Dr Lorens Holm, Architecture ‘The environmental subject and its relations’

space & its 3 subjects: the neurotic the psychotic & the pervert

Lorens Holm, School of the Environment, University of Dundee

the bound subject of perversion [Bernard Tschumi’s postcard series]

machinic subject of psychosis [frontispiece to Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia]

2 ways to mark difference and position [the threshold versus the continuous folded surface]

[Zaha Hadid, Maxxi, Rome + Rem Koolhaas, CCTV, Beijing]

Post-modern architects who use their buildings and writings to theorise the contemporary subject: they are informed by the philosophical writing team Deleuze+Guattari and their work on the figure of the schizo and the formal metaphor of the fold.

[Zaha Hadid, Maxxi, Rome]

[Lorens Holm, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: architecture space and the construction of subjectivity (London, Routledge, 2010)] the origins of my research on space and subjectivity

the elements of the perspective model: position of viewer, screen/threshold, object of desire [Durer, The Painters Manual (1527)]

the perspective model internalised [diagram of visual field from Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964)]

the elements of the perspective model [Durer, The Painters Manual (1527)]

the Cartesian subject [diagram from Descartes, The Dioptrics (1637)]

neurotic: knows the law, suffers under it, that suffering produces symptoms psychotic: does not know the law (we would expect the psychotic to use an other reason) pervert: knows the law, enjoys being bound by it, and playing with it - the trickster

neurotic

psychotic

pervert

the neurotic subject understands the logic of position in space & in the social matrix, and suffers to comply with it. the psychotic subject does not know the logic of position: it traverses space & the social matrix by means of an other form of logic. the perverted subject understands the logic of position, enjoys being bound by it and playing with those bounds.

subject positions

neurotic

psychotic

pervert

the neurotic subject understands the logic of position in space & in the social matrix, and suffers to comply with it. the psychotic subject does not know the logic of position: it traverses space & the social matrix by means of an other form of logic. the perverted subject understands the logic of position, enjoys being bound by it and playing with those bounds.

subject positions

my image, my image of the world

the I who suffers

the neurotic I comes to a point of signification in a symbolic inside

the position of the neurotic

an image that I cannot call my own

the dispersed I

the psychotic I does not come to a point or is not located

the position of the psychotic

my image, my image of the world

the I that I plays with

the pervert tricks us into being elsewhere

the position of the pervert

[Holbein, The Ambassadors (1533)] the dialectic of technology and renunciation The aim: how to theorise our relation to environmental codes, the codes by which we symbolise our relation to the environment: if technology extends our reach, it also expands the field for renunciation.

the environment & its 3 subjects: the neurotic the psychotic & the pervert

If my work makes a statement, it is about the fundamental unity of the world, at a symbolic level - in other words, at the level of discourse - if not at the material one. This unity is the article of faith with which my work begins and it is the aim or end point which my work seeks to demonstrate.

One of the phenomena which I have chosen to address is space, that great unifier which manages to be everywhere and nowhere at once.

Lorens Holm, School of the Environment, University of Dundee