Surfaces of Inscription

Surfaces of inscription may include such things as sheets of paper, computer screens, digital writing pads, scrolls, tapestries, bank notes, invoices, receipts, postage stamps, licenses, certificates, diplomas, sheets of cardboard, and sheets of canvas.

      Surfaces of inscription may also include such things as windowpanes, glass bottles or jars, coffee mugs, watch or clock faces, cement or asphalt surfaces (such as streets and sidewalks), street signs, blackboards, posters, and billboards. 

      They may also include wooden surfaces (such as furniture, walls, doors, and floors), medicinal tablets or capsules, surfaces of the human body, and articles of clothing.

      They may also include blocks of stone (such as pillars, columns, gravestones, statues, and monuments), stone walls (such as cave walls), blocks of soap, wax, clay, or brick, and coins, medals, insignias, badges, tools, and weapons.

      Surfaces of (metaphorical) inscription may include such things as thoughts, impressions, memories, emotions, feelings, attitudes, and (moral, aesthetic, and cultural) sensibilities.

      Inscriptions may vary in their legibility and durability. Some may be relatively permanent, others merely temporary.

      Instruments of inscription may include pencils, pens, needles, styluses, crayons, paint or ink brushes, spray guns, pieces of chalk, drills, computers, video or movie projectors, and printing presses.

      To inscribe may be to write, print, draw, paint, carve, engrave, stamp, paste, or burn words, letters, symbols, or images onto something. It may also be to write a signature, personal message, or dedication (e.g. inside the covers of a book, on a photograph, or on a work of art).

      The body surface may be a site, locus, or medium of self-inscription, self-identification, self-representation, and self-expression. An interesting exception to this rule, however, may be when people inscribe other people’s names (such as the names of friends, lovers, or family members) on their own bodies.

      We may inscribe or map our social identities onto our own bodies (e.g. through the use of makeup, lipstick, nail polish, jewelry, tattoos, and body piercings). Cosmetic surgery may be another means of inscribing or altering the surface and contour of the body. Bodily inscriptions may be markers of not only social identity, but also social and cultural difference.

      Growth or shaving of facial or body hair, and the wearing of wigs, toupees, and particular hairstyles may also be ways of inscribing particular aesthetic, religious, political, social, and cultural values and attitudes onto the surface of the body.

      Modes of inscription may be governed by textual (aesthetic, interpretive, stylistic, and rhetorical), social, and cultural codes. The wearing of a bodily inscription may be a kind of performance that may be governed by social performance codes (as when bodily inscriptions have to be disguised or concealed in certain social settings).

      Michel Foucault (1977) describes the human body as a surface of inscription of events that are traced by language and dissolved by ideas.¹ History inscribes or imprints itself on the human body. The body is the site of a dissociated self, insofar as genealogy (as an analysis of ancestral descent) requires us to maintain past events in their proper dispersion. Genealogy requires us to identify the accidents that gave birth to what exists and has value for us, and to discover that at the root of what we know and what we are there is not truth or being, but the exteriority of accidents.^2,3

      Jacques Derrida (1974) says that writing signifies inscription, insofar as it is taken to mean something durable and something occurring spatially. The world may be seen as a space of inscription.⁴

      Gilles Deleuze (1986) says that the human face may be a surface of inscription, insofar as thoughts, feelings, and emotions may be inscribed on it.⁵

      Ernesto Laclau (1990) argues that structural dislocations in society provide spaces of representation for individuals, and that those spaces of representation may function as alternatives to the socially dominant forms of structural discourse. The suturing of structural dislocations may in turn create new spaces of representation. These new spaces function as surfaces on which structural dislocations and social demands are inscribed. Structural dislocation is therefore a source of freedom for the individual subject. The individual subject’s acts of self-identification and self-determination are made possible by structural indeterminacy and undecidability. The relation between the surfaces of inscription constituted by spaces of representation and whatever is inscribed on them is therefore essentially unstable. The incomplete and unfinished nature of surfaces of inscription is the condition of possibility for the constitution of social imaginaries (which in turn are horizons of possibility for the emergence of the world of objects).⁶

      Elizabeth Grosz (1993) distinguishes between two kinds of approach to theorizing the human body: (1) the inscriptive, and (2) the lived body. The inscriptive approach conceives the body as a surface on which social law, morality, and values are inscribed, while the lived body approach is concerned with the lived experience of the body, and with the body’s internal or psychic inscription.⁷ Grosz explains that “the body can be regarded as a kind of hinge or threshold: it is placed between a psychic or lived interiority and a more sociopolitical exteriority that produces interiority through the inscription of the body’s outer surface.”⁸

      Grosz (1994) also explains that “the body’s psychical interior is established as such through the social inscription of bodily processes, that is, the ways in which the 'mind' or psyche is constituted so that it accords with the social meanings attributed to the body in its concrete historical, social, and cultural particularity.”⁹ This does not mean that the self or ego is “an effect of which the body or the body’s surface is the cause…The ego is derived from two kinds of 'surface.' On the one hand, the ego is on the 'inner' surface of the psychical agencies; on the other hand, it is a projection or representation of the body’s 'outer surface.'"¹⁰

      Margo DeMello (2000), in discussing the social significance of tattoos, notes that the human body may be both inscribed and reinscribed by culture and society. Tattoos may be a means for individuals to write themselves into a particular kind of social context, and also to be “read” within that context. People may construct “tattoo narratives” about their own tattoos in order to provide others with an appropriate social context within which to determine their meaning.¹¹ Tattoos (and surgical scars, and other kinds of bodily inscriptions) may “tell a story” about their wearers, and their wearers may in turn “tell a story” about them.

FOOTNOTES

¹Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 148.

²Ibid., p. 146.

³Foucault, “Nietzsche, La Généalogie, L’Histoire,” in Hommage À Jean Hyppolite, edited by Suzanne Bachelard, et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), p. 152.

⁴Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 44.

⁵Adrian Jonston and Catherine Malabou, discussing Deleuze’s Cinema 1 (1986), in “The Face and the Close-Up: Deleuze’s Spinozist Approach to Descartes,” in Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 46.

⁶Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on The Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), p. 63.

⁷Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason,” in Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 196.

⁸Ibid., p. 196.

⁹Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) p. 27.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 37.

¹¹Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A cultural history of the modern tattoo community (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 12.

Luis Villoro's Power and Value: Fundamentals of a Political Ethic

In El poder y el valor: Fundamentos de una ética política (1997, not yet published in English), Luis Villoro is concerned with the relation between political power and moral values. He explores the question of whether there is any necessary opposition between the will to power and the realization of the good. He also explores the question of how political power may be combined with moral values in order to promote the interests of the whole of society.

      The first part of the book outlines a general theory of value. The three following parts describe three different ways of defining the relation between political power and moral values. The first way is to delineate the characteristics of political action, in which the relation between power and value converges with two distinct forms of rationality: instrumental and evaluative. The second way is to describe political change from the standpoint of the relation between social morality and the ethical proposals of politics. The third way is to describe the aims of the two previous approaches, namely, to describe the particular values and kinds of political association they aim to realize.¹

      Villoro says that, as a first approximation, we may understand “value” as the characteristics of an object or situation that cause us to have a favorable attitude toward it.² A favorable attitude toward an object may have a reverse aspect: a perception that the object is lacking something valuable.³ "Value" is then whatever alleviates a deprivation, placates the tension of desire, fulfills a longing, or returns plenitude to a lacking world. The realization of value in a particular good suspends (at least partially and temporarily) the perception that it may also be lacking something valuable.

      Value may be intrinsic or extrinsic, but some objects may be both intrinsically and extrinsically valuable, i.e. they may be both valuable in themselves and valuable insofar as they enable us to obtain other objects, states, etc. that are valuable.

      Villoro explains that there are at least four kinds of valid reasons to doubt the reality of an experience of value: (1) sufficient reasons to believe that it has been produced by a distortion or disruption of reliable faculties of perception, (2) sufficient reasons to believe that it has been produced by subjective alterations of actual reality, (3) sufficient reasons to believe that it is motivated by beliefs that are insufficiently justified, and (4) prior beliefs that are objectively justified and that contradict it.

      The boundary between reasonable belief and knowledge cannot be precisely determined, says Villoro. Objective knowledge may be no more than the limit to which beliefs based on more or less sufficient reasons extend.⁴ Thus, beliefs about value, even when based on sufficient reasons, may not provide us with complete certainty.

      To depart from the first approximation to the meaning of value (“value” as a term for a positive attitude toward something), we need to distinguish between those judgments that declare that an object is considered to be valuable by a particular subject and those that assert that the object is valuable independently of the attitude of a particular subject. A particular subject may affirm without contradicting herself that “I know x is valuable, but I don’t feel any esteem or admiration for it,” or “I should admire or appreciate x, but it’s too bad that I’m incapable of doing so!”⁵ We must therefore distinguish between subjective and objective value.

      If an object’s value is purely instrumental, then its desirability is conditioned by the choice of the end that it serves. Thus, if x leads to y, and S desires y, then S should choose x (if the word “should” is taken to have a purely instrumental meaning). But if this instrumental rule is valid for every subject under determinate conditions, then every subject becomes a member of a collectivity for whom x is now an objective value, and the instrumental rule is converted into an unconditional norm, insofar as it provides a universal guide for action. The conjunction of such norms constitutes an ethic. Ethical norms may therefore be seen as precepts for the realization of objective values.⁶

      The term “value” may thus be used in at least two senses. As a first approximation, we may say that a value is the intentional object of a positive attitude, i.e. that which is desired or admired by a particular subject. As a second approximation, we may say that it is that which is desirable or admirable for any subject under determinate conditions. The attribution of subjective value to an object indicates that the object is desired or admired by a particular subject, while the attribution of objective value to it indicates that it is desirable or admirable independently of being seen as such by any particular subject.⁷

      Values may sometimes conflict with, or be opposed to, one another. The realization of one value may sometimes come at the cost of the realization of other values. A hierarchy of values may therefore have to be established in order for us to determine those that are most important for us to realize.⁸

      A political ethic deals most importantly with values that satisfy the general interest of society as a whole by encouraging social cooperation and promoting the common good. The major tasks of a political ethic are therefore (1) to determine the common values that are worthy of being esteemed by any individual, (2) to show that those values have been chosen for objective reasons, and (3) to indicate the regulative principles of political action so that those principles may be realized.⁹

      According to Villoro, there is in fact an implicit ethic in any political discourse. In any political text (speech, document, proclamation, manifesto, or party program), we may encounter two types of language, which may often be intermingled and confused with each other. The first is justificatory, the second explicative. Justificatory discourse engages practical reason, and it may be expressed in an ethics of political action. Explicative discourse puts into effect both theoretical reasoning about facts and instrumental reasoning about the relation between means and ends.¹⁰

      Ethical movements in the field of politics have always wanted to limit the power of the state, says Villoro. Because of the inevitably corrupting nature of power, imposed power may always exceed the end that justifies it. But the attempt to end oppression may also require power. How then can the circle of power and domination be broken?

       “Counterpower” (contrapoder) may be an effective means of halting the excesses and abuses of power, says Villoro. Counterpower replaces intolerance with tolerance, conflict with cooperation, and confrontation with negotiation and dialogue. Its ultimate goal is the abolition of imposed power. While this goal may never be fully achieved, counterpower may still effectively restrain and control political power.¹¹ It is not an imposition of power, nor is it a will to power. It is rather a resistance to imposed power, and to the will to power.

      According to the functions they serve, political ideologies may be divided into those that reinforce an existing system of power and those that subvert or disrupt it. The first may be described as reiterative, the second as subversive or disruptive. What makes an ideology reiterative or disruptive may depend on the function it performs in a particular society, rather than on the particular content of its doctrines. For example, a nationalist ideology may be reiterative of a totalitarian system of power, but subversive of a colonialist system of power. A socialist ideology may be reiterative of a socialist system of power, but subversive of a capitalist system of power.¹²

      Some ideologies may be more pragmatic than theoretical, while others may be more theoretical than pragmatic. Between those that are predominantly theoretical and those that are predominantly pragmatic, there may be intermediate cases.

      According to the functions they perform, “pragmatic” ideologies may be reiterative or disruptive of a system of domination. The same may be said of “theoretical” or “doctrinal” ideologies.¹³

      Villoro distinguishes between ideology and ethics by saying that ideologies present as objective those values that respond to the needs of a particular group, while ethics presents as objective those values that may be considered valid for any individual or group. Ideologies may be motivated by the striving for power, while ethics may be motivated by the striving for value.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the distinction between ideology and ethics may not always be clear. There may be ideologies that contain moral doctrines, and there may be systems of power that attempt to legitimize themselves by means of a discourse that contains moral principles.¹⁵

      Ideologies may therefore attempt to reconcile two discourses: ethical discourse and discourse aimed at the achievement of political power. But ethical discourse may be shown to be in contradiction to the pursuit of power that the ideologue attempts to justify. The ideologue has to reinterpret the two discourses in a manner that conceals their contradiction. The maintenance of power may be based on this act of deception.¹⁶

      Villoro also distinguishes between an association (asociacíon) and a community (comunidad). In an association, the more we try to detach ourselves from our own interests, the more we are faced with the conflict between those interests and the interests of other subjects in the association. In a community, on the other hand, such conflict is eliminated, because the interests of every subject include the interests of the whole community.

      According to Villoro, utopianism may express both an attitude of departure from the real world and an affirmation of an ideal world. The opposition between the projected ideal world and the actual world corresponds to the distinction between ideal values and actual facts that are deprived of value.¹⁷ Utopianism proposes an imaginary or ideal reality where an objective order is fulfilled, valid for every community, and at its limit, valid for every individual.

      Utopianism may therefore be characterized as a kind of disruptive mode of thought that establishes a maximal tension between a projected ideal world and the actual world, between ultimate and proximate ends, between what ought to be and what is.¹⁸

      Villoro says that the most common criticism of utopianism is that it lacks efficacy. It desires an ideal end without putting into practice the means to realize that end.¹⁹ The ideal society has a normative character; it directs political action, but is never fully realized.

      He also explains that moral action in politics presupposes two kinds of knowledge: (1) knowledge of both the values that constitute the common good and the political means necessary for the realization of those values (this kind of knowledge corresponds to principles of rationality of means and ends) and (2) knowledge of the actual facts that will lead to the realization of those values in society (this kind of knowledge corresponds to both theoretical rationality concerning existing social forces and instrumental rationality concerning the effective means of achieving desired ends).²⁰

      A political ethic, according to Villoro, cannot be limited to promulgating general norms or establishing abstract principles; it must be a concrete ethic, subject to three kinds of rationality: (1) valuative rationality concerning the ends and values that fulfill the general interest, (2) theoretical and instrumental rationality concerning the actual circumstances and consequences of actions, and (3) rationality of judgment that weighs, in every case, the relations between the given data and the two previous kinds of rationality.²¹

     

FOOTNOTES

¹Luis Villoro, El poder y el valor: Fundamentos de una ética política (Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997), p. 8.

²Ibid., p. 13.

³Ibid., p. 15.

⁴Ibid., p. 27.

⁵Ibid., p. 41.

⁶Ibid., p. 45.

⁷Ibid., p. 45.

⁸Ibid., pp. 46-47.

⁹Ibid., p. 74.

¹⁰Ibid., pp. 74-75.

¹¹Ibid., p. 88.

¹²Ibid., p. 188.

¹³Ibid., p. 191.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 192.

¹⁵Ibid., pp. 192-193.

¹⁶Ibid., pp. 193-194.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 210.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 211.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 213.

²⁰Ibid., p. 123.

²¹Ibid., pp. 124-125.