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic differently, stressing less the separateness and more the interrelatedness of the two functions and ultimately problematizing the very terms of the opposition” (Brandt, “The Power and the Horror of Love: Kristeva on Narcissism,” Romanic Review 82, no. 1 [January 1991], 91-92). She continues: In the course of her analysis of the amorous dynamic in Tales of Love, Kristeva … comes to conclusions that alter significantly her earlier distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. Rather than emphasizing the separateness of the two functions as she has in the past, Kristeva now finds that the experience of love that both founds the subject and dissolves it as an integrated identity indissoluably ties them together … the speaking subject is inevitably and permanently caught up in what is now seen as a contradictory dynamic, one that incorporates both the idealizing mechanisms of the symbolic as well as the libidinal charges linked to the semiotic (104).

45. Kundera, Milan, Life Is Elsewhere, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 195 Google Scholar.

46. Ibid., 219-20.

47. “The Ethics of Linguistics,” 34

48. Ibid., 25.

49. Guillaume, Apollinaire, “Poeme lu au mariage d'Andre Salmon,” in Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, ed. and trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions, 1971), 89 Google Scholar.

50. “Toujours,” in Selected Writings, 177.

51. Revolution, 150.

52. Ibid., 156.

53. Ibid., 70.

54. And Kristeva's word, both “word” and “flesh,” looks suspiciously like the outmoded Logos, in its Christian incarnation, that Derrida has worked so hard to deconstruct. The formalists, would-be scientists who were programmatically opposed to all forms of mysticism, are also guilty of “resurrecting,” in Shklovskii's term, a christological word made up of both spirit and flesh.

55. Revolution, 156; “The Ethics of Linguistics,” 34.

56. “The Ethics of Linguistics,” 24. Andrei Zhdanov, architect of Stalin's policy of socialist realism, was, incidentally, responsible for hounding “fellow travelers” like the formalists out of Soviet literature. Kristeva's perverse pairing of the two is typical— in the same passage, she called structural linguists “wardens of repression” ( “Ethics of Linguistics,” 24).

57. Ibid., 27, 32.

58. Quoted in Katanian, Vasilii, Maiakovskii: Literaturnaia khronika (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), 145Google Scholar.

59. V. I. Lenin, “Partiinaia organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura,” in Lenin, V. I., Sochineniia (Moscow: Ogiz, 1947), 10: 27Google Scholar.

60. Revolution, 17.

61. This abbreviated Soviet-speak bears, in fact, a striking resemblance to the “monotheistic Western” “system of speech” that Kristeva has condemned elswhere as a “logical, simple, positive and ‘scientific’ form of communication … stripped of all stylistic, rhythmic and ‘poetic’ ambiguities” ( “About Chinese Women,” in The Kristeva Reader, 151).

62. Boris Arvatov, “Rechetvorchestvo,” Lef, no. 2 (1923): 79-91. English translation in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928, 224. The “Cheka,” the “Chrezvychainaia komissiia” or “extraordinary commission,” was the first incarnation of what would later become the KGB.

63. Noveishaia russkaia poeziia, 50; Major Soviet Writers, 67.

64. “Psychoanalysis and the Polis,” in The Kristeva Reader, 313.