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.
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the lack of the word IS the word
Duality is everywhere in Lacan, but it should not be confused with dualism. It is key to the idea of the void, both in architecture and the other arts, and its popular culture examples tie topology to ethnology and is a critical test of complementary relations. If it seems that there are two of everything in Lacan, it’s because, in the logic of conservation, a unit is a constant is a criss-cross between the generated and the generator, although these terms can be reversed.
This began with Freud’s pairing of the Ego-Ideal and Ideal Ego, ethnologized when he was attracted to Carl Abel’s theory of the antithetical meaning of primal words. The pinnacle of Freud’s dualism is the Death Drive, which combines catastrophe with Nirvana, a pairing that both evident in the individual subject and the collective (cf. Maurice Halbachs’ work on music and pilgrimage).
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, described 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.
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.
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.