The Very Large Zairja is a list of terms with annotations, followed by a list of compiled interactions of terms with commentaries added by project participants. The VLZ, like any LLL algorithm, works through the logic of emergence, a retroactive realization of primal terms that stand as generative forces subsequently imagined through separate, seemingly independent list terms. The zairja’s authenticity is based on the seemingly indisputable fact of each participant’s disconnection from other participants, and the implicit involvement of randomness at every level.
Watch the instructional video, Zairja: An Operator’s Manual.
The independence that insulates each term from the others converts to the dependency of a discovered relation, in the same way that a type 2 error (false positive) generates the necessity of the type 1 error (wrongful negation). The wrongly accused thrown in prison is symmetrical but different from the guilty offender allowed to go free. Out of this symmetry, the zairja finds authenticity by repudiating any mechanical (and, hence, non-disinterested) causality. Unlike current LLL models, the zairja is emergent and self-correcting, since its positive products are based on negative interactions. In terms of Giambattista Vico’s motto verum ipsum factum, the convertibility of the true and the made, truth (authenticity, the “second program of Space Odyssey‘s HAL“) is based on the double etymology of factum, from a passive participle and active participle (fierens). This is not an antiquarian grammatical debate but, rather, the realization of the primal necessity of finding, within any active principle a passive element (instrumentality) and at the same time an active element within any passive principle (convergence). Vico’s motto is a literal statement of the necessity and universality of instrumental convergence. The zairja constitutes a “clinic” of the IC principle: an experimental staging of what, in randomness, is never random: coincidence.
The zairja exercise is not mandatory but it sets the stage for a broader discussion of lalangue and will offer participants a justification for a speculative are topica.
Click here to go directly to THE VERY LARGE ZAIRJA. Watch the instructional video, Zairja: An Operator’s Manual.
From “Zairja-Thinking: Associative/Aleatory Basis for Design” (Kunze 2021) …
Early–Medieval scholars developed the astrological Zairja (زايرجة) as a kind of “reverse computer.” Instead of compiling data and reducing them to more refined determinative structures, the Zairja worked seemingly in reverse, using celestial calculations and aleatory procedures to extend potential and sometimes fantastical relationships, specifying “as many causes as possible” for any one idea or effect.1 Most historians presume that the Catalan mnemonicist/mystic Ramón Llull, whose theories were taught at the University of Paris until the 1500s, based his Ars Magna (1305) on the Zairja and intended his various combinatorial diagrams to work in the same way, with the aim of spiritual perfection. Thus, a computer, albeit the Zairja’s reverse–causality computer, lies at the foundation of Western thinking!
While Ramón Llull made a comprehensive effort to follow the Zairja both as a paradigm and literal methodology, the 16c. Cistercian monk who developed a “universal memory theater” under the sponsorship of Francis I, Giulio Camillo, could be said to have, intentionally or otherwise, assimilated the Zairja–idea as the accelerant for a parallel endeavor: a machine enabling a mnemonicist to combine images, sayings, and texts within a semi–circular auditorium–turned–stage, whose forty-nine cells’ contents were activated by positions regulated by radial and circular lines. While Francis Yates sometimes seemed to regard Camillo’s theater as a kind of Renaissance version of California Closets®, Camillo actually sought to achieve the highest ideals of Cabalistic meditation: contact with the Divine Absolute.7 In this goal, he continued Llull’s ambition and confirmed the Zairja’s essential spiritualization of the idea as collective if not universal, a realization of Truth with a capital ’T’. The Zairja’s computer–generated reply to Ibn Kahldūn’s skepticism coincides with Camillo’s Cabalistic aims: “The Holy Spirit will depart, its secret having been brought forth to Idrīs, and through it, he ascended the highest summit.”
For additional background on the historical zairja, see David Link, “Scrambling T-R-U-T-H Rotating Letters as a Material Form of Thought” and “Ars Topica,” an experimental essay on the relation of lalangue to the gap.
While our zairja has an entirely practical function, of generating ideas that, mutually shared, produce distinctive and contrasting individual projects, we anticipate a beneficial connection to the zairja tradition, which has been going on since at least 1000 B.C.E. with the Western Zhou Period’s compilation of divinatory writings in the I Ching.
This reference to ancient sources is intended to have a forward-reaching revolutionary effect on current AI theorizing. Large Language Learning models have regarded the technique of assembly as sufficient basis for theorizing AI’s relation to human thought, but they have ignored previous LLL projects, such as the I Ching, zairja, and other assembly algorithms that, despite the lack of internet search engines, used the cognitive networks of users as a collective imagination. Human neural networks, incredibly more complex and extensive than any computer, were harnessed into a single mechanism by means of such Effective Objects (our term for memory devices such as the I Ching, Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater, Lull’s Ars Magna, and even Italo Calvino’s matrix of Tarot cards in Castle of Crossed Destinies). The computing power of human neural networks, harnessed to act in concert by comparatively minuscule devices is demonstratively many times larger than any contemporary computer-based LLL.
AI theorists have disregarded the historical reality of their search mechanics, thinking them impossible to exist without electronic computers, when in fact the computer, as one material instance of collective thinking, has existed since the beginning of human thought, with the “split atom” of metaphor. By dividing reality into subject and object, metaphor was able to sublate the role of division itself, creating in the process an implicit operator, which Lacan characterized as the “unary trait.” This is, in short, the power of self-generation, evident in the way the Golden Ratio can be a number without being a number. The proof of this can be found in Lacan’s “slide-rule metaphor,” a critical turn in his Seminar XIV, The Logic of Phantasy, where a line is divided by demand and desire to prove that iteration is an emergent function of identification (the not-1 is a product of the 1).
Lalangue makes the same claim in linguistic terms. Language seems to produce not-language—lalangue—as a kind of margin or failure, but in fact the reverse is the case. Language is, like the production of a butterfly out of the inchoate biological mass of the chrysalis. “Confused mass” is a retroactive description of what is necessarily antecedent to any definitive utterance or thought. It is in fact the incubator, all the more numerical for its reference to the cube root and the relation of the cube to the discovery of the theoretical ground of the binomial equation.
Why a Zairja?
The zairja three-step precedes a more conventional project, the assembly of essays in the first (special topic) iPSA publication of the online journal, Psyche Extended, guest-edited by Jodi LaCoe and Cindy Zeiher. The zairja is a collective effort to establish what is normally missing in any standard solicitation of work for a journal publication, namely the conviviality of the authors. Before any individual intellectual effort, the zairja invites collaboration. The web-published results of the zairja’s three steps of addition, combination, and conversion (a reversed index) provide an evidentiary foundation for zoom seminars where the project takes form through a series of two-hour conversations among participants across the globe.
The idea is to set in motion the mechanisms of symmetrical difference and instrumental convergence. The diametrical opposition of this process to standard academic protocols for the production of texts is obvious. Where the academic standard is that of “blind review,” a double error is committed. If an author’s findings are original, they will be beyond the critical expertise of reviewers. The standard model confirms authority through an impossible authorization. Novelty will be rejected, absence of novelty will be re-packaged as legitimate and authorized. In between the Scylla and Charybdis of what Vico called the related errors of (1) seeing the lowest truths without knowledge of the highest—the particularist fallacy of criticism by paraphrase, what Vico related to “the learned ignoramus,” and (2) the presentation of abstractions without reference to particulars—of human life as well as the physics of nature and mathematics—Vico’s “learned man destitute of prudence,” lies the field of the sage who is able to order universals and particulars following the advice of Lacan: to see them in light of symmetrical difference, i. e. the lack of each, which belongs precisely to the other.
The alibi given for the logically contradictory process of the blind review is, in any terms, scandalous: to serve as a rationale for providing authors with quantifiable proof of accomplishment, as a part of their efforts for job retention. In other words, the validity of academic truth, based on the principle of disinterest, is entirely itself interested.† At each stage of the process characterized as objective review, author and reviewers are complicit with a fundamental irrationality. “Value” is confirmed on those who claim to know by those who, by this very claim, are designated as not knowing. Only in the field of mathematics, where problems are known beforehand and solutions are presented as satisfying all of the known components of the problem, can this procedure be valid. Mathematicians do not have to adhere to Vico’s second model of idiocy, “the learned man destitute of prudence.” In its dedication to extreme abstraction, mathematics would be impossible without its implicit denial of prudence. Only in the impossibility of the mathematical Real, can the truth of structure be articulated. (Note: Lacan has recognized, in Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis, the status and significance of this position in his encomium to Richard Feynman’s Lectures in Physics.)
The other side of this coin is “the learned imbecile.” This is the ethnographer who knows what it means to count but not the meaning of count-for. Counting for what presumes an understanding of structure, without which the cultural meaning of any act, object, relation, or process can never be discovered. The zairja technique cannot on its own prevent these two disorders of thinking, but it can expose their symmetrical idiocy in relation to thought’s structural dependence on discourse: Lacan (and Vico’s) discovery that thought does not exist in the privacy of the individual but only at the level of the collective, the mass of possible speakers and auditors that, condensed within the circuitry of the rhetorical exchange—which Lacan idealized as the four forms, hysteria, master, university, and analysis; and which Vico crystalized in the “ages” of the gods, heroes, and men. Against the tyranny of the contemporary Inquisition of self-commending mastery, supported by the blind review and other fictions, the zairja stands as the unique means of opposition and, simultaneously, Prime Procedural. The zairja is nothing less than the only means by which the collective may be understood, in terms of expository thinking, critical writing, and collective realization. The Real of the zairja is the truth of making’s hybrid formation out of the passive and active causality of the material order, the Thing that Freud held in such high regard that Lacan had no choice but to designate it as the object-cause of desire.
Notes
†Proof of this claim lies in the fact that authors who are subject to the most intense critical review are required to forego any direct remuneration for their work. In contrast, publishers set profitability of a publication as the single-most compelling principle deciding for or against publication. This is Marx at his best: the worker is exploited precisely on the basis of exchange value. Authors are valuable because they are sworn to forego value. Such is the definition of the slave, in relation to the master.