Poe's Purloined Letter

PURLOINED LETTER – LACAN

At the start of the session on the Purloined Letter Lacan reminds the participants that the introduction of the + – notation system outlines the difference between memory and remembering: the memory is “internal to the symbol” (grouped in succession); remembering is informed by biography of an individual (a subjectivity). Memory is a group of symbols which are exterior to the subject. Being “internal to the symbol” as memory is, is stochastic in nature and follows the logic of probability. “The human subject doesn't foment this game, he takes his place in it, and plays the role of the little pluses and minuses in it. He is himself an element in this chain which, as soon as it is unwound, organises itself in accordance with laws. Hence the subject is always on several levels, caught up in crisscrossing networks.”16 Lacan invites the members of the seminar to play odds and evens. He sets them a task to play together for the next seminar and assigns the mathematician in the group to define randomness.

In the next session Lacan stresses that in this game, and as a general principle, “the play of the symbol represents and organises, independently of […] a subject”

Lacan gives another account of the story to those assembled (less than half of those attending had read it).

[brief account of poe’s story]

In Poe's Purloined Letter, detective Dupin relates the tale of an eight-year old boy who was adept at the game of odd or even. The rules are simple: guess if your opponent is holding an odd (one) or even (two) pennies in their hands. As we have established, a very similar game was known to Von Neumann & Morgenstern as matching pennies and is discussed in their book on game theory, Game Theory and Economic Behaviour, it is a good example of a “zero-sum two-person” game. This is ostensibly the same game that the machine SEER was designed to play. We also know that if contestants in odd and even are evenly matched, it makes sense for a player to play randomly because chance gives the advantage when two players are evenly matched. 17 But it only makes sense to employ chance if you know the field, if a record of the game has cycled through the system, if you know the record of the game [and you know your opponent knows it too]. This foreknowledge of the opponent’s knowledge structures the game of ones and twos, as it does the narrative of the Purloined Letter. Lacan and the members of the seminar played the game and made a record. The record, a series of + and –produce a syntax of order that governs each successive move . This establishes autonomy of self-organization of the symbolic order. 19 "The symbol [–] produces by itself, its necessitates, its structures, its organizations" Within this the subject will always find its place

In such a circumstance, players become place holders in a game which promises a particular outcome. On a level of basic structure, irrespective of who wins, there will be a winner, and irrespective of who plays there will be players; the structure of the game produces a loser and a winner (subjects), this much is established at the very beginning of the game. In this way the game, the purloined letter and SEER are machines of subjectivity. This ordering operates on the level of syntax, insofar as it established the conditions in which a more sophisticated system of signification can be established.

TEXT BOX: The key components of Lacan's seminar on the Purloined Letter Lacan’s understanding of finite state automata allowed him to theorize that simple information machines were structured similarly to simple languages with limited functions; that the syntax of a finite-state automata was descriptive of the symbolic order. Below I list the key theoretical objects discussed or referred to in seminar II and Lacan’s lecture on cybernetics in order to map out a local “discourse network”

1. the objects 2. where the objects occur:

1. the objects Von Neumann & Morgenstern's Game Theory and Economic Behaviour; The Tale of the Purloined Letter by Edger Allen Poe; The game of odds & evens (matching pennies); Lacan describes a finite state automata that can play the game of odds and evens, (with the same function as Claude Shannon & David Hagelbarger's SEER, )

2. where the objects occur A matrix of common themes interconnect the different elements of the discourse: Odd & even (matching pennies) appears in Poe's story; Poe and odd and even (matching pennies) appear in von Neumann & Morganstern’s Game Theory and Economic Behaviour; Poe, odd and evens (matching pennies) and von Neumann & Morganstern Game Theory and Economic Behaviour; appear in Lacan’s seminar on the Putrloined letter; Poe, odd and evens (matching pennies), von Neumann & Morganstern Game Theory and Economic Behaviour; and Lacan appear in texts by Guilbaud. Guilbaud's What is Cybernetics? [1954] references Poe's story and in a 1953 lecture he draws an equivalence between odds & evens and matching pennies.) .

Lacan moves on to examine the plot of the Purloined Letter in such terms, concentrating not the psychological element – which demanded the investigator to put himself in the place of the opponent (the emphasis that Shannon also took in his memo about SEER) – but rather the degree to which the game itself structures the symbolic. The content of the actual letter is not relevant. The possible effect of the content, and the fact that the content is the key to power and control, provides the main emphasis. A message that is not sent can still send a message. If I fail to send tax returns to the tax office they will receive the message that the message has not been sent – and there will be consequences (as Bateson was fond of pointing out). This is at the base of negentropic economies: if it takes little energy to send a message, it takes no energy to not to send a message, and yet not sending a message registers a difference that makes a difference. Similarly, for the protagonists in the tale of the purloined letter, who through their actions and non-actions send messages unconsciously, the letter becomes the machine for action that allows the various individuals in the story to find their place, they are caught in a play of difference. In the manner of the game of odds and evens, those with knowledge of the letter’s contents and whereabouts have a different stake in the game than those who are ignorant of it. In this way the letter, as it passes through the circuit, is the inanimate agent of subjectivity; and in this sense “the letter always reaches its destination” and affects the subjects in the circuit irrespective of their knowledge of it. 22

The subjects in the circuit are subjects in a discourse over which they have no control. The story introduces three subject positions that are mirrored as the story progresses. There is a compromising letter to the queen which the minister purloins and replaces with a substitute; the queen sees this, the king does not see this; the queen takes advantage of the kings ignorance, as does the minister, Dupin recovers the letter by using the strategy the minister had used against the queen. The pattern repeats itself, passing through the circuitry of the various protagonists: king, queen. minister, police, minister, detective, the pattern dictates that the subjects in the pattern MUST repeat.

Now, how does this symbolic order relate to the world of the machine? The symbolic order encodes the real as number, or as Lacan would have it, "it ties the real to the sequence" which allows the integration within the circuit. A signifying mark (position of the letter) reveals the syntax, engenders the subject position that in turn engenders / generates subjectivity (it gives a place to) and allows movement within the circuit23 and as in the changing places of the 0 and 1 in SEER).

Lacan further examines the point that the space of the letter is the space of difference: the letter cannot be purloined because a letter does not have a stable state of belonging, a proper place to be. Does its place of belonging rest with the person who sent it or with the recipient? The letter is “speech which flies”, a “letter is a fly sheet” whereas “speech remains” even when no one remembers it any more. It is not part of remembering and yet it is part of memory because the succession of a, b, y and s will still be determined under the same law (the stochastic symbolic order). In the order of probability it is not a specific thing that has its proper place, rather it is the thing which finds its place. Lacan will return to language’s tendency to “fly” and the compulsion for things to find their “proper place” his lecture on cybernetics (see chapter *)

Speech remains but the letter wanders by itself because it cannot rest with the sender or the receiver; its place is within the contingent space of the circuit. The letter, in its circularity, is a character, it becomes for the other characters within the circuitry of the story synonymous with “the original, radical, subject” In each case “the letter is the unconscious”.

At the end of the seminar, in “questions to the teacher” Lacan returns to the circuitry of the Purloined Letter in relation to the Oedipus myth. It transpires that the tale of the purloined letter sits in isomorphic relation to the story of Oedipus. The letter is the radical character which wanders by itself. Oedipus’ tale is the function of the oracle, his fate was foretold, which gives the ground to the fate of Oedipus. In this sense Oedipus precedes himself, his story goes before him, he is the head and tail of a message that runs in a circuit, and Oedipus is, by necessity, ignorant of the discourse which inscribes him as a subject. Indeed, Oedipus’ destiny depends on the veiling of the discourse, “which is the reality of which he is ignorant.” Here Lacan describes the unconscious function of language as that machine which inscribes the subject which sits in homologic relation not only to the circuitry of the Purloined Letter but also to Grey Walter’s Tortoise, Ross Ashby’s Homeostat and Shannon & Hagelbarger’s SEquence Extrapolating Robot (SEER). In his profound ignorance Oedipus sends clear messages. This discourse, this circuit, which is invisible to the subject, is the cybernetic unconscious.