Form / Matter

The Judeao-Christian account of creation is an account of the origin of form, not of matter. "In the beginning..the earth was without form, and void."... The passage deals at length with the origin of order.

 For Aristotle, the generation of each organism was the result of a male formal cause (conveyed by the semen) and a female material cause (the menstrual blood.)(see epigenesis)  cf body / soul.

 The "hylomorphic" model separates a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form.  Gilbert Simondon bases his critique of the hylomorphic model on "the existence, between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension." 

 A formalist concept presupposes a contrast between form and matter. Indeed, without this distinction the absolutization of form makes no sense. "When we look upon the work of art, the means and the materials are forgotten and it is satisfying in itself as form." (Gottfried Semper)

 In The Life of Forms in Art, Henri Focillon argues against the antithesis of form and matter. For him, art is bound to matter, and "unless and until it actually exists in matter, form is little better than a vista of the mind, a mere speculation on space that has been reduced to geometrical intelligibility." (p95) According to Focillon, "matter, even in its most minute details, is always structure and activity, that is to say, form." (p.96) and each kind of matter has a certain "formal vocation." But the life which inhabits matter undergoes a metamorphosis as it becomes a substance of art, and technique is a "whole poetry of action" as a means to achieve metamorphoses.

 Konrad Fiedler described the achievement of classical Greek architecture as the complete intellectualization of all the material elements of building. "We can speak of understanding a Greek building from the great period only when we perceive how the force that strives for a pure expression of form has taken command of every part of the building." ("Observations on Architecture, in Empathy, Form, and Space, p. 134) Still, Fiedler is careful to note that "Form has no existence except in material, and the material, to the mind, is not only the means by which form expresses itself but the medium in which form achieves existence."

 For Heinrich Wölfflin, the force of form (Formkraft ), the opposition between the tendency of matter towards formless collapse and the opposing force of will, life, or whatever, sets the entire organic world in motion and is the principle theme of architecture. 

 For Ferdinand de Saussure, "language is a form and not a substance." (Cours, p.169)

 For Deleuze and Guattari, the distinction between matter and form is characteristic of "Royal Science", the science of a society divided into governors and governed. For nomad science the relevant distinction is material-forces rather than matter-form. Materials for nomad science are not homogenous, and form is not fixed. The singularities or haecceities are already like implicit forms that are topological rather than geometrical, and that combine with the processes of deformation: for example the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. "energetic materiality in movement" (see Thousand Plateaus, p 408)

 (see transcendent / immanent) (see also natural form)

psycho-sexual space

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud warned the reader against the view of the mind as physically spatial. Such an error would be mistaking "the scaffold" for "the building". Yet his "topographical" accounts of the unconsious are thoroughly spatial.

One of the earliest reflexes of a breast-fed newborn is to turn its head towards the person, male or female, who is holding it in the nursing position (that is, in a horizontal position. Later, the baby will stare at the face of the mother unwaveringly during the act of nursing. During this time she feels the nipple in her mouth while at the same time she sees the mother's face. Ren Spitz describes this experience as the origins of the distinction between contact perception (oral tactile) and distance perception, between haptic and optic perception.

The dyad of reciprocal relations between mother and child, between object and subject, are the first form of "object relations," which later become social relations. Karl Abraham invented the term of "object relations" to describe persons or things which mediate instinctual discharge for a given person. Melanie Klein developed the theory in relation to the mother as principal object and used children's play as a basis for understanding their cognition. D.W. Winnecott describes the holding environment, the "potential space" between the baby and the mother that comes into being during the phase of repudiation, when the baby is at a stage of separating out the mother from the self and the mother is lowering the degree of adaptation to the baby's needs. (He also compares this moment to late stages of psychiatric treatment) Confidence in the mother's reliability, and therefore in that of other people and things, makes possible a separating-out of the not-me from the me. The move from dependence to autonomy is achieved by the filling in of the potential space with creative playing, with the use of symbols, and with all that eventually adds up to a cultural life. (Playing and Reality, pp 107-9)

Jessica Benjamin links the intersubjective realm of the holding environment and transitional experience to the experience of inner self, which she sees as enabling the experience of women's desire. ("A Desire of One's Own, in Teresa de Lauretis, ed. Feminist Studies / Critical Studies) see body.

The analysis of the mirror stage accounts for the child's aquisition of notions of spatiality and temporality. (see also ego)For the first time, the child is not absorbed by its environment (both occupying no space at all and being all-pervasive) but is now part of space, taking up a place or location in space. The "buccal" space of the neonate, the space that can be contained in or exploited by the child's mouth, is replaced with the first notion of a binarized space, capable of being divided into real and virtual planes. The virtual duplication of the subject's body, the creation of a symmetry measured from the picture plane, is necessary for these more sophisticated, abstract, and derivative notions of spatiality. (see body image.)The mirror stage is a link between space and representation.

J.-B. Pontalis observed that Charcot's space at the Salpetri re was a full, theatrical space -- which is, in fact, the space of the hysteric -- which Freud replaced with an empty, purely mental space. The analyst sat out of sight of the patient, who reclined on a couch without the presence of any other spectators. ("Between Freud and Charcot: from One Scene to the Other" , in Frontiers in Psychoanalysis)

In "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia" (first published in Minotaure in 1935 and playing a crucial role in Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. published in English in October 31, Winter 1984) Roger Caillois talks about "depersonalization by assimilation into space" in both psychosis and animal mimicry. (see bwo) Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment.

Surrealism and the city as the place of chance (and magical) encounter. "Ce qui me s duit dans une telle mani re de voir, c'est qu'a perte de vue elle est recr atrice de d sir" (Andr Breton, L'Amour Fou) magnetic fields as the actions of desire.