The zairja was a device used by medieval Arab astrologers to generate ideas by mechanical means. The name may derive from a mixture of the Persian words zaicha (“horoscope; astronomical table”) and daira (“circle”). Ibn Khaldun described zairja as: “a branch of the science of letter magic, practiced among the authorities on letter magic, is the technique of finding out answers from questions by means of connections existing between the letters of the expressions used in the question. They imagine that these connections can form the basis for knowing the future happenings they want to know.” He suggests that rather than being supernatural it works “from an agreement in the wording of question and answer … with the help of the technique called the technique of ‘breaking down'” (i.e. algebra). By combining number values associated with the letters and categories, new paths of insight and thought were created. [Wikipedia]
What is the modern zairja? The employment of aleatory techniques of construction and imagination benefit, primarily, the beauty of thought and should be made from parts lying at hand (a Tarot deck, notes from class, photographs in a drawer). The zairja is powered by obsession and repetition, a true automaton — hence the legitimacy of its claim to be “the first computer.”
The argument for the zairja’s relevance to psychoanalysis and architecture can be made from the evidence that its first form was as a “cosmogram” linking the now of birth to universal celestial movements. Who could have guessed that, nearly one thousand years later, Sigmund Freud would devise a new idea of human fate, or that Jacques Lacan would associate this fate with the “ersatz methodology” of Analysis, where errors — slips of the tongue, bungled explanations, and repetitions — would be primary data? Any non-French or non-German speaker has limited access to the primary texts of psychoanalysis, so all in effect face an unsurmountable barrier, all must devise a methodology that takes this into account, all must employ some variant of the ersatz idea. But, the theorists error data is sympathetic to the “errors” of the Analysand, errors that allow the Unconscious to say what it means.
These essays supplement the main index entry of ZAIRJA, where instructions can be found to extend the zairja idea to a “horizontal” collaboration with others. To clarify this somewhat, imagine that a novel is just that.