Mark of Theory

Andrea Bachner

Description

What imaginaries, tropes, and media have shaped how we theorize? The Mark of Theory argues that inscription constitutes one of the master metaphors of contemporary theory.As a trope that draws on a wide array of practices of marking, from tattooing to circumcision, from photographic imprints and phonographic grooves to marks on a page, inscription provides an imaginary that orients and irritates theoretical thought. Tracing inscriptive imaginaries from the late nineteenth century to today, The Mark of Theory offers a wide-ranging conceptual genealogy of contemporary thought. Navigating poststructuralism's attention to figurative language as well as media theory's attention to objects, phenomena, and practices of mediation, the book works through core questions for how we theorize. Across a range of disciplines and scholarly conversations-from literature and media to anthropology, race and gender, art, psychoanalysis, sound, and ultimately ethics-sites of inscription come to constitute the past legacy of a thought to come, a prehistory of our current moment.In focusing on materiality and mediation The Mark of Theory shows how inscriptive practices shape conceptual thought, as well as political and ethical choices. By contextualizing the fraught relationship between materiality and signification, The Mark of Theory lays the ground for a politics of theory that begins there where theory and politics are no longer conflated.

Sujets

• Literary theory
• Structuralism
• Post-structuralism
• Media studies
• Deconstruction

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823277506
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

T h e M a r k o f T h e o r y

The Mark of Theory Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories

Andrea Bachner

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

c o n t e n t s

 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

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1

2

5

5

9

105

145

189

211 213 249 265

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 oth- erwise 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.

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Introduction: At the Scene of Inscription

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.CivilandSc. 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 1 guilty.

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 photo- graphic indexicality in the digital age; from early twentieth-century fascina- tions 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 theo- retical 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 con- temporary theoretical thought, one that forms part of a theoretical uncon- scious, 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 mate- rial 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 decon- structivist theories or merely the object of media studies in the form of 2 reflections on concrete technographic media. 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

Introduction: At the Scene of Inscription

3

impact metaphors, feminist reflections on the mark of gender, or the con- testation 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 imagi- nary, has an inception point that coincides with the beginning of moder- nity: 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 aesthet- ics. Inscription as a theoretical fi gure 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 pro- found 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 con- cepts 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 accord- ing 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 reac- tion against it, or even a turn away from it, since, for proponents of inscrip- tion, the levels of material and structure can no longer be differentiated as neatly. Instead, through the lens of inscription, thinkers focus their atten- tion 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