Abstract:
In the Stones, Ruskin defines three architectural "orders" of ornament that underpin his entire thesis. “Classed according to the degrees of correspondence of the executive and conceptive mind”, they are based on three configurations of mastery and servility. Historically, these are manifested in three phases: from pre-Christian “servile ornament”, where the workman was slave; to the medieval system, “in which the mind of the inferior workman is recognised, and has full room for action, but guided and ennobled by the ruling mind”; finally, to “ornaments expressing the endeavour to equalise the executive and inventive, -endeavour which is Renaissance and revolutionary, and destructive of all noble architecture” [9. 291]. The workman has become master. He does so at the cost of his original power, which is defeated by abstract learning. As in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit, mastery proves to be a dead-end. A viable subordination alone offers the way to an experience of independence and individuation in and through work. In Gothic architecture, Ruskin sees the elevation of the particular, the individual, the unique and the detail. Particularity becomes an active principle that reunites subjectivity and the world, creating identification between individual and individuated matter through a painstaking “panegyric accuracy”. A sense of self is seen to derive from particularisation of the exterior world and deeper and deeper interiorisation of consciousness. This paper will examine politico-theological patterns of sovereignty and submission in Ruskin’s treatment of architecture and the paradoxes it gives rise to that, on closer reading, cannot be resolved. Ornament, Ruskin’s touchstone of architecture, belongs to a dynamic of government and individuality, limitation and excess, greatness and minuteness. Ornament is normally regarded as peripheral and background, but in Ruskin, it is given focus and foreground. The Gothic is concerned not only with particularisation but also with the non-finite. And thus, Ruskin’s classification shatters before the wonder of limitlessness: "Infinity of infinities in the sum of possible change" [9.142]. Thus, “the whole is inconceivable”, and there is always an inbuilt lack. Put another way, it is the lack that is filled by particulars, for such ornament. But Ruskin's elevation of the particular threatened a loss of hierarchy and an assurance that any personal experience could be generalized. The particular exists outside of order, relation, meaning and ultimately, as the Schoolmen already knew, individuum est ineffabile, what is individual cannot be spoken about.