Abstract

This essay proposes the concept of ‘anscription’, and employs it to re-think some of the typical valences of inscription in media theory. The word is derived from the German anschreiben, which can simply mean, ‘to write up’, but also refers to the specific act, and the set of social relations that come into place, when one writes something up on a blackboard. Not quite encompassed by inscription, it offers an essential counterpart to the term for media-oriented thinkers. The essay draws out this corresponding function through readings of three imagined (but not-quite-imaginary) media, across which emerges a dialectic in the cultural imaginary of inscription. The first comes from the mathematician Norbert Wiener’s description of a mechanism that would translate written text into tactile impressions; the second, from Jacques Derrida’s historical framing of the project of deconstruction in relation to writing systems; and the third, from a thirty-two-page description of an American football game in Don DeLillo’s 1972 novel, End Zone. Each will offer a different exemplification of the function termed ‘anscription’. Just as significantly, each example presents this function in relation to the technical possibilities of media and articulates it through a theory of the body that is entangled with writing.

Highlights

  • If we take the metaphor seriously, performing an ‘anatomy of inscription’ might involve dissecting its practices into the particulate forms, the atomy, which make up the function of inscribing—and scribing them, in turn, onto some media surface

  • This essay aims to draw out one such reflexive function and the productive tensions it holds for considering the cultural imaginary of inscription

  • Derrida’s stretching of the vocabulary of information to its limits enables both the articulation of a cultural moment in which meaning is defined by its derivation from information, and the articulation of an elapsing of presence which Derrida wishes to channel into his deconstruction of logocentrism

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Summary

Introduction

If we take the metaphor seriously, performing an ‘anatomy of inscription’ might involve dissecting its practices into the particulate forms, the atomy, which make up the function of inscribing—and scribing them, in turn, onto some media surface. Media theorists have long grown accustomed to a certain level of hand-wringing about this translation problem, as is felt keenly in rendering Kittler (1990) use of Aufschreibesysteme in English (see Connor 2015) The point where this problem intersects the terms of inscription and of writing is worth some specific attention. Each presents this function in relation to the technical possibilities of media, and articulates it through a theory of the body that is entangled with writing In this sense, anscription will shift across three quite different iterations, but its central meaning will denote the imaginative properties of transforming meaning-making across surfaces while remaining media-specific. Anscription describes the extent to which writing expands beyond the historical contours of inscription, beginning to describe a practice specific to digital media, and one which activates the fantasy that all bodies may be written across informational systems of meaning-making

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