| School of Architecture ¥ McGill University |
Exactitude
in Science, by Jorge Luis Borges (1)
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of
a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire,
the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer
satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size
was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The
following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as
their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was useless, and not without
some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun
and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins
of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no
other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, LZ
[Adapted from MontrZ
Jorges Luis Borges and Roland Barthes are the key textual references, the two leading voices as it were, that will guide our seminar.(2) Thus some of Borges'themes and critical strategies--the relationship between time and space, imagery and memory, as well as his predilection for metaphor, myth, and allegory--will resonate throughout the "seminar".
Think of the 12 fictions that you will produce as tesserae from an ancient mosaic: original and unique compositions, fragments of a conceptual map of Montreal, which together help the reader discern the fleeting facets of this city. Of course, unlike Borges’ cartographers, your task will not be that of completing a perfect map, but rather like Borges himself, the task of making a fictional writing of space, the transformative doubling of the city proper. In this fashion work, Montreal, initially addressed as reality, will ultimately becomes an imaginary territory inhabited by a vast and heterogeneous group of figures and events.
This "writing space" will emerge from the seminar, a particular educational practice. As Roland Barthes points out:
In the seminar (and
this is its definition), all teaching is foreclosed: no knowledge is
transmitted (but a knowledge can be created), no discourse is sustained (but a
text is sought): teaching is disappointed. Either someone works, seeks, produces, gathers, writes in others’
presence; or else all incite each other, call to each other, put in circulation
the object to be produced, the procedure to compose, which thus passes from
hand to hand, suspended from the thread of desire like the ring in round games.
(3).
Barthes' words are dear. They evoke the ideal learning experience we will work towards and will continue to seek.
Indeed, your final ruminations shall reflects the rustle as Barthes calls the noise of what is working well.(4)
Ricardo L. Castro, MRAIC
Associate Professor of
Architecture
Montreal, August 2004
Footnotes:
1 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected
Fictions; translated by Andrew Hurley
(Toronto: Penguin Books, 1998) p. 325.
2 Roland Barthes, The
Rustle of Language; translated by
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986) and Jorge Luis Borges, This
Craft of Verse, edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2000). 3 Barthes, The
Rustle of Language, p. 337. 4 Ibid., p. 76.