Consider a thesis: what is it? what is it composed of? how do you go about doing one? how do you know when you have one?
For a moment, let’s look at an imaginary thesis. A fiction. I’m not sure what the title would be, but I can identify the subject: a doghouse…
Or perhaps more generally, housing dogs; or perhaps even more generally, animals and domesticity; or again even more generally, the role of domestic animals in our life; or perhaps even, how we project domesticity onto animals. (This could go on for some time, but let’s stop here. The idea that it could go on for some time is an idea I’ll revisit later in these notes; it is an important part of the problem of the thesis.)
You can see how, in a few short steps, I went from something trivial, and by degrees arrived at something that, socially and academically, might be quite serious. The steps are obvious because the subject was initially so small, so insignificant, that we could see the layers of substance grow around it quite clearly.
First, a doghouse... This was my absurd opening. When I first thought of it I was thinking only of the most absurd example of building for a thesis subject. The absurdity of the choice would let me model the thesis without fussing too much with questions of substance. Doghouses are so small that they are under the horizon of history, or culture, or building science, or architecture. We use the idea of doghouse more than we use doghouses: when we screw up domestically, we’re in the doghouse; when we can’t design, we can’t design a doghouse. Dog’s aren’t fit clients, so they don’t get architecture.
Well, the absurdity lasted less than the time it took me to type the word” doghouse.” Why? Because a thesis is not simply a subject; it is also a theme, or several themes. And the themes are everywhere around me these days.
I read several essays a week (sometimes several in a day): they are my recreation and they are also how I choose to study human affairs. I don’t watch television, and newspapers are a remarkably unsatisfactory institution for reporting on human affairs. I am left with some journals, some magazines, and books to understand the world I live in. (I should say that I do take television and newspapers seriously, but only in the sense that (1) they evidence how the popular media work; (2) other people do take them seriously, so they play a part in human affairs, if mostly perhaps as an anesthetic; (3) they provide a lot of, occasionally off-colour, raw material; and (4) almost by accident, they often lead me to stories I wouldn’t otherwise come across – that is, they are like a forest floor to a tracker; they don’t tell the story, but they often bear signs of its passing.)
As I was saying, I read essays – on line, in journals, in magazines, in books. When I come across one that sparks my interest – relates to a subject I’m working on, might provide a footnote, might lead in time to a new trail – I save it. Recently, I saved one New Yorker essay on PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – and another, from the on-line edition of the New York Review of Books, on Peter Singer, the man who, thirty years ago, coined the term “Animal Liberation”. Both essays came to mind almost immediately after I began my riff on “doghouse.” Moments later a third essay also popped up, one I didn’t save, written by a quadriplegic activist and scholar who was critical of aspects of Singer’s rational inquiries into suffering and human worth. Details of the essays – the description of PETA headquarters, with the staff’s “animal companions” roaming free in an office building; descriptions of humane society kennels; stories of animal rescues; accounts of industrialized animal husbandry – came to me quickly, and the riffing took on form. Part of the immediate exercise had me, in a moment, turning the convention of “the doghouse” on its head; I asked myself, almost without reflection, what it would be like if doghouses were an important subject for our consideration. Here, I engaged in a simple operation – considering the opposite of what first comes to mind – and the themes began to build. (I probably benefited from the influence of three essayists – Guy Davenport, who is the master of the unexpected classical connection, and of childhood recollections; Evan Connell, the prince of fuzzy reference… Connell’s special gift is finding contradictory authorities on historic events and playing them off each other in a passage, and then doing this again several times throughout an essay, to dizzying effect; and Nicholson Baker, who is the finest miniaturist writing in English today, an author capable of finding clouds of angels on the heads on pins, universes in a drop of water, and in at least one case, a novel in a single escalator trip. (Addendum: this evening I started Baker’s latest novel, A Book of Matches. By chapter two he was writing about a pet duck and the doghouse it lives in.)
So the themes began to emerge, and if they were still vague, they had one commonplace: they took the subject seriously.
We have a subject – doghouse, and all of the sense of domestication that might go with that term, plus all the attendant material that will arise as we play with the concepts of house, domus, domesticity, the original domestication of animals, and the double meaning that attends the term domestication. And, if we do not quite have our themes in hand, we know they are there to be developed; that is, they will, with application, emerge.
Now, we now have the problem of application.
First, personal recollection: do I know a doghouse? In all my life I have only been intimate with one, and that would have been somewhere between the years 1954 and 1957. The doghouse was in the backyard of a house down the lane from my own home, in Winnipeg. In the summer of 1954, aged 5, I might have been allowed to roam that lane; in the summer of 1957 my family moved away. Sometime in those years, on a summer’s day (or more than one), I played in the sandbox next to that doghouse, an unpainted spruce plywood doghouse with a pitched, tarpapered roof, and I played in the doghouse. I was small, it seemed big. I could probably recall more, but I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t manufacturing the recollections; more important, I realized that doghouses are rare in my experience. I can at least suspect that they are rare in other people’s experience as well.
Next, personal experience of dogs; this was more fruitful. As children we were forbidden to play by the banks of the Red River, and so of course we played there constantly; my first dog followed me home from the river one day, and never left. A mix, as near as we could tell, of collie and lab, her name was Trixie. Following her death, there were daschunds, Heidi and Mitzi and Suzie (there is a pattern to these names). In the years after I left home to go to university there were more dogs in my parents’ house, all adopted strays, all welcomed. Without going on at length, I knew that I would have to work my way through my recollections of all of those dogs if only so that I had properly reflected on my own prejudices.
Important to my (imaginary) doghouse thesis, I would have to come to terms with one more dog: my daughter’s dog, Ben. Ben is an extraordinarily handsome cross between German shepherd and collie; a big, robust dog with a white ruff and a golden coat flecked with black. Trained as a guard dog, during the summers Ben is my daughter’s near-constant companion, keeping close as she and her friends roam a small lakeshore village in Quebec. Back in Toronto, most of the time, Ben lives with Robin’s mother. But for a few weeks every year, he stays with me. In those weeks I walk at least ninety minutes a day, whatever the weather, and feel better for it; Ben is, for me, a positive influence.
In this (imaginary) thesis, Ben would become very useful. First, I would be more conscious of the routines of his life, his role in the household, his behavior. Then, he would provide an easy, unselfconscious entré to the dog-owner’s world: I could interview his trainer, at length and over months; I could meet and talk with other dog owners; on walks I could meet new dog-owners; I could use Ben to become more conscious of what it is to live with a dog; I could, in some sense, live out one or more themes of the thesis. Moreover, Ben would become the hinge between the solipsistic face of the thesis (the part of the thesis where I spend my time studying myself) and the public face of the thesis – those aspects of the thesis that search out and deal with the public issues of the question (the part where I study the world). Not only would I live out the thesis in some way, I would also connect with a larger community of people who were also living out the thesis.
That roughly, would be the boundary around the personal part of the enquiry. How would I take my inquiry farther afield? There are several ways to pursue the question, and it makes sense to pursue several at once.
First, I would go back to the sources that, almost unbidden, insinuated the first themes into my off-hand consideration of the subject: PETA and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. It wouldn’t take long to find that both are rich with material, and both are controversial. (The recollection of the handicapped rights article I referred to earlier would be reminder enough of that.) I would at least fantasize a trip to PETA headquarters, and interviews among the members and spokespersons of other animal right’s groups. The subject is now itself so large – the bibliography has grown to several hundred books since Singer first wrote Animal Liberation – that I would have to keep a tight rein on this face of the question; I know, if the subject of the thesis is doghouse, animal rights would set one of the themes.
Before I consider the domestication of dogs, I have to consider their utility. The second field of study that I could see arising out of the PETA criticism of human-animal relations would be an investigation of the role of the modern working dog – shepherds, hunters, guard dogs, sled dogs, seeing eye dogs and so on. (Here I’d be tempted to consider those societies and cultures where dogs were, or still are, raised for food. This would make an excellent “extreme case.”)
After a review of literature, I think this field would be best investigated directly, much the same way a journalist would investigate it – by finding sources. (Here I’d start with Ben’s trainer, but special associations – especially for seeing-eye dogs – and the yellow pages would help.) Since this research is also potentially bottomless, I’d set some parameters around it before I got going: length of chapter or chapters, what kind of material I’d like to use – stories, statistics, graphic information – number of examples, models of how to work from specific to general and back again.
As I researched in this field, I’d expect fresh themes to arise, but the field itself would not be a theme.
Then, there is a third, very large field of inquiry – the culture of domestication and the modern dog.
This field of inquiry is really an aggregate of many different studies. You can imagine everything from the dog photographs of William Wegman and Elliot Erwitt (both very serious, if comic bodies of work) to dog shows (I wouldn’t be able to let this go by without a reference to Chris Guest’s film, Best in Show). With this example in mind, I’d probably plan an entire set of investigations into in films: for instance, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin would make a wonder subject for consideration; and there is a special sub-genre of Steven Spielberg’s films on fatherless (or weakly-fathered) suburban families where dogs play a role (Poltergeist for instance, and E.T., which has a special place in the cultural consideration of other species). And who could leave out the Queen and her Corgis, or those really odd paintings of dogs playing cards. (As I look into it for a moment, I find there is now a digital equivalent of the dog paintings at several websites; while they are terrifyingly camp, they certainly have a place in my analysis.) All this material is quite rich, and it is also something of a pleasure to sift through. There is definitely a theme of sorts here, perhaps a bit Freudian, perhaps Jungian, obviously open to contemporary forms of cultural analysis. For a moment I even found myself what Lacan would make of all these dogs, and while I couldn’t say now, I would certainly try and work it out.
A subset of this field would be a short, perhaps more anthropological consideration of the domestication of dogs in history. Depending on how I chose to handle the material, and on what I find, this could be a simple piece of work, or a complex one. In the hands of my friend Robert Jan, this could undoubtedly grow to formidable proportion; depending on how I wanted to handle this material, I might seek him out as an adviser on my committee.
Another subset might be a study of what people are reading about dogs right now. Amazon.com offers a best selling search. On the subject of dogs, the top ten best sellers are:
(1) How to Housebreak Your Dog in Seven Days
(2) The Art of Raising a Puppy
(3) Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs tonight: An African Childhood
(4) How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend: The Classic Training Manual For Dog Owners
(5) Walter, The Farting Dog
(6) Don’t Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training
(7) Because of Winn-Dixie
(8) Good Owners Great Dogs
(9) Bones Would Rain From the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs
(10) Dr Pitcairn’s Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats.
Other featured titles on the site included The Power of Positive Dog Training, and a subscription opportunity to the magazine Dog Fancy. Clearly there is a rich vein of animal personification loose in our society today. The consideration of this list and its implications might occupy no more than a couple of pages in the final thesis, but it would be an enlightening couple of pages.
While I can imagine going on, I am going to conclude this section with one more study, a field trip. Anticipating that serious dog cultures exist in our society, and that, probably in rural areas, there will be doghouses. I would start to scout out a trip that would survey the original building type – the doghouse. If this once again seems slightly absurd, I am confident that a close look at any phenomenon in a particular sub-culture is inherently interesting. A hunch would put my trip in among the hunting dog culture of the Ozark Mountains, and I would do enough general searching to satisfy myself that the investment of two weeks time and a few tanks of gas and camping fees would be worth the effort.
For me, such field trips are an encyclopedic exercise. The following is from my own notes for a book on the culture of the rural west.
In 1993 I began an account of my travels in America.
That account was gathered from records made on the road with notebooks, cameras and a tape recorder, with hundreds of maps – both official and homespun; with several four-wheel drive trucks and, in the back of those trucks, boxes packed with paper and books.
The papers include guides, local newspapers, political pamphlets, restaurant menus, church programs, museum brochures, tourist literature, photocopied memorabilia, and comic postcards. The books include atlases, histories, travel accounts, geography texts, handbooks of natural history, and an unfathomable number of local books and booklets which I could best call enthusiasms – those books, apparently of only local interest, which account for much of the lore of America. Sometimes enthusiasms are naively structured or not organized at all; sometimes they are obsessively focused on some personal pre-occupation; sometimes they seem utterly unfocused on anything much. For all their apparent immediacy they are not necessarily more honest than "real" books, but they have not been so much smoothed over either.
In this they are related to another strange resource: the amateur museum. Whatever tells some story, or is old or odd or unsung or frankly puzzling, and not wanted or worthy elsewhere, may go to an amateur museum. Not much different than the curiosity cabinets that were the seeds of great museums, amateur museums are out of time with what museums have become. They are not irreverent except in a hit or miss way, but they are tasteless and unfashionable, and perhaps in this they are a distinctly American art. In other places in the world there is some discrimination, or perhaps less motivation to exhibit the unsavory, the obscure, the over-personal or absurd; elsewhere there may be a well-developed professional class of curators, archaeologists, historians, exhibit designers, critics, and museum directors – an effective aristocracy dedicated to the defense of good taste, scientific practice and the official narrative. But in America, so large perhaps no single official narrative can dominate for long, or perhaps so democratic that the official narrative is center-less, or perhaps so preoccupied with the merit of its market that its aristocracy concentrates in very few places – mostly on its coasts – leaving everyone else to make their stories from the remnants left when the fabric of their experience was done up as radiant garments for the Great Institutions of Great Cities, that anyone with an itch to exhibit the lost bits of their lives and the lives of others – whatever their provenance, their sentiment or significance – seems willing and able to do so. Amateur museums are not exclusive to the countryside and the small town but they are easier to find there, and they flourish there.
In their unruly sense of inclusion, in their cultural marginality, in their eccentricity, their passion and their particularity, the enthusiasm and the amateur museum are perhaps some part of a sort of social sub-conscious.
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Reviewing what I have considered of an imaginary thesis so far, I can come to some provisional conclusions, and I can identify work I would have to do to fill out the model.
1. Start with a subject. Understand that the subject is not the thesis and it won’t be until themes are exposed and examined and drawn together into clear ideas.
2. Play with the subject. Enlarge it, shrink it, turn it over, pull it inside out and back to front. Consider the subject, however substantial, as no more than a micron across; however insubstantial, as a question that covers the earth. Look at the subject from several points of view, several disciplines.
3. Prepare your mind for a thesis, and re-prepare it throughout the process. Preparation is not, in this case, something you simply do before the case. Prepare to shed you prejudices, prepare to champion your ideas, prepare to be discomforted, and to discomfort yourself.
4. Consider all your reading. I generally classify what I’m reading, or working on reading, into four groups (with fluid borders, depending on the question).
(i) First there are those texts, those pieces of work that frankly inspire me. I want to emulate their artistry, their insights. I want to write (draw, build, photograph) with the same craft and force and effectiveness. For instance, I will probably never entirely shed a taste for the cool grace of Joan Didion’s essay on the Central Park Jogger, or the calm dignity of Walker Evan’s sharecropper portraits, or the ironic intensity of Evan Connell’s book on Custer – Son of the Morning Star – but I’m not going to put them into every biography I prepare either. They are my inspiration, but they are not my authority; including them everywhere I went would be a bit like the practices of cargo-cult societies, building bamboo airplanes and expecting them to leave the ground and shower down gifts from the gods.
(ii) Then there are texts that are solid authorities for what I am doing. They do find themselves in bibliographies. I read them closely, I annotate them, I write summaries to myself of key passages, I sometimes work to refute them.
(iii) Next, there are those texts that provide solid material in parts. A chapter here, a diagram there – these books are enlightening (in part), dependable backing for aspects of what I’m working out. These are the books that most often find themselves in the footnotes and the bibliography.
(iv) Finally, bearing apparently little content, there is that enormous mass of print material that surrounds us everyday. I include newspapers generally in this group, the internet always, almost all self-published material, all the folk printings and spontaneous announcements that show up in the world from tourist brochures to lost dog notices on lamp posts.
Many government publications sit in a space between this mass and the third class of material. That is because, as often as not, they don’t have an idea, just form. Corporate annual statements also sit in this in-between class. It is against the law to make misrepresentation in such reports, but they still put their best foot forward. (We wouldn’t have scandals like the Enron collapse if annual reports were actually dependable.)
5. Accept the fact that the themes you bring to the thesis reside in a space between the subject and yourself. Whether you are developing your understanding of the issues you bring to the subject, or the issues that arise from the subject, the theme is inevitably what makes a thesis of the subject. But because themes are, in part, something the author embodies, they are sometimes difficult to express. It is as if they area scrap of text pasted to your forehead, more apparent to everyone around than they are to you; to you, they may be no more than an itch over your eyebrows. On the other hand, if you are particularly self-aware, you may be clear about the theme or themes you carry about, and willing to find an appropriate subject early on in the process.
Whatever the case, you don’t have to be entirely clear about your themes at the outset, so long as you work to expose them to yourself in the course of the thesis.
6. Design studies to carry on your thesis. These could take several forms, and they don’t all have to be feasible. The unfeasible study will often lead to the feasible one. Studies take several forms.
(i) First there are the solipsistic studies. These are the studies that start with the self – with personal opinion and experience, with the close examination of our own recollections and our own impressions of the world. I think they are important, mostly because they expose – to an imaginary audience, to ourselves – who might be engaged in the inquiry. If we don’t examine our own experience of a subject, we are wasting our time; if we examine only our own experience of that subject, we are wasting everyone else’s time. In self-examination it might be best to remember that all of us have a self, and (more or less) we all find our own self more interesting than other people’s; it takes a well-developed self to hold someone else’s attention for long; the best self-development exercises involve looking beyond your self to other people, and other things.
(ii) Then there are there are literature searches. As I’ve said, I think that print generally falls into four categories. All four are important, but the first – your personal inspirations – may best be kept out of the bibliography, unless that is, they bear directly on the question at hand. The second and third categories – master texts in the field, texts that bear on the field – will not only appear in you bibliography, they will change your way of thinking about it, unless you have a rock-hard determination not to learn anything, in which case, you won’t finish your thesis anyway.
The last group – the un-washed masses of text that surround us – may be a source, may find its way into your bibliography, but probably only as raw material, and hardly at all as direct authority. The presence of lost cat posters on lamp-posts may tell us a lot about the relationship between cats and their keepers when gathered together in a multitude, but they are not going to be much authority on anything, in and of themselves. The phone book and the city directory work the same way. Often so do real estate circulars: one by itself is of no consequence, ten are trivial, but I would imagine that a collection of many of them would tell us something important about the real estate business, and about what it thinks we value in a home.
Here begins the distinction that we should make as we work through second-hand material – and most of what we work with is second hand material. There is authority (we recognize it by its provenance), and there is text, and in this case we could probably regard as texts all the artifacts of our culture: great books, serious essays and reports, newspaper stories and television news, political pamphlets, comic books, telephone directories, street graffiti, photographs, films, television programs, the TV Guide, action figures of wrestlers – certainly anything that is grouped or collected or operates as a class of objects or part of that class, or perhaps even anticipates a class that has not yet floated over the horizon . (This last group of objects – objects seeking a classification – is often the provenance of buffs and cranks and obsessives, collectors of minutiae and connoisseurs of trivia; that may only make this material more poignant, evidence of a social sub-conscious pushing itself to the surface.)
Authorities can be treated for their face value; what they say is important, no mater how they say it. Texts offer the opportunity for analysis, and that analysis may uncover fresh material for consideration; that is, we are no longer simply looking at what they say, but in what context they say it, and how. When we reach this point, we are deep into the development of a theme or themes, and we have transcended the simple literature search.
(iii) The archival search could be said to be a subset of the literature search, but it is different in a very important way. The archive is a catalogued collection of everything an archivist has deemed worth keeping. It is a borehole in time, and like bore holes, it is indiscriminate. The only distinction between the archive and the general mass of unedited material is that it has been catalogued; its citation is somehow more respectable than a citation of uncatalogued, uncollected material. A comic book from the corner store is trash; the collected dime novels of turn-of-the-century America (thousands of them) archived at Stanford are a treasure of popular mythology; only time, the collection and the catalogue makes one respectable and the other invisible.
(iv) Empirical studies are those investigations designed to find information or develop information directly from the world. Such studies are, in a way, related to the solipsistic investigations I began this train of thought with, but they are more structured, and they are outward looking. Scientific studies are often both empirical and theoretical; empirical in the sense that they involve measuring or testing or assaying the world or some part of it; theoretical in the sense that they are guided by theory, controlled in their form, and generally only ask question for which there are clear answers.
At least in this case, I would say that an empirical study (1) looks directly at the world or some part of it, (2) records its observations systematically, (3) is designed to draw conclusions, however provisional, from those observations, and (4) applies those conclusions to the gathering of further information, in order to test the validity of the conclusions.
(v) Related to the empirical study is the documentary. What distinguishes the empirical study for the documentary is only the third step; the documentary stands alone, without conclusion. What takes the place of the conclusion is the format. The format of the documentary tends to draw its own conclusion from the audience without, in some sense, underlining it. For instance, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evan’s depression era portraits of three families of sharecroppers does this perfectly.
These photographs are wonderful because the cameraman never intrudes in the slightest way upon the scene he is showing you. The subjects of the photographs – family groups of sharecroppers, individuals among them, children, a house, a bed in a room – are just there, in a completely barefaced manner, in all their dignity of being, and with their very nature shining through.
Personal letter from C. Wright Mills to Dwight Macdonald
New York City, undated (spring 1948)
(vi) Field studies may be either empirical studies or documentaries, or both. For instance, my imaginary field trip to the Ozarks to hunt for doghouses might have resulted in a very formal set of photographs documenting a typology of doghouses – a sort of Berndt and Hilla Becher account of doghouse – but it could also have included plans of doghouse sites showing their relationships to the sun, prevailing winds, other out buildings, houses, farm fields, natural features – all drawn to the same scale and in the same manner – an anthropological survey of doghouse settlement patterns. I might have taken this further with transcriptions of tape-recorded interviews with dog owners, operating as a field anthropologist. I could have gone further again with questionnaires in an attempt to establish some sociology of the doghouse and its place in the community.
The crucial thing to remember in a field study is that you have an opportunity for a time to live your thesis. Fieldwork takes people out of their own milieu and into another. While the field experience is not an entirely unselfconscious one, it is one where the unadorned truth of circumstance can be brought home to us.
(vii) finally, theoretical studies are precisely that: studies without empirical research of any sort, studies without documentation or field research. Theoretical studies are those studies where reason is applied to theories already in place to develop new theories. Theoretical studies make a good deal of sense in some fields and very little sense in others; they appeal when we are trying to answer certain kinds of questions; they are useless in the face of others. Probably, such studies have to renew themselves regularly by contact with the world.
In all of this there is something missing. Before anything else, it is important for you to remember that you are doing an architectural thesis, and (if we abide by the contract we have made with the academic community of Ontario), a design thesis. None of the work sketched above makes any great sense unless it finally turns on the form and shape and nature and technique of a doghouse.
Here there is one more study to note, and in this case it should probably be the first study. Years ago, when architects were trying to be systematic and scientifically respectable, it was called the design probe. Now that architects are working to be culturally respectable we might call it a design speculation. Whatever the term, the practice is clear: one of the first things to do when you are investigating a problem of architectural design is design.
Design is its own form of thinking. Whatever the case, it is an activity that throws up questions to be answered. When the questions start to appear, then it is time to begin to study to find useful (if not necessarily correct) answers.
DM April 30, 2003
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