1 Communication models - unibas.ch · Semiotics is the study of the relationships among signs and meaning. In semiotics, a sign is ... It is a picture on a photocopy of a computer

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semiotics: the basics

1 Communication models 1.1 Shannon and Weaver (1949)

Semiotics is concerned with signs, messages and their meanings as they are exchanged in various forms of communication. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver were engineers work-ing for a phone company (Bell). Their model was meant to explain how telephone communi-cation works, but is now also used in semiotics and linguistics.In the following examples information is sent and gathered, signs are emitted, “read” and interpreted.

1. A radiologist spots a silhouette on a chest X-ray photograph of a patient and diag-

noses lung cancer. 2. A meteorologist notes a rise in barometric pressure and delivers the next day’s fore-

cast taking that change into account. 3. An anthropologist observes a complex of ceremonial exchanges practised among

members of a tribe; she draws analytical insights into the polity, economy, and social organisation of the people she is studying.

4. A historian looks at the handwriting of Napoleon and gains insight into her subject’s personality.

5. A Kremlin watcher, in the former Soviet Union, observes the proximity of a mem-ber of the politburo to the party secretary on May Day and draws conclusions about the member’s current status.

6. A compromising fingerprint is introduced as evidence in a trial; the defendant is convicted on that evidence.

7. A hunter notices in the snow tracks of pointed hoofs; the forefoot track is 15 cm long and 13 cm broad, and the measurements for the hind-foot track are 15 cm and 11 cm. There are spherical droppings on the trail 20-30 mm long and 15-20 mm broad. The hunter surmises, with a high degree of probability, that a fully-grown bull elk is trotting ahead of him.

8. A man finds himself being stared at by a dog, growling, barking, head held high and neck arched, lips contracted vertically and teeth bared, ears erect and turned forward. The man turns and walks away.

9. Hundreds of bees are buzzing round a tree. It is a cherry tree and it is in full blos-som.

10. There is a crucifix next to the blackboard in a Bavarian classroom. Every morning the pupils say their prayers.

11. A student sends one of Shakespeare’s sonnets as an e-mail greeting to her boy-friend.

12. Two hikers have just left the pub. When they notice a dark cloud in the distance, they turn and go back to another pint of bitter.

(Examples adapted from: Sebeok, Thomas A. An Introduction to Semiotics. London: Pinter 1994. 3f.)

sender receiver sign channel message

1 patient’s lung radiologist silhouette x-rays / visual “I have cancer”

2 atmosphere meteorologist change of needle air pressure / visual “the weather will change”

3 tribe anthropologist ceremonies visual, aural “we are like this”

4 Napoleon historian handwriting visual “this is me”

5 politicians journalist proximity visual “X is important”

6 criminal court fingerprint visual “I was there”

7 elk hunter tracks, droppings visual “I was here”

8 dog man bark etc. visual, aural “go away”

9 tree bees blossoms olfactory “fetch nectar”

10 Bavarian state pupils cross visual “pray!”

11 student boyfriend sonnet electronic / visual “I love you”

12 atmosphere hikers cloud atmospheric / visual

“It’s going to rain”

Notice: senders or receivers need not be human, and the emission of a message does not need to be a conscious act.

receiverinformation source

destinationmessage

noise

CHANNEL

sendertransmittermessage

signal

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1.2 Bühler’s organon model (Karl Bühler, 1965)

Bühler, Karl. Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsform der Sprache. G. Fischer, Jena: 1965.

Bühler’s model describes the communication between a sender and a receiver by including a third party, the “objects or states of affairs”. A communicative function is attributed to each act of communication, depending which of the three parties involved is focused.

When the focus is on the sender, we speak of the expressive function of communication.

When the focus is on the world of objects, the function is representative.

The third function refers to communication where the focus is on the receiver. This function is called appellative.

1.3 Jakobson’s six functions of the sign (Roman Jakobson, 1988)

The linguist Roman Jakobson has extended Bühler’s model by adding further functions:

Functions of significance:

1) referential function: a sign’s ability to invoke a content. (Bühler: representative)2) metalingual function: suggests the codes by which the sign might be understood (e.g. conventions, genres).3) formal (poetic) function: involves the sign’s formal structure and the format which it takes. Messages convey more than just content. They always contain a creative touch. Rheto-rical figures, pitch or loudness are some aspects of the poetic function.

Functions of address:

4) emotive function: messages enable the construction of a sender. (Bühler: expressive)5) conative function: a sign’s construction of an addressee. (Bühler: appellative)6) phatic function: constructs a relationship between sender and receiver. Some utterances only serve to maintain contact between two speakers. objects and state of affairs

(Gegenstände undSachverhalte)

sender(Sender)

receiver(Empfänger)

sign(Zeichen)

signal(Appell)

symptom(Ausdruck)

expressive function

representative function

appellative function

symbol(Darstellung)

2 (metalingual)

CONTEXT

SENDER RECEIVER

CODE

CONTACT

(CHANNEL)

1 (referential)

6 (phatic)

3 (poetic)

MESSAGE

4(emotive)

5 (conative)

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2 Signs and Meaning

2.1 the semiotic triangleadapted from: [http://www.rdillman.com/HFCL/TUTOR/Semiotics/sem1.html] (2000)

Human beings have the ability to notice patterns of information (=signs) in their environments. When the perception of these patterns leads to an interpretation in the context of previous knowledge, we may say that meaning occurs. The notion of meaning (the making sense out of some information) is an important aspect of human communication, but there is little agreement as to how the term “meaning” should be defined, nor is there agreement as to how meaning is created, preserved, changed, or lost in the communication process. Among the differing points-of-view are the following:

meaning is contained in the patterns themselves (objectivist view)meaning is created in the minds of the individual senders and receivers (subjectivist view)meaning arises from the social interactions of the communicators (constructivist view)

Semiotics is the study of the relationships among signs and meaning. In semiotics, a sign is anything which produces meaning, or:

A sign is a pattern of data which brings to mind something other than itself.

Although this definition appears simple on the surface, it has complex implications. Please look at Figure 1 for a moment and try to notice what happens in your mind:

You have perceived this picture as a sign. The thought that was formed in your mind was your concept. The real-world animal that the sign resembles is the object to which the sign refers.

This process is described in Charles Saunders Peirce’s semiotic triangle (1903):

a) the sign is something which is perceived, but which stands to our mind for something else: A sign is something which stands for another thing to a mind. (MS 380, 1873)

b) the concept are the thoughts or images of a previous experience that are brought to mind when we perceive the sign

c) the object or referent is the “something else” of which we have some previous experience and to which the sign refers according to certain rules or conventions (e.g. language)

The link between a sign and the real-world object is conventional, signs do not have a fixed meaning.(figure 1)

ASIGN

COBJECT

BCONCEPT

perception

experience

convention

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2.2 different signs: icon, index and symboladapted from: [http://www.rdillman.com/HFCL/TUTOR/Semiotics/sem1.html] (2000)

A sign is a perception that refers to something other than itself. Why does a particular sign bring to mind a particular concept? In the case of a picture, the connection lies in the resem-blance of the sign to the object. It might be that one day during a trip to the zoo, you saw a large animal - and when you see a printed image that resembles the animal, this earlier expe-rience is brought to your mind. Connection-by-resemblance is one of the three fundamental ways that signs, concepts and experiences relate. The particular kind of sign in figure 1 is called an icon because it seems to resemble the animal that it brings to mind.

So far we have refrained from using the word “elephant”. The reason for this is that the word ELEPHANT is itself a sign. This second type of sign is called a symbol. Symbols and their referents (the objects that they bring to mind) are re-lated in an arbitrary manner. There is no reason why the animal under discussion might not be tagged by a different word (by different sounds or different letters) - HEFFALUMP, for example, or FRITZ, or FRINDLEMAT, or JELLYFISH. ELEPHANT is used because it has come to be used - nobody knows why.

A third kind of sign, the index, brings a concept to mind by means of a physical connection with its object. For example, if someone is walking down a street and suddenly notices the smell of freshly baked bread, he or she might find the concept of a bakery coming to mind. When he perceives footprints on the beach, Robinson concludes that he is not alone on his island.

Index: a sign that is physically con-

nected to its object.

If the rain touching your face brings

to mind the nearby storm, it is acting

as an index.

Symbol: a sign whose relationship

to its object is arbitrary

If the above sign brings to mind an

interstate highway in the United

States, it is acting as a symbol.

Icon: a sign that resembles its

object

If the above sign brings to mind a

kind of fruit, it is acting as an icon.

2.3 signifier and signified (F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. 1910/11. Translated by Wade Baskin. London, Owen: 1960.)

In Ferdinand de Saussure’s terminology, a sign consists of two elements: the signifier and the signified. In our previous examples, the picture of an elephant and the word “elephant” in its spoken or written form are signifiers. We recognise the dots and lines on the paper or the sound as something meaningful, it “signifies” something. This “something” is a concept (or a mental picture): the signified. It is not a real or a particular elephant, it it is rather something like “elephantness”. The same sound or picture can stand for male or female, young or old, African or Indian animals. Both signifier and signified are aspects of the sign, the signifier is what provokes the sensory impression, and the signified is its mental abstraction in our mind, they belong together like two sides of one coin. It is important not to confuse “signified” and “object” or “referent”: Signifier and signified are the two parts of the sign itself, the signified is a concept, not a thing.

What we see in René Magritte’s painting is not a pipe: It is a represenation of a pipe, a sign. Its material form, the canvas and the colours, are only signifiers, and what comes to our mind when we look at the painting is not a pipe either - it is only the signified - our concept of a real thing that we call “pipe”. We can smoke neither of them. (What you see here is not Magritte’s painting: It is a picture on a photocopy of a computer print-out in black and white, that was taken from a digitalized pic-ture in the internet that was probably taken from some other website and originally taken from a photography of the actual painting...)What we see in Dan Piraro’s comic are not René Magritte and his ficticious brother Rodrigo, ei-ther. Rodrigo’s pipe is just as “unreal” as René’s. What “reality” is, is difficult to say. Signs are always signs of signs, what we think of as the ref-erents of signs (the real-world objects) are con-cepts, and they become signs as soon as we talk about them, they are representations (as words or as pictures etc.) of what has been perceived in our mind via one or several of our sensual channels. Our world is not a world of objects, but a world

of signs.

SIGN =

signified

signifierSIGNIFICATION

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2.4 some more signs

Saussure was only concerned with words as linguistic signs (symbols). But as we have just seen, Saussure’s principles apply also for pictures (icons). All other things, situations or ac-tions can be regarded as a sign as soon as we attribute meaning to them. Everything that we find “significant” becomes a signifier. Attributing meaning to things is a cultural process, but it is also a semiotic process. If we interpret something, we substitute one sign for another (x=y). Every time we do that there is the possibility that the interpretation is “wrong” for somebody else (e.g. not intended by the sender of the message), or that the sign may have been consciously used in order to lie. The fact that we recognise something as a sign does not mean that its sender intended it as one, nor does it mean that the real thing is there (=refer-ential fallacy). Umberto Eco’s sentence “A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie” (A Theory of Semiotics, 1976) is meant as a general definition, not as a moral judgement. (Think of such beautiful lies as literature or film!)Thomas Sebeok (An Introduction to Semiotics, 1994) treats a large number of further signs, but categorizes them into six basic species:

signal A sign which mechanically (naturally) or conventionally (artificially) triggers some reaction on the part of a receiver.

symptom The signifier is coupled with the signified in the manner of a natural (compul-sive, automatic, non-arbitrary) link.

icon A sign is said to be iconic when there is a topological similarity between a signifier and its signified.

index A sign whose signifier is contiguous with its signified, or is a sample of it.symbol A sign without either similarity or contiguity, with only a conventional link

between its signifier and its denotata, and with an intensional class for its des-ignatum. (intensional class = a group of signifieds with the same attributes, e.g. the sign “dog” may refer to any known or unknown particular animal of a group of animals that bark and wag their tails.)

name A sign which has an extensional class for its designatum. (extensional class = a countable group of individually defined signifieds: Many people are called “Peter”, but I will only recognize one as “Peter” if I know him.)

Signs may be used in different ways, a particular sign does not have to belong to one class only. For example, the American flag can be used as a signal (e.g. at a race), it can be seen as an icon (because the number of stars stands for the number of states etc.), it can be used as an index (planted on the top of a mountain or on the moon), or it may stand symbolically for the country or for certain values.

2.5 codes as networks of differences

That a sign has a particular meaning is not because of a fixed relation between signifier and signified, but because it is different from any other sign. Our concept of the animal CAT has the signifier “cat” because it is not a “bat”, “rat”, “mat”, “hat”, “cap”, “cad”, “cut” etc. Differ-ent speakers may pronounce a word differently and different writers may write it in different ways, but this distinction must remain clear. In the same way we distinguish the signifieds by difference: We recognize an animal as a cat if we notice that it is not a dog, a horse etc., and

in other contexts also because it is not a panther, a tiger, or a lion etc.Meaning is not the product of the sign itself but of the code within which it is used. A sign can only be understood if we know in which set of differ-ences (e.g. in which language) it is used. In the picture on the left we have to know whether the background is black or white. The signifiers “hut”, “gift”, “rat”, “bat” have different signifieds in German and English, the colour red may stand for “stop”, for “love”, for “blood” etc.

Nodding or shaking your head means “yes” and “no” in the body language of our own cul-ture, but in Greece this is just the other way round. The hand movement that stands for “go away” in our body language means “come” in Spain.

2.6 connotation and denotation

We know that within one language words can have more than one meaning. This is also true for all other signs, and it is a rule rather than an exception. When you looked at figure 1, you may have thought of an animal, but somebody else may have thought of “zoo”, “safari”, “Africa”, “means of transport”, “circus”, “happiness”, “friendliness”, “weight watch-ing” or something else. All these might be possible connotations, and depending where (in what context) you see the picture, some of them might be more or less significant than others. The most likely meaning in a given context is a sign’s denotation.

Connotations are the set of all possible signifieds to one signifier. Denotations are the most stable connotations of a sign. Connotations do not have to be “true”, they can even contradict each other. The picture with the vase or the two faces above has to be read in two different ways - with a black background and with a white one. An advertisement that juxtaposes the brand name of a cigarette with happy people makes “health” a connotation of its product, although “cancer” may also be a connotation of smoking.Like all meanings, connotations are related to codes and to contexts.

(figure 1)

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2.7 paradigm and syntagm

Codes are organised along two axes: selection and combination. Within a given code, selected elements may be combined according to certain rules:

A paradigm is a set of signs within a code (e.g. the words of a language)A syntagm is a combination of such signs according to a certain rule (e.g. grammar, metre and rhyme schemes)

elements of paradigm + rule = syntagmwords grammar, syntax sentenceingredients recipe finished dishclothes dress code way somebody is dresseditems on menu sequence of courses mealchess figures rules of the game moveletters, numbers, operators algebra equationtraffic signs traffic rules signs on a particular streetfolds origami paper animalgenes genetic code person

Syntagms are complex signs that may again be part of of other paradigms and may become part of other syntagms following further rules. Words are syntagms formed upon the para-digm of the alphabet; as words they form the paradigm that serves to form sentences; the sentences in a sonnet follow specific rules regarding metre and rhyme, several sonnets in a sonnet sequence follow certain rules of this genre etc.

2.8 metaphor

A metaphor is an implicit or explicit comparison between signs. “He is a pig” may be a meta-phor: It does not mean that somebody is a farm animal, but that his behaviour is somehow like such an animal. Everyday speech is full of metaphors, and many of them have become so common that they are not even noticed as such: “give me a hand”, “lend me your ears”, “I can’t grasp this” / “ich kann das nicht begreifen” etc.Metaphors may be visual as well as verbal. The examples here were part of a campaign for the relaunch of a news-paper (Basler Zeitung). Paradigmati-cally, the new newspaper is exchanged for a baby in a mother’s womb. The unfamiliar, a yet unknown newspaper, is compared to something more natural and familiar. Syntagmatically, the met-aphor in these advertisements sets up a proposition: “Since the new Basler Zei-tung and the baby in the womb are now both members of the same paradigm set, they are equivalent.” The future change of format is thus legitimized as some-thing natural, as something its creators or “parents” are proud of and as some-thing everybody is looking forward.

2.9 metonymy

A metonym is an association of terms. One sign is associated with another of which it signi-fies either a part, the whole, one of its functions or attributes, or a related concept.We can refer to a car as a “motor” or as “wheels” (synekdoche: part for the whole); we can refer to a smaller amount of people as a nation by saying “The British have decided” (whole for a part); if we call somebody “Dear” we use an attribute, if we call somebody “Mr. Chair-man” we refer to him metonymically by his function.In visual representation metonymy is often problematic, but always inescapable: During a TV news report only a few people can be shown and interviewed, but they will automatically stand as representatives (signs) for a larger group. In many countries it is forbidden to advertise for tobacco or alcohol. Advertising may then use metonymy to overcome legal constraints (the colour gold for Benson and Hedges, a camel for Camel, a cowboy for Marlboro etc.)

Adapted from: Thwaites, Tony et al. Tools for Cultural Studies, Melbourne 1994.

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semiotics: narratology

Vladimir Propp: Functions in Russian Folk Tales

[adapted from: Durant, Alan and Nigel Fabb. Literary Studies in Action London and New York: Routledge, 1990. p. 184Peter Barry, Beginning Theory. Manchester UP 2002, p. 227fand: Downes, B. and S. Miller. Teach Yourself media studies. London, Hodder: 1998, p.50]

Introduction of a family or a hero:

1. The initial situation in a community/family/kingdom. 2. A warning is given. 3. The warning is ignored. / An interdiction is violated.

The villain enters the tale:

4. A villain appears. 5. The villain receives information about his victim. 6. The villain tries to deceive his victim (often by disguise) in order to take possession of

him or of his belongings. 7. The victim submits to the deception and thereby unwittingly helps his enemy.

Complication of the tale:

8. The villain causes harm or injury to a member of a family. 8a. One member of a family lacks something or desires to have something.

The hero enters the tale as seeker or victim:

9. Misfortune or lack is made known; the hero is approached with a request or command; he is allowed to go or is despatched.

10. The hero (seeker) decides upon counteraction.11. The hero leaves home.

The donor (friendly or unfriendly) is introduced. He/she will provide the hero with something (usually magical) which will enable the tale to be brought to a conclusion:

12. The hero is tested, does well and receives an object or person to help him (a magical thing or helper).

13. The hero reacts (positively or negatively) to the actions of the future donor.14. The hero acquires the use of a magical thing / power.

The hero now uses the magical thing / power. His intentions create the axis of the narrative:

15. The hero arrives at the place where the thing he seeks is to be found.16. There is a struggle between hero and villain.17. The hero is branded or recognisably wounded.18. The villain is defeated.19. The problem is resolved / The initial misfortune or lack is reversed. (peak of the nar-

rative)20. The hero returns to the community/family/kingdom.21. The hero is punished or pursued.22. The hero escapes or is rescued from pursuit.

Sometimes there is a new villainy, which starts the plot sequence off again:

23. The hero, unrecognised, arrives home or in another country.24. A false hero arrives and presents unfounded claims.25. A difficult task is proposed to the hero.26. The task is resolved.27. The true hero is recognised.28. The false hero or villain is exposed and punished.29. The hero is rewarded / given an new appearance30. The villain is punished31. The hero is married and ascends the throne.

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Little Red Riding Hood

From: Charles Perrault, Histories: or, Tales of Times Past with Morals, trans. Robert Samber (London: J. Pote and R. Montagu, 1729) [http://www.usm.edu/english/fairytales/lrrh/lrrhm.htm] (2003)

THERE was once upon a time a little country girl, born in a village, the prettiest little creature that was ever seen. Her mother was beyond reason excessively fond of her, and her grand-mother yet much more. This good woman caused to be made for her a little red Riding-Hood; which made her look so very pretty, that every body call’d her, The little red Riding-Hood.ONE day, her mother having made some custards, said to her, Go my little Biddy, for her christian name was Biddy, go and see how your grandmother does, for I hear she has been very ill, carry her a custard, and this little pot of butter. The little red Riding-Hood sets out immediately to go to her grandmother, who lived in another village. As she was going through the wood, she met with Gossop Wolfe, who had a good mind to eat her up, but he did not dare, because of some faggot-makers that were in the forest.HE asked of her whither she was going: The poor child, who did not know how dangerous a thing it is to stay and hear a Wolfe talk, said to him, I am going to see my grandmamma, and carry her a custard pye, and a little pot of butter my mamma sends her. Does she live far off? said the Wolfe. Oh! ay, said the little red Riding-Hood, on the other side of the mill below yonder, at the first house in the village. Well, said the Wolfe, and I’ll go and see her too; I’ll go this way, and you go that, and we shall see who will be there soonest.THE Wolfe began to run as fast as he was able, the shortest way; and the little girl went the longest, diverting her self in gathering nuts, running after butterflies, and making nose-gays of all the little flowers she met with. The Wolfe was not long before he came to the grandmoth-er’s house; he knocked at the door toc toc. Whose there? Your granddaughter, The little red Riding-Hood, said the Wolfe, counterfeiting her voice, who has brought you a custard pye, and a little pot of butter mamma sends you.THE good grandmother, who was in bed, because she found herself somewhat ill, cried out, Pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up. The Wolfe pull’d the bobbin, and the door open’d; upon which he fell upon the good woman, and eat her up in the tenth part of a moment; for he had eaten nothing for above three days before. After that, he shut the door, and went into the grandmother’s bed, expecting the little red Riding-Hood, who came some time afterwards, and knock’d at the door toc toc, Who’s there? The little red Riding-Hood, who hearing the big voice of the Wolfe, was at first afraid; but believing her grandmother had got a cold, and was grown hoarse, said, it is your granddaughter, The little red Riding-Hood, who has brought you a custard pye, and a little pot of butter mamma sends you. The Wolfe cried out to her, softening his voice as much as he could, Pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up. The little red Riding-Hood pull’d the bobbin, and the door opened.THE Wolfe seeing her come in, said to her, hiding himself under the clothes. Put the custard, and the little pot of butter upon the stool, and come into bed with me. The little red Riding-Hood undressed her self, and went into bed, where she was very much astonished to see how her grandmother looked in her night-cloaths: So she said to her, Grandmamma, what great

arms you have got! It is the better to embrace thee my pretty child. Grandmamma, what great legs you have got! it is to run the better my child. Grandmamma, what great ears you have got! It is to hear the better my child. Grandmamma, what great eyes you have got! It is to see the better my child. Grandmamma, what great teeth you have got! It is to eat thee up. And upon saying these words, this wicked Wolfe fell upon the little Red Riding-Hood, and eat her up.

The MORALFRom this short story easy we discernWhat conduct all young people ought to learn.But above all, the growing ladies fair,Whose orient rosy Blooms begin t’appear:Who, Beauties in the fragrant spring of age!With pretty airs young hearts are apt t’engage.Ill do they listen to all sorts of tongues,Since some enchant and lure like Syrens songs.No wonder therefore ’tis if overpower’d,So many of them has the Wolfe devour’d.The Wolfe, I say, for Wolves too sure there areOf every sort, and every character.Some of them mild and gentle-humour’d beOf noise and gall, and rancour wholly free;Who tame, familiar, full of complaisance;ogle and leer, languish, cajole and glance;With luring tongues, and language wondrous sweet,Follow young ladies as they walk the street,Ev’n to their very houses and bedside,And though their true designs they artful hide,Yet ah! these simpring Wolves, who does not seeMost dang’rous of all Wolves in fact to be?

A different ending: Malena, n.d. [http://www.usm.edu/english/fairytales/lrrh/lrrha.htm] (2003)

“The better to eat you with, my darling,” shouted the wolf, and with one bound he sprang out of bed, and would have gobbled Red Riding Hood right up, had not she been too quick. She ran screaming out of the cottage, and fortunately Karl, the Woodman’s son, was pass-ing, and he quickly killed the wolf with his axe.Little Red Riding Hood was very much frighteded, but not hurt. Karl took her home to her mother, and ever since that day she has never been allowed to go through the wood alone.

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The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar From The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II. New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son, 1884.

Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not - especially under the circumstances. Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the present, or until we had further opportunities for investigation - through our endeavors to effect this - a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations; and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbelief. It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts - as far as I comprehend them myself. They are, succinctly, these: My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mes-merism; and, about nine month ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission: - no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, whether in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extend, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity - the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.In looking around me for some subject by whose means I might test these particulars, I was brought to think of my friend, M. Ernest Valdemar, the wellknown compiler of the “Bibliotheca Forensica”, and author (under the nom de plume of Issachar Marx) of the Polish versions of “Wallenstein” and “Gargantua.” M. Valdemar, who has resided princi-pally at Harlem, N.Y., since the year 1839, is (or was) particularly noticeable for the ex-treme spareness of his person - his lower limbs much resembling those of John Randolph; and, also, for the whiteness of his whiskers, in violent contrast to the blackness of his hair - the latter, in consequence, being very generally mistaken for a wig. His temperament was markedly nervous, and rendered him a good subject for mesmeric experiment. On two or three occasions I had put him to sleep with little difficulty, but was disappointed in other results which his peculiar constitution had naturally led me to anticipate. His will was at no period positively, or thoroughly, under my control, and in regard to clairvoy-ance, I could accomplish with him nothing to be relied upon. I always attributed my fail-ure at these points to the disordered state of his health. For some months previous to my becoming acquainted with him, his physicians had declared him in a confirmed phthisis. It was his custom, indeed, to speak calmly of his approaching dissolution, as of a matter neither to be avoided nor regretted. When the ideas to which I have alluded first occurred to me, it was of course very natural that I should think of M. Valdemar. I knew the steady philosophy of the man too well to apprehend any scruples from him; and he had no relatives in America who would be likely to interfere. I spoke to him frankly upon the subject; and to my surprise, his inter-

est seemed vividly excited. I say to my surprise; for, although he had always yielded his person freely to my experiments, he had never before given me any tokens of sympathy with what I did. His disease was of that character which would admit of exact calculation in respect to the epoch of its termination in death; and it was finally arranged between us that he would send for me about twentyfour hours before the period announced by his physicians as that of his decease. It is now rather more than seven months since I received, from M. Valdemar himself, the subjoined note:

“MY DEAR P.You may as well come now. D and F are agreed that I cannot hold out beyond tomor-row midnight; and I think they have hit the time very nearly. VALDEMAR.”

I received this note within half an hour after it was written, and in fifteen minutes more I was in the dying man’s chamber. I had not seen him for ten days, and was appalled by the fearful alteration which the brief interval had wrought in him. His face wore a leaden hue; the eyes were utterly lustreless; and the emaciation was so extreme, that the skin had been broken through by the cheekbones. His expectoration was excessive. The pulse was barely perceptible. He retained, nevertheless, in a very remarkable manner, both his mental power and a certain degree of physical strength. He spoke with distinctness - took some palliative medicines without aid - and, when I entered the room, was occupied in pencilling memoranda in a pocketbook. He was propped up in the bed by pillows. Doc-tors D and F were in attendance. After pressing Valdemar’s hand, I took these gentlemen aside, and obtained from them a minute account of the patient’s condition. The left lung had been for eighteen months in a semiosseous or cartilaginous state, and was, of course, entirely useless for all purposes of vitality. The right, in its upper portion, was also partially, if not thoroughly, ossified, while the lower region was merely a mass of purulent tubercles, running one into anoth-er. Several extensive perforations existed; and, at one point, permanent adhesion to the ribs had taken place. These appearances in the right lobe were of comparatively recent date. The ossification had proceeded with very unusual rapidity; no sign of it had been discovered a month before, and the adhesion had only been observed during the three previous days. Independently of the phthisis, the patient was suspected of aneurysm of the aorta; but on this point the osseous symptoms rendered an exact diagnosis impossi-ble. It was the opinion of both physicians that M. Valdemar would die about midnight on the morrow (Sunday.) It was then seven o’clock on Saturday evening. On quitting the invalid’s bedside to hold conversation with myself, Doctors D and F had bidden him a final farewell. It had not been their intention to return; but, at my request, they agreed to look in upon the patient about ten the next night. When they had gone, I spoke freely with M. Valdemar on the subject of his approaching dissolution, as well as, more particularly, of the experiment proposed. He still professed himself quite willing and even anxious to have it made, and urged me to commence it at once. A male and a female nurse were in attendance; but I did not feel myself altogether at liberty to engage in a task of this character with no more reliable witnesses than these people, in case of sudden accident, might prove. I therefore postponed operations until

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about eight the next night, when the arrival of a medical student, with whom I had some acquaintance, (Mr. Theodore L ... l,) relieved me from further embarrassment. It had been my design, originally, to wait for the physicians; but I was induced to proceed, first, by the urgent entreaties of M. Valdemar, and secondly, by my conviction that I had not a moment to lose, as he was evidently sinking fast. Mr. L ... l was so kind as to accede to my desire that he would take notes of all that oc-curred; and it is from his memoranda that what I now have to relate is, for the most part, either condensed or copied verbatim. It wanted about five minutes of eight when, taking the patient’s hand, I begged him to state, as distinctly as he could, to Mr. L ... l , whether he (M. Valdemar) was entirely will-ing that I should make the experiment of mesmerizing him in his then condition. He replied feebly, yet quite audibly: “Yes, I wish to be mesmerized” - adding immedi-ately afterward: “I fear you have deferred it too long.” While he spoke thus, I commenced the passes which I had already found most effectual in subduing him. He was evidently influenced with the first lateral stroke of my hand across his forehead; but, although I exerted all my powers, no further perceptible effect was induced until some minutes after ten o’clock, when Doctors D and F called, accord-ing to appointment. I explained to them, in a few words, what I designed, and as they opposed no objection, saying that the patient was already in the death agony, I proceeded without hesitation - exchanging, however, the lateral passes for downward ones, and directing my gaze entirely into the right eye of the sufferer. By this time his pulse was imperceptible and his breathing was stertorious, and at inter-vals of half a minute. This condition was nearly unaltered for a quarter of an hour. At the expiration of this period, however, a natural although a very deep sigh escaped from the bosom of the dy-ing man, and the stertorious breathing ceased - that is to say, its stertoriousness was no longer apparent; the intervals were undiminished. The patient’s extremities were of an icy coldness. At five minutes before eleven, I perceived unequivocal signs of the mesmeric influence. The glassy roll of the eye was changed for that expression of uneasy inward examina-tion which is never seen except in cases of sleepwaking, and which is quite impossible to mistake. With a few rapid lateral passes I made the lids quiver, as in incipient sleep, and with a few more I closed them altogether. I was not satisfied, however, with this, but continued the manipulations vigorously, and with the fullest exertion of the will, until I had completely stiffened the limbs of the slumberer, after placing them in a seemingly easy position. The legs were at full length; the arms were nearly so, and reposed on the bed at a moderate distance from the loins. The head was very slightly elevated. When I had accomplished this, it was fully midnight, and I requested the gentlemen present to examine M. Valdemar’s condition. After a few experiments, they admitted him to be in a perfect state of mesmeric trance. The curiosity of both the physicians was greatly excited. Dr. D resolved at once to remain with the patient all night, while Dr. F took leave with a promise to return at daybreak. Mr. L ... l and the nurses remained. We left M. Valdemar entirely undisturbed until about three o’clock in the morning, when

I approached him and found him in precisely the same condition as when Dr. F went away - that is to say, he lay in the same position; the pulse was imperceptible; the breath-ing was gentle (scarcely noticeable, unless through the application of a mirror to the lips); the eyes were closed naturally; and the limbs were as rigid and as cold as marble. Still, the general appearance was not that of death. As I approached M. Valdemar I made a kind of half effort to influence his right arm into pursuit of my own, as I passed the latter gently to and fro above his person. In such ex-periments with this patient, I had never perfectly succeeded before, and assuredly I had little thought of succeeding now; but to my astonishment, his arm very readily, although feebly, followed every direction I assigned it with mine. I determined to hazard a few words of conversation. “M. Valdemar,” I said, “are you asleep?” He made no answer, but I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eyelids unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of a ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words: “Yes; - asleep now. Do not wake me! - let me die so!” Here I felt the limbs, and found them as rigid as ever. The right arm, as before, obeyed the direction of my hand. I questioned the sleepwaker again: “Do you still feel pain in the breast, M. Valdemar?” The answer now was immediate, but even less audible than before: “No pain - I am dying!” I did not think it advisable to disturb him further just then, and nothing more was said or done until the arrival of Dr. F, who came a little before sunrise, and expressed unbounded astonishment at finding the patient still alive. After feeling the pulse and applying a mir-ror to the lips, he requested me to speak to the sleepwaker again. I did so, saying: “M. Valdemar, do you still sleep?” As before, some minutes elapsed ere a reply was made; and during the interval the dying man seemed to be collecting his energies to speak. At my fourth repetition of the ques-tion, he said very faintly, almost inaudibly: “Yes; stillasleep - dying.” It was now the opinion, or rather the wish, of the physicians, that M. Valdemar should be suffered to remain undisturbed in his present apparently tranquil condition, until death should supervene - and this, it was generally agreed, must now take place within a few minutes. I concluded, however, to speak to him once more, and merely repeated my previous question. While I spoke, there came a marked change over the countenance of the sleepwaker. The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the pupils disappearing upwardly; the skin gener-ally assumed a cadaverous hue, resembling not so much parchment as white paper; and the circular hectic spots which, hitherto, had been strongly defined in the centre of each cheek, went out at once. I use this expression, because the suddenness of their departure put me in mind of nothing so much as the extinguishment of a candle by a puff of the breath. The upper lip, at the same time, writhed itself away from the teeth, which it had

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previously covered completely; while the lower jaw fell with an audible jerk, leaving the mouth widely extended, and disclosing in full view the swollen and blackened tongue. I presume that no member of the party then present had been unaccustomed to deathbed horrors; but so hideous beyond conception was the appearance of M. Valdemar at this moment, that there was a general shrinking back from the region of the bed. I now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will be star-tled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed. There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M. Valdemar; and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses, when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue. This continued for perhaps a minute. At the expira-tion of this period, there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice - such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets which might be considered as applicable to it in part; I might say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation - as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears - at least mine - from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch. I have spoken both of “sound” and of “voice.” I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct - of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct, syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke - obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. Now he said: “Yes; - no; - I have been sleeping - and now - now - I am dead.” No person present even affected to deny, or attempted to repress, the unutterable, shud-dering horror which these few words, thus uttered, were so well calculated to convey. Mr. L ... l (the student) swooned. The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not be induced to return. My own impressions I would not pretend to render intelligible to the reader. For nearly an hour, we busied ourselves, silently - without the utterance of a word - in endeavors to revive Mr. L ... l . When he came to himself, we addressed ourselves again to an investigation of M. Valdemar’s condition. It remained in all respects as I have last described it, with the exception that the mirror no longer afforded evidence of respiration. An attempt to draw blood from the arm failed. I should mention, too, that this limb was no further subject to my will. I endeavored in vain to make it follow the direction of my hand. The only real indication, indeed, of the mesmeric influence, was now found in the vibratory movement of the tongue, whenever I addressed M. Valdemar a question. He seemed to be making an effort to reply, but had no longer sufficient volition. To queries put to him by any other person than myself he seemed utterly insensible - although I endeavored to place each member of the company in mesmeric rapport with him. I believe that I have now related all that is necessary to an

understanding of the sleepwaker’s state at this epoch. Other nurses were procured; and at ten o’clock I left the house in company with the two physicians and Mr. L ... l . In the afternoon we all called again to see the patient. His condition remained precisely the same. We had now some discussion as to the propriety and feasibility of awakening him; but we had little difficulty in agreeing that no good purpose would be served by so doing. It was evident that, so far, death (or what is usually termed death) had been arrested by the mesmeric process. It seemed clear to us all that to awaken M. Valdemar would be merely to insure his instant, or at least his speedy, dissolution. From this period until the close of last week - an interval of nearly seven months - we continued to make daily calls at M. Valdemar’s house, accompanied, now and then, by medical and other friends. All this time the sleepwaker remained exactly as I have last described him. The nurses’ attentions were continual. It was on Friday last that we finally resolved to make the experiment of awakening, or attempting to awaken him; and it is the (perhaps) unfortunate result of this latter experi-ment which has given rise to so much discussion in private circles - to so much of what I cannot help thinking unwarranted popular feeling. For the purpose of relieving M. Valdemar from the mesmeric trance, I made use of the customary passes. These for a time were unsuccessful. The first indication of revival was afforded by a partial descent of the iris. It was observed, as specially remarkable, that this lowering of the pupil was accompanied by the profuse outflowing of a yellowish ichor (from beneath the lids) of a pungent and highly offensive odor. It was now suggested that I should attempt to influence the patient’s arm as heretofore. I made the attempt and failed. Dr. F then intimated a desire to have me put a question. I did so, as follows: “M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes now?” There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks: the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before), and at length the same hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth: “For God’s sake! - quick! - quick! - put me to sleep - or, quick! - waken me! - quick! - I say to you that I am dead!” I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. At first I made an endeavor to recompose the patient; but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him. In this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful - or at least I soon fancied that my success would be complete - and I am sure that all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken. For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared. As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once - within the space of a single minute, or less, shrunk - crumbled - absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before the whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome - of detestable putrescence.

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Roland Barthes: Textual analysis: Poe’s Valdemar

[This article was written in 1973; it demonstrates the (post)structural method Barthes had devised, most famously, in S/Z (1970), his analysis of Balzac’s story Sarrasine. ]

The structural analysis of narrative is at present in the course of full elaboration. All research in this area has a common scientific origin: semiology or the science of signification; but already (and this is a good thing) divergences within that research are appearing, according to the critical stance each piece of work takes with respect to the scientific status of semiol-ogy, or in other words, with respect to its own discourse. These divergences (which are con-structive) can be brought together under two broad tendencies: in the first, faced with all the narratives in the world, the analysis seeks to establish a narrative model - which is evidently formal -, a structure or grammar of narrative, on the basis of which (once this model, struc-ture or grammar has been discovered) each particular narrative will be analyzed in terms of divergences. In the second tendency, the narrative is immediately subsumed (at least when it leads itself to being subsumed) under the notion of ‘text’, space, process of meanings at work, in short, ‘significance’(we shall come back to this word at the end), which is observed not as a finished, closed product, but as a production in progress, ‘plugged in’ to other texts, other codes (this is the intertextual), and thereby articulated with society and history in ways that are not determinist but citational. [...]Textual analysis does not try to describe the structure of a work; it is not a matter of recording a structure, but rather of producing a mobile structuration of the text (a structuration which is displaced from reader to reader throughout history), of staying in the signifying volume of the work, in its ‘significance’. Textual analysis does not try to find out what it is that determines the text [...] but rather how the text explodes and disperses. We are then going to take a narra-tive text, and we are going to read it, as slowly as is necessary, stopping as often as we have to (being at ease is an essential dimension of our work), and try to locate and classify without rigor, not all the meanings of the text (which would be impossible because the text is open to infinity: no reader, no subject, no science can arrest the text) but the forms and codes ac-cording to which meanings are possible. We are going to locate the avenues of meaning. Our aim is not to find the meaning, nor even a meaning of the text [....] Our aim is to manage to conceive, to imagine, to live the plurality of text, the opening of its ‘significance’. [...Textual analysis] touches on a theory, a practice, a choice, which are caught up in the struggle of men and signs.1. We shall cut up the text I am proposing for study into contiguous, and in general very short, segments (a sentence, part of a sentence, at most a group of three of four sentences); we shall number these fragments starting from 1 (in about ten pages of text there are 150 segments). These segments are units of reading, and this is why I have proposed to call them ‘lexias’. [...] All in all, the fragmenting of the narrative text into lexias is purely empirical, dictated by the concern of convenience: the lexia is an arbitrary product, it is simply a segment within which the distribution of meanings is observed; it is what surgeons would call an operating field: the useful lexia is one where only one, two or three meanings take place [...]

2. For each lexia, we shall observe the meanings to which that lexia gives rise. By meaning, it is clear that we do not mean the meanings of the words or groups of words which dictionary and grammar, in short a knowledge of the French language, would be sufficient to account for. We mean the connotations of the lexia, the secondary meanings. These connotation-mean-ings can be associations (for example, the physical description of a character, spread out over several sentences, may have only one connoted signified, the ‘nervousness’ of that character, even though the word does not figure at the level of denotation); they can also be relations, resulting from a linking of two points in the text, which are sometimes far apart, (an action begun can be completed, finished, much further on). Our lexias will be, if I can put it like this, the finest possible sieves, thanks to which we shall ‘cream off’ meanings, connotations.3. Our analysis will be progressive: we shall cover the length of the text step by step, at least in theory [...] we shan’t be carrying out an explication of the text, unless we give the word ‘explication’ its etymological sense, in so far as well shall be unfolding the text, the foliation of the text. Our analysis will retain the procedure of reading; only this reading will be, in some measure, filmed in slow-motion. [...]4. Finally, we shan’t get unduly worried if in our account we ‘forget’ some meanings. For-getting meanings is in some sense part of reading: the important thing is to show departures of meaning, not arrivals (and is meaning basically anything other than a departure?). What founds the text is not an internal, closed, accountable structure, but the outlet of the text on to other texts, other signs’ what makes the text is the intertextual. We are beginning to glimpse (through other sciences) the fact that research must little by little get used to the conjunction of two ideas which for a long time were thought incompatible: the idea of structure and the idea of combinational infinity; the conciliation of these two postulations is forced upon us now because language, which we are getting to know better, is at once infinite and struc-tured.I think that these remarks are sufficient for us to begin the analysis of the text (we must al-ways give in to the impatience of the text, and never forget that whatever the imperatives of study, the pleasure of the text is our law).[Barthes introduces here Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,“ in Charles Baudelaire’s translation]To be frank, I ought to add this: in analyzing the ‘significance’ of a text, we shall abstain voluntarily from dealing with certain problems; we shall not speak of the author, Edgar Poe, nor of the literary history of which he is a part; we shall not take into account the fact that the analysis will be carried out on a translation. [...] This does not necessarily mean that these problems will not pass into our analysis; on the contrary, they will pass, in the proper sense of the term: the analysis is a crossing of the text; these problems can be located in terms of cultural quotations, of departures of codes, not of determinations.A final word, which is perhaps one of conjuration, exorcism: the text we are going to analyze is neither lyrical nor political, it speaks neither of love nor society, it speaks of death. This means that we shall have to lift a particular censorship: that attached to the sinister. We shall do this, persuaded that any censorship stands for all others: speaking of death outside all reli-gion lifts at once the religious interdict and the rationalist one.

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Analysis of lexias 1-17

1) The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (La Vérité sur la case de M. Valdemar)The function of the title has not been well studied, at least from a structural point of view. What can be said straight away is that for commercial reasons, society needing to assimilate the text to a product, a commodity, has need of markers: the function of the title is to mark the beginning of the text, that is, to constitute the text as a commodity. Every title thus has several simultaneous meanings, including at least these two: (I) what it says linked to the contingency of what follows it; (ii) the announcement itself that a piece of literature (which means, in fact, a commodity) is going to follow; in other words, the title always has a double function; enunciating and deictic.a) Announcing a truth involves the stipulation of an enigma. The posing of the enigma is a result (at the level of the signifiers): of the word ‘truth’ [in the French title]; of the word ‘case’ (that which is exceptional, therefore marked, therefore signifying, and consequently of which the meaning must be found); of the definite article ‘the’ [in the French title] (there is only one truth, all the work of the text will, then, be needed to pass through this narrow gate); of the cataphorical form implied by the title: what follows will realize what is announced, the reso-lution of the enigma is already announced; we should note that the English says: The Facts in the Case: the signified which Poe is aiming at is of an empirical order, that aimed at by the French translator is hermeneutic: the truth refers then to the exact facts, but also perhaps to their meaning. However this may be, we shall code this first sense of the lexia: ‘enigma, posi-tion’ (the enigma is the general name of a code, the position is only one term of it).b) The truth could be spoken without being announced, without there being a reference to the word itself. If one speaks of what one is going to say, if language is thus doubled into two lay-ers of which the first in some sense caps the second, then what one is doing is resorting to the use of a metalanguage. There is then here the presence of the metalinguistic code.c) This metalinguistic announcement has an aperitive function: it is a question of whetting the reader’s appetite (a procedure which is akin to ‘suspense’). The narrative is a commodity the proposal of which is preceded by a ‘patter’. This ‘patter’, this ‘appetizer’ is a term of the narrative code (rhetoric of narration).d) A proper name should always be carefully questioned, for the proper name is, if I can put it like this, the prince of signifiers; its connotations are rich, social and symbolic. In the name of Valdemar, the following two connotations at least can be read: (i) presence of a socio-ethnic code: is the name German? Slavic? In any case, not Anglo-Saxon; this little enigma here implicitly formulated, will be resolved at [lexia] number 19 (Valdemar is Polish); (ii) ‘Valdemar’is ‘the valley of the sea’; the oceanic abyss’the depths of the sea is a theme dear to Poe; the gulf refers to what is twice outside nature, under the waters and under the earth. From the point of view of the analysis there are, then, the traces of two codes: a socio-ethnic code and a (or the) symbolic code (we shall return to these codes a little later).e) Saying ‘M(onsieur) Valdemar’ is not the same thing as saying ‘Valdemar’. In a lot of stories Poe uses simple Christian names (Ligeia, Eleanora, Morella). The presence of the ‘Monsieur’ brings with it an effect of social reality, of the historically real: the hero is socialized, he forms

part of a definite society, in which he is supplied with a civil title. We must therefore note: social code.

2. Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not - es-pecially under the circumstances.a) This sentence (and those immediately following) have as their obvious function that of exciting the reader’s expectation, and that is why they are apparently meaningless: what one wants is the solution of the enigma posed in the title (the ‘truth’), but even the exposition of this enigma is held back. So we must code: delay in posing the enigma.b) The word ‘extraordinary’ is ambiguous: it refers to that which departs from the norm but not necessarily from nature (if the case remains ‘medical’), but it can also refer to what is supernatural, what has moved into transgression (this is the ‘fantastic’ element of the stories - ‘extraordinary’, precisely [The French title of Poe’s Collected Stories is Histoires extraor-dinaires] - that Poe tells). The ambiguity of the word is here meaningful: the story will be a horrible one (outside the limits of nature) which is yet covered by the scientific alibi (here connoted by the ‘discussion’, which is a scientist’s word). This bonding is in fact cultural: the mixture of the strange and the scientific had its high-point in the part of the nineteenth century to which Poe, broadly speaking, belongs: there was great enthusiasm for observing the supernatural scientifically (magnetism, spiritism, telepathy, etc.); the supernatural adopts a scientific, rationalist alibi; the cry from the heart of that positivist age runs thus: if only one could believe scientifically in immortality! This cultural code, which for simplicity’s sake we shall here call the scientific code, will be of great importance throughout the narrative.

3. Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the present, or until we had further opportunities for investigation - through our endeavors to effect this -a) Same scientific code, picked up by the word ‘investigation’ (which is also a detective story word: the fortune of the detective novel in the second half of the nineteenth century - starting from Poe, precisely - is well known: what is important here, ideologically and structurally, is the conjunction of the code of the detective enigma and the code of science - scientific dis-course - which proves that structural analysis can collaborate perfectly well with ideological analysis).b) The motives of the secret are not given; they can proceed from two different codes, present together in reading (to read is also silently to imagine what is not said): (i) the scientific-deon-tological code: the doctors and Poe, out of loyalty and prudence, do not want to make public a phenomenon which has not been cleared up scientifically; (ii) the symbolic code: there is a taboo on living death: one keeps silent because it is horrible. We ought to say straight away (even though we shall come back and insist on this alter) that these two codes are undecidable (we can’t choose one against the other), and that it is this very undecidability which makes for a good narrative.

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4. a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations, and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbeliefa) The request for truth, that is, the enigma, has already been placed twice (by the word ‘truth’ [in the French title] and by the expression ‘extraordinary case’). The enigma is here posed a third time (to pose an enigma, in structural terms, means to utter: there is an enigma), by the invocation of the error to which it gave rise: the error, posed here, justifies retroactively, ana-phorically, the [French] title .... The redundancy operated on the position of the enigma (the fact that there is an enigma is repeated in several ways) has an aperitive value: it is a matter of exciting the reader, of procuring clients for the narrative.b) In the actional sequence ‘to hide’, a second term appears: this is the effect of the secret: distortion, mistaken opinion, accusation of mystification.

5. It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts -- as far as I comprehend them myselfa) The emphasis placed on ‘the facts’ supposes the intrication of two codes, between which - as in (3b), it is impossible to decide: (i) the law, the deontology of science, makes the scientist, the observer, a slave to the face; the opposition of fact and rumor is an old mythical theme; when it is invoked in a fiction (and invoked emphatically), the fact has as its structural func-tion (for the real effect of the artifice fools no one) that of authenticating the story, not that of making the reader believe that it really happened, but that of presenting the discourse of the real, and not that of the fable. The fact is then caught up in a paradigm in which it is opposed to mystification (Poe admitted in a private letter that the story of M. Valdemar was a pure mystification: it is a mere hoax). The code which structures the reference to the fact is then the scientific code which we have already met. (ii) However, any more or less pompous recourse to the fact can also be considered to by the symptom of the subject’s being mixed up with the symbolic [...] the narrator takes on an imaginary role, that of the scientist: the signified of the lexia is then the asymbolism of the subject of the enunciation; ‘I’ presents itself as asymbolic; the negation of the symbolic is clearly part of the symbolic code itself.b) The actional sequence ‘to hide’ develops: the third term posits the necessity of rectifying the distortion located in (4b); this rectification stands for: wanting to unveil (that which was hidden). This narrative sequence ‘to hide’ clearly constitutes a stimulation for the narrative; in a sense, it justifies it, and by that very fact points to its value (its ‘standing-for’), makes a com-modity of it: I am telling the story, says the narrator, in exchange for a demand for counter-er-ror, for truth (we are in a civilization where truth is a value, that is, a commodity). It is always very interesting to try to pick out the ‘standing-for’ of a narrative: in exchange for what is the story told? In the ‘Arabian Nights’, each story stands for a day’s survival. Here we are warned that the story of M. Valdemar stands for the truth (first presented as a counter-distortion).c) The ‘I’ appears [in French] for the first time - it was already present in the ‘we’ in ‘our endeavors’ (3). The enunciation in fact includes three I’s, or in other words, three imaginary roles (to say ‘I’ is to enter the imaginary): (i) a narrating ‘I’, an artist, whose motive is the search for effect; to this ‘I’ there corresponds a ‘You’, that of the literary reader, who is read-ing ‘a fantastic story by the great writer Edgar Poe’; (ii) an I-witness, who has the power to bear witness to a scientific experiment; the corresponding ‘You’ is that of a panel of scientists,

that of serious opinion, that of the scientific reader; (iii) an I-actor, the experimenter, the one who will magnetize Valdemar; the ‘You’ in this case is Valdemar himself; in these two last instances, the motive for the imaginary role is the “truth”. We have here the three terms of a code which we shall call, perhaps provisionally, the code of communication. Between these three roles, there is no doubt another language, that of the unconscious, which is spoken neither in science, nor in literature; but that language, which is literally the language of the interdict, does not say ‘I’: our grammar, with its three persons, is never directly that of the unconscious.

6. They are, succinctly, these:a) Announcing what is to follow involves metalanguage (and the rhetorical code); it is a boundary marking the beginning of a story in the story.b) ‘Succinctly’ carries three mixed and undecidable connotations: (i) “Don’t be afraid, this won’t take too long”: this, in the narrative code, is the phatic mode ... the function of which is to hold the attention, maintain contact; (ii) “It will be short because I’ll be sticking strictly to the facts”; this is the scientific code, allowing the announcement of the scientist’s ‘spareness’, the superiority of the instance of the fact over the instance of discourse; (iii) to pride oneself on talking briefly is in a certain sense an assertion against speech, a limitation of the supple-ment of discourse, that is, the symbolic; this is to speak the code of the asymbolic.

7. My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mes-merism;a) The chronological code must be observed in all narratives; here in this code (‘last three years’), two values are mixed; the first is in some sense naive; one of the temporal elements of the experiment to come is noted: the time of its preparation; the second does not have a diegetical, operative function (this is made clear by the test of commutation; if the narrator had said seven years instead of three, it would have had no effect on the story); it is therefore a matter of a pure reality-effect: the number connotes emphatically the truth of the fact: what is precise is reputed to be real (this illusion, moreover, since it does exist, is well known; a delirium of figures). Let us note that linguistically the word ‘last’ is a ‘shifter’; it refers to the situation of the speaker in time; it thus reinforces the presence of the following account.b) A long actional sequence begins here, or at the very least a sequence well-furnished with terms; its object is the starting-off of an experiment (we are under the alibi of experimental science); structurally, this setting-off is not the experiment itself, but an experimental pro-gramme. This sequence in fact stands for the formulation of the enigma, which has already been posed several times (‘there is an enigma’), but which has not yet been formulated. So as not to weigh down the report of the analysis, we shall code the ‘programme’ separately, it be-ing understood that by procuration the whole sequence stands for a term of the enigma-code. In this ‘programme’ sequence, we have here the first term: the position of the scientific field of the experiment, magnetism.c) The reference to magnetism is extracted from a cultural code which is very insistent in this part of the nineteenth century. Following Mesmer (in English, ‘magnetism’ can be called

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‘mesmerism’) and the Marquis Armand de Puységur, who had discovered that magnetism could provoke somnambulism, magnetizers and magnetist societies had multiplied in France (around 1820); in 1829, it appears that it had been possible, under hypnosis, to carry out the painless ablation of a tumor; in 1845, the year of our story, Braid of Manchester codified hypnosis by provoking nervous fatigue through the contemplation of a shining object; in 1850, in the Mesmeric Hospital of Calcutta, painless births were achieved. WE know that subsequently Charcot classified hypnotic states and circumscribed hypnosis under hysteria (1882), but that since then hysteria has disappeared from hospitals as a clinical entity (from the moment it was no longer observed). The year 1845 marks the peak of scientific illusion: people believed in a psychological reality of hypnosis (although Poe, pointing out Valdemar’s ‘nervousness’, may allow the inference of the subject’s hysterical predisposition).

d) Thematically, magnetism connotes (at least at that time) an idea of fluid: something passes from one subject to another; there is an exchange (an interdict) between the narrator and Val-demar: this is the code of communication.

8. and, about nine months ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in a series of experi-ments made hitherto,a) The chronological code (‘nine months’) calls for the same remarks as those made in (7a).b) Here is the second term of the ‘programme’ sequence: in (7b) a domain was chosen, that of magnetism; now it is cut up; a particular problem will be isolated.

9. there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:a) The enunciation of the structure of the ‘programme’ continues: here is the third term: the experiment which has not yet been tried - and which, therefore, for any scientist concerned with research, is to be tried.b) This experimental lack is not a simple oversight, or at least this oversight is heavily signifi-cant; it is quite simply the oversight of death: there has been a taboo (which will be lifted, in the deepest horror); the connotation belongs to the symbolic code.

10. - no person had as yet been mesmerized “in articulo mortis.“a) Fourth term of the ‘programme sequence’ the content of the omission (there is clearly a reduction of the link between the assertion of the omission and its definition, in the rhetorical code: to announce/to specify).b) The use of Latin (in articulo mortis), a juridical and medical language, produces an effect of scientificity (scientific code), but also, through the intermediary of euphemism (saying in a little-known language something one does not dare say in everyday language), designates a taboo (symbolic code). It seems clear that what is taboo in death, what is essentially taboo, is the passage, the threshold, the dying; life and death are relatively well-classified states, and moreover they enter into a paradigmatic opposition, they are taken in hand by meaning, which is always reassuring; but the transition between the two states, or more exactly, as will be the case here, their mutual encroachment, outplays meaning and engenders horror: there is the

transgression of an antithesis, of a classification.[...][Barthes continues, naming other codes and emphasizing actional and enigmatic codes.]

These are the codes which traverse the fragments we have analyzed. We deliberately don’t structure them further, nor do we try to distribute the terms within each code according to a logical or semiological schema; this is because for us the codes are only departures of ‘déjà-lu’ [already-read], beginning of intertextuality: the frayed nature of the codes does not contradict structure [...] but on the contrary (this is the fundamental affirmation of textual analysis) is an integral part of structuration. It is this ‘fraying’ of the text which distinguishes structure - the object of structural analysis, strictly speaking - from structuration - the object of the textual analysis we have attempted to practice here.The textile metaphor we have just used is not fortuitous. Textual analysis indeed requires us to represent the text as a tissue (this is moreover the etymological sense), as a skein of differ-ent voices and multiple codes which are at once interwoven and unfinished. A narrative is not a tabular space, a flat structure, it is a volume, a stereophony [...]All this ‘volume’ is pulled forward (towards the end of the narrative), thus provoking the im-patience of reading, under the effect of two structural dispositions: a) distortion: the terms of a sequence or a code are separated, threaded with heterogeneous elements: a sequence seems to have been abandoned (for example, the degradation of Valdemar’s health), but is taken up again further on, sometimes much later; an expectation is created; we can now even define the sequence [...] b) irreversibility: despite the floating character of structuration, in the classical, readable narrative (such as Poe’s story), there are two codes which maintain a directional order, the actional [and the enigmatic codes. Barthes claims that ‘modern’narrative attempts to reverse this irreversibility.][...]

Edited by:Wyrick, Deborah, North Carolina State University [http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/rbvald.htm] (Nov. 2002)

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Codes in Barthes’ Textual Analysis of A Tale of Poe

1) narrative code (code of actions, proairetic code): Actional sequence, chronology and causality of action. (structuring the plot)2) code of enigmas (hermeneutic code, code of puzzles): Riddles are posed, delayed and unveiled (solved). 3) cultural codes (e.g. code of knowledge, scientific code, referential code, socio-ethnic

code, social code) The narrator (or a character) relays on certain things that are known within the reader’s

(or the characters’) culture.4) code of communication (code of destination; phatic code; semic code; connotative

code): Voice of the person, communication between author/narrator and reader, between char-

acters.5) symbolic code: Differences that lead to binary oppositions (e.g. male-female, life - death), psychoana-

lytical symbols

1) The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar a) code of the enigma (position) b) code of communication: metalinguistic code c) code of actions (narrative code) d) cultural code: 1) socio-ethnic code 2) symbolic code e) social code

2) Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordi-nary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not - especially under the circumstances.

a) code of the enigma (delay) b) cultural code (scientific code)

3 Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the present, or until we had further opportunities for investigation - through our endeavors to effect this -

a) cultural code (scientific code) b) 1) cultural code (scientif-deontological code) 2) symbolic code

4 a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations; and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbelief.

a) code of the enigma b) narrative code (mystification)

5 It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts—as far as I comprehend them myself. a) 1) scientific deontological code 2) symbolic code b) narrative code

c) code of communication (“I” vs. “you” = artist vs. literary reader; witness vs. scien-tific reader; actor/experimenter vs. Valdemar)

6 They are, succinctly, these: a) metalinguistic / rhetorical code b) 1) narrative code, phatic mode 2) scientific code 3) symbolic (asymbolic) code

7 My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mes-merism;

a) narrative code (chronological code) b) code of the enigma (programme: posing of the scientific field of the experiment) c) cultural code d) code of communication

8 and, about nine month ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of ex-periments made hitherto,

a) chronological code b) code of the enigma (programme: isolation of problem)

9 there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission: a) code of the enigma (programme: One experiment remains to be done) b) symbolic code

10 - no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. a) code of the enigma (programme: contents of the lacuna); rhetorical code b) scientific code and symbolic code

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Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, Kristeva

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

The I, the Id, the Superego

Our Ego (= consciousness) makes us think of ourselves as an ‘I’, a personality that has everything under control and is able to make rational and autonomous decisions, but it does not know that it is influenced and controlled by two other parts, the Id (unconscious, Es) and the Superego (conscience, Über-Ich). Whatever we think or do, we are driven by our unconscious desires (libido), which get controlled by our Superego before they reach our consciousness and thus “come to our mind”. The division of our psyche in these three parts takes place in our childhood as a consequence of the Oedipus complex. In the phallic phase1 between the age of 3 and 5, the child begins to feel sexually attracted to the parent of the opposite sex, the son wants to kill his father and take his place, and the daughter wants to kill her mother (Electra complex). The superego (conscience) prevents this and forbids these thoughts: the image of the father threatens the boy with castration - and the girl, who notices that she has got no phallus, experiences penis envy and is afraid of a further loss2. From now on, all forbidden thoughts and desires get deleted from our consciousness and the whole complex (everything that is somehow related to this forbidden desire) gets stored (repressed) in the Id. Like steam in a pressure cooker, these repressed wishes try to get out of their confinement, but the superego prevents them from coming to the surface. Occasionally, when it is not vigilant, messages of our repressed desires may turn up as Freudian slips3. But usually the censorship of the Superego is very efficient, and to pass it unnoticed, the repressed desires have to disguise themselves in various ways. The most effective way is to appear in a socially accepted, praiseworthy form (sublimation, e.g. creative work in art, science, religion, politics), but messages of our Id may also be detected in our “spontaneous” ideas or in symbols of our dreams and day-dreams.

Condensation and displacement

Our dreams are stories with latent (hidden) messages. Straightforward messages of our Id do not pass the censorship of the Superego - what becomes manifest (what enters our

consciousness) are encoded messages that often just seem nonsensical. Repressed thoughts of sexual intercourse may appear as a dream sequence in which a train speeds into a tunnel, a latent fear of castration may manifest itself as a dream in which all our teeth fall out. The codes of our dream-work are not universal, it is not possible to write a dictionary of symbols, but they are always based on linguistic (semiotic) principles, they work with connotations and puns, metonymies and metaphors on the level of pictures, words, sentences, characters and stories. Displacement (Verschiebung) works metonymously, a close person may be represented by one of his or her typical attributes, e.g. a pipe may stand for a person who smokes; a “harmless” word with a similar or identical pronunciation may replace a more offending word (e.g. “mail” instead of “male”: The dream of a pregnant mother that she receives a letter could indicate that she unconsiously hopes to have a male baby); in condensation (Verdichtung) several elements are compressed into one symbol, just as in a metaphor: A stranger in a dream may have features of several persons we know and thus tell us that these persons are in some way similar, e.g. that we love them or hate them.

1 Freud assumes that we pass three different stages in our childhood: the oral, the anal and the phallic phase, before the oedipal stage that makes us believe that we are an autonomous person. In the oral stage (0-1.5) the mother‘s breasts are the source of food and love. In the anal stage (1.5 - 3) children learn to control their bowel movements, they experience pleasure and displeasure in excretion and realize that this gives them power over their parents.2 At this early stage, the terms castration and phallus may be understood literally. But Freud uses these terms also symbolically. Phallus then stands for (patriarchal) power, castration for the loss of power. (cf. Lacan‘s use of Phallus)3 Freud discusses such slips in Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens: They occur when we use a word that we did not intend to use, when we forget, lose or misplace things, when we do not wake up in time etc.).

EGO“I want to ...”

SUPEREGO

ID

EGO“I want to ...”

SUPEREGO

ID

EGO“I want to...”

SUPEREGO

ID

EGO“I”

sleep with my mothersleep with my mother

sleep with my mother

kill my father

kill my father

write a novel

write a novel

expose my genitals

have breakfast

have a Coke

Allowed Delete!

Allowed Delete! Castration! Allowed Delete! Castration!

sleep

ID

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Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, Kristeva

Psychoanalysis as therapy

In a “normal” person the balance between Ego, Super-Ego and Id corresponds to what a society regards as “normality”. Too much repression (= too strong a superego) or not enough control over one’s desires (= too weak a superego) will lead to mental disturbances (fixations, obsessions, perversions, psychoses, neuroses). The analysis of hidden messages of the id can enable the ‘I’ to throw some light into the darkness of its unconscious and thus gain more autonomy (“Wo Es ist, soll Ich werden”). Knowing more about our repressed desires can help us to deal with them. Psychoanalysts help their patients to analyse their dreams and spontaneous actions or ideas, to find out their latent thoughts that hide behind the manifest symbols.

Uses of psychoanalysis in literary theory and cultural studies

Freud’s theory is meant as a science of the human mind, but the theory has not remained unchallenged: Behavourist psychology dismisses Freud’s work as unscientific, other branches of psychiatry and psychology offer radically different theories of the human mind, but none of them has had such an impact on philosophy and cultural theory. No matter whether we believe in Freud’s theory or not, it is a useful tool to analyse cultural phenomena. If we assume that we all share similar subconscious desires, we may analyse a work of art as a manifestation of a society’s repressed (latent) desires and explain cultural (individual, social or ideological) processes. Freud discussed jokes, novels, paintings and sculptures as if they were similar to dreams. There is a danger, though, that we begin to see ourselves as psychoanalysts and draw conclusions about the artist’s childhood or sexual obsessions. (Such an attitude can often be noticed in biographical interpretations of Kafka’s works).We may also use Freudian concepts to describe what effects certain artefacts (e.g. films, advertisements, bestsellers) have on their consumers’ psyche, or which techniques they might have deliberately used to achieve these effects.A knowledge of Freudian theory is necessary if an artist used the theory consciously, e.g. in the choice of symbols or in the construction of characters. This is the case with many modern artists (e.g. Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Julian Barnes, Arno Schmidt, Max Frisch, René Magritte, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski etc.).

[http://store1.yimg.com/I/pomegranate_1821_183640232]http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/sigmund_freud.asp

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Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan combines the linguistic and semiotic theories of Saussure and Jakobson with Freudian theory, the philosophy of Heidegger and Hegel. For Lacan, we (and the world we live in) are created, defined and formed by language, and the development of the human subject follows the development of language.

The Mirror Stage

At the age of 6 to 18 months, when an infant begins to recognize its own image in a mirror (literally, or figuratively by the reaction of others), the psychological experience of an undifferentiated union with the mother and the world gets lost. The infant starts to see itself as an ‘I’, it forms a concept of this ‘I’ as something different from other things. This ‘I’ is now able to form further concepts (imaginary signifieds) and link them to words (signifiers). By seeing itself as an ‘I’, the child leaves the realm of the ‘Real’ and enters into the ‘Symbolic order’, into the world as a system of signs, into culture and civilization.

The I and the world: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real

The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are three different psychological modes of existence in which we are or in which we believe ourselves to be. Lacan calls them ‘realms’ or ‘orders’.Like the hero in The Truman Show, we usually think that the world in which we live is real, but what we call “reality” is only our own imagination, it is triggered by our perception and shaped by our language. The Imaginary is our illusion of reality. Mediated through our language, our world is composed of an ‘I’ and a ‘Not-I’, the ‘other’ (with a lower-case o). But what we believe to be this ‘other’ are nothing but images in our brain. No signifier is firmly linked to a particular signified; our imaginary ‘I’ gives meaning to the signifiers (our words or thoughts) by linking them to other signifiers which it considers to be their signifieds.When we pass the mirror stage, we start to live as an ‘I’ in a linguistically mediated world, a psychological realm which Lacan calls the Symbolic. This Symbolic order is our culture, the order of representations, significations and images. It is the place where the individual gets formed as a subject: As an ‘I’ we continually construct and reaffirm ourselves by attributing meaning to ourselves and the world around us. Since we live and function only within the symbolic realm of language, we have no access to the Real. Like Kant’s ‘Ding an sich’ or Plato’s ideas, the Real is not verifiable, it is forever out of our reach, we cannot talk about it (as soon as we use words or concepts we are in the Symbolic order). We think of signifieds as real things just as the infant believes that the reflection in the mirror is its ‘I’. But language is only a representation: My picture in the mirror is not myself, it is only my reflection, and the word for a thing is not the thing itself. As a signifier it can never be in the same place as its referent, it is always something else. Language, thus, is always the Other (with capital O), a kind of mirror-world. The word “tree” or the picture of a tree is not a tree, it is only a signifier. The ‘real’ tree can only be in itself.

The unconscious: floating chains of signifiers

If we look up a word in the dictionary, we will find another word. Saussure’s “signified” is not the sign’s referent in the real world, as a concept in our brain it is purely imaginary and thus just another sign. The unconscious consists of chains of floating signifiers without any anchor: the signfiers have no fixed signified, they are only chains of differences (each signifier is different from all the others: a ‘rat’ is not a ‘mat’ or a ‘cat’). The ‘I’ tries to stabilize itself by stabilizing these chains, by attributing seemingly fixed meanings to floating signifiers, but this stabilisation remains an illusion a) because the ego itself is only an illusion and b) because every signified is just another signifier.

The Name-of-the-Father / Phallus

As soon as the ‘I’ enters the symbolic realm it is a subject of language. Language imposes on us a pre-given structure that provides order in a world of otherwise meaningless signifiers, a structure that determines the social and sexual roles that constitute our society. In the Oedipal stage, we experience the loss of the Real as the loss of the unity with our mother (and thus with the other), and we therefore associate the Symbolic system (the Other) with the figure of the ‘Father’. Similar to Freud’s Superego, the Name-of-the-Father or nom-du-père (= a psychological principle, not the real father!) represents the Law of our language and society, it is the order that governs our culture. To underline the patriarchal nature of this law, Lacan sometimes uses Freud’s term Phallus. As in Freud’s theory, Phallus does not mean the penis, it means the ultimate power which nobody owns (an effect of the castration complex), the primordial signifier. The Phallus is the principle that anchors and stabilizes the chains of signifiers which are floating in our unconscious. It creates a momentary jouissance, a feeling that we had when we were in the Real, and a feeling of exstasy that we get when things (signifiers, texts) make sense to us.

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Julia Kristeva (b. 1941)

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian writer, psychoanalyst and theorist, who writes in French. Her theory is based on semiotics, Freud and Lacan.

The semiotic and the symbolic

As in Lacanian theory, the symbolic is the result of the separation from the mother and the loss of the Real, which begins in the mirror stage and is completed through castration. (see Lacan)For Kristeva, the speaking subject is not only a result of loss and pain, but also a result of excess and pleasure that the child experiences in the pre-oedipal phase. Excess (the growth of the baby) gives rise to the first separation, birth. During the oral phase, the maternal body regulates the availability of the breast; its withdrawal leads to further experiences of separation. Thus the maternal breast operates as a first law before the paternal Law of signification (Phallus). Another sense of separation is experienced in Freud’s anal phase, where an excess of matter is expelled in pleasurable privation.Pleasure and pain, anguish, frustration etc. are drives that make the infant utter senseless sounds, cries and babble. This elementary language (or rather: this element of language) consists of rhythm and tone, the sounds do not yet signify, they are organic discharges of our drives. Kristeva calls this “maternal” element of language the semiotic (not “semiotics”). The dialectical oscillation between the semiotic and the symbolic makes language possible. The symbolic as the phallic element is associated with stability, syntax and grammar and with the ability to take a position or make a judgment (the Law). The semiotic as the “female” element is associated with movement and negativity, it gives rise to, and challenges, the symbolic. Without the symbolic element of signification, we have only sounds and babble. Without the semiotic element, we would not speak. The semiotic creates a bodily need to communicate, the symbolic provides the necessary structure.

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