Tessellation of Empty Speech

The "tessellation of empty speech" names a structural property of everyday talk as theorized in Samuel McCormick's reading of Lacan's analysis of the Irma dream. In Lacanian terminology, "empty speech" (parole vide) designates discourse in which the speaking subject is alienated from the truth of their desire — discourse that orbits around the ego's imaginary self-representations rather than opening onto the dimension of the Other. A tessellation is a geometric covering of a plane by interlocking, repeated units (tiles, herringbone bricks, automata-like patterns) that leave no remainder and require no central organizing intelligence — only the mechanical fitting of one unit against the next. The compound concept thus designates the specific way empty speech propagates: not through meaning, argument, or the mediation of the subject's genuine desire, but through a purely formal, contiguous, alogos interlocking. Each utterance tiles against its neighbor, producing surface continuity without symbolic depth or subjective engagement.

This characterization aligns empty speech structurally with the automaton — Lacan's name for the dimension of repetition governed by the mechanical insistence of the signifier-chain independently of any encounter with the Real. The tessellating quality emphasizes that this kind of talk has no telos, no orienting lack, no gap through which desire could breathe. It is the discourse of the ego (imaginary, specular, misrecognizing), extended laterally across social space — as in the "egomorphic crowd" — filling the field of the Other while systematically blocking access to it. The discourse is characterized by the absence of anxiety (in the structural Lacanian sense), because anxiety signals the proximity of the Real; tessellating empty speech is precisely the cultural-linguistic device that keeps the Real at bay, covering over the void with interlocking, self-sufficient patterns.

This concept appears in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p.268) and operates as a vivid conceptual specification within that text's broader argument about the structure of everyday discourse. It sits at the intersection of several Lacanian canonical concepts: it extends the concept of the automaton (the mechanical, signifier-driven dimension of repetition that circles without touching the Real) by showing how that automatism manifests at the level of social speech rather than merely the intrapsychic; it specifies the ego's imaginary axis as the generative engine of tessellating talk — utterances tile together because they are produced from and for specular self-confirmation rather than from desire; and it implicitly draws on identification and the imaginary register as the structural glue that makes adjacent utterances "fit" without genuine symbolic mediation. The absent cross-refs — desire, anxiety, egomorphic crowd — are equally important as negative poles: tessellating empty speech is constituted precisely by the foreclosure of desire (no lack, no gap, no orienting objet a) and the suppression of anxiety (no opening onto the Real).

Within the source's argument, the tessellation figure does the work of making the spatial and formal character of empty speech visible: it is not merely empty in content but geometrically closed, a self-replicating surface that resists interruption. This makes it a specification rather than a critique of Lacan — McCormick is translating Lacan's clinical and structural vocabulary into a media/cultural-theoretical account of how everyday talk operates as a social practice. The concept is effectively an extension of the automaton into the sociology of discourse, and a specification of empty speech into something with a determinate formal shape: tessellated, recursive, imaginary.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.268)

their individual words and the adjoining utterances into which they are tightly fitted form a tessellation of empty speech

The phrase "tightly fitted" is theoretically charged: it renders the geometric logic of tessellation (no gap, no remainder, no void) as the structural signature of imaginary discourse, directly opposing the constitutive lack that Lacanian theory requires for desire and the symbolic to function. "Empty speech" then names not mere vacuousness but the foreclosure of the very opening — the gap — through which a subject could speak from their desire rather than their ego.