Architecture’s two bodies

Roman Jakobson famously had converted neurological research on World War I aphasia victims into a binary signifier that dominated architecture theory for the remainder of the century. Metaphor, aligned with the brain’s ability to recognize similarity, became the basis of humanistic poiesis. Metonymy took on functions opposite this poetic: logic, instrumentality. Metaphor’s semblance-function connected to the ethnography of sympathetic magic; in contagious magic, metonymic contiguity revealed anticipations of rational causation. Functions clearly differentiated in the cases of aphasia victims’ loss of either semblance or contiguity functions, seem, in individual non-aphasiac subjects, to combine in an uncanny subject/object cross-inscription that is like having, paradoxically, two bodies separated by a paradoxical void.