Ornamental Ground Plan

Definition

The ornamental ground plan (French: plan au sol — Soulillou's "ground plan (or original matrix)") is the analytic device by which Jacques Soulillou explains how order appears in ornament: "The appearance of order in ornament is produced according to what I would call a ground plan (or original matrix), traversed by a double polarization: transversal in one respect, as in the male/female opposition, and vertical in another, as in the superior/inferior opposition" (p. 315). The plan's two axes are two forces: "sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan" — or, condensed: "order initially appears through that feature of the ground plan where the sexual relation is intersected by the power relation" (p. 315). The vertical axis "may take on a sexual significance, but not necessarily": it is the intra-sexual dimension where "the dominating male is opposed to the dominated male and, more generally, free man to the non-free" (p. 315). In traditional societies the plan is legible directly in who wears what: "from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women; from upper to lower, with hierarchy, ornaments for the prince, the nobles, free men in general, and the slaves" (p. 316) — the transversal axis unordered (sex differentiates without ranking), the vertical axis hierarchized (power ranks without sexual difference). The ground plan is thus ornament's contribution to the wiki's dual symbolic classification: not a cognitive scheme applied to space but an encoding practiced on bodies through ornament, assigning each body "a place in a social or cosmic order."

The concept's historical claim is that the plan distorts under modernity asymmetrically: with the decline of the aristocracy "the opposition between free man and not-free gradually lost its meaning," while "the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes (the sartorial image of nineteenth-century man seems, on the contrary, to go one better in the abandonment of showy ornamentation)" (p. 319) — the vertical axis dissolves, the transversal axis persists, and when "the markers of the ground plan began to loosen, to unravel, the seemingly self-evident connection between ornament and order had to justify itself" (p. 321), producing the rationalized ornamental orders of design reform and modernism. See free-and-not-free and design-reform.

Key Thinkers

• Jacques Soulillou — the concept's author: the ground plan as ornament's encoding matrix, its anthropological scheme (left/right, upper/lower), its asymmetrical modern distortion, and its unravelling as the crisis of ornament (2002/2006).
• Shirley Ardener — the classification apparatus the ground plan presupposes: right/left and top/bottom among the cross-cultural oppositional pairs (Bourdieu, quoted p. 19); see dual-symbolic-classification.
• Robert Hertz — the right/left template the transversal axis extends to ornament (not yet paged — see log).
• Pierre Bourdieu — the schemes that "divide the world up" in oppositions; the ground plan as the ornamental register of the classification apparatus.

Related Concepts

• Dual Symbolic Classification — the cross-cultural oppositional apparatus the ground plan deploys: right/left and top/bottom as ornament's encoding axes; Hertz's right/left template given its ornamental register.
• Gendered Space — the transversal axis as spatial-gender ordering: direction (left/right) and position (who is adorned how) as linked gender-and-space mechanisms.
• Free and Not-Free — the vertical axis's social content: the intra-sexual hierarchy of free men and non-free that ornament encodes from "upper to lower."
• Ornamental Excess — the plan's economic face: the expense that registers status on the ground plan's vertical axis.
• Architectural Ornament — the surface the plan organizes: ornament as the medium in which the sex/power polarization becomes visible.
• Woman as Decoration — the transversal axis's industrial-age codification: the woman as the registered ornament of the male-ordered scheme.
• Separate Spheres — the modern distortion's transversal residue: the sex opposition in ornament outlasting the class opposition's collapse.
• Power — one of the two forces sustaining the plan; the ground plan as power's ornamental encoding.
• The Decorative — what escapes the plan's encoding: "a kind of wild outgrowth that order seems unable to tame" (p. 316).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the concept's source: the ground plan (original matrix) and its double polarization (p. 315); "sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan" (p. 315); the traditional scheme — "from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women; from upper to lower, with hierarchy, ornaments for the prince, the nobles, free men in general, and the slaves" (p. 316); the plan's asymmetrical modern distortion (the class axis dissolving, the sex axis persisting, p. 319); and the unravelling — "from the moment the markers of the ground plan began to loosen, to unravel, the seemingly self-evident connection between ornament and order had to justify itself" (p. 321).

Open Questions

• The ground plan's transversal axis is unordered ("without hierarchy") while the vertical axis is hierarchized: is sexual differentiation in ornament always non-hierarchical, or does the man/woman opposition covertly rank (the woman's ornament as display of male success — Gordon's "adorned to testify to his success")? Is the transversal axis only apparently flat?
• Soulillou dates the plan's modern unraveling to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finds the sex axis persisting. Does the twentieth-century history the wiki holds (men's dress conscription, the woman as consumer of fashion, the Cold War kitchen) confirm the transversal axis's persistence, or is the plan's gender axis now dissolving the way the status axis did?
• The plan encodes sex and power interactively — "order initially appears through that feature of the ground plan where the sexual relation is intersected by the power relation" (p. 315). Can the two axes be read separately in any actual ornamental system, or is every ornament already the intersection (the prince's vs the slave's ornament, the man's vs the woman's)?
• If the ground plan is what makes the "seemingly self-evident connection between ornament and order" hold, then modern design's rationalized ornament (the reformers' artifacts) is the plan's attempt to re-found itself without hierarchy — is the wiki's design-reform and modernism material the documented history of the plan's failed re-founding? See call-to-order.