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This Ph.D. Submission Is in Two Parts : a Dissertation : a Series of Visual Works

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This Ph.D. Submission Is in Two Parts : a Dissertation : a Series of Visual Works Language Games in a Visual Environment This Ph.D. submission is in two parts : a dissertation : a series of visual works. The two parts of the submission are complimentary. Neither should be thought of as a 'commentary' on each other. The subject of the dissertation is the relationship of the visual to the discursive and its subsequent effect on the notion of the 'Plan'. The opening of the dissertation builds up a view of the different relationships these two may have, and how it is possible to discuss these relationships in different ways. As a model for these relationships I have used Diderot's Sa lon of 1767. In this essay Diderot begins to reassess the relationship between beholder and artist. and the nature of the relationship between the seen and the recorded. The seven sections [Diderot's 'Sites'] each serve to introduce a particular relationship between criticism and practice, and introduce consideration of such topics as the Sublime, the incestuous relationship between the work and its critique, and the relationship of landscape, model [as in the form of landscape garden], and the painting. The second section takes a look at more specific relationships, in a historical sense as in Emblems and Devices, and in a linguistic sense as discussion of Heidegger's work on 'Form' and Lyotard's Discourse/figure. These chapters are distillated in the final chapter 'PPP' in which aspects of these notions are reassessed in relation to a potential visual work. The third section begins with a precis of Steinberg's thoughts about inconsistencies found in the plan of Borromini's church of San Carlo and then moves on to consider possible explanations which may occur through the reading of Deleuze's book Th e fold. This develops into a discussion of the nature of the idea of 'the Plan', and its is significance in the creation of a work of Art. The final section, Vasculum, attempts to re-order these finds into a network of ideas, images, events which will serve as an encyclopaedia [a Diderotian notion in itself] from which a potential visual response can be mounted. LANGUAGE GAMES IN A VISUAL ENVIRONMENT David Kirshner A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Brighton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Supervisors L. Preece [University of Brighton] and G. P. Bennington [University of Sussex] January 2000 Manu al Introduct ion Didero t's Salon of 1767 Aper�us desa grea bles Drawing on Borromini Vasculum Bibliography Exhibition Ma(lual The plan This dissertation is part of a work : this dissertation is part of a work. The other parts of the work constitute visual works. Objects. Things. One objective of the work is to open up a discussion about the figural and the discursive. As we will see, these do not have an easy relationship. Consequently there is not an 'easy' relationship between the two parts of this work. The writing and the 'things'. This 'unease' is in many ways the subject of the dissertation. The figural /discursive debate is not therefore the subject of the dissertation. It constitutes the place, the locus, the fulcrum of the work. 2 There are three sections to the dissertation. A discussion of issues raised by Diderot in his Salon of 1767. A chapter exploring different attitudes to the figural and the discursive - discussing in particular Lyotard's work in this field. A section discussing Deleuze's notion of the Fold in relation to Borromini's Church of San Carlo. Each of these chapters exists independently. But they are connected by/through notions. Some of these notions are destructive, in that they in turn, damage and destroy the identity of their own boundaries. And in these chapters each of these notions may be described in a different way. They may be thought of as being inside or outside of the argument at any one time. The final scene of this devastation is the work itself. The last section introduces the secondary theme of the dissertation. The Plan and its relation to the sententious : the laying down of the Law. But in the Wildean sense of 'Nature following Art' the plan of the dissertation itself will have already undergone some of the contortions that will be described in San Carlo's Plan. So there is some f[r]iction here between 'saying it' and 'how it is said'. 3 Diderot tears open the canvas. He 'invades' the picture surface, moves freely inside it and describes views not visible to the beholder. Appropriation. Copying . Eventually, plagiarism. Vernet undertakes to describe a scene through a series of paintings depicting different viewpoints, each competing for the beholder's interest : Diderot dissolves the notion of the beholder's fixed position. He constructs a fiction within fiction and a paradox within a paradox. A double art of confusing art and nature: nature and garden: model and 'model'. Diderot expands this notion of the privileged 'inside' in Conversations on the Natural Son. He re-enacts the emotional impulses of the beholder, but is able to see the blurring of the divide between the 'pure' criticism of the philosopher and the less pure, more 'human', passionate, self -indulgent criticism of the cicerone. There is an enjoyment here, a sense of pleasure. Of ' Jouissance'. He enjoys himse/l This is a theme, too. Lyotard considers the relative qualities of the figural and the discursive. Initially he privileges the figural over the discursive. He underlines the 'modernity' of the figural, its relative lack of historical baggage, again, its jouissance. Forms, copies, repetitions bind these two. Emblems, devices, rhetoric would seem to fix them together But 4 PENCER PAN CE R PANS E R PENScR PONCER·· P 0 N s·· E R casts them adrift again � to recap ..................... This work has a plan : there are three sections. This work is also about the idea of the 1Plan'. About the differences between the plan as a foundation, and the plan as a developing idea, 'the planning'. The example, the specific, is Borromini's church of San Carlo. Borromini's Plan, that is, his geometry, was not apparent in the 'earth'. It was not underground or in Heidegger's words, 'pressed to the earth', but existed above ground, in the air, in 'real' space. A geometrical abstract that reached out and disseminated its own laws in its own space. Deleuze invents the theory of the 'Fold'. The Fold contrasts Renaissance certainties with the conflicts inherent in the Baroque. These conflicts lie between the inside and the outside, and the plan and the elevation. 5 just Prefacing .... .... " R"ousseau was embarrassed about having written a novel. He wrote two prefaces to La Nouvelle Heloise. In the second he introduces a c[s]ensor 11 N 11, to pre-empt criticism. N likes the plot, but criticises the characters as being too "Romanesque". He implores R to tell him whether the letters are true. But the fiction is truer than the truth because it is lived. lls se refusent aux verites decourageantes: ne trouvant nulle part ce qu'ils sentent, ils se replient sur eux-memes; ii se detachent du reste de l'Univers; et creant entre eux un petit monde differentdu notre, ils y forment un spectacle veritablement nouveau. I 'I read while writing: slowly, taking pleasure in prefacing at length each term' 2 A written preface provisionally localises the place where, between reading and reading, book and book, the interscribing of 'reader(s)','writer{s)', and language is forever at work. Hegel had closed the circle between father and son, text and preface. He had in fact suggested, as Derrida makes clear, that the fulfilled concept - the end of the self-acting method of the philosophical text - was the pre-dicate - pre-saying - pre-face, to the preface. In Derrida's reworking, the structure preface-text becomes open at both ends. The text has no stable identity, no stable origin, no stable end. Each act of reading the 'text' is a preface to the next. The reading of a self- I Rousseau O.C., vol. 11, pp.16-17 [They refuse to accept discouraging truths: finding nowhere that which they feel, they rely only on themselves (become self­ sufficient), detaching themselves from the rest of the universe, and believing themselves to be a little world different from ours, they form there a truly new spectacle]. 2oerrida "Positions," in Diacritics, 3, 1973, p.43., quoted in The Archaeologyof th e Frivolous, p. 2 6 professed preface is no longer an exception to this rule.3 ....... and ..... ...... 'There is, then, always already a preface between the two hands holding open a book.And the 'prefacer', of the same or another proper name as the 'author', need not apologise for 'repeating' the text'.4 In Derrida's The Archaeology of the Frivolous, he says [writes] that his text merely precedes Condillac's. He remarks .. .'you have already remarked that this alleged Introduction' ... .. that 'All that can be said against a preface, I have already said.The place of what absence - of what of whom of what lost text - does the preface claim to take? Thus disposing and predisposing (o� a first word that does not belong to it. the preface - a crypt in its turn - will take the form of what pre-serves (and ob-serves me here), the irreplaceable. 'I shall not engage myself beyond this first word in (the) place of another'. .. .. of Grammatology contains the 'Introduction to the 'Age of Rousseau': this work will present itself gradually. I cannot therefore justify it by way of anticipation and preface.
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