Corporeal Inscription

Definition

Corporeal inscription names the theory — Foucault's and, in her wake, Butler's — that the body's "interior" is not a pre-existing substance but an effect of social marking on the body's surface. Burns mobilizes it against the inner/outer binary that organizes both subjectivity and the reading of architecture. Foucault's version (Discipline and Punish): "The interior is a privileged trope for the soul. Occupying the body's internal cavities, the soul is the interior space intrinsic to the substance of a particular body, the locale of that body's sovereign will." The binary "erases the social work of inscription": the soul-as-interior is what discipline produces by writing on the body. Butler's extension: "acts, gestures, and desire produce the semblance of an internal core or substance on the surface of the body" — the inner core is a semblance, manufactured outward-in. Vicky Kirby sharpens the spatial paradox (note 4): "The body's surfaces continue into the 'interior.' Paradoxically the surface is both the thing which supposedly divides and secures inside and outside and the thing that holds them together. Foucault's notion of inscription, which implies a surface to be written on, is an extraordinary surface that includes the bodies' depths and questions the division between interior and exterior."

Burns's contribution is the theory's missing case: "Neither Foucault nor Butler in the texts I am citing address the question of corporeal inscription as cultural difference, ethnicity, and race." Her corrective runs through Spivak's epidermal schema objection: inscription must be located "in the full complexity of that term (where does the body's surface begin and end?)", with skin "one organ, within a multiple network of corporeal organs, cells, and tissues" — and reading itself is "one form of social inscription" that "brings various parts of the corporeal to the surface."

The concept matters for architecture because Burns extends it to buildings: "The structuring binary of surface/interior and its position in the description of psychic identity have a home, too, in architecture." The domestic interior functions as "an allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants"; the architectural interior "may be projected as a topography of the individual's own interior life." Inscription theory therefore contests interiority itself: the interior that the room shelters is not a given depth but a produced effect — and when the binary is applied as a norm, subjects read as all-surface (Baker) get construed as lacking rather than as confounding the binary.

Key Thinkers

• Edward W. Soja (via Barbara Hooper) — the concept's lived-space extension in Postmetropolis Part III: Hooper's "somatography" — body writing, "a hierarchical differentiating of flesh that began millennia ago with the division of body and mind and that, like geography, earth writing, orders ambiguous substances of matter as political meanings and territories" (quoted p. 361) — the case of Citizen Rodney King, whose flesh was ordered, classified, and beaten according to the "order in place" ("It is what I thought that matters," Sgt. Koon, p. 369); with Hooper's caveat that the body is "neither a product of culture nor a creation of biology: it is both of these and more… it is, in sum, a social space" (p. 362); and "border work" as the ongoing negotiation of the produced definitions — "the zone of the border is always a site of conflict and contestation" (p. 365).

• Jacques Soulillou — the concept's ornamental prehistory: the mark as "something impressed (imprinted) on the flesh" — "it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but, on the contrary, the ornament that appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order"; ornament "inseparable from cruelty" and central "to the creation of memory" (Nietzsche via The Genealogy of Morals), the marked body gaining "access to social individuation" (2002/2006) — inscription theorized at the body's surface as ornament, decades before the Foucault/Butler versions, and with the mark's social function (place-assignment) as its explicit content.

• Karen Burns — the theory's architectural and racial extension: the surface/depth binary's "home… in architecture"; the missing case of "corporeal inscription as cultural difference, ethnicity, and race"; Baker's all-surface body as the case that "radically confounds the surface/depth binary."

• Michel Foucault — the founding account (Discipline and Punish, pp. 29–30 in Burns's citation): the soul as the interior effect of inscription; "the man of description" over "the man of the sovereign."

• Lee Edelman — inscription's gendered case: the architectural imperative that "shapes the subject – forming and informing him as the subject of ideology… modeling the subject as container of space"; the body's "structural flaw that opens his body, by way of its multiple openings (ocular, oral, anal, genital)" that the subject must "performatively shelter" (1996/2006). See mens-room, the-closet.

• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse" (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) — the semblance of an internal core produced on the surface; Vicky Kirby, "Corporeal Habits" (1991) — the surface that "includes the bodies' depths"; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — the epidermal-schema criticism.)

• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the textual inscription case (via the Intimus editors' headnote): "the gender (of the author's body) is inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings under discussion" (1979/2006) — inscription running not onto the body but from it: the body's gender written into texts and, through them, into interiors. The woman writer's double bind — the "anxiety of authorship," the forbidden pen, the wallpaper's "inexplicable text" — is inscription by prohibition; the wallpaper as "the facade of the patriarchal text" makes the room's surface the place where the gendered text is read. See patriarchal-poetics, house-body-equation.

Related Concepts

• Interiority — the concept inscription theory destabilizes: the "internal psychic space" and "fantasized locale for the identity of self" that Burns shows Baker being denied; the produced-vs-given question.
• Embodiment — the body as the site where the social is written; inscription as the social production of the corporeal (against a purely phenomenological body).
• Epidermal Schema — the racial narrowing of inscription to skin; the surface read as the sign of difference.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the spatial form of the same binary: Bachelard's lived inside/outside pairs with Butler's produced inner core; both refuse geometrical division (osmosis vs. semblance).
• Psychoanalysis — the "divided subject" whose inner space the binary presupposes; Burns: without an interior, Baker "cannot be the divided subject who is the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry."
• Domestic Interior — the building-scale extension: the interior as "allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the concept's wiki source: Foucault's soul-as-interior (p. 65); Butler's produced semblance of the internal core (p. 65); Kirby's surface that "includes the bodies' depths" (note 4, p. 66); the raced inscription gap ("Neither Foucault nor Butler… address the question of corporeal inscription as cultural difference, ethnicity, and race," pp. 65–66); Spivak via Burns on the "multiple network of corporeal organs, cells, and tissues" (p. 66); and the architectural extension — the domestic interior as psychic allegory, "a topography of the individual's own interior life" (p. 66).
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the concept's ornamental prehistory, and its place-assignment content: "This word 'mark' should be taken in the sense of something impressed (imprinted) on the flesh because, for epochs past, it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but, on the contrary, the ornament that appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order. This explains why ornamentation has so often been inseparable from cruelty. One is reminded of what Nietzsche said about the creation of memory in The Genealogy of Morals. By means of a practice which is sometimes extremely cruel – of which our 'body piercing' is a distant ancestor, leaving ineradicable marks on the body – ornament has played a central role in the creation of memory" (p. 316); the marked seeking "access to social individuation and desire (desire for the Other)"; and the equivalence of registrants — "the woman of ancient China whose feet have been bound, the middle-class person who hangs a Warhol print in his living room, the Western man of the seventeenth and eighteenth cent[uries]" (p. 316). Where Foucault/Butler produce an inner core on the surface, Soulillou's inscription produces a social place: the ornament writes the body into the ground plan of sex and power — inscription as registration, its depth not a psyche but "a place in a social or cosmic order." See ornamental-ground-plan, memory, woman-as-decoration.
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — inscription's gendered apparatus: the built room that "shapes the subject – forming and informing him as the subject of ideology – in its own monumentalizing image, modeling the subject as container of space through the articulation of structural, because structuring, identities" (p. 103); the body inscribed as closet — "conceiving his body simultaneously as container and thing contained" — and the inscription's fragility: the "structural flaw that opens his body, by way of its multiple openings (ocular, oral, anal, genital), to the various psychic vicissitudes able to generate illicit desires," which the subject must "performatively shelter" for the inscription to hold (p. 104). Where Burns shows inscription producing (and denying) an inner core, Edelman shows the room producing the container — the body's interiority as a spatial performance with openings that betray it. See mens-room, the-closet, interiority.
• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — inscription's textual circuit, stated by the Intimus editors as the selection's design rationale: "the gender (of the author's body) is inscribed in the text, and by implication, into the architectural surroundings under discussion" (p. 121) — the body's gender writing itself into texts and thence into interiors, the reverse direction of Foucault's soul written onto the body. Its narrative apparatus: the forbidden pen ("forbidden her to touch pen to paper," p. 123) as inscription by prohibition; the wallpaper as "the facade of the patriarchal text" whose sub-pattern conceals the formless figure — the room's surface as the gendered text's front design; and the escape as de-inscription — "before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper," the written surface removed from the room by hand. See patriarchal-poetics, house-body-equation, the-madwoman.
• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — inscription's reciprocal circuit, named in the editors' headnote: "Home and body are shown to be inscribed upon each other so that space becomes an extension of the female inhabitant and an embodiment of home" (p. 126). Gordon's archive shows the writing running in both directions at once — the woman's character inscribed on the room (rooms "just like her," rooms with "countenances," p. 128) and the room inscribed on the woman (Wharton's heroines who "came to share physical traits with their houses, or who changed themselves to suit those houses more perfectly," rooms that took "possession," p. 128) — with the social instrument of inscription named as adornment: "Dress – the decoration of the body – and interior furnishings – the decoration of the home – together formed… the front" (p. 129), both body and dwelling "adorned to testify to his success" (p. 131). Where Burns's inscription is authored by discipline and Gilbert and Gubar's by the patriarchal text, Gordon's is authored by the household economy — and it is genuinely two-way, the concept's strongest case that surfaces and depths are co-produced. See house-body-equation, woman-as-decoration, embodiment.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the somatographic register (Barbara Hooper via Soja): "The whole of (social) space proceeds from the body" (Lefebvre, quoted p. 359) as Part III's ground; somatography as "body writing, a hierarchical differentiating of flesh" — the inscriptions accumulating "the story of Citizen Rodney King" (p. 361); the trial as the somatography's courtroom performance ("a scopic device, a spectacle… for producing perception according to inherited logics linking reason, order, and control with mind (as sited in white male) and those linking disorder, danger, violence, threat, with body (with not-white, with Other)," p. 369); Fanon's historico-racial schema and Butler's "racially saturated field of vision" as the inscription's racial mechanism (p. 360); and the concept's disorder-fantasy — Lugones's mestiza ambiguity that "threatens by its very ambiguity the orderliness of the system" (p. 362). Where Burns's inscription produces a denied interior, Hooper's somatography produces a sentenced body — inscription as verdict. See trialectics-of-space, embodiment, new-cultural-politics-of-difference.

Open Questions

• If the inner core is a produced "semblance," does architecture produce interiority rather than shelter it (Manack's "complete fabrication" thesis independently converges) — and can the two claims be held together: interiority as effect of inscription and as lived refuge?
• Burns locates the theory's racial gap; Butler's Bodies That Matter (1993) partially fills it. Does the filled version survive Burns's Spivak-based objection (skin as one organ among many), or repeat the epidermal narrowing?
• "Where does the body's surface begin and end?" (Spivak via Burns) — the question has an architectural twin: where does a building's surface begin and end (poché, cladding, the thick edge)? Is inscription theory a general surface-ontology for both bodies and buildings?
• If reading is itself "one form of social inscription" that "brings various parts of the corporeal to the surface," then criticism writes the bodies it reads — Burns's "pinning her back against the wall." Is there a non-inscribing reading, or is the only alternative to read for the surface's multiplicity rather than against it?
• Soulillou's ornamental inscription inverts the direction of agency the Foucault/Butler versions keep individual: "it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but… the ornament that appropriates the individual" (p. 316). Is inscription then something bodies undergo (the mark assigning place) or something they perform (Butler's performativity) — and does the ornament's cruel genealogy (foot-binding, mutilation, body piercing) show inscription's consent-problem, which the Foucauldian versions abstract away?
• Soulillou registers the inscribed body in "a social or cosmic order" rather than in a psyche — his examples (bound feet, the Warhol print, the eighteenth-century Western man) span body-ornament, interior-ornament and dress. Is inscription then one operation across the wiki's three surfaces (body, room, garment) — and does interior-as-garment describe its room-scale case?