Trace Factory

289 Pages·2020·6.635 MB·English

by  Jeanneret, Yves

The Trace Factory

Traces Set
coordinated by
Sylvie Leleu-Merviel
Volume 3
The Trace Factory

Yves Jeanneret
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced,
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ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2020
The rights of Yves Jeanneret to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954215

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-420-9
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Chapter 1. The Mediatized Trace of the Social World,
the Object of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. There are traces and traces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.1. The avatars of a trace of use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1.2. Metamorphoses of the trace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.1.3. Mediation, mediatization, device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2. The social trace as a problem: the legacy of the
history of the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.1. From book to reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.2. A constellation of categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.2.3. Structural difficulties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.3. Relevance and efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.3.1. The evasive relevance of the trace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.3.2. An efficient figure of relevance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.3.3. Trace as an interpretative schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chapter 2. The Schema of the Trace, a Paradoxical Semiotics . . . . . . . . 31
2.1. The false evidence of the Peircian index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.1.1. The concept of index and semiotic theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.1.2. The index as a commonplace category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.1.3. The production of indexicality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.1.4. Assessment: a problematic legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.2. The trace, appearance and presence of the past in the present . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.2.1. The photographic scene, here, now and in the past . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.2.2. The theoretical issue of Barthes’ analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
vi The Trace Factory
2.3. From the archetype of the trace to its theoretical status . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.3.1. Photography as a commonplace archetype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.3.2. From the trace schema to the deployment of devices . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.3.3. Photography as a pretext . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
2.4. The mediatized trace, a complex info-communication device . . . . . . . . . . 69
2.4.1. Device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.4.2. Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.4.3. Representation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
2.4.4. Competence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
2.4.5. Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Chapter 3. The Complex Genesis of the Written Trace . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.1. The available inscription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.1.1. Inscription as a framework for thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
3.1.2. Grammatology or philosophy in the camera obscura . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3.1.3. Ichnology as radical logistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
3.2. The thickness of the traced-out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
3.2.1. Actualized presentification in absentia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
3.2.2. Between inscription device and graphic gesture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
3.2.3. The traced-out feature, a figure of mediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
3.3. It has been… written . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.3.1. Signature, a social act between identification
and authentication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
3.3.2. Genetic criticism in the context of the
trace/traced-out couple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
3.4. The written trace as an institutional fact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
3.4.1. The written trace, a scientific assumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
3.4.2. The written trace, a device of social knowledge power . . . . . . . . . . . 141
3.4.3. The written trace, an educational mediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Chapter 4. The Emerging Trace of the Media Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
4.1. The poetics of Mnemosyne: media forms and social memory . . . . . . . . . . 154
4.1.1. A mediatized space of thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
4.1.2. The trace schema questionned by the atlas of forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
4.1.3. The poetics of Mnemosyne at work in media analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.2. Indexical reading of media texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
4.2.1. The textual witness as a ferment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
4.2.2. The “index paradigm”, from its commonplace life
to its heuristic scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
4.2.3. Quotations, from second hand to guestimates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Contents vii
4.3. Writing in the future perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
4.3.1. Mnemosyne struggling with Lethe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
4.3.2. Changes in authority, economy of writings and
media genesis of traces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
4.3.3. Memorial writing in devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259