Since the Shogren Foundation Project (adapting the non-numerical calculus of George Spencer-Brown to issues of topology), boundary language expanded to cover film study (mainly Hitchcock and David Lynch), “surreal” conditions in landscape, and architecture as it has appeared in fiction, art, and film. As my reading of Lacan continued, I used the division separating énoncé (content) and énonciation (the act) as an active topological divide. I adapted Lacan’s theory of four main discourses (Master, Hysteric, University, Analysis) to the study of themes and dynamics of films, buildings, and landscapes. Much of that work has the frailty of being work in progress, but is included here to testify on behalf of the need for error.
Thought and Place
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was a highly original philosopher of culture who con- tributed in diverse ways to the intellectual life of Europe from the Eighteenth Century onward. He was largely ignored in his own time, and although periodic revivals restored interest and added contextual scholarship, his ideas remain as fresh — and strange — today as they were in the Eighteenth Century. His theories about culture and human development anticipated those of Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, Marx, Piaget, and even Freud and Lacan. His use of optical metaphors emphasized the psychological function of dimensionality in the construction of knowledge. This method opens the way to com- bine literature, poetry, architecture, the arts, and the study of landscape into a single humanistic project. Vico’s theory of culture is, fundamentally, a theory of the signifier, extended to account for socio-cultural, environmental, psychological, political, linguistic, and historic phenomena. As such, it promises much to those who seek a comprehensive and grounded theory of place. This on-line version is a revision of an original text, Thought and Place : The Architecture of Eternal Place in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (New York: Peter Lang, 1987).
ATLAS of the OBVERSE
The idea of Atlas of the Obverse (on-line only) has been to employ the theme of the obverse: to look at cases of it as well as to endure, as consciously as possible, the restrictions imposed on such looking. By pairing one-page observations with a page of diagrams and pictures, I aspired to not just the style but the idea of an atlas. I wanted both to understand the ordinary atlas in terms of its native obversity as well as use the structure of the atlas as a self-imposed limitation. A book wants to be closed at the end, and in the act of closing, judged by the reader. Just as words steal being from the things they name, and in that theft cre- ate a retroactive desire for something that never existed, a book creates a tornado that sucks thought up into a vortex. As we know from Dorothy’s trip to Oz, the tornado is somewhat gratuitous. Oz is both the same and different from Kansas. We have to take seriously the possibility that the more the text empties out its subject, the more we risk having our thoughts returned to zero. Still, there is something refreshing in having to start over, just as there is something really insightful in Roger O. Thornhill’s response to Eve Kendall’s question after looking at the monogram on his customized matches, in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest:
—What does the ‘O’ stand for? —Nothing.
Secondary Places
Place materializes the power of the secondary through its ability to carry, into its interior, the very function and form of distinction between the primary and the secondary. This is the theme of the “inside frame,” the means by which the dream can experience dreaming, the story to include other stories, and life to experience its own death. The inside frame of the secondary has the advantage of being able to retroactively acknowledge the role of the first frame, the frame “that gave it life,” so to speak. This is an advantage that firstness can barely manage to conceive, but the inside frame can use simple mockery to allow its audience a means of speculating on profound paradoxes without too much fuss.
Secondariness is a consequence of our “”first sense” of being present in a world with others, in scenes that don’t go away simply because we leave them. The “first world” stands up to interrogation about its “first- ness,” but there are sufficient gaps and shadows to make us aware, not just of hypothetical alternative realities but of scale dysfunction of realities inside realities: the inaccessible cosmic container that encloses our world and, at the opposite scale, fascination with the small, beginning with toys, continuing with animals and pets and the strictly bounded experiences of rituals, works of art, buildings, and places. The feeling that entry into the secondary space of a bounded interior is also entry into a new, alternative reality grows even more with our sophisticated bondings with the worlds–within–worlds of books, paintings, films, and computer screens. But, this book is not an inventory of such secondary places. Samples assembled are meant to show, economically, how the secondary works.