This thesis is concerned with architectural and design practitioners involved in areas outside of their training: specifically, with the way designers embrace a do-it-yourself or DIY ethic to create experimental, ephemeral, collaborative environments not usually considered “architecture” in the professional sense. This happens because they become directly involved with a variety of methods, construction activities, project types and materials normally associated with amateur building. The thesis does not aim to contribute to more comprehensive solutions for architectural production (say, commercial practice), but rather focuses on a particular production opportunity. It attempts to draw forth qualities of process, practice and conceptualisation that are of relevance to architecture and could be the basis of future exploration in architecture. With this intent, this thesis outlines a conceptual explanation for why these designers sometimes background their training in, and knowledge of, building procurement, in favour of amateur building activities. This design approach raises questions about the way architecture is understood, discussed and practiced. In philosophy and architectural theory, architecture is usually described as a device for ordering and framing the world, an opposition to the unfolding, unpredictable process of the evolving, natural world. Yet there are things that some designer-maker-inhabitants do in practice to thwart their environmental control and influence, thus introducing a degree of unpredictability into projects. This unusual design approach has the potential to inform discussions about architecture and architectural practice beyond this thesis. There is a plethora of technical information about DIY in the popular media, yet little investigation of how professionally-trained designers creatively engage with DIY. The experimental approach to building and space studied in this research is different to self-building or simple DIY because it does not adhere to a set of design plans or set approaches. This approach is also different to outsider architecture or vernacular building because it is initiated by people with design knowledge and training, even if they put aside some of their knowledge. To clarify this latter approach to architecture and space, the research describes a space of blurring between professional and non-professional building, architectural control and spontaneity; a space of germinant practice, based on the precepts and proposals manifest in germinant philosophy. The thesis includes speculations about ways to encourage germinancy in design practice. This practice-led study involved preliminary fieldwork studies through critical analysis of my own, and others, sitespecific installation art practice. These preliminary studies led to two major fieldwork projects in Brisbane: both are homes to artists and architecturally- trained designers working outside of commercial, professional practice.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duquesne University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-118).

This dissertation uses Masny’s Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) to problematize assumptions about literacy underpinning the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program. In addition to teaching English, LINC aims to orient adult immigrants to “the Canadian way of life” which I argue constitutes a form of peace education: teaching peaceful, multicultural values as part of being/becoming Canadian. How do language, literacies, and lessons about peace intersect? MLT foregrounds the Deleuzean-Guattarian concept of becoming: reading intensively and immanently disrupts and transforms individuals in unpredictable ways. I deploy Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine to think about peace as a text that is read and violence as a revolutionary, disruptive force essential for the invention of peace. Accordingly, this research focuses on how experiences of peace AND violence contribute to becoming (i.e. transformation) through reading, reading the world, and self in LINC. Over a 4 month period, 2 teachers and 4 students participated in qualitative inquiry strategies including: video-recorded classroom observations, individual interviews (based on the viewing of video footage of classroom events), and student audio journals. I also collected classroom artifacts used during the observations. Through Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism I frame my research approach as rhizoanalysis. Rhizoanalysis is a (non)method that views data as transgressive (exceeding representation), analysis as a process producing rhizomatic connections (immanence), and reporting as cartography (mapping different assemblages). This research affirms that there is more going on in LINC than its mandate implies and raises questions pointing to the complexities of teaching and learning English in LINC. How might lessons about multicultural values be taken up in ways fraught with tensions between peace AND violence? Becoming-Canadian is an event that unfolds through reading, reading the world, and self. As sense emerges, how might the collision of worldviews around experiences of peace AND violence create encounters that potentially disrupt? How are students, teachers, and even the concepts of “Canadian” and “peace” transformed? I posit rhizocurriculum as a way to account for the affective and transformative powers of multiple literacies in language learning and to view adult immigrant language classrooms as sites of experimentation.

Rosemarie Trockel: The Problem of Becoming is a theoretical investigation of the artwork of contemporary German artist Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952). Although Trockel is best known for her knit canvas works made throughout the 1980s, she has a remarkably large oeuvre which utilizes almost every artistic medium possible – from video and film work, to public monuments, painting, earthworks, sculpture, drawing, installation art, book-making, photography, and even robotics. Trockel’s artwork is constantly changing stylistically and thematically, which makes her work difficult to write about but is also what makes her work unique. By opening up a multiplicity of readings that refuse a fixed symbolic order, her art represents a continuous state of becoming other. Ultimately this project claims that Rosemarie Trockel’s artwork exemplifies a ‘virgulian’ subjectivity and an aesthetics of becoming. This project reads Trockel’s art through the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well important feminist and queer theorists such as Griselda Pollock, Teresa de Lauretis, Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, and Monique Wittig. It also uses the theoretical construct of the virgule as an alternative to common art historical methods such as gender, culture, biography, historicity, or intentionality. The virgule is a theoretical construct (representing both an aesthetic mode or style and a form of subjectivity), which is, ultimately, a new way of reading works of art and literature. Each chapter of this thesis demonstrates different ways in which the virgule operates within Rosemarie Trockel’s artwork. Chapter one, ‘BB/BB’, centres on Trockel’s vitrine work ‘The Bardot Box’ (1993), in which Trockel combines Brigitte Bardot and Bertolt Brecht. These two figures are used to explore concepts of myth, fandom, the rhizome, and adolescence. Chapter two, ‘Mermaid/Angel’, looks at Trockel’s sculpture Pennsylvania Station (1987), which is usually read as relating to the Holocaust. Here, instead, the work will be looked at in relation to fairy tales and mythological creatures. It will also demonstrate Trockel’s fascination with the history of art and how women’s bodies are constructed throughout that history. Chapter three, ‘Domestic/Violence’, discusses how Trockel’s work can relate to historical German events (namely, the activities of terrorist Group the Red Army Faction). It also demonstrates her interest in uncovering forgotten histories and people. Chapter four, ‘Body/Machine’, explains how Trockel’s sculptural machine Painting Machine and 56 Brushstrokes bridges the divide between mechanical production and the handmade. This chapter also discusses the very different ways in which Trockel’s work portrays bodies (visceral versus clinical). The concluding chapter of Rosemarie Trockel: The Problem of Becoming, ‘Across the/Continental Divide’ places Trockel’s video work ‘Continental Divide’ (1994) in dialogue with Monique Wittig’s novel Across the Acheron, to show how the virgule operates as a subject position, and to demonstrate the limits of a virgulian subjectivity.

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Le présent mémoire aborde les problématiques morales de la scission corps-esprit chez les soldats de la guerre du Việt Nam telles que représentées à travers certains films traitant de cette guerre. Notre démarche sera centrée sur le travail individuel que propose le film Apocalypse Now, plutôt que sur la representation de la guerre. Nous postulons que ce film met les individus devant les contradictions inhérentes d'une société qui prétend justement pacifier le monde en faisant la guerre, et qui plus est, comme ce fut le cas au Việt Nam, au moyen d’un déchainement de violence qui dépasse l'entendement (torture, massacre de masses, napalm et Agent Orange). Notre hypothèse est que le film, à travers son personnage central, nous propose une « voie » qui n’empêche pas la guerre, certes, mais permet du moins d'entreprendre une demarche de distanciation et de redefinition morale individuelle permettant de survivre au(x) temps de guerre(s). Cette mutation morale, chez le personnage principal, s'acquiert au bout d'un voyage réflexif à tout point de vue « au coeur des ténèbres » – de la jungle, tout autant que de son être. / This master’s thesis addresses some moral issues of the body/spirit dichotomy, induced in the military training, in the Vietnam War vets as portrayed in several films on that war. Our work will be centered on the work of the individual as suggested in Apocalypse Now, rather than on the depiction of the war. We contend that this film puts the individuals in front of the contradictions of a society that pretends to pacify the world using war, and inasmuch, as was the case in Vietnam, using a conspicuous outburst of violence (torture, mass murder, napalm, Agent Orange). We hypothesize that the film, through its main character, propose a “way” which doesn’t eradicate war, but suggest that we can take a step to redefine our moral standpoint in front of ourselves to heal the wounds caused by Wars. This individual moral mutation, in the main character, is the result of a reflexive process, on all accords at the “heart of darkness”, of the jungle as much as of his soul.

The starting point of this work is the concept of indigenous animism in Félix Guattari's late work at the end of his life, understood as a form of subjectivity operating through different regimes of signs than the "modern" one. These animist semiotics are "polysemic" and "trans-individual," while instead of building a sharp division between the spheres of "nature" and "culture", they inhabit reality by "collective entities half-thing half-soul, half- man half-animal, machine and flow, matter and sign." The aim of most of the following text is then primarily to trace these semiotics across the joint work of Deleuze and Guattari. After introducing the context of Deleuze's philosophy and its specific "image of thought," and explaining its basic concepts, we will focus on the description and comparison of the semiotic "ethnographies" of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The first volume traces the "universal history" of the ways of hominization (becoming human) of man from the state of nature, through various forms of inscription, which constitute society and culture. These modes are several and do not work only through language. In the limit experience of schizophrenia, the authors of Anti-Oedipa find a moment preceding all these historically contingent forms of hominization. In contrast, the...

This thesis investigates conceptual networks —systems of organising, understanding and explaining thought and knowledge— and the ways in which they underlie both text and its mise en page across a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Catalan literary texts and their manuscript witnesses. Each of the three chapters explores a separate corpus of texts, using two of four interrelated network theories: Michel Serres’ notion of parasites and hosts as the basic interconnecting units that combine to constitute all relational networks; the ubiquitous organizational tree; Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold as the primary factor in producing differentiation and identity; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s unruly, anti-hierarchical and anti-arborescent rhizomatic systems. The first chapter engages primarily with parasites and trees; the second with trees and folds; and the third with folds and rhizomes. However, resonances with the other network theories are discussed as they occur, in order to demonstrate the fundamentally interconnected and often interchangeable nature of these systems. Each chapter includes close analysis of manuscript witnesses of the texts under discussion. The first chapter, ‘Saints Denis and Fanuel: Parasitism and Arborescence on the Manuscript Page’, examines parasitic and arboreal networks in two hagiographic texts: late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century prose redactions of the Vie de Saint Denis, and the thirteenth‐century hagiographic romance Li Romanz de Saint Fanuel. The second chapter, ‘Ramon Llull’s Folding Forests: The World, the Tree and the Book’, addresses arborescent and folding structures in Llull’s encyclopaedic Arbre de ciència [Tree of Science], composed between 1295 and 1296. The third chapter, ‘Transgender Genealogy: Turning, Folding and Crossing Gender’, considers three characters in medieval French texts who can be read as transgender: Saint Fanuel; the King of Torelore in Aucassin et Nicolette; and Blanchandin/e in Tristan de Nanteuil. The chapter explores the ways in which these characters’ queer trajectories can be understood through conceptions of directionality which relate to the fold and the rhizome.