PROVOCATIONS. The provocation will be to serve as the central art-form of the seminar. Provocations may be on any topic, of any length, for any motive. Ideally, a provocation should be short enough to provoke effective responses from seminar members. Effectivity is based on three principles: (1) it is the result of a project or action that leads somewhere, as a part of personal work; (2) it makes sense to others, and is translatable into other’s work; and (3) it provokes discussion that leads to more provocations. If this format is OK (title, preamble, body, with or without footnotes, bibliography) use it; otherwise there are no limits. Drawings, music samples, and experiments would also be productive. Where available, MS-Word formatted .docx files — indicated by (formatted) — are available to use as style-sheet examples. Unformatted essays should not be used as style guides.
- 1.1 Parapraxis of the Tiny House (Don Kunze) The aim of this paper is to establish a protocol for considering the combination of condensation and displacement (metaphor and metonymy) as the spatio-temporal rationale of the Tiny House in relation to Lacan’s idea of the interval of suspension: between the two deaths (katabasis), the suppression effect of ± i, and the pharmakon. MS-Word file (formatted)
- 1.2 Concentricity of George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (Don Kunze) In the work of George Spencer-Brown, there is an interesting parallel between his central contention, that a distinction is coincident with an indication and the more general phenomenon of concentricity, and what in literature and story-telling is the device of the story in the story. A brief unpacking of these ideas, and some background on George Spencer-Brown is necessary (unformatted).
- 2.1 From Symptom to Sinthome, Borromeo to Brunn (Iraj Ghoochani) The mathematical basis for linking topics such as the Tiny House to lalangue requires an understanding of the three “Borromean” domains, the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real in more general terms. When Lacan began to theorize the sinthome, he moved to a broader interpretation of the Borromeo rings’ variability. This paper lays out a foundation for pursuing the sinthome via knot theory developed by Hermann Brunn, in a 1982 article, Über Verkettung. The connection of lalangue to the discourse, in particular Capitalist Discourse and the Hysteric’s discourse, cannot be understood without this mathematical elaboration of knot topology.
- 2.2 The Persian Connotations of Tiny House Architecture (Iraj Ghoochani) Tiny houses have emerged as a popular architectural trend, reflecting a minimalist lifestyle and sustainable living ethos. However, beyond their physical dimensions, tiny houses embody a complex interplay of cultural, psychological, and philosophical dimensions. This essay is a short journey into the intricate connections between Lacanian topology, Persian connotations of tiling, the torus, magic squares, and posthumanist ideas within the context of tiny house architecture.
- 1.3 Video on the Space of Rotation Analogy and Text Annotations. If you are math-averse, but want to understand the role of topology in psychoanalysis, you may want to consider this proposition. While we believe that we operate in an observable realm, our motives and plans create maps that project both to and from a realm that is decidedly unobservable. Use Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film, Strangers on a Train, a story about the plan for a double murder, to model this problem, in terms of a “circuit with a twist.”
- 1.4 Discovering Circle Inversion. On page 53 of the English translation of “La troisième,” the translator Yolande Szczech describes Lacan’s diagram of a cross superimposed by a circle as “clearly” the Cartesian XYZ. But, in fact, this is a Brunnian variation of the RSI Borromeo rings. Ghoochani has discovered something more: the translation of circles into the two lines representing the Symbolic and the Real are the result of “circle inversion,” a transformation that comes close to describing the relation of the rim to Lacan’s general idea of extimité.
- 1.7 The Ghoochani Parallax. In response to Ghoochani’s list of points relating to tangency (“the kiss”) and refusal (“apotrope”), Kunze imposed the zairja protocol to choose two items from the list of thirty, combined them, then applied the “synthesis” (Hegelian synthesis is not a merger but a displacement of the dialectic to a “supplemental” level) to a third randomly selected term. The results were ultimately about the zairja’s transformation abilities.
- 3.1 John Shannon Hendrix: La langue and the Barenholtz Pavilion. Certain compositional procedures in the design of the early houses of Peter Eisenman, pavilions or tiny houses, can be directly related to the use of metaphor and metonymy in language, and can be directly related to the structuring of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. They reveal the presence of the unconscious, as la langue, through architecture, in a dialectic of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, which architecture is uniquely qualified to stage. Architecture has the potential to reveal the unconscious in a way that is different from any other form of visual art or communication based in language.
Using the Zairja: pairing two terms
This may be done through random selection or intentional selection. Pairing raises questions of sympathy and contrast; the terms may have relations to a third term which comes to light only by means of coupling.
- The response to the pairing itself constitutes an “entry” to a second, deeper level of the zairja. The findings from the first pairing is itself paired with another term from the main list, or another finding. The new account of this second pairing constitutes a third-level zairja. This zairja is edited and publicized.
- ChatGPT with Francis Conrad. It seems that OpenAI is only too willing to play the Zairja Game and, even, to consider the possibility that the Zairja was in fact the first Large Language Learning algorithm (unformatted).
obsessive formatting
As these two categories accumulate entries, theses begin to form around new patterns and themes. These become the basis for zoom sessions, as potential authors begin to conceive essay contributions to the Special Theme Issue of Psyche Extended. At this point the editorial process begins with an invitation for “cold contributions” (by authors who did not participate in the zairja-zoom activities). The call-for-papers mission statement will be based on the zairja discussions.
In preparation for the publication of the special theme issue, read and follow the formatting instructions based on the past project, Lacan+Architecture. Down-load the MS-Word file to use as a model or request the template by emailing the editors. Formatting, a form of typographical humiliation, exerts a force on the writer that as akin to meditation, also a form of humiliation. For the considerations of this “typological hygiene” in relation to the laminar viscosity binding natural aggression of argumentation and stylistic humiliation in writing, see Edmund Bergler, The Basic Neurosis, Oral Regression and Psychic Masochism, also Bergler’s The Writer and Psychoanalysis (1950). Note: Bergler is the author of the common expression “writer’s block.”