CRITICAL TERMS
APORIA
A Greek term that
denotes an insoluble problem or paradox; etymologically it comes from aporos
meaning impassable (a-, without; poros, passage).
In rhetoric and literary theory, it is often used to indicate those moments in
a text where meaning becomes ambiguous or appears self-contradictory. In his
book Aporias, Jacques Derrida differentiates an aporia from a problem,
arguing that the former is ‘the experience of the nonpassage . . . What, in
sum, appears to block our way or to separate us in the very place where it would
no longer be possible to constitute a problem, a project, or a projection’ (Derrida
1993: 12). In other words, while a problem can be resolved within the rules of logical
argument, an aporia calls those very rules into question and remains impossible
to incorporate into a straightforward logic.
BASE / SUPERSTRUCTURE
A materialist conception
of the relationship between economics and culture. ‘Base’ refers to the economic
modes of production at the basis of any society. This economic base determines the
‘superstructure’, or the public, political and intellectual configuration of that
social system. Karl Marx proposed this system in his ‘Preface’ to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). For Marx the individual
is subject to external forces ‘independent of their will’ which are shaped by
the modes of production. This principle forms the basis for the everyday formation
of judicial and religious institutions. Marx contended that this produced ‘definite
forms of social consciousness’ which, in a capitalist society, were ‘false’, or
an illusion to secure social compliance. These early formulations are now
generally regarded as excessively deterministic. In place of the
base/superstructure dichotomy, subsequent Marxist theorists have elaborated
more refined conceptions of the material construction of society. These include
Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Louis Althusser’s outline of the Ideological
State Apparatus and Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industry.
CARNIVAL/CARNIVALESQUE
A term that came to
prominence after the publication of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World
(1965). Bakhtin identifies a shift from popular festive life to literary
culture, arguing that Rabelais’s grotesque representation of the human body,
linguistic diversity and taste for parody derive from the popular practices of
carnival in Renaissance Europe. Bakhtin conceives of carnival as a utopian
moment when dominant constraints and hierarchies are temporarily overturned:
authority figures are parodied, routines are disrupted, and the body is
celebrated. Rabelais’s writing, with its focus upon the grotesque body, draws
its subversive energy from carnival practices and, in this sense, it can be described
as ‘carnivalesque’. Bakhtin’s ideas about carnival are valuable because they
provide a framework for assessing the influence of popular forms on literature.
Critics have explored the relationship between the historical carnival and the
political uses of popular culture in Renaissance literature; but the term
‘carnivalesque’ has also been stretched beyond the actual historical moment of
carnival to describe writing that reproduces the inversions of carnival. This approach
has been used to study writers such as the British novelist Angela Carter, who
employ popular against elite forms, mixing a variety of styles and voices.
CHORA
Julia Kristeva’s
concept of the semiotic chora is developed out of Lacanian psychoanalysis and
attempts to account for the repressed linguistic and libidinal excesses of the
speaking subject that originate in the pre-Oedipal phase. Kristeva appropriates
the chora from Plato’s Timaeus (c. 360 BC) to denote an
unnameable space or receptacle formed by the drives which are anterior to
identity. This chora refers to the earliest stage in psychosexual development
in which the child is dominated by the drives and is unable to distinguish
boundaries between itself and its mother. At this stage the child experiences
its body as an undifferentiated, ungendered space across which chaotic and
rhythmical drives of physical and psychic impulses flow. These drives form the
basis of the semiotic chora, which is the alternative non-signifying element of
meaning within language. Although it is repressed by the symbolic, this
semiotic chora remains active beneath the rational discourse of the speaking
subject and manifests itself in the ‘vocal or kinetic rhythm’ of poetry and
other non-rational discourses, threatening to disrupt the stability of meaning
and subjectivity.
CHRONOTOPE
Term coined by
Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s to describe the way in which time and space are
represented and connected in literature. In his essay ‘Forms of Time and the
Chronotope of the Novel’, Bakhtin offers a history of the novel, which aims to
show that different novels are structured according to different ideas of time
and space. Moreover, Bakhtin argues that changes in chronotopes, or dominant metaphors
of time and space, can be explained by broader historical developments. The
concern of Bakhtin’s work, such as in his discussions of language and carnival,
is to explore the relationship between forms and structures, and the
transformations of history. His approach is useful not only because it
identifies links between the metaphorical significance of motifs such as ‘the
path of life’ and the narrative progress of a character, but also because it
encourages analysis of time and space in the context of specific
socio-historical conditions.
DESIRE
This term has long
been central to Western culture, but its contemporary theoretical importance
derives from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s elucidation of
unconscious desire. Sigmund Freud observed that the human sexual drive is never
wholly satisfied. For Lacan, this is because desire is produced by the
subjection of the human organism to the law of language, which is for him the fundamental
organizing principle of consciousness. Desire, which he differentiates from
bodily need, is conceivable as the structural effect of the split that language
introduces between our animal and speaking selves.
Desire comes from the
‘Other’, the place of speech, which is both outside and inside us. We
internalize speech by learning it, but it never truly becomes ‘ours’ as its
meanings are not generated by individual subjects but by the arbitrary
differences between signifiers. Lack results from this awkward compromise
between the general and the specific, the linguistic and the organic, in which
something of the latter is consistently lost. Desire, which is not only sexual,
relentlessly attempts to fill this lack, settling on various objects which seem
to offer fulfilment: hence the appeal of a different lover or new car. The lack
cannot be filled, and so desire keeps going, finding new objects, and making
the grass appear greener on the other side of the fence. It is effectively the
desire of nothing, of no thing that exists, which is why its sign is the
phallus. Though Lacan’s account may appear pessimistic, desire’s energy can be vital,
revolutionary and exciting. Founded upon lack, its restless dissatisfaction
drives change. However, it can also be destructive. Desire could only be
satisfied in the end, which is to say in death: it can thus become the desire
for annihilation of self and other.
Lacan’s definition
has been critiqued and extended by the philosophers Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari among others, but remains of central importance to
accounts of subjectivity, sexuality and culture.
DIALECTIC
Derived from the word
‘dialogue’, meaning the pursuit of truth through debate or discussion, the term
denotes the belief that change is driven by contradiction. The ancient Greek
philosopher Plato’s dialogues represented discussions in which the truth of a
proposition was tested, and its contradictions revealed, by question and
answer.
The late
eighteenth-century German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel developed a form of
dialectical logic that influenced a group of mid-nineteenth-century German philosophers
known as the ‘Young Hegelians’, which included the political philosopher Karl
Marx. Marx’s theory of ‘historical materialism’ applied the dialectic to the
study of human history, while his collaborator Friedrich Engels controversially
attempted to develop a scientific method of ‘dialectical materialism’, founded on
‘three Laws’ applicable to human history and the natural world. The first of these
is the unity of opposites, which simply refers to the interdependence of two contradictory
principles; an example of this kind of relationship is that between capitalists
and workers. The second is the transformation of quantity into quality, whereby
gradual quantitative change brings about a fundamental qualitative change. To
take a proverbial example: placing a single straw on a camel’s back will effect
no qualitative change; continue to do so and eventually the load will be so
heavy that the camel’s back will break. The third is the negation of the
negation, which occurs when elements of a prior stage of development
subsequently recur in a modified form; Engels gives the example of evolution as
it takes place in plants.
Though the dialectic
is primarily associated with Marxist thought, it was Hegel’s contemporary
Johann Fichte who detailed the most common explanation of the dialectic: two
competing terms (‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’) generate a third (the ‘synthesis’),
which incorporates aspects of both. Marx, for example, believed conflict between
bourgeoisie and proletariat would lead to revolution and a new, productive but
classless society. The dialectical conception of change continues to influence contemporary
theorists of culture and society, although its universalizing premises have
been challenged by many thinkers associated with poststructuralism.
DIFFERANCE
A term coined by Jacques
Derrida, which forms a central strand of his attack on the logic and values of
traditional Western philosophy – what Derrida calls ‘logocentrism’. Perhaps
unhelpfully, Derrida claims in Margins of Philosophy (1972) that difference
is ‘literally neither a word nor a concept’ and that it ‘has neither existence nor
essence’. What is clear, however, is that differance derives from the Latin
verb differre and the French différer, which in English have
given rise to two distinct verbs: to defer and to differ. Differance
incorporates both of these meanings and thus serves to emphasize two key
Derridean concerns: with absence rather than presence (full meaning is never
present, but is instead constantly deferred because of the difference characteristic
of language); and with difference rather than identity (Derrida focuses on the
difference between terms, and the spaces between words, rather than on the
terms in themselves and any positive value they might otherwise be thought to have).
In describing
differance as the ‘systematic play of differences’ which is built into language,
and highlighting the dependence of language upon ‘intervals’ (spaces between
words) without which words could not function, Derrida carries Saussure’s theory
of language as a system of differences to its most extreme conclusion. He also
develops and expands the emphasis upon difference which has been central to the
work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In addition, differance reiterates Derrida’s desire
to assert the primacy of writing over speech, because the ‘a’ which makes it
distinguishable from difference is only detectable when the word is written or read,
not when it is spoken or heard (différance and différence are
pronounced in exactly the same way in French); so differance is also an attack
on the perceived phonocentrism of Western philosophy, i.e. its privileging of
speech over writing.
DISCOURSE
This term refers to
the use of language as it is embedded in social practice. In emphasizing the
social and functional aspects of language, discourse analysts seek to examine
the rules governing
language use as it is
deployed within wider social structures of regulation and control. Within
critical theory, this study is related, most importantly, to the work of French
structuralist Michel Foucault, who understood discourse to be part of the social
structure itself. Any language community, such as medicine, will share a methodology,
phraseology and a body of thought which makes up their discourse. This
discursive field contains within it rules governing language use within the
community; thus certain usages will be prohibited as unacceptable or excluded
altogether. By examining the historical formation of, for example, medical
discourse, Foucault shows that the rules governing acceptable language use
amount to a discursive regime which determines not only what can be said but,
ultimately, what can be known. Discourse is thus a site of power as it constitutes
both the sphere of knowledge and the community perceived to be in possession of
it: ‘It is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together’ (Foucault
1984: 100). While Foucault’s earlier work focused primarily on the institutionalization
of certain discourses, hence certain knowledge regimes, in the service of
social control, his later work on sexuality refined the concept somewhat. Here,
the medical and juridical discourses concerning homosexuality in the nineteenth
century are shown to give rise to a ‘reverse’ or counter-discourse which allows
for the possibility of resistance. The writings around homosexuality, which
were designed to define the excluded category of the homosexual, also
guaranteed the emergence of a new identity which ‘began to speak on its own
behalf . . . often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which
it was medically disqualified’ (1984: 101). Discourse here remains a channel
for power but this is no longer understood to be controlling, rather strategic.
The reworking of discourse becomes a tactical force within the ongoing
strategies of power and resistance.
ÉCRITURE FÉMININE
The leading
practitioner of écriture féminine is the French poststructuralist Hélène
Cixous whose works, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’ (originally
published in French in 1975), are manifestos of the practice. This form of
writing attempts to inscribe femininity by challenging the phallocentric discourses
of sexuality and subjectivity posited by the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan in which women are marked as deviant on account of their lack of
a penis. Cixous makes a close link between sexuality and writing and focuses on
the imaginary mother/child dyad of the pre-Oedipal phase, which forms the repressed
‘Other’ within the unconscious upon entry into the symbolic. Cixous argues that
writing is the place of the ‘Other’ and the feminine text attempts to write
through the body the unconscious polymorphous drives of the child and its closeness
to the body of the ‘m/other’. The subversive potential of this
‘what-comesbefore-language’ (1986: 88) is expressed through the use of puns and
metaphors which attempt to foreground the polysemic, literally ‘multiple
meaning’, nature of signification. Cixous refuses to define the feminine,
insisting that it must remain an open question and that the writer must actively
search for gaps, disruptions or excesses in language, not in order to ‘master’
otherness, but ‘to see it, to experience what she is not, what she is, what she
can be’ (1986: 86). The connections between the female body and the ‘feminine’
remain ambiguous. Whilst she does not attempt to fix the ‘feminine’
biologically, her maternal metaphors of writing in ‘white ink’ suggest a female
biological essence (1981: 251). However, this seeming impossible logic
is strategic in its attempt to displace (masculine) binary logic,
formulated on the principle of Oneness and the effacement of the feminine, by
gesturing towards the (im)possiblity (within phallocentric logic) of
articulating an ‘other’ discourse of heterogeneity and difference.
EGO
A concept defined by Sigmund
Freud, who conceived the human subject as being divided between the ego, the superego
and the id. In the Freudian schema the ego represents the subject’s conscious self-image,
a defensive space from which the violence and irrationalism of the id is excluded.
The ego thus provides a vantage point, in terms of the reciprocal gaze between
spectator and image outlined in the Lacanian mirror stage, from which the subject
can view the ego as both a unified formation and, crucially, as an object
worthy of love. The ego is that component of subjective identity that, in terms
of ‘normal’ psychical development, is what represents the subject in social,
intersubjective relations. What the ego represents is how the subject would
like to be viewed, minus the unconscious, destructive and anti-social urges of
the id and the punitive sadism of the superego.
Contd…
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