boundary language seminar / architecture 417 / spring 2010
architecture / SALA / penn state university

This page is the index and guide for the interdisciplinary seminar hosted by the Department of Architecture, SALA, Penn State University. The seminar will take up the topic of the 'uncanny in the landscape', beginning with a review of the primary documents of Freud, Lacan, Dolar, Zizek, and others, which define the phenomenon of the uncanny and place it within the intellectual history of the Twentieth Century.

direct link to: seminar description / schedule / notes / briefs / assignments / documents / sources

For Graduate and Advanced Students in …

Architecture & Landscape Architecture
Visual Arts, Art Education, Art History
Geography
Philosophy
Critical Theory in any humanities field

Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958), showing Scottie observing ‘Madeleine’ in a flower shop

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMINAR ON PLACE THEORY
(BOUNDARY LANGUAGE, ARCH 417 / SP10 / course #393469) …

… where films are used as laboratories to study the subjective use of boundaries (frames, points of view, blank spots, sacred zones, margins, hiding places, blinds, force fields). The position of the seminar is that all critical theory is grounded in a theory of place. This theory begins with an idea of “the subjective uncanny,” the subject’s uneasy presence in place, “unsettled” because of the complex structure of desire.

Another position of the seminar is that there is a critical path for studying the subjective uncanny — from Plato, then skipping over some two thousand years to the “new science” of Giambattista Vico, thence to Freud, Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek (& Co.). Why this geneology? Only in these central sources is the matter of the subjective uncanny dealt with directly, in visual-narrative ways that can be correlated diagrammatically.

The seminar studies 20 “basic” films, formalizes 40 “main” ideas, and articulates four “subject-specific” architectures common to all cultures and periods of history. Nonetheless, it is maintained that each architecture occurs within a “radical historicism” that creates its own “political unconscious” — a term coined by Fredric Jameson to press Marx’s point that there is no subject without the dynamic oppositions created within and by history. These oppositions are maintained by “master signifiers” that constitute an ideological basis for thought, fantasy, and desire. Thus, this seminar could be useful to anyone studying culture, consumerism, place, imagination, popular
culture, cuisine, and critical theory.

The seminar presumes no prior familiarity with the fundamental sources, but it does demand curiosity, a speculative personality, and the ability to suspend judgment on behalf of the need for a theory of the subject situated simultaneously in an “anti-disciplinary” yet scholarly discourse. Participants are required to formalize their views in a written study or project.

Recommended reading in preparation for the seminar: Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject.