A collaboration of Iraj Ghoojani, Don Kunze, Claudio Sgarbi, Jodi LaCoe, and Berrin Terim focuses on the extensive role place by the concept of lalangue in (primarily) the work of Jacques Lacan. The premise guiding this research is that, for the full extent of Lacan’s writings, the distinction between the phonemic and phonetic is a primary cut that allows Lacan and his readers to enjoy the use of Freud’s principle of Gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit, a free-floating attention corresponding to the Analysand’s free association, not unrelated to the idea of Bach’s “well-tempered clavier,” which must be slight out of tune to be in tune in all keys.
FIRST LALANGUE/TINY-HOUSE ZOOM
SUNDAY • JUNE 9 • 12 NOON EASTERN US TIME
register with kunze767@gmail.com
The distinction between phonemic and phonetic aspects of speech and hearing constitutes a cut that is no less than the “katagraphic cut” that Lacan uses to define the projective topologies of the Möbius band, torus, cross-cap, interior-8, and Klein bottle. It is the basis of his idea of extimité, a principle of duality that builds on but surpasses Freud’s famous contronyms, in his essay “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words.” Not only does the circularized duality define the symmetrical difference of projective spaces, it is foundational to the idea of the conservation of energy by which psychoanalysis connects to Quantum Physics.
Jump to: the very large zairja • how to prepare for the lalangue zoom • the zairja list • zairja forum
the lack of the word IS the word
Every word involves a lack. As soon as a word is enunciated (the act, or énonciation), there is something missing. It is elsewhere, lost … but it will return, as a Real, inverted. The darkened auditorium is a good analogy for where the missing part goes when it goes missing: into the “nowhere” of a space of audition and spectation. In the trope of the Tiny House, this elsewhere is materialized as something small, which nonetheless contains all we really need (condensation), and something tangent to the Elsewhere of desire. As good Lacanians, we know that desire is not the same as the wish; it is constructed by the Other; for us it is enigmatic (che vuoi?). When the word returns from nowhere it comes back with a law attached. Voilà! This is both sorrow and delight. The Tiny House materializes both displacement and condensation and is thus an instructive “clinic” on the role of metaphor and metonymy in the dream.
In previous research, the Gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit has been a late exponent of the Zairja (زايرجة) the first recognized means of generating ideas by mechanical means devised by Medieval Arabic astrologers, de
scribed by Ibn Khaldun as “a branch of the science of letter magic,” happily congruent with Lacan’s notion of “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious.” It is likely that Giulio Camillo based his l’Idea del Theatro (1550) on the Zairja, along with a reconstruction design that combines a 180º display with a 360º rotisserie.
The Lalangue Project includes an annotated archive of related writings of Ghoochani and Kunze. This is a start-up kit for invited short essays (“position papers”) from all participants documenting their interactions with the zairja and ChatGPT. In addition, a timeline has been loosely sketched to encourage independent collaborations and parallel projects. The products of these will serve as fuel for the zoom seminars and conferences, live sessions at host conferences, publications, and YouTube videos.
theoretical lalangue
Lacan lectured annually for twenty-eight years, 1953–1981, with transcriptions, many of which became officially approved translations. Between the spoken word and the written texts, however, lies a vast amount of material that, distinguished from the carefully edited printed representations, counts as a “theory lalangue” — the supplemental gestures, facial expressions, motions, chuckles, sighs, and groans that, along with the movements made during the draw-ing of his many graphics, constituted a performative whole. We approach this lalangue as a unique theoretical territory, since it must be treated differently from the way theorists respond to the written texts alone. If the printed text could be considered to be the Symbolic,and the surviving diagrams and other visual materials the Imaginary, the remainder, the lalangue, would be the Real of theory. Following Lacan’s formula, Real>Structure>Topology, lalangue of theory reveals itself as an unconscious of cryptograms, rebuses, and anagrams where permutations and recombinations constitute theory as action rather than content.
Begin with reading Lacan’s La Troisième: English Translation (by Yolande Szczech). This key document lays out an ambitious research program to investigate what Lacan called the language of the unconscious.
Not a Lacanian? If anything could convince you of the value of studying Lacan, it is the idea of lalangue. But, to demonstrate the non-specific quality of Lacan’s thinking — its applicability to a broad range of issues — this list of terms relating Lacan’s topology to the experience of works of art, architecture, poetry, film, etc. focuses on the consequences of our bodily presence in a perceivable world, with the thesis that, within every frame there is another frame; and within the parallax of Euclid there is another parallax.
the giant zairja
The central rotunda of the lalangue project is an AI device modeled after the 11c. Arabic astrological device known as the “zairja.” In the age of zoom communication and consultations with ChatGPT, the zairja has a productive role as a central exchange of conversations that precede any formal product, such as a special topics issue of Psyche Extended. The idea of the zairja is that of a list where each new item added is both a quantitative extension and a qualitative re-organization of the whole.
In one recommended practice, the zairja constitutes a conversation with an imaginary entity whose powers are projected by the user. Lacanians understand the process by which demand—inchoate because the subject does not know what it wants and is, hence, in a self-created ambiguity—creates desire by creating an external circuit involving an Other’s production of an equally ambiguous desire, a che vuoe? Not knowing what the Other wants but knowing that it wants something creates a cloud of pronouns whose referents are in flux and whose relations are dynamic, if not chaotic.
Out of this turbulence arises a fresh order of thought if, through the discovery of critical symmetries, new relations are found. The novel methodology of the Lalangue Project involves regarding the zairja as a large but imaginary companion in the project; and, in that expanded circle, including ChatGPT as one of the contributing editors of the zairja. In the tradition of Harvey (1950), a film about an eccentric who believes that he is accompanied by a spirit who takes the form of a large rabbit invisible to everyone but him, or HAL, of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the success of a Second Program known only to the computer depends on the computer’s staged suicide, the Lalangue Project‘s zairja works according to instrumental convergence, a force through absence. Watch the instructional video, Zairja: An Operator’s Manual.
lalangue & the Tiny House
One aim of the Lalangue Project is to create solid links to ethnological studies, where the disconnect of lalangue from phonemic-based linguistics amounts to an Adamic speech where the non-bi-univocal concordance of ordinary language can be traded in for the 1:1 shouts and murmurs of lalangue. In architecture, the first productive starting point is the popular contemporary phenomenon of the “tiny house,” the sometimes portable, usually ergonomic and always sustainable miniature dwellings for the ideal vacation, retirement, or artist retreat. Wherever askesis responds to dæmon (Harold Bloom’s terms for contraction in the face of anxiety/fear), the Heim finds its unheimlich counterpoint in the cabin, shack, gazebo, cottage, summer house, folly, or tempietto. The architectural type, the ædicula, typically involves the themes of energy conservation, laminar flow, and a sidereal relation to de-sire. These themes, in turn, compliment Lacan’s treatment of lalangue as rule-based and truth-telling: a vera narratio.
Ghoochani and Kunze will be conducting a workshop on the Tiny House at the VANDA conference in Vienna, September 23–26 (all are welcome to join). In the meantime, we offer the Tiny House as a means of accessing the structure of lalangue via the multiple ethnologies of architecture. Where lalangue connects to the structure of the Unconscious, the objet a, and Freud’s primally repressed (Urverdrängt), the Tiny House presents itself as Ur-heim, the home-within-the-home as “that which ought to have remained concealed but has come to light” (Freud, The Uncanny, 1919). As an irreducible kernel/remainder, the Tiny House is radically contronymic and, as such, an atom formed in the mold of the Janusian Death Drive, where Nirvana and the impulse to “start over” combine thematically and theoretically.
In practical as well as theoretical terms, the Lalangue Project and Tiny House Project overlap. Although the first zoom session will focus on new approaches to lalangue, there will be at least one session to follow-up the Tiny House premise. Even in the early stages of developing position papers, authors are encouraged to involve the Tiny House at any level. Visit the Tiny House Project pages on this website for further information.
In the early 1970s, Lacan made three dramatic changes to his theory of discourse. First, he re-defined the quadrants over which the elements, $, S1, S2, and a, rotated, from AGENT, OTHER PRODUCT, and TRUTH to SEMBLANCE, JOUISSANCE, SURPLUS JOUISSANCE, and TRUTH. At the same time, Lacan opened up the possibility of a fifth discourse devoted to Capitalism, where $ and S1 changed places, putting $ in the place it formerly occupied as a Hysteric, with the concurrent possibility of converting the Hysteric’s S2 into surplus jouissance, counterpart to lalangue. In a third radical move,
Lacan connected the discourse matheme to one of the variations of the Borromeo knot, perhaps inspired by the work of Hermann Brunn (right). If Marx’s proletariat had betrayed the revolution and taken up the styles and practices of the capitalist, the result was a hysteria dependent on lalangue‘s comic reserves. As Fintan O’Toole has noted (New York Review of Books, March 21, 2014), Donald Trump’s performance of the Green Acres theme song at the Emmy Awards, Los Angeles, September 2005, set the stage for his later characteristic blend of terror and mockery. Lacanians cannot afford to ignore these connections.
But, Why the Tiny House?
It’s only fair to ask, “Why the Tiny House?” The point of the zairja-and-zoom is to generate many points of view on this, but a “starter kit” might help. Here are five angles on a possible answer.
1. Analogy: Just as lalangue is a kind of reject from intentional, meaningful speech, the Tiny House drops out of the spectrum of living spaces on behalf of a certain jouissance that popular culture has assigned to the desire for solitude, compactness, and an ideal of sufficiency and completion, untroubled by neighbors — which one would have to speak to.
2. Dreams: The Tiny House is something small but complete (= condensation), also it is usually built somewhere away from “civilization” (= displacement). This should ring some bells for those who have read Freud’s book on dream interpretation, especially if it suggests we should think of lalangue as language dreaming itself, esp. in the sense of Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Gives Rise to Monsters”).
3. Float Your Attention in the Tiny House: There is an angle that is a road untraveled in Lacanian studies. This is Freud’s idea of “freely floating attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit), the analyst’s ear set to match the Analysand’s free association. This, we could speculate, is the same ear-tuning that James Joyce used to overhear the “meaning of non-meaning” that constituted his recorded “epiphanies” (recorded conversations overheard in public places).
4. Tiny House as a Kind of Analysis: The Tiny House is set in the woods, at the sea-coast, or some other idyllic spot (a utopian impulse, no doubt), to tune into something, too. Wouldn’t that be interesting to use freely floating attention to see how the Tiny House is designed to coax out some message from the unconscious? (This would take the Tiny House out of the model of consumer capitalism that normally fetters it.)
5. Dennis the Menace/Richard Feynman answer (from Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis): The Tiny House is an economy of parts that seek the most efficient configuration, so elements have to be reinterpreted and seen from multiple angles to optimize their “fit”; the aim of this is to live dedicated to an unnamed and perhaps unknown pleasure. Economy = conservation of energy = no little bit of energy will be lost. [This may be a bit too Zen.]
6. Different Kinds of Tiny Houses. A famous book in architecture is Joseph Rykwert’s Adam’s House in Paradise. Considering that Lacan quipped that, although Adam was the one who called the animals into existence by naming them, Eve was the one who actually talked to them, famously beginning with the animal who was most like a self-consuming margin (the uroboros-styled serpent of wisdom). So, consider a companion volume, Eve’s House in Paradise; also the “tiny houses” that are astrological signs. The monument, grave-stone or coffin, the shack, the beach-side changing-room, and the ædicula are all tiny houses worth our attention, which have never been properly psychoanalyzed! Be the first! As for the temple and tempietto, Google Jim Egan’s analysis of what may likely be the first and only Renaissance building in the U. S., a structure likely designed by John Dee for Queen Elizabeth as a foundational structure for the English Colony in Providence, Rhode Island. Doesn’t get Tinier than this!
The Tiny House aims at the Real but hits the Imaginary, as the many AI-generated images, which look all too much like Thomas Kincaid’s paintings of cute cottages.
first theme issue of Psyche Extended
Following a series of zoom conversations to talk about the collective project, and armed with multiple re-configurations of the lalangue idea, milled slow and fine by the zairja, the party faithful proceed from the chamber of conversations to the hall of writing. iPSA’s on-line journal, Psyche Extended launches its first issue as a special number devoted to lalangue, inviting collaborative co-authorship, solo flights, book and movie reviews … in other words, topical explorations whose style (lexis) matches lalangue‘s heterotopic mental geography. Lacan’s lively interplay, in Seminar IX, Identification, between lexis and phasis, style and content, involves the problematic recognition of the vertical dimension. In projective geometry, where there are only two dimensions, a third can be envisioned as a “working out.” Topologically this is the way the Möbius band can be doubled to make a Klein bottle, or how a cross-cap can be continent and incontinent at the same time.
readings
The central text for the lalangue project will be E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Sandman, a text that figured prominently in Sigmund Freud’s study of the uncanny. This story not only involves the theme of artificial intelligence (the automaton Olimpia), it includes distinctions between the optical and ocular, ventriloquism, the acousmatic voice, and of course lalangue. The short story has attracted the interest of the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, who regarded it as a textbook on suspense. When the project begins to focus on the special theme journal issue, the central text will give authors a common example to develop through commentary and encourage collaborative writing. Here are few la-links to establish “The Sandman” as a core text:
- The Freud connection
- Wikipedia‘s description of Hoffmann’s famous tale
- An English text from Project Gutenberg
- The German text
With themes of ventriloquism and la voix acousmatique, we also highly recommend Mladen Dolar’s book, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006). “The Sandman” also raises important issued about concentricity, the structure of metonymy, and the mapping functions of parapraxis. In short, it could be called the clavis universalis of lalangue.
(1) Klein, A. M. “A Shout in the Street (1951).” In Collected Works of A.M. Klein: Literary Essays and Reviews, edited by USHER CAPLAN and M. W. STEINBERG, 342–66. University of Toronto Press, 1987. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt1vxmdxr.83.
(2) Lacan, Jacques. “La troisième,” VIIème Congrès de l’école freudienne de Paris” [1974]. Translated by Yolande Szczech. ResearchGate, August 2016.
(3) Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore (1972–1973), On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.), 44, 88, 101, 106, 132, 138–39, 141–42, 143.
(4) Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, The Sinthome (1975–1976). Translated by A. R. Price. New York and Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016, 3, 6, 98, 146, 222n.
(5) Moncayo, Raul. Lalangue, Sinthome, Jouissance, and Nomination: A Reading Companion and Commentary on Lacan’s Seminar XXIII on the Sinthome. New York and London: Routledge, 2017.
(6) Raoul Moati, “The Performative: from Ordinary Conventions to the Real,” The Symptom 9 (Fall, 2008), https://www.lacan.com/symptom/the-performative.html.
(7) Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” reprinted from Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
learning more about topology
One premise of the lalangue project is that topology is the key for connecting the linguistic idea with spatial manifestations, such as the Tiny House. This is the general thesis of iPSA — that architecture has as much to offer psychoanalysis as psychoanalysis has to offer architecture. Although we argue that ethnology offers an alternative route for understanding the topological thinking that Lacan employed, officially, from 1961 onward, the mathematics behind this thinking is within reach of even those who are matho-phobes.
One especially useful source of instruction on various topics is the YouTube collection, Numberphile. For an explicit focus on projective geometry, however, look at Norman O. Wildberger’s podcasts on the History of Projective Geometry.
Within Lacanian studies, the tendency has been to avoid topology in favor of set theory, but the connection between the two fields needs to be understood in relation to issues of “rotational space” and particle physics. Two videos in particular are helpful:
- Noah Miller, “Dirac’s Belt Trick, Topology, & Spin 1/2 Particles,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACZC_XEyg9U&t=396s.
- Trefor Bazett, “Dirac’s Belt Trick: Why a 2π Rotation Twists Space but a 4π Rotation Fixes It,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgsUDby0X1M.