Julia Kristeva and a Collective Semiotic in a Social Body

Julia Kristeva distinguishes between the semiotic and the symbolic as they apply to the individual human body. This essay argues that there is a similar application to the social, political, economic, and cultural body. This “social body” possesses its own collective semiotic, which could be seen as bringing about social change in a Lotmanian semiosphere, the space of meaning generation without which language cannot exist. In the semiosphere, strategic communication can lead to either hegemony or counter-hegemony, where organic intellectuals, charismatic authority, and meta-signs emerge and in which system and lifeworld fuse in a postmodern hyperreal. Such a hyperreal is the result of a collective semiotic playing at multiple levels. This has similarities to Kristeva’s fourfold signifying practices in a collectivity: the collective and the individualistic dimensions of sociology interpenetrate her work.