The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories by Andrea Bachner (review)

What is the relation between meaning and materiality, and how does this relation leave its mark on theory? These are the primary questions explored by Andrea Bachner in The Mark of Theory, which sets forth a compelling examination of inscription and in so doing offers an important and persuasive critique of poststructuralist tendencies.

Bachner begins with an introduction that examines inscription as a theoretical problem. Inscription, in short, is that which renders meaning material: it brings processes of signification into the fabric of material reality, and in so doing leaves some type of indelible mark—though with the crucial caveat that this mark often persists primarily through its manifestation in projects of erasure. These vexing matters around erasure bring poststructuralist theory to the fore, particularly through the work of Jacques Derrida and the multifarious ways in which his examination of the "trace" leaves its mark on that theoretical community. The fundamental matter, as Bachner persuasively elucidates it, is that there are strong tendencies within poststructuralism toward the rejection and disavowal of inscription, even as poststructuralism as theory is impossible without its being inscribed. To clarify matters, Bachner makes the bold move of positing a variety of "Laws of Inscription" (7–13), before exploring theoretical efforts to denounce inscription—particularly in relation to the marks composing differentiations of race and gender—that ultimately trade in a one-sided and limited conceptualization of inscriptive practices and possibilities.

Chapter 1 offers a provocative treatment of inscription through an examination of its centrality to nineteenth-century anthropology in relation to the reception of Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" by Derrida and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Bachner suggests that a colonial anthropology haunts poststructuralism: it is that which poststructuralism defines itself in opposition to, and yet it is that which poststructuralism, reflectively examined, appears to recapitulate and mirror. "Inscription," Bachner writes, "harbors the secret to poststructuralist theory's paradoxical figurality: the use, reuse, and abuse of the specific for the reification of conceptual universals, even as singularity is constantly invoked and celebrated" (54).

Chapter 2 takes up the issue of trauma. Trauma, as put forth by figures like Jean-François Lyotard, is that which transcends consciousness; on such [End Page e-10] an understanding, "those who suffer from trauma, as well as theorists of trauma, have no access to trauma's primal impact. Unless through trauma's repetitions, of course" (64–65). Through an examination of Sigmund Freud's reflection on the writing pad and circumcision, Bachner raises the problem that many theorists seek to define trauma in such a way that it necessarily transcends the inscriptive, even as both the traumatized and the theorist of trauma apprehend the subject through the myriad of ways in which it is inscribed.

Following this comes an examination of image and sound, respectively, in Chapters 3 and 4. The former is explored through C.S. Peirce's notion of indexicality as it relates to the work of Roland Barthes and others on photography, which is then examined through Walter Benjamin's notion of "shock." Bachner argues that "poststructuralism carefully restrains and indeed polices contact in order to curtail its tether to presence" (135), erecting a notion of visuality that begets criticism of the image on the cheap. The work of the artist Guadalupe Santa Cruz is then examined to demonstrate alternative inscriptive possibilities. Chapter 4 turns to Rainer Maria Rilke's imagining of a phonographic needle running along the grooves of a human skull to examine sound as a medium of inscription. Here Bachner explores whether translation of some form is a necessary dimension of mediality. Sound, Bachner suggests, presents both a medium and the means for mediating mediality—it facilitates the transmission of meanings even as it offers the possibility of representing that which transcends signification.

In the conclusion, Bachner indicts those theoretical approaches that would position themselves against inscription. The simple problem is that inscription is a necessary condition for theory: one cannot...