The Tortoise and Homeostasis

Jacques Lacan: “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”

CYBERNETICS IN PARIS

The reception of cybernetics and information theory in Paris in the early 1950s was mixed. Some were suspicious of a discourse which appeared to be an agent of a technocratic instrumental reason. Henri Lefebvre and Jean Paul Sartre, for instance understood the imposition of cybernetics and information theory was another example of the creeping cultural hegemony of the United States. On the other hand, for many European intellectuals, cybernetics presented the opportunity to make a clean break with the trappings of the past: humanist liberalism, idealist individualism and Cartesian dualism. Some had been seriously engaged with American cybernetic and information theory in America itself during WWII. Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss, for instance, had studied at Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York during the Nazi occupation of France. Ecole Libre was a francophone academy in exile, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which strongly supported the emerging scientific disciplines of cybernetics and information theory. Jakobson and Levi-Strauss both incorporated elements of information theory, game theory and cybernetics into the disciplines of structural linguistics and structural anthropology.

Jacques Lacan attempted a similar synthesis by situating the discourse of cybernetics and information theory within the frame of Hegelian dialectics and Freudian psychoanalysis. Lacan manages this by positioning cybernetics as part of the shift from the discourse of knowledge (which dominated until after the time of Hegel) to the discourse of the machine (which would dominate the coming age of communication and control).

Lacan will argue that Freud’s theories adapted to the transition from the discourse of knowledge to the discourse of the machine (indeed Lacan credits Freud with actually anticipating many of the changes to come in the cybernetic era). Lacan acknowledges, however, that the nineteenth-century entropic model of “psychic energy” requires revision. This is to be replaced by the cybernetic notion of homeostasis which more accurately demonstrates the distribution of information (as opposed to energy) within a system.

Lacan does not condone or condemn cybernetics, but he does acknowledge the need to adapt to the discourse of the machine. For Lacan, cybernetics represented a tendency which had developed over the preceding centuries. Lacan traces the genesis of this shift toward the discourse of the machine to the 1600s when mathematical systems of probability and conjecture were first introduced. Such systems proposed a subject exterior to the symbolic order they were part of. The 1600s also witnessed the invention of calculating machines which were capable of organising complex numbers in sequence (Pascal’s Pascaline and Leibniz’s calculator, for example). Thereafter knowledge is inscribed within the machine, which again places the subject in exterior relation to the symbolic systems which inscribes them as subjects.

In Seminar II Lacan will establish a developmental dialectic of science.

The three periods are:

1. The animistic order – precedes the age of science. It is the realm of magic, mediated by speech
2. Exact science – places the real in its “proper place” (the revolutions of the planets, the constancy of physical properties). The operations of the real are independent of human action. The era of exact science is mediated by writing and produces the subject of science.
3. Conjectural science – the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which systems of probability were formulated. Rules of indeterminacy were introduced, which disrupted the stability of exact science. That which is in its “proper place” (the ontic) is “substituted by the science of combination of places as such (the conjectural).”

For Lacan the “new science” of cybernetics is part of a wider discourse, which arises from conjectural science, and which both psychoanalysis and cybernetics are produced within.

In this periodisation of science Lacan draws on the philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré (1882-1964). Koyré held that the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth century produced not only a new theoretical outlook of the world but also a shift of the position of man in relation to the world. Koyré was one of the contributors to a series of discussions which ran concurrent with Seminar II, entitled “Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences”. Like Lacan, Koyré distinguishes between a discourse of magic and its successor, the discourse of science. The discourse of science is mediated by written symbolic systems which are exterior to the subject. Simply put: if the discourse of magic is spoken, the discourse of science is written. It is this “flight” of the symbolic from the body which produces the modern subject. The “new science” of cybernetics brings us to a realisation that symbolic systems can run by themselves and that people take their place within those pre-existing systems. The era of conjectural science introduces a play between absence and presence which extends into the era of cybernetics.

LACAN, HEGEL AND THE ROME DISCOURSE.

In the year before Seminar II 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. (1953). In this paper, which along with its introductory text are known as The Rome Discourse, Lacan set out to introduce the formation of his own school of psychoanalytic thought (Société Française de Psychanalyse), and 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.

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 Bataille, 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.

To understand Kojève’s reading of Hegel goes a long way in explaining Lacan’s mode of address circa 1953-1955. Lacan, like Kojève, recognises that thought is relative to time (the dialectic of history). This dialectical time begins with the recognition of I in the Other, which is the moment when the subject enters language.

Kojève states, in the introduction to his own seminar:

“Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when-for the ‘first’ time-he says ‘I.’ To understand man by understanding his ‘origin’ is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed by speech.”

Kojève goes on to outline that (for Hegel) the subject locates their Self Conciousness through desire. This can be a basic desire such as hunger or sexual desire. This desire can be recognised in the Other. This desire brings an encounter with the self which is realised in language – the becoming of the "I". This encounter creates subjectivity and allows the "transformation" of an alien reality into its own realty" and "assimilation" of its other.

And here, in Seminar I, Lacan discusses the coming into self-consciousness, in psychoanalytical terms, with Jean Hyppolite (the principle translator and commentator of Hegel in France):

“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.”

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

The exchange between Hyppolite and Lacan also carries across Seminar I and Seminar II. For instance, in Seminar II Hyppolite points out that our relation to the machine has shifted radically in recent history. This allows Lacan to unpack this change of relation in dialectical terms, and to outline consequent change in the human subject position with particular relation to cybernetics.

HEGEL IN LEVI-STRAUSS

Early on in the seminar Lacan also establishes a structural relation between the Hegelian dialectic and Levi Strauss' Elementary Structures of Kinship

JAKOBSON–LEVI-STRAUSS–CYBERNETICS

The fact that symbolic material circulates within a human community, sets humans aside from animals. The animals are in a “jam”, their fate is determined by genetics and by their environment (in this respect they are more machine-like than humans). Humans entry into the symbolic order makes them radically different. Lacan argues that Levi-Strauss’ elementary structure of kinship, at the moment it is introduced, is total. When the first words are spoken the whole symbolic order is instituted (one might say “installed”). At this point it is impossible to think outside of it because the symbolic order is "a universe".

Lacan:

“The human order is characterised by the fact that the symbolic function intervenes at every moment and at every stage of its existence. In other words, the whole thing holds together. In order to conceive what happens in the domain proper to the human order, we must start with the idea that this order constitutes a totality. In the symbolic order the totality is called a universe. The symbolic order from the first takes on its universal character. It isn't constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols.”

Here Lacan has already made the transition from Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology into the Hegelian dialectic, a little later he states.

“[…] we can formulate the hypothesis that this symbolic order, since it always presents itself as a whole, as forming a universe all by itself – and even constituting the universe as such, as distinct from the world – must also be structured as a whole, that is to say, it forms a dialectic structure which holds together, which is complete.”

Here we see a very different emphasis to the cyberneticians. Whenever Lacan discusses cybernetics (or any other issue) it is always in relation to a dialectic which was set into motion when humans first exchanged and circulated symbolic material. The dialectic is always already complete, the elements of this elementary structure are there (Levi-Strauss does not describe them as “primitive” or even “complex”) they are the elements that structure the whole (speaking constitutes a symbolic order). This structure is fully realised even before humans start to talk about what is within it and what is outside of it. It was in place when people first started to ask: What am I? What do I know?

A little later in the seminar, whilst in another exchange with Hyppolite (in which they discuss the post-revolutionary stage of absolute knowledge, at which stage the dialectic is fulfilled), Lacan states:

“I think that according to Hegel. everything is always there, all of history is always actually present, vertically so. Otherwise, it would be a childish tale. And the thing with absolute knowledge, which indeed is here, ever since the first Neanderthal idiots, is that discourse closes in on itself, whether or not it is in complete disagreement with itself, whether or not everything which can be expressed in the discourse is coherent and justified.”

We see that Levi-Strauss has been gathered into Lacan’s Hegelian-Freudian dialectic at a moment when it was necessary to reassess the human relation to the machine. This reassessment is itself a moment of coming into consciousness of our relation to the ever-present dialectic. When Lacan talks of cybernetics he understands it as a further coming into consciousness of a structure which has existed since the symbolic was first introduced. In the Hegelian scheme, intellectual, artistic and technological innovations represent a (sometimes messy) working through of a dialectic which ends in absolute knowledge.

I’ve taken time to outline this Hegelian, dialectical construction because when Lacan discusses cybernetics, and the activities of servo-machines within this unfolding dialectic, the moment when the subject enters into language becomes central, particularly at a moment when machines appear to apprehend themselves in another machine and even exhibit elementary desire. It is at this point when the role of the machine must be reassessed, in an ongoing dialectic in which humans have consistently understood themselves in mechanical terms.

SEMINAR II

Galvini's experiment with a frog's leg

Lacan: "Freud's whole discussion revolves around that question, what, in terms of energy. is the psyche?"

Central to Lacan’s Seminar II was the issue that had been at the heart of the critique of Freudian energetics conducted by Kubie and McCulloch (see previous). This 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 further from the discourse of knowledge to the discourse of the machine. 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 1800s the self-correction of such machines could be regarded as synonymous with “thinking”.

Galvini's experiment with a frog's leg (detail 1)

In Seminar II, Lacan cites a particular type of servomechanism, Grey Walter's Tortoise, which had been gliding in a hesitant gait across the floor of the 1951 Paris Congress on Cybernetics only a few years before, and which has the ability to process information coming from its environment and adjust its subsequent actions accordingly. This creature, which seems to express homeostasis and exhibit something close to desire, invites Lacan to reassess Freud's dynamic psychology.

Galvini's experiment with a frog's leg (detail 2)

In Lacan’s reading of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud is repeatedly struggling with the invisible issues of negative entropy 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.” 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 , 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 (negative feedback). 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.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” 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.

The machines compulsion to repeat its actions gives Lacan the opportunity to reassess Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle further. Freud had posited the “death wish” as the desire of the subject to repeatedly place themselves in situations which would be harmful, and to do so voluntarily. Freud called this compulsion to repeat “Wiederholungszwang”, which Lacan translated as “automatisme de répétition” (which is in English “automation of repetition”) In so doing Lacan renders the unconscious death wish as equivalent to the non-conscious repetition of a servomechanism. As the tortoise is compelled to seek light, to test the limits of life, it is also compelled, by the same non-conscious circuitry, to seek rest.

In Seminar II Lacan recounts the encounter between two of Grey Walter's cybernetic tortoises “Which we know how to furnish with homeostasis and something like desires” in compulsive terms. The machines operate with a light sensitive sensor and 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”. This orientation is achieved through the scansion of the rotating photocell which registers a precedence or an absence – repetition and insistence. In Lacan's narrative the two machines are "jammed" in apprehension of each other. Lacan asks where could the desire of such a machine be located, "The sole object of desire which we can presume of a machine is therefore its source of nourishment. Well then, if each machine is intent on the point to which the other is going somewhere there will necessarily be a collision."

It is the cybernetic tortoises mechanistic desire to repeat which saves it from death, from the inevitable effects of entropy (death) and brings it toward life (negative entropy). Lacan describes the homeostatic feedback loop of the cybernetic tortoise in the following way: "the machine looks after itself, maps out a certain curve, a certain persistence; And it is along the very path of this subsistence that something else becomes manifest, sustained by this existence it finds there and which shows it its passage."

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. When one machine is “jammed” in its encounter with the other, as it encounters itself in the other. This might be read as a neurotic response (Norbert Wiener's cybernetic bedbug-moth was prone to such neurotic paralysis; Cora Mrk 2 was also prone to seizure) But this "jamming" is unique in another sense: servomechanisms and humans share similarities which they do not share with animals. The animal is in a genetic "jam" because, lacking access to symbolic material. In the post cybernetic era, humans and machines share a material relation to the world through manipulation of the symbolic system. 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 cybernetic tortoise the circuit is rudimentary, it is purely reflexive, a memory without storage, but even at this rudimentary level the scanning action which encodes the dark-light signals from the environment into a sequence, the machine is organising symbolic material. It is the repetition and insistence of the scanning light cell that anchors the tortoise in the world of the symbolic.

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. 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 which we discussed in the last chapter. In The Living Brain Grey Walter had described 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 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 the cybernetic tortoise memory takes 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, as far as the cyberneticians are concerned, the distance becomes a matter of degree.

For Lacan such machines provide plastic models for the formation of the subject in which consciousness is not essentialised (it is a body in pieces). The moment when the tortoise apprehends itself in the other is the moment when the nascent subject grasps unity. If the body in pieces finds its unity in the image of the other it is within the circuitry of cybernetic creatures that the model of homeostatic co-dependency is expressed. Cybernetic machines such as the tortoise allows Lacan to conceive of "a symbolic regulation, of which the unconscious mathematical subjacency of the exchanges of the elementary structures gives us the schema. This last sentence provides a complex knot to cut through, but it will be worth the effort. Here Lacan brings us back to Levi-Strauss' elementary structures. The symbolic material which circulates within human cultures has an underlying structure which is fundamentally mathematical. This order has been brought into dialectical relief by machines which, like human beings, exhibit negative entropy. The legislator is not a puppet master of the human-machine (there is no place for idolatry in this scheme) it is rather a reiterative pattern, ordered pulses of absence and presence (dark-light-on off) which brings forth consciousness. This is the "subjacent" material that gives rise to the symbolic order. In Play Like an Idiot we will discuss how this "mathematical subjacency" comes into being in Lacan's Schema.

DISCOURSE NETWORKS 1800/1900

Once Lacan had outlined the role of the servomechanism in positioning the subject– Hyppolite interjects, offering two observations which allows Lacan to develop his argument further:

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.

These are, principally

1. the shift from the entropy model of energy to the homeostatic (negative entropy) model of energy and
2. the development of the science of probability in the seventeenth century, 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 upd