Materiality and the Digital Future of Inscription

What is it about?

How does the digital age of immaterial textuality problematize enduring metaphors of materiality and inscription? This article proposes a rethinking of the material and textual concept of “inscription,” crossing the threshold from print to post-print actualities of language. Paul de Man’s essay “Hypogram and Inscription” prefigures the central paradox of literary presence in a digital age, showing poetry’s claim to lively phenomenality as simultaneously undercut by material inscription’s nonliving logic. The digital future of inscription inhabits a similar paradox of materiality. This article addresses questions arising from literary and critical theories of computational technology within the undecidable context of our computational universe’s digital (informational) independence from its material substratum.

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Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash