The Master's House

The Master’s House DONALD KUNZE By a definition that may seem terse, arbitrary, and even Hegel; and Lacan) in anthropological and linguistically ridiculous at this point … interesting ways.1 … the “master” is whoever has a “house,” meaning an archi- This study is, therefore, presented as a kind of thesis tecture that facilitates — but later explicates and under- about what a comprehensive answer to the question, mines — mastery. The architecture of this “house” positions “what is the political unconscious of architecture?” might the master and his house with respect to space around it, look like. A thesis aggressively pursues the old Positivist both in material and ideological terms. Thus, this architecture is similar to the topology of the “houses” of planets, ideal of falsifiability. Even the classic formulation of the whose spheres align in specific ways to create variable con- scientific thesis appears in negative form: the famous ditions of influence based on adjacency. “null hypothesis.” Any position involving such diverse and historically-philosophically separate sources as Vico On the side of materiality, the master’s house is one and Lacan has to construct fragile bridges over deep that is frequently easy to identify on account of its water. My strategy will be to disavow mastery as a goal prominence in the landscape, its conspicuous display of of study and to face the potential damage of errors in wealth or control, its symbols, its grandeur. Clichés advance, knowing that error will be an unavoidable come to mind: the castles or manor houses that are the component of any account. Does this mean accepting staple of British National Trust properties filled with defeat in advance? Yes. But, in the spirit of Lacan’s fawning tourists; the plantation houses of the Deep promise, in the face of the Gödelian paradox, to choose South, set like jewels in fields of agricultural wealth; the between incompleteness over inconsistency, inconsis- less grand contemporary McMansions set behind gates tency is the choice of the comedian and the politician. and electronic security systems; the parts any house Incompleteness offers the advantage of treating the where occupants display their status through posses- limits of mastery in a material way — as a boundary sions, trophies, or precious objects. both characterizing the object of study as well as study Mastery is exercised through architecture in ways itself. Also, the renunciation of mastery engages the that are not always obvious. Mastery is not simply quan- issue of double negation, a key component in the issue titative superiority. It is not the “successful solution” of of mastery, particularly in its relations to Hegel’s famous a functional, climatic, resource, or sustainability prob- master-slave parable. As Iris Murdoch would call it, this 2 lem, although it can be the way rhetoric situates a aims to be a “fairly honorable defeat.” building project within these anxieties. Mastery, here, is This recursion, which is really a reciprocity between meant in three senses in addition to the usual one: the objects and methods of study, leads in the direction (1) the Vichian, and later Hegelian and Marxist, sense of of a style of inquiry famously polished by Slavoj Žižek, radical historicism, in which formation of the idea of a mas- for whom popular culture is both a laboratory and ter, and a master metaphor, is key to various economies of stage-set for psychoanalysis. In particular, film, which is exchange, including the exchange of metaphors and me- experienced “authentically” in all of its copies, so to tonymies to create autonomous “mentalities”; speak, provides the best field for discourse. In this (2) The Lacanian sense of “false mastery” employed by the study, Akiro Kurosawa’s 1950s crime thriller, High and ego, following the mirror stage, in retroactively creating a Low, provides multiple angles on the case of the mas- contrasting “subject in pieces” (objective subjectivity) as ter’s house.3 An industrialist set to take over his com- well as objects that resist mastery (“partial objects,” subjec- pany is interrupted by a kidnapping. His chauffeur’s son tive objectivity); and is taken by mistake (the two boys were in costume, (3) The reconfiguration of agencies and actions to modify playing “cowboys and Indians”) but the industrialist is spaces and times into Möbius-band-like topographies creat- persuaded to accept full responsibility, not only ruining ing “symptom structures” that include a variety of dis- his chances for closing the deal but ruining him finan- courses and perceptual frameworks. cially. The issue of double negation looms prominently, “The master’s house” thus comes to stand for both and here we can identify the relation of negation to the the variety of architectural strategies taken to symbolize role played by metonymy as well as the differentiation and culturally sustain the idea of mastery as well as the of two types of metonymy, privation and prohibition. ideological and psychological structures that alterna- The background logic of High and Low’s plot is based on tively create and then undermine/explicate mastery. a plus-minus system privation: the ransom equals ex- Because mastery involves a large range of topics in actly the amount of money the industrialist needed for what might be called “the Freudian-Lacanian field,” the his take-over; the chauffeur’s son played the role of an psychoanalytic framework — where linguistics, rhetoric, “exact copy” of the industrialist’s; the industrialist’s optics, and topology interact closely — constitutes a prominently visible house reciprocally metonymizes and laboratory for positioning the role of the unconscious in is metonymized by the low docklands of Yokohama, the process of constructing and construing mastery. where it, in the latter case, “stands (up) for” Yokahama because its “highest citizen” has come from the low But, because the Vichian-Hegelian-Marxian projects on 4 the subject of mastery involve the creation of stable class ; and, in the former case, the unknown location of domains of political/ideological order, this unconscious the kidnapper necessitates a process of interpolating repeats the insistent conclusion of Fredric Jameson, that synesthetic qualities of the city and landscape (the ur- the unconscious is inherently a political matter, and that ban version of the Lacanian “subject in pieces”). its analysis requires a Marxist analysis. I concur but Prohibition involves the dropped-out metonymy of promote Vico’s perspective into first place over Marx’s wealth and its reciprocal force, the evil eye that envi- because, I would argue, Vico anticipates Marx (and ously and literally hold the master’s house in its gaze.5 Kunze: The Master’s House 1 The kidnapper’s telescope casts a shadow that inverts “The Little Corporal” for Napoleon) to the identification the house’s interior space, forcing police assisting with of a condition or situation with the qualities of a proper negotiations to crawl beneath the sight line. The X- name. Reversed antomasia gives a literal proper name structure of surveillance is optical but also rational, set- or the status of a proper name to a condition of mind or ting up the inversion that finally brings the victim and experience. Hitchcock’s story about the origin of the victimizer together in a final scene where reflections on McGuffin is key: the glass separating the two men anamorphically blends It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two their faces. At this point it may be possible to speculate men in a train. One man says, “What's that package up about how the components of the master’s house con- there in the baggage rack?” And the other answers, “Oh stitute a “cipher” that combines perceptual data with the that's a McGuffin.” The first one asks, “What's a McGuffin?” logical order of consciousness. Unlike theories of the “Well,” the other man says, “It's an apparatus for trapping unconscious that romanticize it as an inaccessible re- lions in the Scottish Highlands.” The first man says, “But pository, this interactive model inverts the usual inside- there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other outside relationship that plants the unconscious at the one answers “Well, then that's no McGuffin!” So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.8 interior of the subject’s “point of view.” Rather, this analysis relocates the unconscious at the antipode of the The McGuffin’s emptiness and meaninglessness cap- point of view, the perspectival “vanishing point,” re- tures the essence of the master signifier, whose very leased from its obligation to sit at the horizon line to power and pervasiveness is based on the fact that it has play a wider role as the subjective object, the “exti- no logical relationship to any referent. Andrea Battistini mate,” the unlocatable gaze.6 has argued that the logic of reversed antonomasia was, in fact, what Giambattista Vico described as the “master According to Lacan, the master signifier is not simply key” to the mentality of the first humans, who perceived a paradigm but rather a defect in causality itself that in a clap of thunder a “word of Jove” that meant to tell differentiates the human concept from universals, such them something (but they knew not what). The key is as the “laws of physics,” that play out tautological rela- that, in a series of signifiers, a final one is pulled out of tionships without creating remainders. An example of place: a metonym “set higher” than the rest, which this latter would be F=MA, or “force equals mass times back-projects a point of origin that “must have been” acceleration”), Newton’s second law of motion. The the causal energy behind the previous series.9 The con- terms are exchangeable according to the standard laws nection between this “last term” and the “first term” of algebraic equations.

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