A Feminist's Semiotic Playground...

Within Barry's summary of various feminist positions I found several ideas fascinating. One was the idea of language having "two aspects" (123) the symbolic and semiotic, from the work of Julia Kristeva. I found this idea, a repesentation of "Lacanian re-use of the notions" (123) of conscious and unconscious, fascinating. How true it is (as we saw in our discussion of post-structuralism) that as we consciously communicate in an ordered and rational way, there is always an undercurrent that works against us, that "emerg[es] into and disrupt[s] the 'conscious' or 'surface' meaning" (124). I'm not sure why, after encountering these ideas in only sightly different words from Derridas et al. I am now so intrigued, but this presentation jumped out at me. I was uncertain however, whether Kristeva and Cixous were claiming this semiotic aspect as a feminine aspect of a male medium, or if they were merely finding in its existence "s vital theater of possibilities, the value of which is to imagine alternatives to the world which we now have" (124). Barry does, just before the last quoted passage, label it "this visionary 'semiotic' female world" which would seem to indicate that is the case. Still, certainly it was something the women recognized they shared with other theorists both post-structuralist and psychoanalytic, and, as such open to everyone regardless of gender, right?

I wonder who they would characterize as making use of this semiotic language then? A single example is given: e. e. cummings, and I don't know anyone who plays with language quite like he does. Other examples seem to be other high modernists like Joyce and Woolf, maybe Faulkner (I haven't really read Faulkner so I'm stretching), perhaps some of Kerouac's more experimental work, although some of the beats' ideas about women are troubling in the context of applying feminist ideas. Still, I don't know that I would characterize many women writers that I have read as possessing this semiotic characteristic as I am struggling to understand it through the one example given. I mean Austen, the Brontes, George Elliott, even more modern writers such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, etc. don't seem to be playing with this semiotic aspect of language in the way she describes except in the sense that it is present in all of us. Are there a bunch of radical experimentalists out there that I'm not aware of?

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An addendum to my original post...I just finished reading Toni Morrison's Jazz and reading an article focused on the identity of her very, very fluid and mysterious narrative "I" in that novel. I would have to revise what I said in including her in the list at the end of the above...In this novel at least there is that experimental form in the interplay of voices, and the mysteriousness of the narrator that I'd have to identify it as an example of the conscious use of the semiotic in the manner Kristeva/Barry seem to be discussing.