Materiality and the Digital Future of Inscription

abstract: In Of Grammatology, Derrida asserts the absolute generality of the trace, arguing that it pertains to life and its material basis. However, it has been difficult for Derrida's interpreters to identify the warrant for this generality claim. Recently, Martin Hägglund has offered an influential defense of the generality of the trace by grounding it in the form of finite life (survival). However, as Catherine Malabou's critique of the grammatological project suggests, any such attempt is programmed to fail. On her view, writing never was and never could be general; by linking the trace to the model of writing or inscription, Derrida limited the generality of the trace and its pertinence for any philosophical materialism. Materiality, Malabou argues, is what will always necessarily escape every model of inscription. To think the generality of the trace requires thinking a nongraphic trace. Insofar as Malabou's notion of " plasticity " does this, it should be understood as heir to Derrida's notion of writing. However, I argue, Derrida's notion of " writing " was always already nongraphic, or plastic in a way that Malabou and other interpreters have failed to factor.

CR: The New Centennial Review, 2021

2024

In one of his latest books, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018), Latour sees the Anthropocene as a fundamental crisis of modernity and a culmination of modernist 'abstract assumptions' and emphasis on 'human detachment from material constraints' (Latour 2018). In this chapter, we argue that the same privileged dream of geo-escapism that Latour considers characteristic of the Anthropocene is constitutive of the narrative structure of Laboratory Life. It is, moreover, our contention that the idea of symmetry risks marginalizing the power of human interpretation as a knowledge constituting political force in local and geopolitical struggles over sustainability. As a case in point of such marginalization, we will present a deconstructive close reading of the introductory chapter of Latour and Woolgar's classic work Laboratory Life; a book often understood as an early draft of actor-network theory (ANT). We consider that this text represents a decisive point in the history of the social and human sciences, by challenging the dichotomous understanding of the nature/culture and social/scientific divide, while at the same time undermining its own project by marginalizing the role of human interpretation in deconstructing this distinction. On the one hand, Laboratory Life emphasizes the role of mediation and interpretation in scientific processes, and further insists on the social as an integral part of the domain of science and nature. Compliant with this is a particular emphasis on the role of inscription and so-called inscription devices. On the other hand, the text actually marginalizes the role of mediation, and particularly the various inscriptions and inscription devices involved, in the production of Latour and Woolgar's own text. To tease out this ironic suppression of the material act of writing, and the materiality of the traces and inscriptions in this founding text of ANT, we will relate the notion of 'inscription' in Woolgar and Latour to 'grammatology' and 'arche-writing' in Derrida. Like Woolgar and Latour, Derrida also aimed

2013

silent reading becomes more prevalent, books are made more readable with the introduction of textual elements that may or may not have oral equivalents: more easily identifiable letter forms, and many ideographic elements that aid the reader in acquiring an overview of the text. Periods in superscript as in certain Latin inscriptions, chapter headings, column titles, markings to indicate paragraphs, lists with marked items, short summaries on the margins, footnotes, as well as writing in different colors, font sizes and fonts constitute common indicators of this shift (Raible, "Von der Textgestalt zur Texttheorie. Beobachtungen zur Entwicklung des Text-Layouts und ihren Folgen" 29). 8 In short, the wide availability of books and the practice of silent reading initiate changes in book culture that break up the linearity of earlier European texts in favor of affording a clearer overview of the entirety of text, as well as making fuller use of the two-dimensional space of the page by incorporating ideogrammatic elements. 9 This multidimensionality of writing suggests that we bring heightened scholarly attention to those aspects of writing that cannot be captured by terms such as "communication," "transcription," and "symbolic structure." Sybille Krämer opposes the "schemata of language or image, symbol or technē" [Schemata von Sprache oder Bild, Symbol oder Technik]. She asserts instead that "writing as medium is a hybrid creation; it is an intermedial phenomenon" [Schrift 8 "hochgestellte Punkte wie in bestimmten lateinischen Inschriften." For further elaborations, see Raible, Die Semiotik der Textgestalt and Raible, Zur Entwicklung von Alphabetschrift-Systemen. 9 It is important to note here that "ideogrammatic elements" does not suggest that alphabetic writing is not already pictorial in some ways, nor that ideogrammatic writing is purely pictorial. Some but not all Chinese ideograms are pictograms, and some of them do "explicitly refer to the reproduction of written forms and contain in their structure an element indicative of action with the hands," as Thomas Blenman Hare indicates (Hare 67). However, it is also true that Chinese ideograms often contain a variety of pictorial, oral and semantic cues, from which many Chinese and Japanese speakers glean the meaning and pronunciation of ideograms. Ernest Fenollosa, whose essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" had great influence on Ezra Pound, famously ignores this fact and propagates a common misconception about the way Chinese and Chinese-derived characters are read by Chinese and Japanese speakers. Assuming that Chinese characters have "no basis in sound," Fenollosa advances that the Chinese written language has, "through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue" (Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry 44, 55). Fenollosa overlooks the way Chinese and Sino-Japanese ideograms are often read without an eye to their pictoriality, and that they often contain clues about their pronunciation. Readers of Chinese and Japanese tend to read ideograms as conventional signs, "without any longer seeing in them the visual metaphorthe visible etymology-which so impressed Fenollosa" (The Brazilian concretist poet Haroldo de Campos quoted in Perloff 72). For a more detailed discussion of Fenollosa's essay, see Haun Saussy's preface to the 2008 edition of "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" (Saussy in Fenollosa and Pound, "Fenollosa Compounded: A Distinction" 1-40). For the relevance of this discussion to the legacy of the avant-garde (particularly international concretism) in the digital medium, see chapter 3 in Perloff.

2024

In my capacity as a designer and design lecturer, over the past decade, I have noticed an increasing lethargy in typographic practice whereby designers (and design students) tend to apply typographic clichés, as visual shorthand, to their work. Alternatively, they tend to afford greater time to considering the communicative function of visuals such as illustration and photography so that typography is only considered toward the end of a design project, whereby safe, visually stripped, and monotonous letterforms make their way onto the design insomuch as they do not interfere with these other, apparently more rhetorical devices. In this study I make use of Hegelian dialectics as a methodological lens with which to frame two communicative complexities surrounding symbolic typography. In doing so, I engage with Barthesian and Baudrillardian philosophy surrounding myth and simulacra, respectively. I attempt to compare and contrast type that communicates in a mythic capacity, and as typographic simulacra. The intention is to prod at staid typographic conventions surrounding the application of mythic type. I do so by investigating examples of symbolic type that communicate in unfamiliar ways, as simulacra. In doing so, I offer new insight into the communicative complexity of symbolic letterforms as it relates to the field of communication and specifically typographic design. The intention is to encourage designers to extend their rhetorical artillery in considering letterforms that communicate in alternative, often less predictable ways.