The Tortoise and Homeostasis

“The organism, already convinced as a machine by Freud, has a tendency to return to its state of equilibrium – this is what the pleasure principle states”

Lacan, Hegel, Structuralism and Cybernetics: from The Rome Discourse to Seminar II.

In the year before Seminar II (1953) Jacques Lacan had delivered the paper “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” at the Rome Congress held at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Rome (the Rome Discourse). In this paper Lacan set out to upgrade Freudian psychoanalysis to meet the technical standards of the mid-twentieth century. For Lacan this meant psychoanalysis had to “take back its own property” –to go back to the first principles of Freud in which the analysis of language was central. For Lacan, recent developments in structural linguistics (Roman Jakobson) and structural anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss) provide “methods” through which Freudian psychoanalysis could be theorised anew. These methodological tools allowed Lacan to recognise a structural equivalence between the different elements of his neo-Freudian psychoanalysis.

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The other key structural element in Lacan’s discourse of 1953-1955 is his reading of the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In the 1930s, Lacan had taken part in Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. These highly influential seminars had been attended by a generation of thinkers who would shape the intellectual life in France over the coming decades, including Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. In Kojève’s reading, Hegel held that the self and the social are mutually constitutive. This is exemplified in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in which the subject is constituted – brought into a whole – in relation to the Other. This reading of Hegel had been transposed into Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory by the mid 1930s, as is evident in Lacan’s formulation of the mirror stage (1936), in which unity of the self is established in its apprehension of the self as other. For Lacan, the moment when the infant apprehends the self in the other, it enters the realm of the symbolic – it enters language.

This connection to Kojève's Hegel accounts for the overall dialectical nature of Lacan’s argumentation around the time of the Rome Discourse (1953-1955) when Lacan was setting forward his re-formulation of psychoanalysis.

In Seminar II, for example, Lacan describes a coming into being of consciousness which is conditioned by changes in technology – the advent of the clock, the emergence of probability, the introduction of the steam engine – technological innovations which structure particular types of subjectivity. A parallel dialectic unfolds in Seminar II when Lacan distinguishes three different periods in human development: (1) animistic order (2) exact science and (3) conjectural science. In Lacan’s unfolding dialectic each era establishes new horizons of possibility.

Hyppolite in Lacan's seminars

Jean Hyppolite ’s presence in Seminar I and II is also important in consolidating Lacan's neo-Hegelian approach. In Seminar I, which took place just after the Rome Discourse, Lacan engages in a discussion with Hyppolite that develops the explicit relation between the mirror stage and Hegel’s dialectic in the following terms.

“The subject originally locates and recognises desire through the intermediary, not only of his own image, but of the body of his fellow being. It's exactly at that moment that the human being's consciousness, in the form of consciousness of self, distinguishes itself. It is in so far as he recognises his desire in the body of the other that the exchange takes place. It is in so far as his desire has gone over to the other side that he assimilates himself to the body of the other and recognises himself as body.”

(Seminar 1, Zeitlich-Entwicklungsgeschicht, 147)

Seminar II

Central to Lacan’s Seminar II was the issue of homeostasis and how a re-evaluation of the nineteenth century energy model ushered in by cybernetics necessitated a re-evaluation of Freudian dynamic psychology. For Lacan, our understanding of homeostasis in the age of servo-mechanisms shifts discourse from the discourse of knowledge to the discourse of the machine. 1 We have seen in the previous chapter that this discourse was familiar in and around the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) […] We have also established that the “vapour engine” had been introduced into the discourse of evolution as early as the 1860s by Samuel Butler. Even in the 1900s the self-correction of such machines could be regarded as synonymous with “thinking”.

In Seminar II, Lacan cites a particular type of servomechanism, which has a particular relation to information and energy. Such a machine has the ability to process information coming from its environment and adjust its subsequent actions accordingly. Such a machine had been gliding in a hesitant gait across the floor of the 1951 Paris congress on cybernetics only a few years before– Grey Walter’s tortoise. We note at this point that Grey Walter actually demonstrated an augmentation of the original tortoise at the 1951 congress. The CORA (Condition Reflex Analogue) attempted to take its interaction with the environment to a further stage of abstraction than the original machine (see chapter seven). In his Seminar II, when discussing the role of homeostasis in the formation of the subject, Lacan will propose an augmentation to a mobile servomechanism, the significance of which we will discuss in this chapter.

But first we must recap what is at stake in Seminar II, which can be read as an extension of the debate on Freudian energetics conducted by Bateson, McCulluch and Kubie a few years before (which we discussed in chapter *).

Freud's Dynamic Psychology

Freud, when developing the system of psychotherapy, built on the dynamic physiology of his former teacher Ernst Brücke (1819 – 1892). This held that every living organism is an energy system that abides to the principle of the conservation of energy (the fourth law of thermodynamics). This model holds that the amount of energy within a system remains constant. The energy can be transferred and redirected but it cannot be destroyed. From this Freud derived the idea of dynamic psychology, which allowed that, in the manner of kinetic energy, psychic energy can be reorganised within the system but cannot be destroyed. The mind has the ability to redirect and repress psychic energy, diverting it from conscious thought. Classically, the libido, which is the source of sexual energy, becomes redirected, to be manifest in different forms of behaviour. In Freud’s later works a similar dynamic operates as the ego, id and superego struggle for equilibrium. Psychotherapy becomes a technique which rebalances the equilibrium of psychic energy within the system.2

In Lacan’s reading of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud is repeatedly struggling with the invisible issues of negentropy and homeostasis, but Freud lacked the theoretical equipment to make the connection between entropy in the machine and biological realm and its relation to information and communication: “the idea of living evolution, the notion that nature always produces superior forms, more and more elaborated, more and more integrated, better and better built organisms, the belief that progress of some sort is imminent in the movement of life, all this is alien to [Freud] and he explicitly repudiates it.” 3 Here evolution, as a homeostatic agent serves as a generative regulator it controls the system within established variables but it also allows growth and adaptation.

In Seminar II’s The Circuit (77-90), Lacan describes Freud’s pleasure principle as follows:

“when faced with a stimulus encroaching on the living apparatus, the nervous system is, as it were, the indispensable delegate of the homeostat, of the indispensable regulator, thanks to which the living being survives and to which corresponds a tendency to lower excitation to a minimum.”

This “minimum” for a living organism is homeostasis. The literal minimum of excitation would, however, be death. There is an important distinction to be drawn here. For Lacan, when Freud speaks of the “death instinct” he speaks of man stepping out of the “limits of life” which is “experience, human interchanges, intersubjectivity”. The withdrawal from sensory input affords survival and regulation. For Lacan it is precisely this homeostatic ability which is the negentropic “rabbit inside the hat”, a previously unaccounted for surfeit. Lacan makes an explicit relation between energy [E] entropy [H] and message [M]: “Mathematicians qualified to handle these symbols locate information as that which moves in the opposite direction to entropy”4 Lacan goes on to further describe the relation between information and entropy and their generative properties: “[…] if information is introduced into the circuit of the degeneration of energy, it can perform miracles. If Maxwell’s demon can stop the atoms which move too slowly, and keep only those which have a tendency to be a little on the frantic side, he will cause the general level of energy to rise again, and will do, using what would have degraded into heat.” A key thread running through Seminar II is the introduction of negative entropy which fundamentally changed the discourse of entropy (in which indestructible forces are held in dynamic equilibrium) to the discourse of homeostasis, communication and control. The ordering of the subject is bound to the signal-noise ratio even to the extent that the most rudimentary non-conscious cybernetic device (the tortoise), by feeding news of order through its nervous system, can express purposeful behaviour.

In ‘A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness’ (p40-52) Lacan recounts the encounter between two cybernetic machines “one of these small turtles or foxes […] which are the playthings of the scientists of our time” [..] “Which we know how to furnish with homeostasis and something like desires”. The machines operate with a light sensitive sensor and, crucially the behaviour of one is determined by that of the other. Indeed the “unity of the first machine depends on that of the other” as long as one gives the “model or form of unity” [...] “whatever it is that the first is orientated toward will be that which the other is orientated towards”. Lacan sees in cybernetics an affirmation of the reality that the organism encounters itself in the other. Here the cybernetic dance provides a reenactment of the mirror stage. This relation also describes something closed to Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind, in which the subject’s formation is immanent to circuit of negative feedback.

Even such rudimentary devices as the tortoise “learned” to navigate the space they were in and negotiate with other versions of themselves – sometimes colliding and sometimes “jamming” – as one tortoise is frozen in apprehension of the other. Lacan identifies the desire of such a machine is to restock its energy sources (Machina Speculatrix did indeed return to base to recharge itself). In this case the desire of the machine is the source of its nourishment. The desire of the machine to withdraw into its hutch is linked with the desire of the machine to continue. The fact that the machine can protect itself through withdrawal, by creating a stop-gap or buffer from the data-stream of the outside world is central to Lacan’s re-formulation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Desire is provided by the source of the initial signal; purpose is established by the feedback of organism-machine and source; the machine must periodically withdraw, to step out of limits of life which is experience, interchanges and intersubjectivity.

In the case of Machina Speculatrix the circuit is rudimentary, it is purely reflexive, a memory without storage. Lacan next suggests adaptations to the design of the mobile servo-machine: if the machine is fitted with recording equipment, a “legislator” intervenes with commands which “regulate the ballet”, this introduces a higher degree of symbolic regulation. 8 This represents a voice which is external to the machine which is nevertheless mixed with the circuitry of the apparatus. When Lacan discusses augmenting the tortoises with additional sensors he is not speaking purely speculatively, he is describing a machine such as Grey Walter’s CORA Mrk. 1.

In The Living Brain Grey Walter describes the seven stage circuitry required for a mechanism to acquire a conditioned response. Here, acquired knowledge feeds into the circuitry in long and short feedback loops. The circuit diagram of CORA provides a map of homeostasis. (see fig. *) The correct functioning of CORA Mrk 1 would require the machine to store information about a previous action and to act in response to it. This is a stage of abstraction removed from the first generation of tortoises (Elsie and Elma). In Seminar II, Lacan recognised that the basic roaming cybernetic device (such as the tortoise) required some augmentation in order to go to the next stage, which would require a rudimentary “memory”. In the cybernetic device these take the form of symbolic units of difference – these feed through the circuitry of the machine as a cluster of 1/0 – on/off – light/dark – the world encoded as a memory which translates as a learned response. This is still some light years from human consciousness but from this point the distance becomes a matter of degree. 1) the performative response (the tortoise) 2) the performative response augmented (CORA Mrk. 1) These follow the actions of neurons and the action of computation in a computer such as SEER (see chapter).

For Lacan such machines provide models for the formation of the subject and also provide the basis for intersubjectivity. One machine is “jammed” in its encounter with the other, as it encounters itself in the other. Here servomechanisms and humans share similarities which they do not share with animals, they are both able to regulate their environment. The animal is “Jammed” in a particular sense, it is in a genetic jam because it cannot reflect on its own condition and adapt its environment. Humans have a unique relation to their environment because they can change it and themselves. In the post cybernetic era, humans and machines share a material relation to the world through manipulation of the symbolic system. The moment when it apprehends itself in the other is the moment when the nascent subject grasps unity.9 If the body in pieces finds its unity in the image of the other, as Lacan writes, it is within the circuitry of cybernetic creatures that the model of homeostatic co-dependency is expressed.

At this point in Seminar II – once Lacan had outlined the role of the servomechanism in positioning the subject– Hyppolite interjects, offering two observations: 1) that the meaning of the machine has changed since the advent of cybernetics, and 2) that it is the human passion for mathematics that makes humans “partners to the machine”.

These two observations allow Lacan to address two of the central themes of his assessment of cybernetics in relation to the shift from the discourse of knowledge to that of the machine.

These are, principally

(1) the shift from the entropy model of energy to the homeostatic (negentropic) model of energy and

(2) the development of the science of probability in the sixteenth century,10 which provided the conditions for humans to become partners to the machine.

Later in the seminar, in his lecture on Cybernetics and the Unconscious, Lacan will identify this as the era of “conjectural science”. Throughout the seminar Lacan describes the shifting horizon of possibility that takes place as the implications of these two things take hold on human life.

In his approach to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan seeks to update our reading of Freud in the light of current (post cybernetic) knowledge of homeostasis. Freud encountered the same energy question as other nineteenth century thinkers: in an entropic universe how could one account for order in the first instance? It was possible to approach the crisis by understanding systems in dynamic equilibrium, but without an adequate theory of homeostasis.11 the theorist of system was in danger of falling into the metaphysics of vitalism and energetics – which must rely on a vague notions such as a “life force” to plug the energy gap. 12

Earlier in his career Freud had practiced in the context which relied on the model of the reflex-arc, which attempted to understand the organism’s relation to environment through input stimulus. In this scheme stimulus provides excitation to action. This theory proposed a hierarchy of reflexes “higher reflexes, reflexes of reflexes...” &c.13 Freud opposed this “reflex architecture” and, anticipating neuron theory, counter-proposed the concept of the “buffer” (this has some relation to Claude Bernard’s milieu interieur). 14

In relation to neuron theory, later experiments, including those of McCulloch and Pitts, would confirm the functioning of synapsis as “contact barriers” and the equilibrating system of filters which “damps down” the synaptic charge (negative feedback). In cybernetic terms, there are checks in the system which avoid “overrun” or positive feedback. The cybernetic tortoises express this in very rudimentary terms. In Lacan’s reading, Freud’s “genius” was that he anticipated a conception of the psyche as working in equilibrium and even described the function, but Freud lacked the theory which accounted for the energy deficit, which Lacan characterises as “pulling the rabbit out of the hat”. Freud did not succeed in finding a coherent model of consciousness principally because he lacked the theoretical apparatus provided by a theory of homeostasis and the cybernetic conception of negentropy.15

A renewed understanding of entropy invites not only a reassessment of Freudian discourse but of discourse in general. Lacan goes into detailed description of how the discourse of knowledge transitioned into the discourse of the machine.17: In tracing the development of this discourse Lacan gives the example of Galvini’s experiment with an electric charge to the leg of a dead frog (1791),16 which gave rise to the notions of “animal electricity” and “vitalism”. Here the energy problem remains. In order to “pull a rabbit out of a hat”, Lacan remarks, one must first place the rabbit into the hat. Lacan mentions that an earlier attempt to account for this energy surfeit, Condillac (1716-1780), was conditioned by the lack of a sufficient model to describe entropy. “[Condillac] didn’t have a formula for it, because he came before the steam engine. The era of the steam engine, its industrial exploitation, and administrative projects and balance-sheets, were needed, for us to ask the question – what does a machine yield?”18 Lacan identifies the “metaphysics” in such an approach, whether one seeks recourse in “energetics” or “vitalism”. “For Condillac, as for others, more comes out than was put in. They were metaphysicians.”19

Before the advent of cybernetics, there is no adequate account of how that rabbit got into the hat. In Lacan’s unfolding dialectic, Wiener’s theory of negentropy and Claude Shannon’s information theory are the only things that can legitimately account for the rabbit’s miraculous appearance.20 Lacan recognises that the horizon of possibilities shifts as the administration of the system of knowledge changes, and that the change is dependent on a particular technological development – be it the steam engine, or the servo-mechanism. This is not to say that the machine produces the discourse, Lacan is careful to give accounts in which each is produced by the other in a discursive feedback loop. The language within Lacan’s account, in which “balance sheets” speak of the fantasy of economic equilibrium and “yield” speaks of economic and energetic surplus, emphasises the very energy crisis in which the discourse is situated. The machines described by Lacan encode, inscribe and send symbolic material into the world – they produce discourse.

Lacan next elaborates the discourse of energy in the light of Hegel’s dialectic and sets this against the emerging discourse of cybernetics. Lacan understands the second to be a dialectical outworking of the first. We have established that if Hegel is concerned with the discourse of knowledge, cybernetics is concerned with the discourse of the machine. Hegel, in the first instance, allows us to see man as co-extensive to discourse, knowledge is “more than a tete e tete with God”, Lacan suggests. In the discourse of cybernetics man is co-extensive with the machine. In Lacan’s account we see the discourse of the machine prefigured in the time of Pascal (with the Pascaline calculating machine) and Huygen (with the clock) whereby man first understood himself as being constituted by symbolic systems – and machines which measure and regulate those systems – which are outside of the self.

Before Galvini’s experiment with the frog’s leg the notion that humans were “energised” was not part of discourse. Lacan notes that Hegel had little or nothing to say about energy – there was no steam engine in the Hegelian universe to provide a model for human energy; the crisis of equilibrium that would accompany the invention of the steam engine and the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics was yet to occur. It is at the point when machines exhibit behaviour that another conception of self is possible, and it is in the cybernetic era that information and energy find their equivalence.

In Lacan’s discourse a change in human conception of what constitutes a human is influenced at every turn by a machine which causes a change in conception of what is possible: The calculating machine (Pasciline) presages an era21 in which the human subject is answerable to systems of probability which are exterior to self; the clock presages a human subject who is beholden to an exterior symbolic order; the steam engine introduces the economy of energy and entropy into the problematic of what constitutes man; servomechanisms, such as Grey Walter’s tortoise, introduce the notion of negentropy, resolving the nineteenth century energy crisis but at the same time making the organism in a fundamental way equivalent to the machine.

The issue of energy becomes central at the point when the steam engine is common (in the time of Freud). Freud intuited that the pleasure principle corresponded to a state of equilibrium, where dynamic forces produce a balance, but he did not have a scientific model or the embodiment of homeostasis in a machine. The model would be provided by Cannon in the 1930s and the machine would be provided by the British neurophysiologists and cybernetician Grey Walter.

1 Although Lacan will invoke the cybernetic creatures built by Grey Walters and the “second guessing” robots like those built by Shannon and … these machines underline the central issue of the seminar, homeostasis. 
2 Hall, Calvin S.  A Primer in Freudian Psychology. Meridian (1954)
3 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988. p79
4 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988. p83)
5 Later Merleau-Ponty is critiqued and provides Lacan with the means by which to warn against essentializing consciousness. 
6 Jean Hyppolite: Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit  (1947) and the proto-post-structuralist work, Logic and Existence (1952)
7 Tortoises: “The playthings of scientists of our time” p51
8 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988. P.539 54
10 Lacan will later term this “conjectural science” (>)
11 Which was provided by Walter Cannon n the 1930s: Cannon, Walter B. “The Wisdom of the Body”. The American Journal of the Medical Sciences 198, no. 1 (1939), 113. doi:10.1097/00000441-193907000-00031. An extension of Bernard’s milieu intérieur. See: Bernard, C. (1974) Lectures on the phenomena common to animals and plants. Trans Hoff HE, Guillemin R, Guillemin L, Springfield (IL): Charles C Thomas
12 Bergson, H. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. North Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation, 2012. 
13 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988. (From the Entwurf to the Trandeutung) p. 116
14 Bernard, C. (1974) Lectures on the phenomena common to animals and plants. Trans Hoff HE, Guillemin R, Guillemin L, Springfield (IL): Charles C Thomas “which Bernard described as “the condition for free and independent life: the mechanism that makes it possible is that which assured the maintenance, within the internal environment, of all the conditions necessary for the life of the elements.”
15 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988. (From the Entwurf to the Trandeutung) p. 117
16 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988.  Homeostasis and Insistence, p.62
17 Here Lacan gives an interesting description of the functioning of a discourse network, as readers of Kittler would understand it. In Kittler, discourse is conditioned by the technical standards of the day; Lacan Takes up Hypolite’s point that our understanding of what a machine is has changed in the era of cybernetics. See: Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1990. 
18 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988. p 61  
19 Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1988. p.61
20 Ristituative function of the psychic organisation = circuit

For Lacan, writing in the era of feedback and control systems, within the discourse of the servo-mechanism, the psyche must be understood in terms of homeostasis. He describes the circuitry of the unconscious in the following way:

21 Later described by Lacan as “conjectural science” (Cybernetics and the Unconscious is discussed in chapter *)