This page describes upcoming opportunities for extending the scholarship of architecture+Lacan.
iPSA-sponsored zoom seminars are maximally conversational, minimally presentational. Newcomers and late-comers are welcome; the point is to expand the discursive potential of new ideas lying latent within Lacanian theory, and within other theoretical frameworks as ‘anamorphic’ second senses. Sessions are normally held in series – minimally two sessions to pair informal brain-storming with formal presentations published on YouTube and discussed in a second session. This can be expanded to include invited speakers/critics, or even a final session in the style of the formal symposium, where speakers present abbreviated arguments and answer questions from critics and the audience.
opportunities
LACK 2025
The 2025 LACK CONFERENCE will be held at Otterbein University, in Westerville, Ohio, March 13–15. LACK was formed in 2015 to bring together theorists interested in engaging psychoanalytic theory and its intersection with philosophy, politics and contemporary culture. As its name suggests, historical focus has been on the work of Freud and Lacan. This next year’s event will feature Slavoj Žižek as keynote speaker. Anyone interested in a special session devoted to Architecture and Lacan contact John Hendrix or Don Kunze. Short presentations (12–15 minutes) are recommended. Email proposals (title, 250-word description, short bio, MS-Word format) to Jennifer Friedlander (jennifer.friedlander@pomona.edu). Participants can address any issues touching on Lacanian theory in the broadest sense.
PROPOSALS DUE SEPTEMBER 1, 2024
TinyHouse/Lalangue Project
A series of zoom sessions is designed to refine the conversation around the popular culture meme of the Tiny House in relation to Lacan’s original notion of lalangue, signifiers that, freed from conventional signifiers, become road-maps for energy-efficient circuits. The first zoom was June 9; second and third zooms are planned for later in the summer of 2024. At that point, qualifying authors will submit full-paper drafts to Psyche Extended, a special issue edited by Jodi LaCoe and Cindy Zeiher.
past events
the meaning of architecture • november 19, 2023
John Shannon Hendrix proposes: “Architects should be banned from society. Engineers can design buildings, contractors can design houses. Architecture no longer has any value for society. As Nikolaus-Ion Terzoglou wrote in The Cultural Role of Architecture, ‘Architecture has concentrated mainly on technological means and instrumental procedures that, in certain cases, manage empty forms without conceptual content …. This situation has marginalized architecture as a form of mental expression and spatial imagination. An almost exclusive and one-dimensional emphasis on material and technological means reduces the ontological complexity of architecture and often leads to results which lack mental depth.’ Architects have abandoned the elements of architecture which have given architecture value to society: the expression of ideas, the communication of cultural values, the modelling of philosophical structures. Psychoanalysis could provide fertile ground for those elements of architecture if the practice of architecture were able to return to them. Most students coming to architecture school say that they want to be architects to make the world a better place, but they soon discover that that is not possible, given the constraints put on the architecture profession. The elimination of architecture is necessary for the survival of the human race.”
Read Hendrix’s complete proposal here.
To discuss this topic, iPSA will host a reverse-zoom (schmooz) session this fall (members will be canvased to determine a mutually workable time). There are a number of ways of taking up this idea:
- What is the proper (if any) means of distinguishing between “building” and “architecture”?
- What has happened to architecture schools?
- “What would Lacan say?” — how does architecture constitute a medium for the Big Other (and one of its principal messaging services)?
- What would a Lacanian School of Architecture look like? Does psychoanalysis have its own special “architectural curriculum”?
Go to the MEANING OF ARCHITECURE zoom page to read position statements from participants. As soon as a mutually workable schmooze-time can be find, it will be announced on this page.
Architecture in the Alethosphere
Andrew Payne
click here for full prospectus
“Architecture in the Alethosphere,” aims to essay the explanatory power of Lacan’s comments concerning the alethosphere and those “lathouses” that are its objective correlatives for considerations of architecture in its current condition. This aim has two vectors. The first seeks to forge links between the alethosphere and the constellation of broader themes that animate The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, viz.: the novel alliance between science and capitalism that emerges with the transition from thermodynamic to cybernetic models of industrial enterprise; the diminishing significance of the Oedipal impasse in the subjectivation of contemporary individuals and the resultant decline in the prevalence of neurotic structure (with its associated dialectic of desire and repression); the replacement of this neurotic culture of desire by a culture of consumerist enjoyment, and with that replacement, the emergence of new psychical dispositions sharing certain features with, while nevertheless remaining irreducible to, traditional formations of perversion and psychosis.
Authors’ Conference: The Stendhal Syndrome
Angie Voela, Don Kunze, Kōan Jeff Baysa, MD
June 15, 2022
click here for full prospectus (when available)
Participants in 2021’s zoom seminars on the Stendhal Syndrome (the sudden collapse of viewers of art, landscapes, city views, works of music, and even texts (think of Paolo and Francesca) were invited to contribute essays collected in a special issue of Psyche Extended. The variety of Stendhal experiences suggests that the spatial and temporal structure buffering the work of art and the spectator can give way, its normal insulating powers worn thin at critical spots. The variety of art types capable of causing a viewer’s sudden collapse or even death (cf. The Great Beauty) call for a general theory of this space-time.
possible futures
Cassirer with Lacan
Angie Voela, Don Kunze, Franceso Proto, Christopher Bell
April 15, 2022 (est.)
click here for full prospectus (when available)
Where Lacan’s theory of the subject insisted on being non-philosophy, the early 20c. German neo-Kantian philosopher, Ernst Cassirer’s equally extensive theory of subjectivity was intensely philosophical. Within the complementarity of these two thinkers, born 26 years apart, there are parallels and affinities that cause their otherwise distinctive projects to short-circuit.
Magic+Architecture
Don Kunze, with (tentatively) Paul Emmons, Kōan Baysa, and Thomas Mical
July 31, 2022
click here for full prospectus (when available)
Architecture and magic have overlapped throughout history, although it could be said that, in the very beginning of human culture they were synonymous. From cosmograms of Yoruba slaves, inserted into masters’ houses to shrines and forbidden spaces, the agency of magic has been employed as a force-field of effectiveness. Join this zoom discussion with examples and arguments about the effectiveness of magic, using historical examples and contemporary theory.
[new and barely thought out]
Some projects are in the early planning stages, so if you are interested in participating — as a participant, planner, or critic — contact the organizer(s) to get in on the ground floor.
Psychic Comics
Francesco Proto, Don Kunze, (tentatively) Susan Squire, (possibly) Paul Emmons, (likely) Linda Heinrich, (with any luck) Ted Zelmo, and (really really hopefully) Tom Gauld
Fall 2022
click here for a full prospectus (when available)
It goes without saying that the advent of graphic novels was simply a formalization of the loose principle of popular culture’s ability to work as a collective unconscious, an “anxiety management machine” playing out, in the fictionalized lives of pathetic failures, animal totems, super-heroes, and timeless tricksters, a panel-by-panel freeze-frame version of psychoanalysis. Using evidence of Krazy Kat, cartoonists have merged their clever facility with the “inside frame” with cinematic sensibilities. Architecture theory has yet to treat this remarkable archive, but iPSA suggests that it should do so with Lacanian theoretics at hand.