zairja list for lalangue project

As a counterpart to the Large Language Learning algorithm employed by computer-based Artificial Intelligence, our human-based neural network learning model involves the Dada principle of (1) take something, (2) do something to it, (3) do something again. The three steps of the zairja are (1) pick a random topic from the list (2) combine it with something other random pick from the list, then (3) combine the combination you invented to something else on the list, also randomly picked. (You can get ChatGPT to do this for you.)

Watch the instructional video, Zairja: An Operator’s Manual.

The Cryptic List

Escape Clause: You can invent and use your own zairja list. Suggested minimal length: 33. An “arguments” forum will be opened up to discuss the relevance and potential of zairja terms. Annotations (in gray) intended as minimal guides, but all terms are Google-able, with the proviso that Lacan’s definitions for terms such as metaphor and metonymy, as well as his special neologisms, cannot be understood outside his writings. Lalangue is a paradigm case reminding us that Lacan’s thinking is systematic, consistent, and circular. Each idea intersects in some way with all others and, in a real sense Lacan’s writing constitutes a zairja in tune with his RSI-Borromeo system of three domains. All zairjas could be said to have three topologically linked logics: the Symbolic, where a term is taken from a historical context of use and grammatical relations; the Imaginary, where the term occupies a more poetic access to fields of meaning; and the Real, where the term becomes the nucleus for an anagogical rebirth as a structuring device, through the principle of ex falso quodlibet sequitur, or “fictional truth” (Vico’s verum ipsum factum).

The Cryptic List is not mandatory; anyone can invent an alternative zairja, of any length, that will be effective. The rule of “random combination of two terms, squared by a third” (pick two terms, invent a relation; apply that relation to a third term) will always have the effect of lalalangue: random noises reveal a hidden intentionality. The brief commentaries after each term are neither authoritative nor definitive. Like the guide you forgot to tip, their advice may be vengeful.

Pick two terms at random, invent a connection; apply the connection to a third randomly picked term:

lalangue [Lacan’s term for language’s “in-between” elements; non-phonetic]
symmetrical difference [circular condition of two elements with lacks in opposite positions, creating a void in between, illustrated by Euler circles in the position of “union without intersection]
“slide-rule analogy” (Lacan, Sem. XIV) [demonstration of how the relations of A, the objet petit a, and 1 relate in relation to the Golden Ratio]
golden mean [a ratio equating expansion and contraction, a constant that cannot be reduced to a number or point]
unary trait [Lacan’s remake of Freud’s idea of a symptom unconsciously transported between subjects as a kind of identification]
metaphor [for Lacan, a structure of inversions and parapraxis, where sublation produces a metonymic signifying chain in relation to a unary relation to self-intersection, M/S’•S’/x→M(1/s”), one of several variations]
metonymy [a bi-directional—material/ideal—signifier, implicitly enchained and concentric]
phonemics v. phonetics [Lacan’s style of distinguishing sense and nonsense]
aleatory [chance-based procedures]
passive causality (Lacan’s critique of Aristotle’s material cause) [material cause’s passivity is productive; it embodies its active opposite through a logic of emergence; thus it is related to instrumental convergence and Zizek’s “effective cause”]
instrumental convergence [although this causality has an extensive history in Medieval logic, it should be updated in relation to Lacan’s topologized relation of demand and desire, particularly in his use of the fundamental polygon of the torus]
the katabasis [the universal ethnological initiation protocol of humiliation/descent/rebirth, expressed in literature as a visit to Hades but present, disguised, in all travel narratives]
Euler voids [two overlapping Euler circles create a condition known as “union without intersection”; their common area is a void, not a mixture of opposites]
emergence [the sudden appearance of a phenomenon without evident cause; closer examination shows how the phenomenon was, however, present “implicitly” or “anamorphically” in the prior condition]
negation: (a) Verneinung, (b) Verleugnung, (c) Ververfung [the sequence structure is critical here, since it ties negation to concentricity, as shown in the joke about the broken kettle]
Brouwer fixed-point theorem (coincidence of sense and nonsense) [In Seminar XIII, Lacan cites this theorem in relation to the concentricity of the map/territory relation, where there will always be one point, or an odd number of “fixed” points, between the object and its representation]
énoncé (speech content) v. énonciation (speech act) [Lacan’s distinction deepens the classic distinction between langue and parôle in linguistics; it is a relation between the “ideality” of the “meaning function” and the material signifier as an independent operator, condensed in the metonym and particularly evident when the independent functions coincide as “non-orientation”]
concentricity [the time line is the most familiar example of concentricity, where each succeeding moment “swallows” the previous event; Spencer-Brown’s calculus shows how retroaction works to convert the binary relation of inside/outside to an “extimate” recursive condition]
labyrinth [this fractal-structured meander gets us lost simply out of the difference between tight and slack, the reason Ariadne’s thread works for Theseus; it is the architectural essence of lalangue in that it refuses to create a syntactical “space” but is overdetermined in its fractal pattern of centripetal and centrifugal curving]
“colorless green ideas sleep furiously” [Lacan, in Seminar XII, quotes Chomsky’s effort to create a meaningless chain of signifiers, only to refute the famous linguists by showing how, once you realize that colors are colorless without light — think of Hegel’s “night when all cows are black” — allows ideas to be sleep to prepare for being green at dawn’s early light; it’s all about vampires]
coincidence of distinction and indication (Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form) [the British mathematician’s pre-Boolean calculus relies on a rule that is more easily understood through popular culture: the “story in the story,” where any frame frames a content where other frames may be created; CDI is about concentricity and the necessity of containers-in-containers to be (1) chiralistic and (2) emergent — i. e. self-intersecting and non-orientable]
discourse forms (Lacan) [Lacan’s famous four discourses — Hysteric, Master, University, Analysis — are a dial over a quadrated field (Agent, Other, Production/Product, Truth), where behind articulated expression there is a lalangue of structure]
laminar flow [the harmonic reinforcement of dynamic opposition in fluids, carried to the idea of binary oppositions in communications (speaker-listener), semantics (the contronym), and the toroidal exchanges of demand (a) and desire (A)]
self-intersection and non-orientation [the two principles of projective geometry, the Real projective plane as closed, finite, and curved; whose “immersed” manifestations always appear non-oriented, such as the twist in the Möbius band]
“Escher formations” [whenever a 2-d form in the Real projective plane is immersed into 3-space, non-orientation appears as an anomaly, contradiction, or paradox; following the Dutch master of such such surprises in architectural forms (staircases going up and down at the same time; fields of angels turning into devils) we name these “Escher formations”]
extimité [Lacan’s famous coinage of the term neutralizing the divide between inside and outside, intimacy to be found in the external world that is simultaneously the alien kernel “internal” to subjectivity]
anamorphosis [In Seminar VIII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan asks, before the flurry of artistic interest in distorted images, cylindrical mirrors, and the like, just what must have been going on before? In this spirit, the term anamorphosis should be taken beyond its traditional optical definition, applied famously by Jurgis Baltrušaitis — if only to include ideas of acousmatics and lalangue]
ambiguity (Buridan’s Ass Problem) [the key to this simple fable of indecision is paralysis, and how ambiguity creates a balance point that is isomeric rather than a natural number; see Seminar XIV, The Logic of Phantasy, esp. Lacan’s “slide-rule analogy,” to expand this]
The Golden Ass (Lucretius) [in this Ur-treatise of concentricity, we have evidence that the double frame was on the minds of authors as early as the Late Latin period; other themes include alter-ego, masquerade, imposture, katabasis, and laminar flow; also reincarnation/metempsychosis]
indefinite pronominal indication (the ambiguity of the frame) [pronouns and prepositions are imprecise; they specify the existence of something “in the distance” without saying what, how, why, or when; this ambiguity of the act of pointing (indicative gesture) creates a fuzzy set whose dynamics plays an active role in any fictional or discursive formation]
hapax formations [a phrase, name, or word that is immediately known by everyone even thought it is appearing for the first time; examples: “tuffet,” “runcible spoon” (Carroll); an immediate emergence from the unconscious]
coincidence of humiliation and aggression (Edmund Bergler) [Bergler’s thesis is that aggression intends to humiliate the aggressor, to return to a primary (usually maternal) trauma; thus, aggression>humiliation>trauma forms a circuit that is essentially unconscious and “pre-intentional”]
the Moorish door [Ghoochani’s study of the Moorish Door is summarized in this condensed essay, “The Adorable Door”]
semblance versus indication (cf. contagious magic v. effigy magic) [the divisions that sprang from early 20c. studies of aphasia point less to two categories of symbolization than to the cut between them; consider mimicry’s need for a division and framing as the literal space of division]
blood (diastole, systole; rhythmic beat; fallen; divinatory; stain) [life as fluid, flow; the circuit implied; wet and hot (system of humors), sanguine; convivial]
vampire (spectral aversion; blood nutrition; eternal life; a-sexual transmission) [just as each domain has its representative animal (jungle=lion a king) blood’s demon is the vampire, who extends its powers by contiguity (the bite-transfusion)]
Vagitanus and infant talk [in ancient Rome, mothers brought their infants to the shrine of Vagitanus to have the oracle interpret the child’s cry; on the site of the present Vatican]
baby talk [adults’ specially adapted speech uses lalangue to initiate the young child into adult discursive practices]
small talk [idle chatter has the function of conveying emotional state, timing a social interval, and giving structure to indifference]
small change [l’argent de poche is the language of the trivial, where overtones, pauses, sighs, and gestures, set the tone; Flaubert was the master]
Joyce’s epiphany quotes [because Joyce’s epiphanies seem to lead to a loss rather than gain of understanding, many critics bemoan their emptiness, while Lacanians find them tantamount to a lalangian handbook]
ciphers; sigla; hieroglyphics within phonetics [the opacity of a code comes with the sense of a mandate, that it should mean something; this is the Other’s first lesson]
poché (architecture’s in-between) [the unseen is a part of the seen; the useless a part of usefulness; Vitruvius’s three “virtues” (utilitas, veritas, firmitas) have an antipode: uselessness, ugliness, ruin, all of which have their own forms of space and time]
Warnicke’s Aphasia [seemingly articulate speech that is incoherent]
Gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit (evenly distributed attention), correlate of the Analysand’s free association) [Freud posited the need for the analyst to develop a talent for “paying no attention” to what his patients were saying, an indifference that did not escape notice and was a part of the agreement to “not mean anything in particular”]
blah blah blah [the Lacanian expression for the Analysand’s free-flowing blather]
Charlie Chaplin singing “Titine” in Modern Times [the story behind this rare “talkey” performance is itself interesting; the film’s rule of silence was not broken but extended]
Parapraxis as lalangue [Freud’s famous case of forgetting the painter’s name led to a set of linked stories whose “message” compared to Joyce’s epiphanies]
Joyce’s words of the thunder [supposedly, these 99-letter words contain all the possible sounds of all possible languages; sí non é vero, é ben trovato]
Fluid mechanics: viscosity [laminar flow demonstrates how, in terms of mathematics at least, it is possible to travel backwards in time]
Mr. Roque’s instructions in Mulholland Drive [the mysterious powerful dwarf, played by Michael Anderson (who was famous for being able to talk and act backwards), continues the ancient tradition of all powerful rulers: the use of a muzzy, vague, whispered manner of conveying orders]
architect Tadeo Ando’s model of a house as a chess-set [his clients were baffled, but the “model” told the story of how the house was to be constructed, used, and imagined]
wrapping projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude [the intention to obscure, no less than the intention to deceive, is ceremonial]
veils of 19c. Italian funerary sculpture (Certosa, Bologna) [in an age plagued by tuberculosis, the stone veil became the chief counterpart to the death that prematurely altered the figures of the living and, symmetrically, extended life beyond its normal stopping-point]
Babel [architecture’s lalangian masterpiece]
John Cage’s 109 Zen stories (“Indeterminacy“) [Cage not only understood and employed lalangue as a musical device, he constructed spoken formulas guaranteed to induce, within the listener, involuntary experiences of epiphany]
non-bi-univocal concordance [the linguists’ technical name for speech after Adam; when the 1:1 link of nomination is broken, what next? —we focus on the break, which in Babel is the cœlum]
scat (jazz singing, as in Ella Fitzgerald’s “How High the Moon”) [the opposite of not being able to play a tune without remembering the (silent) words is continuing the tune with sounds that, by forgetting, re-member]
architectural ruins [the other side of architecture’s erection aspect, orthography, is the entropy of wear, tear, and passivity; the vampire has no reflection but continues as “reflection itself”]
Peter Brooks The Mahabharata (1989) [cast and crew of this film entertained each other at night using the fake language they had invented for the founders of the world]
Anthony Burgess’s invented language, “Nadsat” [invented language appears all at once; natural language conceals its own secret history of sin and betrayal]
Adamic speech [even though Adam is credited with speech that was “original” in that it “originated” (being), Eve was the first to have a conversation (with the tree-wound serpent)]
“L’enigme éternelle,” by Maurice Ravel (in Yiddish) [this song fascinated Lacan: World, you question us:Tra la tra la la la la; The answer comes: Tra la la … (in Yiddish)]
Children’s play songs, esp. for hopscotch [this term is already zairja’d to Freud’s parapraxis, which itself is already zairja’d to his train/boat itinerary]
ChatGPT [in the tradition of the West African tale-type, the “tar baby,” epiphany comes with the detection of interest on the part of the Other]
HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey [the on-board computer begins to kill of astronauts, provoking the survivors to shut it down; is this not a case of “suicide-by-Other”? the situation of “you leave me no choice but to ____” institutes a logic of the forced choice; you think you make decisions, but it’s the Other calling the shots]]
instrumental convergence [the form of causality that works entirely through structure, hence, the Real of passivity]
vampire as scotoma [mirrors refuse the vampire’s reflection; could it be because the reflection is their essence?]
the spiral of demand, the void of desire [Lacan’s model of the relation of demand and desire is the torus, but not the immersed form (donuts, bagels, bicycle tires) but the topological torus that is a face-off between two Möbius surfaces, separated by the Villarceau cut (360º self-intersection with a 180º non-intersection]
indivisible remainder [the atom can’t be split because it’s the split itself; “in the beginning was the word, which was no word”]
√–1 [the impossible creates possibility, through a period of logical suspension; Coleridge: make that a double]
metonymic chains [The S’, or S2, forms chains because it is able to twist 180º; what is orthogonal is “indifferent,” just as thinking is indifferent to Being, in Lacan’s anti- (or ante-) Cartesianism]
Tiny House [the popular craze for living spaces, sometimes portable, as small as 500 square feet with minimal comforts, ideally sited in wilderness locations or in urban margins]
magic chain trick [physicist Tadashi Tokieda demonstrate’s the effects of momentum in down-ward-flowing chains]
“The Sandman” (E. T. A. Hoffmann) [is it possible that this famous unheimlich tale a case of a literary zairja? Read the original or the English version]
the acousmatic voice [the off-stage voice described by Michel Chion is about “the secondary,” the existence of a “space of production” behind every appearance, no matter how trivial]
concentricity (story-in-the-story) [the forced rule of telling a story is that it may involve someone telling a story, who must likewise obey this rule; in the resulting barbershop-mirrors effect, what emerges is the rule of left and right, odd and even — chirality — and the consequent admission that the world has a face (stereognosis)]
suspense (Hitchcock) [the question is not whether pain has a role in producing pleasure, but of how much, and in what order]
pen names [following Lacan’s principle that all subject’s are misrecognized, the device of the name in the Symbolic is that of a ruse, a mask, a fake name; in literary terms, this introduces the secondary before the primary has come on stage]
word golf (Nabokov) [the Russian-American novelist coins the term “word golf” to exemplify what Lacan called the circularity of signifiers as inherently self-referential; the phenomenon of non-orientation comes about through the connection to “whisper-down-the-lane” children’s game — the chain-like essence of the signifier as fundamentally metonymical]
Olimpia (automaton in “The Sandman”) [in this central text of the lalangue project, Olimpia is the connection to AI and discussions of ChatGPT]
anaphora (ἀναφορά) [non-orientation to effect self-intersection; the uncanny hinge effect, demonstrated by the Ames Window Illusion, where a forced perspective maquette of a window appears to be oscillating left and right but in fact is rotating 360º; a rod placed on the sill appears to penetrate the plane of the window]