The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories

THE MARK OF THEORY

The Mark of Theory

INSCRIPTIVE FIGURES, POSTSTRUCTURALIST PREHISTORIES

ANDREA BACHNER

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press

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CONTENTS

Introduction: At the Scene of Inscription

1. Savage Marks: Subjection and the Specters of Anthropology

2. Impact Erasure: Psychoanalysis and the Multiplication of Trauma

3. Stings of Visibility: Picture Theories and Visual Contact

4. Out of the Groove: Aural Traces and the Mediation of Sound

Conclusion: Against Inscription?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Introduction

At the Scene of Inscription

Inscription

1. The action of inscribing; the action of writing upon or in something.

2. concr. That which is inscribed; a piece of writing or lettering upon something; a set of characters or words written, engraved, or otherwise traced upon a surface; esp. a legend, description, or record traced upon some hard substance for the sake of durability, as on a monument, building, stone, tablet, medal, coin, vase, etc.

3. spec. a. A short piece of writing placed at the beginning of a book or other composition, descriptive of its nature, contents, authorship, etc.; a title, heading, superscription. b. A brief dedication of a book or work of art to a person; the superscription of a letter. c. In early Music, a motto or sign, or a combination of both, placed at the beginning of an enigmatical canon, to indicate (often itself enigmatically) the manner of its resolution.

4. Anat. A marking upon some organ or part produced by another in contact with it; esp. a marking on the fleshy part of a muscle where a tendon crosses it.

5. Geom. The action of inscribing one figure in another.

6. Civil and Sc. Law. An accusation or challenge at law made under the condition that if it were false, the accuser would undergo the same punishment that would have been inflicted on the accused if found guilty.¹

Inscriptive Turns

Literature, art, and theory are shot through with scenarios of inscription: from Franz Kafka’s inscriptive execution machine in In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony) to contemporary performance art that rewrites the number tattoos of Auschwitz victims; from Sigmund Freud’s metaphor of the mystic writing pad as a model for the psyche to nostalgias of photographic indexicality in the digital age; from early twentieth-century fascinations with gramophone grooves as alternative mode of writing to gender and racial differences imagined as corporeal marks in recent theoretical discourses. What accounts for this fascination? What aesthetic and theoretical aims does inscription serve? What role does it play in a global imaginary constructed and negotiated by new media technologies as well as in the present and future of theoretical thought?

I argue that inscription constitutes one of the master metaphors of contemporary theoretical thought, one that forms part of a theoretical unconscious, part of the partly visible, partly hidden conceptual matrix that underlies the laws and assumptions of theoretical thought. In this book, I understand inscription as a scene that takes place where and when a material surface is breached and forced to bear marks. As a figure that draws on a wide array of practices of marking, from tattooing to circumcision, from photographic imprints to phonographic grooves, inscription has provided an imaginary that oriented, governed, and irritated theoretical thought at least from the late nineteenth century up to today.

Even though theoretical concepts such as Paul de Man’s notion of inscription or Jacques Derrida’s trace provide some of the most notorious avatars of inscription, figures of marking are not only at the core of deconstructivist theories or merely the object of media studies in the form of reflections on concrete technographic media.² They also play an important role in many theoretical texts, even there where their presence is not explicitly marked: in Foucauldian theories of subjection, trauma theory’s impact metaphors, feminist reflections on the mark of gender, or the contestation of epidermal schemas and stereotypes in theories of race. Rather than a symptom of the linguistic turn, inscription as a theoretical figure is the legacy of earlier inventions, such as the disciplines of anthropology and psychoanalysis or the technologies of photography and phonography, even as it inspires and fuels much of contemporary theory.

Inscription, understood as a conceptual deep structure, a medial imaginary, has an inception point that coincides with the beginning of modernity: with the emergence of new scientific paradigms such as psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sexology, with the invention of new technologies of vision and sound, and with the development of a modern sense of aesthetics. Inscription as a theoretical figure might well have an end date, although, despite incessant invocations of newness and rupture, such as the mantra of the digital revolution, it is yet to come. Inscription forms part of a profound epistemic structure. Although we can see it at work in the writings of many major theorists over the past 150 years, there is no school of inscription, no coherent group of thinkers that espouses inscriptionism as a doctrine. And yet, scenes in which a body becomes the surface of marks or traces are ubiquitous in much of twentieth-century cultural theory and philosophy, from psychoanalysis to (post)structuralism, from postcolonial theory to gender studies, from trauma theory to media studies. Theorists of inscription—though not forming a coherent group, let alone sharing a program—use scenes of inscription as theoretical figures, often for concepts that lie at the very heart of their projects.

Even though much of contemporary theory, philosophy, and aesthetics follow an inscriptive logic, I am not claiming the existence of an inscriptive turn. Thinking in terms of inscription is not just one of many turns according to which we like to describe conceptual shifts in theoretical thinking. Unlike such turns—be they linguistic, pictorial, or sonic—inscription does not constitute a surface phenomenon. Inscription is not just a sub-phenomenon of the linguistic turn that seeks to decode reality as if it was a linguistic system. Thinking in terms of inscription would be unthinkable without the linguistic turn, and yet, at the same time, it consists of a reaction against it, or even a turn away from it, since, for proponents of inscription, the levels of material and structure can no longer be differentiated as neatly. Instead, through the lens of inscription, thinkers focus their attention on how materiality and signification interact; and inscription becomes one of the most prominent models for theorizing this interaction. As part of a theoretical unconscious, inscription cuts deeply into the fabric of philosophical and critical thought. Indeed, rethinking theory through the figure of inscription also involves a scrutiny of the way in which theoretical genealogies privilege the figure of the turn, a pattern of endless ruptures, of a series of breaks—all too repetitive in the never-ending desire for inhabiting the cutting edge of theory. Inscription provides a more general logic for some of the most popular turns—in Chapters 3 and 4, I will read the pictorial and the sonic turn through the lens of inscription—and for the overall structure of theoretical historiography and the fetish of the theoretical turn as such.

In The Mark of Theory, I offer a wide-ranging conceptual genealogy of contemporary thought through the figure of inscription. The narratives that I provide trace inscriptive imaginaries from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as grounds for the theoretical movements of the last few decades. In the book, I present clusters of inscriptive configurations whose conceptual development comes to theory not only, and not even primarily, from the realm of philosophy but from other sister discourses, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, and medicine, from literature, media practices, and theories about art. For instance, I show how anthropological interest in tattooing at the turn of the twentieth century became a crucial, yet partly suppressed, imaginary for Michel Foucault’s theories of subjection and influenced feminist and queer critics such as Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler. And how the cultural practice of circumcision inflected Sigmund Freud’s theory of trauma in complex ways and inspired Jacques Derrida to reflect on the links between ethics and mediation by way of his own marked body. In The Mark of Theory, I scrutinize how theories of indexicality around the emergence of the photographic medium were retooled by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Georges Didi-Huberman as theories of visual violence rife with metaphors of impact and shock. And how the gramophonic inscription of sound allowed intellectuals in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodor W. Adorno, and László Moholy-Nagy, to negotiate between mediation and nonmediated reality, leading to recent media-theoretical paradigms (by theorists such as Friedrich Kittler, Frances Dyson, Lisa Gitelman, or Jean-Luc Nancy) and to reflections on how theory itself is mediated.

The Mark of Theory works according to a double methodology: a poststructuralist attention to figurative language coupled with a media-studies focus on objects, phenomena, and practices of mediation. Inspired by poststructuralist methodologies and insights, I intend The Mark of Theory also as a critique of poststructuralism. It traces some of the prehistories of poststructuralism as a way of working through poststructuralist thought as a past legacy of a thought to come, thus also framing poststructuralism as prehistory of our current moment. By scrutinizing theory’s obsessions with inscriptions, I also analyze a legacy of inscriptive figures that have left their mark on theory and by way of which theoretical approaches have attempted to leave their conceptual, political, and ethical mark on the way we think now.

By reading inscription as part of a historically contextualized theoretical imaginary, The Mark of Theory allows for a new perspective on the logic of contemporary theory. While drawing on pretexts from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries and paying attention to poststructuralist fascinations with traces and marks, I extend these reflections to the contemporary afterlives of inscription and analyze its conceptual and ethical impact in a range of theoretical discourses. My focus on the figure of inscription (i.e., the way in which theoretical works express, illustrate, and concretize their conceptual tenets) enables a reflection on the role of materiality and mediation in theory. As such, the book also mediates in the contemporary theoretical debates around and against the legacies of poststructuralism (for instance, in the form of theory’s material and object-ontological turns, or the new wave of interest in systems theory, as well as media theory).

In this book, I view inscription and its different embodiments in the light of mediality, doubly so: On the one hand, inscription is a medial phenomenon, represented by concrete medial practices and technologies, such as tattooing, circumcision, photography, and phonography. On the other, inscription also becomes a medium by way of which theory stages and concretizes its conceptual moves. In The Mark of Theory, I analyze how theory uses material forms and how these media, in their specific inscriptive embodiments and practices, shape conceptual thought. Deconstructivist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man have taught us that language is fundamentally figurative and that our access to reality passes through the metaphorical transfers of language. This also means that theoretical thought needs concrete imaginaries for its inspiration; multiple representations, imaginaries, and discursive movements adhere to it and aid or hinder its tropological duties. If literality is figurative, if everything is always already software and yet must also rely upon hardware, then the strategic deployments of these categories, the manipulation of their supposed boundaries, and the ways in which we construct theoretical hardness or softness matter profoundly. I have written The Mark of Theory as a critical tropology that takes the medium and materiality of theory seriously and argue that different inscriptive practices and media imaginaries shape conceptual thought and determine representational politics and ethical choices.

What, then, is inscription understood in this way? In its most basic sense, inscription is ubiquitous and timeless, present in the stroke of a pen, the magnetic trace on a hard drive, or the pricks of the tattooing needle. The simple, concrete act of cutting into a surface and its result, a surface that has been altered—indeed, marked—becomes the kernel of a theoretical framework that forges new links between signification and materiality. As such, inscription is a figure of liminality and ambiguity, a bridge between bodies or other material surfaces and meaning. It stands at the threshold between materiality and signification, between the material act or gesture of marking and the potential production of meaning, as its mark is being read as a sign—hence theory’s infatuation with inscriptive scenarios that combine signification as textual abstraction with profoundly corporeal imaginaries. Even though inscription can encompass a range of surfaces, scripts, and scenarios, more often than not inscription is couched in violent terms, as a marking that wounds. Even there where the surface to be marked is not directly the body, an imaginary of corporeality still haunts inscriptive scenes as medial supports are figuratively corporealized, when visuality violently affects the beholder or when the phonograph needle traces the cranial sutures instead of wax plates, inspired by Rilke’s essay Ur-geräusch (Primal Sound) of 1919. This has to do with poststructuralism’s infatuation with the material and corporeal even as textuality becomes its driving force. In the guise of inscriptive practices, textuality reinvents itself as a material practice and claims to influence material reality. Inscription mediates (and manages) this contradiction not merely by equating textuality and materiality but by connecting both in such a way as to allow for the manipulation of both as equivalent and (at the same time) as opposites. Inscription is the interface and hinge for paradoxical theoretical maneuvers.

Minimally, inscription enters signification as the production of a difference: between what has been marked and that which does not bear a mark. On this basis, by way of its status as a liminal figure, inscription allows for the construction and management of various other differences—such as sex, race, culture, or medium. Inscription—understood as the scene in which a material body is marked into signification—is doubly connected to the construction of difference. Inscriptive figures capitalize on specific writing techniques, scriptural practices, and media technologies for their theoretical message, often introducing these as in contrast to signification or writing proper, aligned with materiality or corporeality instead, for instance in the guise of tattooing or circumcision as forms of writing (although not writing proper) or of photography and phonography, which can be compared to the graphic output of writing but differ from its symbolic and signifying function. As a theoretical and aesthetic strategy, inscription becomes a conceptual tool for mediating differences precisely because it can be aligned with writing (as signification) and framed as other (or more) than writing and signification at the same time. The manipulation of the boundaries between materiality and signification is frequently projected onto other limits: between different cultures, between different temporalities, between different media, as well as between reality and mediation.

For this to function, theories that work with inscriptive figures—especially in the context of poststructuralism—stage inscription as a series of paradoxes, open to theoretical maneuvers and difference management. In the form of laws of inscription, as I sketch them in what follows, these theoretically operative aporias are open to different theoretical and political outcomes, especially as paradoxical structures can be strategically highlighted or else put under erasure.

Laws of Inscription

1. INSCRIPTION’S FIRST RULE: THROUGH ITS CUT, INSCRIPTION DRAWS A DISTINCTION

Inscription introduces a difference between the mark and its inscriptive surface, between what remains unmarked and what has been marked.³ This basic act of drawing a distinction, of introducing a difference, however, has profound conceptual consequences. As a mark, inscription results in the production of meaning, in however basic a way.

1.1 The Rule of Materiality Transcended

The surface to be marked and the instrument that marks are entirely of the material realm, colluding in a process of contact that changes at least one of these two agents physically. And yet, these changes in material reality become symbolically and conceptually significant as setting up a threshold between materiality and meaning. By being breached by a cut, the surface thus inscribed accrues more physicality, whereas the trace that cuts through it transcends its material roots through the potential to signify.

1.2 The Rule of Production

By the same token, however, the space thus marked is also produced. This is not to say that an object does not exist materially prior to becoming the site of inscription. However, the fact of its mark sets it apart—marks it off—from its material surrounding, its stretches and folds that have not been marked thus. Inscription makes a material space special, discrete, and intelligible. Embodied realities are at once the surface for and the outcome of processes of marking.

1.3 The Rule of Distinction Breached

Even as inscription draws a distinction, thus establishing a divide between materiality and meaning, it also depends on the intertwining of both sides. Indeed, signification and materiality interact doubly. As discussed in 1.1, in inscription, signification emerges from materiality. And yet, as a virtual set of marks—letters or graphs, images or discernible patterns of lines and dots—signification acquires visibility only by way of being inscribed onto a material surface. Mutual intertwining of bodies and texts, as bodies are intextuated and signs embodied.⁴

1.4 The Rule of Specificity

Inscription, although sutured into an abstract concept, is radically specific. Inscription underlines that we cannot really conceive of signification prior to its material expression. When we talk about a text, a concrete, if variable, image of a writing surface and graphs, as well as an idea of their meaning, forms in our mind, in accordance with the etymology of the term that, still visible in words such as texture or textile, points to the eminently material basis of the term text. Nor can we conceive of flesh as a general, unshaped materiality prior to an organism and its social markers. Not only do the surface that undergoes incisive re-significations and the hand that traces them merit attention. At least of equal importance are the script that is being used, the cultural system (in) which it signifies, and its position and functioning within a whole field of different scripts and their contexts and media. Inscription is invested in the materiality of the writing implements and surface, in the concrete facets of its processes, in the fact that writing cannot be thought without a particular language, script, or cultural context. Even as the rules of inscription traced here attempt to paint a conceptual, generally valid, and hence abstract picture, our imagination constantly fills the concept of inscription with specific images or examples.

2. THE PARADOX OF SPATIALITY: INSCRIPTION SETS UP SPATIAL DIFFERENCES, THOUGH NEVER FAILS TO CONTEST THESE VERY DIFFERENCES

2.1 The Rule of Topology: Inscription Opens up a Three-Dimensional Space by Working on a Surface

Inscription is a surface phenomenon. For it to mark, it has to accede to visibility. Hence it must manifest itself on a material boundary, invest the outermost membranes of material objects. At the same time, inscription creates a depth effect by transforming a heretofore smooth and even surface into a relief. Of course, the difference between unmarked and marked is relative to the presentist perspective of each single inscriptive act, since there is no surface that is not already multiply marked, though, from the vantage point of a cut in process, it might appear pristinely blank (but this is the stuff of another rule). Inscription is poised between surface and depth, and it maintains a paradoxical relationship to the distinction between surface and depth. It thrives on and, indeed, produces the spatial dichotomy of surface and depth, of two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space. On the one hand, inscription needs the surface: It inhabits and invests it. On the other, it questions and, to a certain extent, invalidates the very idea of a surface. It is that which, by marking a surface, cuts through to something beyond (and below) it, opening up the two-dimensional space of a flat plane to three-dimensionality, transforming extension into depth. Even so, inscription is never deep enough. It always faces another depth beyond it, an interiority that defies the grasp of the superficial mark. Such a transcendent elsewhere is not really in something, or only by imagination and convention. Rather, as an invisible, ever-elusive center it holds out against the lure and, well, the superficiality of the surface. Imagined as the deepest depth, the interiority of things, but more insistently of human beings—their core essence, self, or soul—it paradoxically transcends the realm of materiality and space. Inscription mediates between spatial surface and depth and can also draw and foreground a distinction between material superficiality and the depth of immaterial essence.

2.2 The Rule of Inclusion: The Outside of Inscription Is Already Necessarily within Inscription

The other of inscription is unmarked space, matter that has yet to suffer the imprint of meaning. In order for processes of marking to occur, inscription needs its own outside. And yet, such an exterior already falls within inscription’s purview.⁵ It depends on inscription for its very definition: as inscription’s precursor or antagonist. As such, the outside of inscription must be both radically exterior and its necessary part: excluded within, included at the outside.

3. THE PARADOX OF ACTION: INSCRIPTION IS BOTH ACTION AND STASIS

3.1 The Rule of Performance: Inscription Stages a Scene

When a surface is inscribed, inscription as such is always multiple, designating both the process of marking and the resulting text. The cut of a surface, the text, or indeed, inscription, such a mark leaves does not define or exhaust inscription. Inscription is not merely a state or simply an act. Rather, it consists of a whole scene with multiple props and actors. A mark does not appear by pure magic; instead, a hand wields a knife, scalpel, needle, or stylus, an instrument or mechanism punches holes, imprints signs, produces grooves. As a scene, inscription appeals to an audience. Minimally, in order to make sense, an inscription has to be seen or felt, or else at least potentially intended for reading. Perceiving inscription as a scene adds complexity. Other factors and actors, other levels of perception, enrich and complicate its basic differential structure.

3.2 The Rule of Agency: Inscription Marks the Line between Activity and Passivity

Inscription acts as a strange dividing line between activity and passivity. It is both the expression of an active principle and that of passivity, in the split of he/she/it who inscribes and he/she/it who is inscribed. Inscription, the performance of material incision, perceived as a scene, comes complete with different actors: an instrument of inscription and its wielder, a surface about to be inscribed, as the host of inscription, as well as, potentially, the eye that sees the spectacle of inscription, and, indeed, reads the inscription. While not all roles in the play of inscription are equal, no preconceived distribution of activity and passivity need exist here. Inevitably, though, the surface of inscription, the thin line between he who wields the blade and she who has her body cut, implicitly marks the border between he who has power and she who has none, between he who dominates and penetrates and she who receives and suffers. (The use of gendered personal pronouns is entirely intentional here, as a reminder of how activity and passivity are conventionally projected onto gender differences.) Should the scene make coincide in one body the hand that cuts and the skin breached, passivity still becomes the overriding share—and the power behind the hand is desperately searched for beyond and outside of that body and located elsewhere. This is not to say that cutting one’s skin or having one’s body incised empowers that body. And yet the surface that receives inscription is not merely a passive plane; instead, it is curved rather than flat, mutable rather than fixed, and thus, from a different vantage point, active rather than passive. Indeed, the constellations of power in different scenes of inscription can be infinitely more complex. Even so, the theoretical coding of inscription tends to do just that: simplify the difference between passivity and activity, between power and its absence, poising it precisely on the tip of a blade or a pen . . . or complicate matters if the theoretical problem in question calls for more complex scenarios.

4. THE PARADOX OF TEMPORALITY: INSCRIPTION EXISTS IN DOUBLE TIME

4.1 The Rule of Iteration: Inscription Happens Once Only, and yet It Has Always Already Happened

The cut takes place once only, and once it takes place, it takes place once and for all.⁶ The cutting edge that inflicts the cut strikes once only, yet the cut remains in place. The cut, once it has taken place, cannot be undone. What has been cut apart cannot be joined again. The surface that has been incised will never return to its original state. The cut cannot be undone, and therefore it cannot be redone either. And yet, inscription never happens only once. Whenever it cuts, it already cuts at least twice. Even before the first incision into a surface, inscription has already happened. This can be understood in two ways. (1) Even though inscription capitalizes upon the temporality of the event and upon singularity, as a material trace it merely follows in the tracks of other contacts or cuts suffered by an object. Indeed, no surface can ever be completely pristine or unmarked. (2) On a more conceptual level, inscription partakes of the temporal logic of the always already so frequently vaunted by poststructuralist logic.⁷ The temporal mode of the future perfect—closer to the structure of a paradoxical loop than to the grammatical tense of the same name—applies to the same act of inscription, no longer, as in (1), to the necessary repetition of inscription. This can be understood by scrutinizing the structure of the process of drawing a distinction: its double nature between conceptual and material operation. When inscription manifests the drawing of a distinction, a distinction has already been drawn, even before any inscriptive act has happened. In other words, the conceptual distinction between marked and unmarked predates and prepares its drawing. Thus, the scene of inscription as an interface between materiality and signification presents itself as a paradoxical primal scene. In order to provide a powerful model of the interaction between two terms that are often presented as opposites, inscriptive theories both must and cannot stage inscription as an encounter of two separate forces, materiality and signification. Consequently, scenes of inscription repeat what has already happened, while keeping alive at once an awareness of iteration and the pretense of the first time. In more than one sense, then, inscription is both always (already) in the past even when it is just about to occur.

4.2 The Rule of Anachronicity: As a Figure, Inscription Is Anachronistic, and yet It Is Profoundly Modern

In contrast to 4.1, the second part of the paradox of temporality does not apply to the temporal dimension of the operation of inscription itself but rather to its conceptual historiography (i.e., to the way in which different modes and media of inscription have been aligned on a virtual time line). Though most media depend (at least partially) on inscriptive operations, since they find their base in differently produced material traces, inscription often invokes a premodern imaginary. It takes us back to practices that, at first glance, seem far removed from contemporary body politics or from contemporary technologies of writing. Even though the production of all signifying traces is an inscription of sorts, from the impregnation of paper with ink to letters engraved on a tombstone, inscription tends to highlight the materiality of signification, the process of carving into a surface. As the Greeks’ graphein, the marks a stylus engraves into a wax plate, as Mesopotamian cuneiform imprints on clay tablets, as the Chinese incisions on oracle bones, inscription evokes writing in its primal form. Consequently, the images or examples that give concrete shape to the concept of inscription often have an archaic flavor. For instance, in L’Anti-œdipe (Anti-Oedipus), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use inscription in the form of savage rituals of bodily marking to illustrate the most primitive form of social organization.⁸ In histories of media in general, or of writing more specifically, inscription often makes its appearance quite explicitly in an early phase—in spite of the general applicability of it conceptual structure. For instance, in the essay L’excrit (Exscription), Jean-Luc Nancy—though aware of the constructed nature of such an account—evokes a teleological vision of media technology that places the book at the end of a history at whose beginning stand performance, music, chants, and dance, and that reaches the perfection of inky traces on paper only after another period, that of inscription. Though no longer in the guise of supposedly even more primal media, such as the circumcised bodies of Deleuze and Guattari’s model of savage sociality, Nancy’s inscription, as words that must have a characteristic aspect of depth or prominence, engraving or sculpture to be read publicly, not individually, is still the hallmark of past social structures, of monumental communism, architectural writing and hieroglyphic monarchy.⁹

5. THE PARADOX OF MULTIPLICATION: INSCRIPTION IS BOTH SINGULAR AND MULTIPLE

5.1 The Rule of Displacement: Inscription Has the Tendency to Multiply and Shift Levels

In syntony with its inherent double (and doubling) logic, inscription manifests itself often in different shapes and on different levels at once. Almost as if one cut triggered a chain reaction of other inscriptions. More precisely, representations of inscription in its basic physical form frequently echo on formal or figurative levels, translating materiality into textual, medial, or theoretical moves. Such proliferations of inscription forge interesting nodes at which conceptual differences are mediated, negotiated, and, potentially, complicated: Where the material and the abstract, the literal and the figurative become inextricably entwined, where inscription is both at its most real and at its most virtual.

5.2 The Paradox of Plenitude: Inscription Is at Once in Excess and Always Found Lacking

With the rule of iteration (4.1) and the rule of displacement (5.1) comes another paradoxical feature of inscription: its oscillation between excess and lack. Inscription fills a blank space, and yet it also adds emphasis and remarks something not in need of marks. It adds to and thus disrupts material plenitude. Its cut leaves a wound; its trace interrupts a surface that was never blank or empty to begin with.

Difference Management; or, Inscriptive Quandaries

What does inscription as a conceptual figure do? Inscription acts as an interface. It is a Schnittstelle—the German term for interface, but also, quite literally, a cutting point—a site where something must be severed in order to be connected differently. What inscription severs and reconnects is materiality and signification, as a difference that becomes its operational basis. By extension, analogy, contiguity, and displacement, multiple other differences become mapped onto this basic dichotomy. The dichotomy of materiality versus signification, often translated as body versus meaning, extends to spatial—hence surface/depth and exteriority/interiority—and temporal metaphors of duration (permanence/event) and chronology (past/present and primitive/modern), as well as categories of agency (passivity/activity). It can also be mapped onto racial, ethnic, and cultural identity (alterity/sameness) or differences of gender, sex, and sexuality, such as female/male, feminine/masculine, sexually passive/active, receptive/insertive, homosexual/heterosexual. Inscription can be mobilized to cement and complicate differences of medium (analog/digital, sound/image, image/text, logographic/alphabetic) and has profound stakes in the distribution of concretion versus abstraction, as well as managing the difference between literality and figurativity and between the mediated and the unmediated. Starting as a simple physical act charged with conceptual baggage, inscription thus becomes an instrument of difference management, of establishing, aligning, renegotiating, even complicating binary differences. As a conceptual figure, though derived from a material imaginary, inscription rules some of the ways in which we perceive reality, in which the multiplicity of the real becomes intelligible and structured.

Inscription as such does not necessarily create materiality and signification as discrete and, at times, dichotomous categories. Nor does it necessarily produce and cement the other binary pairs with which it tarries. In fact, even as it illustrates, concretizes, and embodies these differences, it can also complicate and subvert them. The different participants in a scene of inscription—the surface or medium, the instrument, the text, the agent, and the audience of inscription—assume the role of placeholders under whose guise differences can be acted out. The laws of inscription favor paradox, they show that the drawing of a distinction also invites, even mandates, the breaching of this very distinction. In other words, inscription as such does not cement differences or reify dichotomies. And yet, inscriptive scenarios can be (and are, indeed, frequently) used for such purposes. Inscription can manage differences precisely because it encompasses both sides. This encompassing means a conceptual coexistence of both as virtually discrete and intertwined. And yet, conceptual difference management always involves