There is an ideological progression that runs from the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, through Julia Kristeva’s post-structural semiotics, to Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism. In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure, recognizing the limits of a purely structural approach, anticipates a wider science of "semiology," the study of all signification of meaning, of which linguistics would be only one subsection. Kristeva later claims that, because all non-linguistic signs remain meaningless until they are approached through language, it is "semiotics" that is contained within linguistics; the "double project of articulation and communication of meaning" is always ultimately accomplished through the use of linguistic phonemes. As does Kristeva, Greenblatt recognizes that once we move from the structure of linguistic phonemes to the structure of semiotic signifiers, from first-order linguistic denotation to a second-order connotative system, involving socio-cultural values and ideological assumptions, we have departed from the Saussurean structuralist hegemony and entered the realm of a reflexive preverbal function that is largely determined by the interaction of the cultural context within which it is performed with the structures of interpretation of the individual subconscious that perform it.
For both Kristeva and Greenblatt, it is impossible to completely abstract the synchronic semiotic sign from its extrinsic diachronic historical significance. They do not focus upon textual meaning as contained in the relations between linguistic signs. Instead they appeal to the subconscious structures described in Freudian theory as one determinant of signification. While Kristeva turns to Freudian dream-work for a model of the semiotic process of articulation of meaning, as involving both a mode of production prior to meaning and a mode of exchange involving a kind of heiroglyphic parole, Greenblatt applies Freudian models to his analysis of Spenser. The Faery Queene has a dream-like quality, and Greenblatt analyzes the dream of the destruction of the Bower of Bliss at the end of Book II, according to Freudian models of sublimation. Furthermore, he describes the poetry of Spenser, along with the drama of Marlowe and Shakespeare, as semiotic systems, whose textual elements are only a minor relic of their historically functional semiotic structures.
If structuralist criticism would restrict all meaning in literature to the functional relations inherent in its texts, according to what criteria are we to draw the limits of a text? In the case of Shakespeare’s plays, must we restrict ourselves to written dialogue, or may we include stage directions (in various versions of folios and quartos). May we, furthermore, allow the organic performance at the Globe Theatre to constitute an element of the play’s text, and, if so, may we, as Greenblatt does in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, allow that this performance is embedded within an even larger theatrical performance, that is the Elizabethan monarchy, that we, therefore, need not only compare the structure of the iambic blank verse of Othello with the drama of the early Tudor period, but with the dramatic structures of the court of Gloriana and her knights and suitors, itself? In Shakespearean Negotiations, he suggests that "the most disturbing effects of the play may have been located not in what may be perceived in the text by a subtle interpreter...but in the phenomenon of theatrical representation itself" (qtd. in Mullaney 499).
If semiotics and New Historicism are concerned with the process of the transmission of meaning through signs and symbols, then they must acknowledge that a great deal of this transmission takes place unconsciously. That is, as an individual witnesses a play, or reads a poem, he is conscious of the verbal text; he is, likewise, conscious of the explicit verbal ideas to which his psychology and presuppositions (conscious and unconscious) give rise, when confronted with the text; however, he is unconscious of a great deal, if not most, of the values and assumptions that are reinforced or negated by the experience of reading or witnessing, within his particular cultural and psychological context. For example, a young Elizabethan man, with strong Oedipal conflicts, is not necessarily conscious of all the semiotic processes he undergoes while watching a public performance of Hamlet.
Similarly to Saussure, Kristeva restricts herself to a discussion of the possibilities of semiotic practice. She anticipates a theory of semiotics that "focuses on the nature of poetic language and the stucturalist notion of the sign, while also including the extralinguistic factors of history and psychology" (Davis and Schleifer 273). In exploring the ways that meaning is both conditioned and communicated, Kristeva points to the "overwhelmingly cultural nature of language and discourse." Her definition of semiotics "always turns and returns to ideology and the cultural formations in which it works" (Davis and Schleifer 240). The common point linking Kristeva to Greenblatt is in the recognition of the semiotic foundation of cultural ideological systems.
While a structuralist semiotics would focus primarily upon the empirical method whereby cultural symbols, such as those evoked in an Elizabethan theater, give rise to specific ideologies in the minds of the audience members, Greenblatt focuses upon the essential cultural ideologies themselves, rather than on their media; however, he is no less interested in the process of transmission, as the welding together of the seams of Early Modern culture, which Post-modern culture finds to be coming apart (Greenblatt 175).
One element of drama in which Greenblatt differs with a stucturalist approach is illustrated through Marlowe’s heroes. Although they represent values contrary to those endorsed by the Elizabethan state, because of the cultural context in which they are created and portrayed, their ultimate semiotic significance is not a contradiction of those values, but their affirmation. A structuralist semiotics would be limited to an interpretation of Tamburlaine as signifying the values of the amoral conqueror. Greenblatt carries the semiotic process further by speculating upon the concepts that such a symbol would necessarily evoke, given the cultural context in which the process takes place.
For Kristeva, "literature is the best example of semiotics as the
site of a critique of the production of meaning..." She predicts that
semiotics will "turn to the social text, to those social practices of which
lit is only one unvalorized variant in order to conceive of them as so many
ongoing transforations and or productions" (Davis and Schleifer 281). It is
precisely this production of meaning that Greenblatt is interested in, but for
him the most fruitful area of research is not within the structures of
literature itself, but in the margins.
Davis, Robert Con, and Ronald Schleifer, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism . White Plains: Longman, 1994.
Greenblatt, Steven J. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare.
Chicago: U of Chicago, 1980.
Mullaney, Steven. "Book Reviews." Shakespeare Quarterly Winter 1989: 495-500.