Drawing in the margins

by Slobtseva, Yelena.

Erin Felicia Labbie, Advisor This thesis offers a discussion of doodling as a marginal activity and the subjects involved in it with the implications of marginality that are borrowed from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, textual and cultural studies. A subject in the margins lacks agency and eludes introspection and retrospection, since margins are thought in relation to the center, which gives them meaning and justifies their being. Drawing on several theoretical perspectives and psychological approaches represented by Sigmund Freud, Anton Ehrenzweig and Alfred Adler, Jacques Derrida, Christine Clement, Julia Kristeva, and others I will try to explore the specificity of resistance of the doodling practice and its subject(s). It will be argued throughout the paper that drawing in the margins involves several subjects, several resistances and submissiveness, none of which can be viewed as the central and or the true one. Speaking of the psychology of doodling practice the following charactersitics will be discussed: the possible presence of gestalt-free elements in doodling and the freedom from requirements of representation, repetition that renders doodling a childhood activity and yet possibly a dangerous one, and ornamental characteristics that can be found in many doodles and can be attributed either to the work of the conscious rational subject or to the intricate patterns and designs of the unconscious. Resistance then bears several meanings within the discussion in the paper as resistance of the conscious subject to its other, also resistance understood as deferral and repetition that works to defer dangerous presences. And finally as resistance of the subject and its intimacy to the pressures of civilization. A specific context for resistance/rebellion in drawing in the margins is created by writing/drawing relationship inherent, it is argued in the paper, in the situation of doodling. iii