When the Structuralists proposed that all of meaning may be codified (or broken down into its “essential”) as in its Binary Opposition, they did not, I believe, take into consideration what I call “experiential” life. For me, experiential life is based on the idea that while our ontological, intellectual, and spiritual evolution is indeed a massive web work of experience and meaning and can, therefore, be seen as ratified just as the spider’s web is that of an architectural marvel, it is in the so-called “weaving of the web,” the process, that remains a mystery. This is because the process of weaving the web is an act totally reliant upon transcendence first and foremost – or, as Julia Kristeva writes in her, In the Beginning was Love, “In fact, the object of psychoanalysis is simply the linguistic exchange --and the accidents that are a part of that exchange--between two subjects in a situation of transference and counter transference.” (1) It is Kristeva’s “accidents” that are likened to one’s motivation to weave; however, as we know, language is purely symbolic. That is, one must weave his identity into consciousness (perception of an objective, static reality, the symbolic, the subjective present, in that order) in order to make it permanent. This is the primary difference between Binary Oppositions and Weaving the Web: in the former, you have the two poles (signified and signifier) morph from one meaning (or semiotic) to the other, where as in Weaving the Web, there is the abandonment of one web for another – and, believed, better – web. However, all of the webs that have been replaced still exist. They do not morph. They do not evolve. They do not change. They remain complete just as our irrational fears remain complete even once we believe we’ve “moved past” them. These fears can, through slips of the mindtongue, be revisited and, more importantly, reexperienced. Binary Oppositions does not allow for this phenomena because once one enters the symbolic (or his ego), one can never fully return to the semiotic, or “weaving,” state. Kristeva writes,
The analytic process is first and foremost an unfolding of language, prior to and beyond all unification, distantiation, and objectification. Language thus resonates between two subjects, posed or de-posed. It opens or closes their bodies to its implicit ideals and offers a possibility (not without risks) of psychic as well as physical life. (ITBWL, 66)
The “unfolding of language” can only occur after the semiotic, according to Kristeva, so that, one might say, one “unfolds from the semiotic and into the symbolic.” Therefore, it is, as Kristeva suggests, language that is the “unified web” already constructed by our constant “weaving,” which is experiential life, which is, then, our constant endless loop of the semiotic to the symbolic.
This is not to suggest, however, that language and meaning are independent; they are interdependent, with experience coming first and ratification of that experience in order to create a symbolic paradigm coming second. [Unfinished]