BATESON–LACAN

Bateson’s Negentropic Discourse Matrix

NOTE:

Had Lacan read Bateson-Rausch's Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951)?

Through his association with Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, and Guilbaud, Lacan was aware of the major developments in communications theory. Lacan was familiar with major works by leading U.S cyberneticians, including that of Wiener, Shannon and Von Neumann. It is likely he would have been conscious of Bateson’s work, particularly as Bateson was at that time at the centre of the discourse of (American) psychiatry which critiqued Freudian energetics and because of Bateson's involvement with the Macy Conferences of Cybernetics (1956-1953). Bateson's anthropological approach to epistemology was also similar to Lacan's.

In Lacan's Cybernetics, Svitlana Matviyenko writes: "Anthony Wilden, social theorist and enthusiastic promoter of Lacan’s work in 1960s and 1970s, wrote several books pursuing this idea and developing parallels between Lacan and second-order cybernetics. In particular, he observed the affinity between the work of Lacan and Gregory Bateson and, according to Lacan in Seminar XX, kept encouraging him to read Bateson’s Steps to An Ecology of Mind. However, Lacan resisted this comparison and was critical of Bateson notion of 'metalogue'"

Extract: Céline Lafontaine The Cybernetic Matrix of `French Theory':
"During his seminar on 8 January 1958, on the ‘foreclosure of the Father’, Lacan refers directly to Bateson’s work:
'It so happens that people in America are concerned about the same thing I explained to you here. They seek to introduce communication in the economical determination of psychic disorders, as well as what they sometimes call the message. . . . Mr. Bateson . . . has contributed something that causes us to reflect slightly more profoundly on therapeutic action.' (1998: 144, my translation)"