And indeed, we might say that such experimental writing, such a reliance on poiesis, refracts at a basic level Kristeva’s description of the turbulent interplay of semiotic and symbolic realms. These temporary moments of instantiation, those provisional “realities,” are a revelation of the semiotic chora, where our drives, rhythms, instincts, emotions await their irruption into signification. Kristeva writes:

 

[The] chora, as rupture and articulation (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality and temporality. Our discourse—all discourse—moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form. (26)

 

In this rhythmic space, “the subject is both generated and negated” and “unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce [the subject]” (Kristeva 28). The break between semiotic and symbolic, the moment of signification, comes as a thetic moment, which Kristeva describes as “a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic. The second includes part of the first and their scission is thereafter marked by the break between signifier and signified” (Kristeva 48–49). This scissive state creates a momentary “truth” of identification, in which the symbolic seems to stand in for the semiotic in a sort of one-to-one correlation. However, the thetic is itself transgressed through the act of mimesis. That is, in poetic language, particularly through mimesis, we cross “the boundary between true and false—maintained, inevitably, whenever signification is maintained, and shaken, irremediably, by the flow of the semiotic into the symbolic” (58). It is a poetics of verisimilitude, in which we prevent the thetic from becoming theological—that is, from “hiding the semiotic process that produces it” (58).

 

The “irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic” (Kristeva 63) is a moment of excess, of creative potential, of orientational possibility. Our orientations themselves function as a particular symbolic order, a language of (im)possible directions. At the thetic moment, any subjectivity projects into the future, imagining a self, however provisional, that asks both to be sustained and to be subject to the possibilities—and the productive damage—of change, of growth. If growth is under erasure here, it is only because we recognize within any imagination of the future both the potential and the peril of embracing a trajectory. This is the work of mimesis, even digital mimesis—the potential revolution (or “revolving”) of dis/orientation that inheres in poetic language. The work of Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology teaches us about orientations as lines of force that direct us, that map out paths, but that also need their own queering, their own disruption lest they blind us to roads not taken, to roads not even imagined—or imaginable. As Ahmed puts it, “The question is not so much finding a queer line but rather asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be” (179).

 

Along such lines, we simultaneously embrace our orientations and hold them at arm’s length.