Methodologies : Speculative/Diffractive Modes of Inquiry and Making
Derrida (Glas, University of Nabraska Press, 1986):
‘The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chainings are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing and ungluing, rather than exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric.’
Marcus Doel (‘Meanwhile - Cats, Glunks, werewolves and other poststructuralists’ in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space, Routledge, London, 2000):
‘... .to approach the text as a map, a tool kit, a record: there are entrances and exits everywhere; fold it however you want; follow whatever trajectory you fancy. It’s still philosophy. A book, a work, an event: they all vary in and of themselves.. ..hence the setting off of the variable ‘and’ in place of the constant to-ing and fro-ing of the sedentary ‘is’ and ‘is not’; identity-difference; self-other; being-nothingness. Every ‘one’, every ‘each’ every ‘a’ is packed with innumerable others that are bursting to get out for a breath of fresh air, a taste of the outside, a stroll in the open.’
Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, Margaret Whitford, ed. (Blackwell, Oxford,
1991):
‘Everything then should be thought of as volume(s), helix(es), diagonal(s), spiral(s), curl(s), tum(s), revolution(s), pirouette(s)....An increasingly dizzying speculation which pierces, drills, bores a volume still assumed to be solid. And therefore violated in its shell, fractured, trepanned, burst, sounded even unto its centre. Or belly. Caught up in faster and faster whirlings, swirlings, until matter shatters and falls into (its) dust.... Fluid must remain that secret, sacred remainder of the one’.
Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
1993):
‘The adversary and accomplice of writing.... is language... One writes against language but necessarily with it. To say what one already knows how to say is not writing. One wants to say what it does not know how to say.. .one violates it, one seduces it, one introduces into it an unknown.’
Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.
UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.
MA Fine Art / Spatial Practices Introduction to Theory
Dr Judith Rugg
Consider the following:
‘A metaphor speaks indirectly - it implies. To be theoretical, one has to explicate - to open the folds.’ Yve Lomax, Writing the Image (2000).
‘Time is multi-dimensional, an uneven bundle of swerves (not linear). The idea of the self as a self-conscious presence in the now, must be abandoned.’ Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology (1976).
‘To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions. I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to se the skein of the light.’ Helene Cixous, ‘Writing Blind. Conversation with the donkey’ in Stigmata (1998).
‘Cultures do not relate to the “reality” of the world but to the world as narrative and illusion. These are subtle and vital for human existence. We live in the Golden Age of the alienation and the dissolution between real and fake, true and false in the triumph of consumer capitalism.’ Jean Baudrillard, Radical Uncertainty
'Seeing red is a matter of reading. And reading is properly symbolic. ’ Trinh T Minh- ha, All Owning Spectatorship.
‘Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent to that it is performed. Certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of gender core or identity... which either confirm or contest that expectation in some way.’ Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.
‘A space exists when one takes into account vectors of direction, velocities and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of moving elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it... that orient it, situate it. In short, space is a practiced place.’ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
‘When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power - a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it... and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: that has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that can’t terminate its mourning.’ Baudrillard, ‘The Procession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulation.
‘...a Chinese encyclopedia in which is it written that “animals are divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor; b) embalmed; c) tame; d) sucking pigs; e) sirens; f) fabulous; g) stray dogs; h) frenzied; i) innumerable; j) drawn with a fine camel hair brush.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Introduction) 1991.
‘The walls will never be really cast down. Hence, the melancholia of all landscapes. We owe them a debt. They immediately demand the deflagration of the mind, and then obtain it immediately. Without it, they would be places not landscapes. And yet the mind never burns enough.’ Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’ in The Lyotard Reader, A. Benjamin, ed.
‘Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture, just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated - saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’, driving out poor families...’ Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (1989).
‘To think about the geography of the female subject of feminism is not to be able to name a specific kind of spatiality which she would produce; rather, it is to be vigilant about the consequences of different kinds of spatiality; and to keep dreaming of a space and a subject which we cannot yet imagine.’ Gillian Rose, ‘Making space for the female subject of feminism.’ In Steve Pile and M. Keith, eds, Mapping the Subject (1995)
In this age of motor cars and aeroplanes, only slight atavistic terrors still lurk beneath the blackened halls, and that comedy of farewell and reunion played out against the background of Pullman cars transforms the platform into a provincial stage.’ Walter Benjamin (see Graeme Gilloch, Myths and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City, 1996).
‘It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think in the first place. In that case, it either “expresses” some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion), or effectively “represses” and diverts it, depending on the side of ambiguity you happen to favour.’ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
Tim Ingold
MAKING 2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.
Practical Geometry
The Architect and The Carpenter
The Cathedral and The Laboratory
The Return to Alchemy
Collage Workings : UCA Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham
