Open Access

Sebastien Fanzun

• In recent years, the notion of infrastructure has enjoyed growing scholarly attention; infrastructure being precisely that which allows for the kind of interfacing between local and global scales the term 'glocalization' resists on. In order to connect this discourse to the studies of language and literature, this article revisits Jacques Lacan's paper "Of Structure as an Inmixing Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever". Rather than taking Lacan's notorious claim that "the best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning" as the absurdity it may seem at first glance, the article proposes to read the claim seriously. Taking the scenic route through the extensive work on the Baltimore region undertaken in urban studies since the 1950s, the article outlines how Lacan's connection of the unconscious to a Baltimore street scene is actually closely tied to the interest in the notion of 'structure' at the core of his paper: Since Jean Gottmann's groundbreaking work on the topic, the extended Baltimore region - the 'Northeastern Megalopolis' - has continued to exert a twofold fascination over urban geography: not only does it represent a cultural and economic center of global importance, but also a type of structure characterized by change and accident rather than by unity and planning. 'Structured', in this context, must adopt a new meaning, which, in turn, sheds a new light on Lacan's famous claim in the same paper that the unconscious is "structured like a language". Lacan's seemingly offhand remark, thus, serves as an entrance into a possible configuration of language, literature, and infrastructure.