_ the Watcher_
by __JOSHUA JOHN INGOLD
Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Architecture in the
Department of Architecture at the
Rhode Island School of Design
Approved by Masters Examination Committee:
_____________________________________________________________ Kyna Leski, Primary Advisor _____________________________________________________________ Laura Briggs, Secondary Advisor _____________________________________________________________ Jonathan Knowles, Graduate Thesis Coordinator
_Dedication_ This Thesis is dedicated to my wife Anna Katherine Ingold, and my two sons, Jon Amon and Samuel Bain. They have patiently, and at great pains, followed spouse and father through a journey to find himself ...finding them.
_Table of Contents_
_____ Introduction 6 _Abstract 7 _Beginning 8 _Bibliography 11 _____ To Begin 15 _____ to Study a Muse 50 _____ a Change Occurs _The Writer Concludes
73 102
_____ Thesis Satement
109
This project begins with an ambition to create a space that is free from the infrastructures and institutions of power. A self-sustaining vessel should not only be independent of the economies and geographies of power, but would provide an escape from the symbolic and ideological systems of power that mediate one’s identity. It would be a purely self-referential space provided for the pursuit of authenticity in the creation of one’s critical self. Perhaps in the absence of the pervasive culture of rhetorical sign, the manipulations of a commodity culture, the ideology of a surficial self__ the individual could reverse the internalization of these disciplines and regain perspective. Georges Battaille once wrote_ “.... man will escape his head as a prisoner escapes his prison.” Like a quest, or voyage, this vessel would be the instrument for just such an escape.
Objective - 12x14, Pencil on vellum
_____Introduction: Abstract
In a series of three unfinished drafts, F.W.J. Schelling’s Ages of the World constructs a mythical narrative describing the process of transition from a timeless/eternal pre-Creation to the first creative act. He focuses on the very problematic of the moment in which God is essentially without any expression of will. He describes this state as “an abyss of pure freedom”, the perfect field with infinite dynamical degrees of freedom. In this state, God exists in pure potentiality, yet by this very condition, is will-less. For this reason, it can be said that the first creative act “occurs when this will-less inert will that prevailed in the primordial void of freedom suddenly and inexplicably transforms into a confused, undirected will which in its wanting causes the abyss to contract… [into a] ….wild irrational vortex of egotism and mad, conflicting cravings”. 1 This contraction is taken to suggest the dual meaning of the word, to pull inwardly unto itself, and “to come down with”, as in an illness. This “vortex of drives” is a knot that folds inwardly unto itself insofar as it yet has no decided Other onto which it might project its will. It is by way of an entirely irrational output of this “undifferentiated pulsating” that God pronounces the Word and “ushers in time, space, and reality”. This outward expression or expulsion of will sets into motion the determinate trajectory of temporal situated reality, or as Denise Gigante describes it,
is pronounced which rejects into the eternal past, this self-enclosed circuit of drives”.4 This beginning sets into motion a stream of rational causes and effects within which, at each moment the degrees of freedom available are only situational tangents/epicycles within the greater symbolic system.
“[T]his founding gesture of temporalization and spatialization opens up time from its closed eternal, rotary motion to the historically progressing, temporal process we experience..[and] opens up space from the closed self-regurgitating vortex to the ordered, physical manifestation of the world. [T]he spark of irrationality that ignites rationality, it forgets its irrational assertions as Logos perpetuates itself as a rational systematic string of irrational acts.”2 Author and psychologist, Slavoj Zizek uses Schelling’s writings as an allegory for understanding the mechanisms by which one actualizes one’s identity. Here, the vortex of drives, this interstice, is the gap that occurs between the pre-symbolic object and the recognition of oneself as free subject. There exists a pre-conscious I that contains all the freedoms of the abyss origin, yet has no system in place within which to exert a will as such, because there is no differentiation of self in opposition to the system one always already was contained within. The contraction of reality occurs when potentiality actualizes itself as a state that wants the powers of its own freedom, and thereby must draw a distinction that splits the object void into an absolute Other and the free Subject constitutive of the split. “[I]t is only through this expulsion that a consistent self constitutes itself in the first place…. The rejection of unacceptable content, of a traumatic foreign body, which cannot be integrated into the subject’s symbolic universe, is constitutive of the subject.” 3 What Zizek calls the necessary “out-of-joint”, is this symbolic fiction whereby one assumes an objective gaze from which to distinguish a separation between the Subject and the absolute Other to which it is opposed. The critical point here is not that this act of distinction sets the subject free, but that the inert potential lost in this self-propulsion, this decisive kinesis, sets the subject upon a trajectory marked by the desire to return to the very freedom its self assertion repressed. Desire is seen as the kinetic advances of a willful subject toward a linearly defined symbolic otherness; desire occurs in time as the consequence of this setting apart of one’s self from the Other. This, as opposed to drive, is understood as an internal and atemporal conjuring of will without direction or expression. “[T]he BEGINNING occurs when the Word
In the act of self-recognition, one is de-centered, setting up the distinct polarity between what one decidedly is and what one seemingly is not. Simultaneously, what was originally an act of authorship becomes the writing of one’s fate as each succeeding act of agency is responsive to the constitutive split which distinguishes the agent thereafter. And, these very acts of expression are the contraction of the subject’s being outside of himself. “He coagulates the core of his being in an external sign….a contraction in the guise of its very opposite”5 If we were to relate this to the notion of chora, it is the writing of this “radical otherness that gives place for being”.6 This coming into being is a distinguishing between two states, “ that which is always real and has no becoming, and that which is always becoming but is never real.”7 Chora is understood as a receptacle, a space or interval, or a vessel from which the situated is derived. Anthony Vidler describes this vessel as a “bastard reasoning with a status somewhere between” these two states.8 Taken with Zizek, chora becomes the irrational vortex of drives. It is the repressed and rejected irrational expression from which a rational and situated causal reality has come into being, the irrational impulse that “must be understood as a structure”.9 It is the shape of the page, the location of the first mark, the color of the ink, etc. by which the project finds its becoming, the Subject writes its story, and sets up a chain of consequences that situate it as subject to its own critical narrative. When Derrida says, “Let us consider architectural thinking” it is precisely this paradox, this creative construction of a symbolic fiction that in its own making becomes its own sign and loses its objectivity, to which he seeks a return. Zizek will assert that, “what sets human desire in motion is a short circuit between the primordially lost Thing and an empirical positive object, that is, the elevation of this object to the dignity of the Thing.”10 This desire for an “architecture as a possibility of thought that cannot be reduced to the status of a representation of thought”11 marks exactly what is lost in the creative process: the desire to return to chora, to the traumatic objective Real. Freedom in a subjective reality is a freedom within the trajectory(s) afforded by logos, by the unfolding of rational causation _ the freedom to/freedom from polemic that requires differentiation. ___ “ The Project is the Prison” G. Battaille
_ Bibliography_
1 -(Zizek/Schelling 1997) 3 -(Gigante 1998) 4 -(Zizek 2007) 5 -(ibis.) 6 -(ibis.) 7 -(Vidler 2005) 8 -(ibis.) 9 -(ibis.) 10 -(Zizek 2007) 11 -(Derrida 1997)
Cheng, Nils Moller Anderson & Lanna. The Marine Insect Halobates (Heteroptera: Gerridae): Biology, Adaptation, Distribution, and Phylogeny. PhD Thesis, Copenhagen/ San Diego: University of Copenghagen/ University of California-‐San Diego, 2004. Chesterton, G.K. The Ball and The Cross. New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1995. Derrida, Jaques. "Architecture Where The Desire May Live." In ReThinking Architecture: a reader in cultural theory, by Neil Leach, 301-‐305. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Gigante, Denise. "Toward a Notion of Critical Self-‐Creation: Slavoj Zizek and the Vortex of Madness." New Literary History 29, no. 1 (1998): 153-‐168. Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. October 10, 2001-‐2012. http://www.etymonline.com (accessed Feburary 14, 2012). Heidegger, Martin. "Building, Dwelling, Thinking." In ReThinking Architecture, by Neil Leach, 95-‐104. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Iamblichus. The Theology Of Arithmetic. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press, 1988. Johnson, Crockett. Harold and the Purple Crayon. New York: Harper/Collins, 1955. Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology and Alchemy. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. Poe, Edgar Allen. The Tell-tale Heart and Other Writings By Edgar Allen Poe. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Rakatansky, Mark. "Identity and the Discourse of Politics in Contemporary Architecture." Assemblage, 1995: 8-‐18. Vidler, Anthony. "Nothing To Do With Architecture." Grey Room, 2005: 112-‐127. Zizek, F.W.J von Schelling/Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom/ Ages of the World. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Zizek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder. London, New York: Verso, 2007.
The Captain – captain late 14c., “one who stands at the head of others,” from O.Fr. capitaine “captain, leader,” from L.L. capitaneus “chief,” n. use of adj. capitaneus “prominent, chief,” from L. caput (gen. capitis) ”head” (see head). Military sense of “officer who commands a company” (rank between major and lieutenant) is from 1560s; naval sense of “officer who commands a man-of-war” is from 1550s, extended to “master or commander of a vessel of any kind” by 1704. Sporting sense is first recorded 1823. head (n.) O.E. heafod “top of the body,” also “upper end of a slope,” also “chief person, leader, ruler; capital city,” from P.Gmc. *haubudam (cf. O.S. hobid, O.N. hofuð, O.Fris. haved, M.Du. hovet, Du. hoofd, O.H.G. houbit, Ger. Haupt, Goth. haubiþ “head”), from PIE *kaput-“head” (cf. Skt. kaput-, L. caput “head”). Modern spelling is early 15c., representing what was then a long vowel (as in heat) and remained after pronunciation shifted. heading c.1300, “a beheading,” from prp. of head (v.). Meaning “advancing in a certain direction” is from c.1600. Meaning “title at the head of a portion of text” is from 1849. profess (v.) early 14c., “to take a vow” (in a religious order), from O.Fr. profes, from L. professus “having declared publicly,” pp. of profitieri “declare openly,” from pro- “forth” (see pro-) + fateri (pp. fassus) “acknowledge, confess,”” akin to fari “speak” (see fame). Meaning “declare openly” first recorded “ 1520s. Related: Professed; professing. pro- prefix meaning “before, forward, in favor of, in place of,” from L. pro “on behalf of, in place of, before, for,” also in some cases from cognate Gk. pro “before, in front of,” both from PIE *pro-, extended form of root *por- “forward, through” (cf. Skt. para “beyond,” pra- “before, forward, forth;”Gk. paros “before,” para- “from beside, against, beyond;” Goth. faura “before,” O.E. fore “before, for, on account of,” from “forward, from”). Pro and con is attested from c.1400, short for pro and contra “for and against” (L. pro et contra). declare (v.) early 14c., from O.Fr. declarer “explain, elucidate,” or directly from L. declarare “make clear, reveal, disclose, announce,” from de- intensive prefix (see de-) + clarare “clarify,” from clarus “clear” (see clear). Related: Declared; declaring. “
The Captain’s Window, pencil, trace, strathmore
The Sagesage (adj.) “wise,” c.1300 (late 12c. as a surname), from O.Fr. sage (11c.), from Gallo-Romance *sabius, from V.L. *sapius, from L. sapere “have a taste, have good taste, be wise,” from PIE root *sap- “to taste” sage (n.1) kind of herb (Salvia officinalis), early 14c., from O.Fr. sauge (13c.), from L. salvia, from salvus “healthy” (see safe). So called for its healing or preserving qualities (it was used to keep teeth clean and relieve sore gums, and boiled in water to make a drink to alleviate arthritis). In English folklore, sage is said to grow best where the wife is dominant. sage (n.2) “man of profound wisdom,” mid-14c., from sage (adj.). wise (adj.) O.E. wis, from P.Gmc. *wisaz (cf. O.S., O.Fris. wis, O.N. viss, Du. wijs, Ger. weise “wise”), from pp. adj. *wittos of PIE root *weid- “to see,” hence “to know” (see vision). Slang meaning “aware, cunning” first attested 1896. Related to the source of O.E. witan “to know, wit.” wise (n.) “way of proceeding, manner,” O.E. wise, ultimately from the same source as wise (adj.). Cf. O.S. wisa, O.Fris. wis, Dan. vis, M.Du. wise, Du. wijs, O.H.G. wisa, Ger. Weise “way, manner.” Most common in English now as a suffix (e.g. likewise). For sense evolution from “to see” to “way of proceeding,” cf. cognate Gk. eidos “form, shape, kind,” also “course of action.” Ground sense is “to see/know the way.” projection 1550s, originally cartographical, “drawing of a map or chart according to scale,” from M.Fr. projection, from L. projectionem (nom. projectio), from projicere (see project (n.)). project (n.) c.1400, “a plan, draft, scheme,” from L. projectum “something thrown forth,” noun use of neuter of projectus, pp. of projicere “stretch out, throw forth,” from pro- “forward” (see pro-) + combining form of iacere (pp. iactus) “to throw” (see jet (v.)). Meaning “scheme, proposal, mental plan” is from c.1600. Meaning “group of low-rent apartment buildings” first recorded c.1958, from housing project (1932). project (v.) late 15c., “to plan,” from L. projectus (see project (n.)). Sense of “to stick out” is from 1718. Meaning “to cast an image on a screen” is recorded from 1865. Psychoanalytical sense, “to convey to others,” is first recorded 1895 (implied in projective). reflection late 14c., in reference to surfaces, from L.L. reflexionem (nom. reflexio) “a reflection,” lit. “a bending back,” noun of action from pp. stem of L. reflectere, from re- “back” (see re-) + flectere “to bend.” Meaning “remark made after turning back one’s thought on some subject” is from 1650s. reflex (n.) c.1500, “reflection of light,” from the verb meaning “refract, deflect” (late 14c.), from L.L. reflexus “a bending back,” prop. pp. of reflectere (see reflection). Meaning “involuntary nerve stimulation” first recorded 1877, from reflex action (1833).
The Projection Room, pencil on vellum
To Follow The Sun_ pencil, trace, xerox toner _ pgs 25-31
Feild, Point, Line, Body, System_ pencil, trace, xerox toner_ pgs 33-40
Voice #1_ hardwood dowell, wooden dollhead, polycarbonate, nylons, steel
The Body Signified_plaster, steel, strathmore
The Machinist‘s Index_ pencil, vellum
Distinction/Difference _ steel, wood,plaster
A Stair to Teach the Draftsman Gravity_ pencil, sink, xerox toner, strathmore
halo 1560s, from L. halo (nom. halos), from Gk. halos “disk of the sun or moon, ring of light around” “the sun or moon” (also “threshing floor” and “disk of a shield”), of unknown origin. Sense of “light around the head of a holy person or deity” first recorded 1640s. As a verb from 1801. A threshing floor is a specially flattened surface, usually circular and paved, where a farmer would thresh the grain harvest halobefore vowels hal-, comb. form meaning “salt, sea,” from Gk. hals (gen. halos) “a lump of salt, salt generally,” in Homer, “the sea,” from PIE *sal- “salt” (see salt). bate (1) “to reduce, to lessen in intensity,” c.1300, aphetic of abate (q.v.). Now only in phrase bated breath, which was used by Shakespeare in “The Merchant of Venice” bate (2) c.1300, “to contend with blows or arguments,” from O.Fr. batre “to hit, beat, strike,” from L.L. battere, from L. batuere “to beat, knock” (see batter (v.). In falconry, “to beat the wings impatiently and flutter away from the perch.” Figurative sense of “to flutter downward” attested from 1580s. thresh - O.E. þrescan, þerscan “to beat, sift grain by trampling or beating,” from P.Gmc. *threskanan “to thresh,” originally “to tread, to stamp noisily” (cf. M.Du. derschen, Du. dorschen, O.H.G. dreskan, Ger. dreschen, O.N. þreskja, Goth. þriskan), from PIE root *tere- “to rub, turn” (see throw). The basic notion is of treading out wheat under foot of men or oxen, later, with the advent of the flail, the word acquired its modern extended sense of “to knock, beat, strike.” The original Germanic sense is suggested by the use of the word in Romanic languages that borrowed it, e.g. It. trescare “to prance,” O.Fr. treschier “to dance,” Sp. triscar “to stamp the feet.” threshold O.E. þrescold, þærscwold, þerxold “doorsill, point of entering,” first element related to O.E.” “þrescan (see thresh), with its original sense of “tread, trample.” Second element of unknown origin and much transformed in all the Germanic languages; in English it probably has been altered to conform to hold, but the oft-repeated story that the threshold was a barrier placed at the doorway to hold the chaff flooring in the room is mere folk etymology. Cognates include O.N. þreskjoldr, Swed. tröskel, O.H.G. driscufli, Ger. dial. Drischaufel hold (n.1) act of holding, c.1100; “grasp, grip,” c.1200, from O.E. geheald (Anglian gehald) “keeping, custody, guard; watch, protector, guardian,” from hold (v.). Meaning “place of refuge” is from c.1200; “fortified place” is from c.1300; “place of imprisonment” is from late 14c. Wrestling sense is from 1713. No holds barred “with all restrictions removed” is first recorded 1942 in theater jargon but is ultimately from wrestling. Telephoning sense is from c.1964, from expression hold the line, warning that one is away from the receiver, 1912. hold (n.2) space in a ship below the lower deck, in which cargo is stowed, 15c. corruption in the direction of hold (v.) of O.E. hol “hole” (see hole), influenced by M.Du. hol “hold of a ship,”and M.E. hul, which originally meant both “the hold” and “the hull”of a ship (see hull). Or possibly from O.E. holu “husk, pod.” All from PIE *kel- “to cover, conceal.” hold (v) O.E. haldan (Anglian), healdan (W.Saxon), “to contain, grasp; retain; foster, cherish,” class VII “strong verb (past tense heold, pp. healden), from P.Gmc. *haldanan (cf. O.S. haldan, O.Fris. halda, O.N. halda, Du. houden, Ger. halten “to hold,” Goth. haldan “to tend”), originally “to keep, tend, watch over”(as cattle), later “to have.” Ancestral sense is preserved in behold. The original pp. holden was replaced by held beginning 16c., but survives in some legal jargon and in beholden.
Light and Lamella_water, plaster, light, feathers, fingers, lentils, oil, and sticks
Degrees of Freedom_ pencil, xerox toner, vellom
The Draftsman Shows the Machinist_ mixed media_ pgs 60-67
The Cartographer Draws a Connection_ pencil, trace, vellum
The Sage Accellerates the Captain_ pencil, trace, xerox toner, strathmore_ pgs 75-top78/79
Conflict With the Sun_pencil on vellum
The Draftsman Finds a Body_ pencil, trace, strathmore_ pgs 81-89
The Machinist Gives Over_ wood, steel, wire, wax, paper_ pgs 90-91
The Cartographer’s Death (detail)_ wood, steel, wire, acrylic
The Cartographer Draws Himself In_ pencil, trace , xerox toner, strathmore
A Map, From the View of the Sun_ wood, wire, butterboard, xerox toner_ pgs 97-99
A Vessel and a Voyage_ steel, bronze, wire, acrylic, wood
Voice: Opaque_ plaster, steel, wood, acrylic
Contraction_ pencil, trace, xerox toner, strathmore