CONCEPT
Projection of Interior
Scarry's account of making as the projection of the body's interior outward into shareable form — the fundamental civilizational act by which consciousness refuses to remain locked inside itself.
Projection of interior names the fundamental operation Scarry identifies across all human making. The chair makes the body's fatigue visible and addresses it. The coat makes the body's vulnerability to cold visible and addresses it. The poem makes the interior of consciousness — its felt experience, its pre-linguistic understanding, its shadow shapes — visible and addresses the isolation that inarticulacy imposes. Each artifact, regardless of its material or its purpose, performs the same fundamental operation: it takes something previously locked inside the body's experience and gives it a form that others can perceive, evaluate, and respond to. This is what Scarry calls making, and it is the central civilizational act: the sustained refusal of consciousness to remain locked inside itself, the projection outward that makes shared symbolic life possible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework rests on a specific phenomenological claim: that the body's interior — its pains, its desires, its understandings, its intentions — is not directly shareable. Other consciousnesses