The deaf infant’s movement through Kristeva’s Semiotic and Symbolic
175.707
The deaf infant’s movement through Kristeva’s Semiotic and Symbolic
Peter Fogarty
Friday 22 October
Analyzing the development of the deaf infant through Julia Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic with focus on the chora, thetic and mimesis stages highlights the source of the problem deaf have with language acquisition. As Kristeva is notoriously difficult to comprehend, once the reader feels that se has understood her prose, a re-reading reveals yet another interpretation: therefore this can but be one possible application of her thesis. Because the deaf infant acquires language at a much slower pace than normal, it is interesting to see how Kristeva defines the boundaries of the movement of the infant from the semiotic into the symbolic. She moves out the scope of language into the extralinguistic past the relations of signifier and signified into the semiotic and symbolic, always with a concern for the speaking subject.
The semiotic is the formless, anarchic motility of impulse and energy seething in the infant’s body before hir drives manifest themselves in the symbolic, which it pre-signifies. The symbolic represents the concrete solidity of the defined, of language. The semiotic and the symbolic enable the subject to signify, produce discourse and engage in society; this is how they are related. In this way the infant learns to associate the signifier with the signified in the semiotic. The formation of hir subjectivity, of identity is made by the connections se makes between the signifier and the signified, thus allowing hir to move into the symbolic. The semiotic is the space occupied by the infant and hir mother; it is a space preceding the moment of stability, of identity acquisition and subject formation. Kristeva locates the infant in the semiotic by the chora: ‘an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases’ (35).
Kristeva’s chora precedes everything, it is unformed, yet formed: it is the loci the infant, whether deaf or not, finds hirself immediately after hir emergence into the world from hir mother. The chora constistutes the uncertain infant before se begins to attain a signifying position; a position in which se consolidates hir identity before crossing the mirror stage. The deaf struggle to emerge from the chora into the thetic phase; their social stimulus is limited to the visual. They live within the social organization they were born into, their family and the communication system of their family, be it sign or oral speech. If the deaf infant is congenitally deaf, se will not acquire an understanding of sound until much latter in life; if the infant suddenly goes deaf, it comes as a great loss; a sense, which they did not know they had, vanishes and the trauma is evident. The social organization, which is always already symbolic, imprints its constraints onto the unformed motility of the chora. The deaf struggle to meet the expectations of a symbolic world while living in the semiotic chora & take a long time to move out into the thetic, and mimesis after that.
The movement out of the chora is marked by the infant’s drive to communicate; this drive is ambiguous, destructive and assimilating. The infant’s oral and anal needs are dominated by hir mother who mediates the symbolic. It is in this mediation of the symbolic that the life of a deaf infant is first determined: oral or visual, the drive to communicate is seeded here. This distinction must be made because it is the method the mother uses to speak to her child that determines the infant’s ability to acquire language. If the deaf mother uses sign to communicate with her child; the deaf infant develops quite naturally, speaking with hir body in gesture and mime. However, sign is object oriented; the tenuous connections between symbols and abstract ideas are not as easily expressed as they have no visual referent. If the mother uses an oral method of communication, such as was made in my case, with amplification of sound and speech movements, the deaf infant will take much longer to acquire language but has the potential to become almost assimilated into the social organization of the English speaking culture.
The drive to move out of the chora into the thetic phase and through the mirror stage is a struggle of waves against stases, pushing through blockages of understanding as the infant gradually realizes its separation from hir mother and passes through a castration phase. The deaf infant floods the barren plain of silence with hir body, expressing what se cannot, in the chora where se is generated and negated in motile instability. The realization that something is wrong, something is lacking, that they have been castrated unknowingly, their silence thrusts against their forming identity, molding it irreversibly as their body speaks. At 6 months of age, the deaf infant falls silent, vocal enunciation ceases but continues in gesture. The deaf infant of deaf parents soon learns to use sign rather than speech to attract hir mother’s attention, and thus their ability to vocalize is gradually lost and has to be brought back into life by therapy. I underwent twelve years of speech therapy to reach my current level of eloquence. The acquisition of the symbolic is a social effect of the relation to the other. It is established through biological and social differences and limits in concrete, historical family structures.
The deaf infant, as other infants do, moves from the chora into the thetic, the precondition for signification and assumption of language: the threshold between the semiotic and symbolic. It is within the thetic phase that the deaf infant moves apart from the normal infant in hir development. Hir growth slows, as stimulus remains visual and its place in the world, before the mirror stage, comfortably resides with hir mother. Fundamentally, Kristeva’s explanation holds for the development of all infants, but deaf in particular struggle to fully enter the symbolic in the sense that they find it difficult to form abstract concepts. It would be impossible, for example, to translate this essay into sign. Deaf tend to have a large vocabulary of signs representing visual concepts, but struggle to make connections between these signs: although all oscillate from the semiotic to the symbolic, the thetic phase is particularly problematic for the deaf
The thetic phase is the break in the signifying process between the signifier and signified: a slippage. The connection between signifier and signified to form signification is problematic for the deaf infant because they find it difficult to grasp the signified. The signifier is seen and understood implicitly, but the meaning in the signified is hard to learn and express. The deaf infant’s awareness of the world about hir is the same as a normal infant but the names of objects take longer to arrive, especially in an oral environment; in a sign environment, there may even be no naming sign for the object. Living in the motile semiotic, fragmented identity, clutching at hir mother, the deaf infant’s enunciation of hir drives is very much trapped in the oral and anal cycles in an acceptance that this is the way things are. This acceptance carries on throughout the deaf person’s life; if that is how things are, then that must be the way things are. The deaf infant learns this during the thetic phase before the mirror stage when se perceives hir reflection and realizes that hir unformed, motile state is reflected in a coherent body and discovers hir identity; hir space is filled by one alone, separate from hir mother. A spatial intuition is realized; the infant realizes se is separate from other objects and begins to distinguish itself with holophrastic enunciations while still in the agitated semiotic.
The deaf infant’s holophrastic utterances, expressing a complex of ideas with a sound or gesture becomes a signifier, the vocalization of the deepest structures of the body speaking its drive to communicate, its struggle to emerge into the symbolic with hir utterances. The deaf infant takes much longer to reach the threshold of language enunciation because se is not aware that gestures, sounds are communications until after passing the mirror stage. There is a division here in this threshold between the sign and oral deaf. The deaf infant in a social environment of sign, of deaf parents, learns early that vocalizing brings no response, whereas gesture does and thus its path of development through the thetic phase is fixed. There is an acute and dramatic confrontation between the unified subject, learning, positing, identifying, and the motile, uncertain, shifting semiotic chora at this stage of the thetic phase.
This separation of the semiotic chora and the unified subject which is posited in the social structure of the symbolic is a castration, a realization of identity and the infant begins to acquire language, guided by hir mother, who represents the phallus. The semiotic motility of the infant is transposed onto the more stable ground of the symbolic order. However the gap between signifier and signified remains; without completion of this phase no signifying practice is possible. Closure of the thetic phase comes with mimesis as the infant learns mimicry from its social environment. Because the deaf infant is trapped in the gap between signifier and signified, observing the signifier but unable to grasp the signified, it must mimic the function of the signified without understanding its meaning. Hence the deaf infant constructs an signified which is perceived to be like the truth but not quite.
The deaf infant of deaf parents comes closer to a normal acquisition of language than the oral deaf raised by hearing parents as visual gestures of sign language in their social environment are easily perceived, absorbed and imitated. The oral deaf are heavily reliant on direct intervention. The oral deaf infant’s mother must make a conscious and sustained effort to communicate with her child as speechreading is arbitrary in the least. An effort must be made on the part of the deaf infant to connect the movements of the mouth with the signified from its signifier. The deaf learn to communicate through mime, gesture and attempts to imitate their parents. Their body speaks by mimesis, the imitation of other creatures. The construction of the symbolic emerges from the semiotic in imitation of social convention. The most successful deaf are usually the born chameleons.
Trapped in the gap between signifier and signified, the deaf infant will always struggle to make a connection between the two to form a full sign. It will not be until a much more mature life, after immersion in the social environment of the symbolic that the deaf is able to make deeper, abstract connections between signs. Even then, their language to the expressible concepts of that language limits the deaf who communicate by sign. As sign is very object oriented, the return to the poetic language of the semiotic in the symbolic; making the semiotic part of the symbolic, making it new, is virtually impossible, distinguished only by subtle nuances in gestures which directly refer to objects and their relation to the environment. It is nearly impossible to distort the signifier to enable this return to the semiotic. The problem of the acquisition of language for the deaf is rooted in the incompletion of the thetic phase, forcing the deaf to rely on the mimesis stage of their development. As language is a doubly articulated system, split between the signifier and the signified, the bridging of this chasm is precisely what distinguishes the deaf infant from a normal infant, absorbing the world like the utterly receptive sponge se is. The limits of the world are defined by the limits of the language learnt.
Bibliography
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989.
• Kristeva, Julia. “The Semiotic and the Symbolic.” The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Oliver, Kelly. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. Eds. Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. New York: Edward Arnold, 1992.
The deaf infant’s movement through Kristeva’s Semiotic and Symbolic
Peter Fogarty
Friday 22 October
Analyzing the development of the deaf infant through Julia Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic with focus on the chora, thetic and mimesis stages highlights the source of the problem deaf have with language acquisition. As Kristeva is notoriously difficult to comprehend, once the reader feels that se has understood her prose, a re-reading reveals yet another interpretation: therefore this can but be one possible application of her thesis. Because the deaf infant acquires language at a much slower pace than normal, it is interesting to see how Kristeva defines the boundaries of the movement of the infant from the semiotic into the symbolic. She moves out the scope of language into the extralinguistic past the relations of signifier and signified into the semiotic and symbolic, always with a concern for the speaking subject.
The semiotic is the formless, anarchic motility of impulse and energy seething in the infant’s body before hir drives manifest themselves in the symbolic, which it pre-signifies. The symbolic represents the concrete solidity of the defined, of language. The semiotic and the symbolic enable the subject to signify, produce discourse and engage in society; this is how they are related. In this way the infant learns to associate the signifier with the signified in the semiotic. The formation of hir subjectivity, of identity is made by the connections se makes between the signifier and the signified, thus allowing hir to move into the symbolic. The semiotic is the space occupied by the infant and hir mother; it is a space preceding the moment of stability, of identity acquisition and subject formation. Kristeva locates the infant in the semiotic by the chora: ‘an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases’ (35).
Kristeva’s chora precedes everything, it is unformed, yet formed: it is the loci the infant, whether deaf or not, finds hirself immediately after hir emergence into the world from hir mother. The chora constistutes the uncertain infant before se begins to attain a signifying position; a position in which se consolidates hir identity before crossing the mirror stage. The deaf struggle to emerge from the chora into the thetic phase; their social stimulus is limited to the visual. They live within the social organization they were born into, their family and the communication system of their family, be it sign or oral speech. If the deaf infant is congenitally deaf, se will not acquire an understanding of sound until much latter in life; if the infant suddenly goes deaf, it comes as a great loss; a sense, which they did not know they had, vanishes and the trauma is evident. The social organization, which is always already symbolic, imprints its constraints onto the unformed motility of the chora. The deaf struggle to meet the expectations of a symbolic world while living in the semiotic chora & take a long time to move out into the thetic, and mimesis after that.
The movement out of the chora is marked by the infant’s drive to communicate; this drive is ambiguous, destructive and assimilating. The infant’s oral and anal needs are dominated by hir mother who mediates the symbolic. It is in this mediation of the symbolic that the life of a deaf infant is first determined: oral or visual, the drive to communicate is seeded here. This distinction must be made because it is the method the mother uses to speak to her child that determines the infant’s ability to acquire language. If the deaf mother uses sign to communicate with her child; the deaf infant develops quite naturally, speaking with hir body in gesture and mime. However, sign is object oriented; the tenuous connections between symbols and abstract ideas are not as easily expressed as they have no visual referent. If the mother uses an oral method of communication, such as was made in my case, with amplification of sound and speech movements, the deaf infant will take much longer to acquire language but has the potential to become almost assimilated into the social organization of the English speaking culture.
The drive to move out of the chora into the thetic phase and through the mirror stage is a struggle of waves against stases, pushing through blockages of understanding as the infant gradually realizes its separation from hir mother and passes through a castration phase. The deaf infant floods the barren plain of silence with hir body, expressing what se cannot, in the chora where se is generated and negated in motile instability. The realization that something is wrong, something is lacking, that they have been castrated unknowingly, their silence thrusts against their forming identity, molding it irreversibly as their body speaks. At 6 months of age, the deaf infant falls silent, vocal enunciation ceases but continues in gesture. The deaf infant of deaf parents soon learns to use sign rather than speech to attract hir mother’s attention, and thus their ability to vocalize is gradually lost and has to be brought back into life by therapy. I underwent twelve years of speech therapy to reach my current level of eloquence. The acquisition of the symbolic is a social effect of the relation to the other. It is established through biological and social differences and limits in concrete, historical family structures.
The deaf infant, as other infants do, moves from the chora into the thetic, the precondition for signification and assumption of language: the threshold between the semiotic and symbolic. It is within the thetic phase that the deaf infant moves apart from the normal infant in hir development. Hir growth slows, as stimulus remains visual and its place in the world, before the mirror stage, comfortably resides with hir mother. Fundamentally, Kristeva’s explanation holds for the development of all infants, but deaf in particular struggle to fully enter the symbolic in the sense that they find it difficult to form abstract concepts. It would be impossible, for example, to translate this essay into sign. Deaf tend to have a large vocabulary of signs representing visual concepts, but struggle to make connections between these signs: although all oscillate from the semiotic to the symbolic, the thetic phase is particularly problematic for the deaf
The thetic phase is the break in the signifying process between the signifier and signified: a slippage. The connection between signifier and signified to form signification is problematic for the deaf infant because they find it difficult to grasp the signified. The signifier is seen and understood implicitly, but the meaning in the signified is hard to learn and express. The deaf infant’s awareness of the world about hir is the same as a normal infant but the names of objects take longer to arrive, especially in an oral environment; in a sign environment, there may even be no naming sign for the object. Living in the motile semiotic, fragmented identity, clutching at hir mother, the deaf infant’s enunciation of hir drives is very much trapped in the oral and anal cycles in an acceptance that this is the way things are. This acceptance carries on throughout the deaf person’s life; if that is how things are, then that must be the way things are. The deaf infant learns this during the thetic phase before the mirror stage when se perceives hir reflection and realizes that hir unformed, motile state is reflected in a coherent body and discovers hir identity; hir space is filled by one alone, separate from hir mother. A spatial intuition is realized; the infant realizes se is separate from other objects and begins to distinguish itself with holophrastic enunciations while still in the agitated semiotic.
The deaf infant’s holophrastic utterances, expressing a complex of ideas with a sound or gesture becomes a signifier, the vocalization of the deepest structures of the body speaking its drive to communicate, its struggle to emerge into the symbolic with hir utterances. The deaf infant takes much longer to reach the threshold of language enunciation because se is not aware that gestures, sounds are communications until after passing the mirror stage. There is a division here in this threshold between the sign and oral deaf. The deaf infant in a social environment of sign, of deaf parents, learns early that vocalizing brings no response, whereas gesture does and thus its path of development through the thetic phase is fixed. There is an acute and dramatic confrontation between the unified subject, learning, positing, identifying, and the motile, uncertain, shifting semiotic chora at this stage of the thetic phase.
This separation of the semiotic chora and the unified subject which is posited in the social structure of the symbolic is a castration, a realization of identity and the infant begins to acquire language, guided by hir mother, who represents the phallus. The semiotic motility of the infant is transposed onto the more stable ground of the symbolic order. However the gap between signifier and signified remains; without completion of this phase no signifying practice is possible. Closure of the thetic phase comes with mimesis as the infant learns mimicry from its social environment. Because the deaf infant is trapped in the gap between signifier and signified, observing the signifier but unable to grasp the signified, it must mimic the function of the signified without understanding its meaning. Hence the deaf infant constructs an signified which is perceived to be like the truth but not quite.
The deaf infant of deaf parents comes closer to a normal acquisition of language than the oral deaf raised by hearing parents as visual gestures of sign language in their social environment are easily perceived, absorbed and imitated. The oral deaf are heavily reliant on direct intervention. The oral deaf infant’s mother must make a conscious and sustained effort to communicate with her child as speechreading is arbitrary in the least. An effort must be made on the part of the deaf infant to connect the movements of the mouth with the signified from its signifier. The deaf learn to communicate through mime, gesture and attempts to imitate their parents. Their body speaks by mimesis, the imitation of other creatures. The construction of the symbolic emerges from the semiotic in imitation of social convention. The most successful deaf are usually the born chameleons.
Trapped in the gap between signifier and signified, the deaf infant will always struggle to make a connection between the two to form a full sign. It will not be until a much more mature life, after immersion in the social environment of the symbolic that the deaf is able to make deeper, abstract connections between signs. Even then, their language to the expressible concepts of that language limits the deaf who communicate by sign. As sign is very object oriented, the return to the poetic language of the semiotic in the symbolic; making the semiotic part of the symbolic, making it new, is virtually impossible, distinguished only by subtle nuances in gestures which directly refer to objects and their relation to the environment. It is nearly impossible to distort the signifier to enable this return to the semiotic. The problem of the acquisition of language for the deaf is rooted in the incompletion of the thetic phase, forcing the deaf to rely on the mimesis stage of their development. As language is a doubly articulated system, split between the signifier and the signified, the bridging of this chasm is precisely what distinguishes the deaf infant from a normal infant, absorbing the world like the utterly receptive sponge se is. The limits of the world are defined by the limits of the language learnt.
Bibliography
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989.
• Kristeva, Julia. “The Semiotic and the Symbolic.” The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Oliver, Kelly. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. Eds. Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. New York: Edward Arnold, 1992.
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