Document Type
Article
Abstract
UNMANNED SIGNATURES? In addition to its more common significations, “unmanned” is used also in the ‘sport’ of falconry, where it means “not broken in”; the term will in falconry be applied to a hawk or kestrel not (yet?) broken into obedience. “Unwomanned” is similarly linked to deviation from control and controlled norms, but is more likely to appear as a reflexive verb (“to unwoman [herself]”) than as an adjective, and is more likely to be tightly tied in gendered fashion to ‘degeneracy.’ As phrase, title and incipit, “Unmanned Signatures” is in all sorts of ways an oddly descended, perhaps even a degenerate, beginning. But then again it might indeed be the case, as Heidegger contends, that “Concealed within itself, the beginning contains already the end” (“Origin” 48). If this is so, beginnings might regularly be implicated in a genealogical process of compositional or biological generation, an issue of signature, that is to say, and so potentially also an occasion for some sort of testing for linkage and separation, some sort of archigraph, I’ll call it: a writing and delineation of the beginning insofar as a beginning can be determined by genealogical tracing, usually but not only a straightforwardly backwards tracing.
Repository Citation
Macaskill, Brian. "Unmanned Signatures." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 4, 2012, pp. 1–25. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss4/8
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