The Body in Pieces

M. SPECULARIX (The Cybernetic Tortoise)

Grey Walter: "If you have a scanning device, a rotating photo-cell, then once it gets on to a line it will tend to pick up that line again within a reasonable time. […] This is characteristic of quite a simple system without storage."

We have established that discussion on psychoanalysis within the discourse of cybernetics centred around the issue of Freud’s dynamic psychology, which mistakenly accorded quantitively measurable properties where they could not be applied. Lawrence S. Kubie had argued, that to think of the psyche in terms of suppression, displacement and redirection of energy, could never be anything other than an ill-fitting metaphor, which in the era of cybernetics became increasingly redundant. Warren McCulloch, Gregory Bateson and Lawrence Kubie were amongst those who gave Freud’s dynamic psychology serious critique in the light of recent developments in cybernetics – in which negative feedback becomes the central agent of adaptation and change.

These arguments were quick to migrate across the channel and to enter the discourse of psychoanalysis in Paris– becoming particularly important to Jacques Lacan’s Seminar II (1954-55) which we will discuss in some detail soon.

In the late 1940s and throughout the first half of the 1950s the reception in France of cybernetic ideas continued apace: It could even be argued that Cybernetics has its origins in Paris. It was on a trip to the Sorbonne in 1947 that Norbert Wiener was persuaded by his publisher, Enriques Freymann, to bring his innovative thoughts together in a publication. The result, Cybernetics (1948) was published simultaneously in France and The United States In 1950 Benoit Mandelbrot invited Norbert Wiener to lecture at the Collège de France. Wiener, a fluent French speaker, gave lectures on the radio and met with many of Paris' leading intellectuals. Jean Hyppolite discussed cybernetics and communication theory with Wiener during his visit, a meeting that greatly influenced Hyppolite’s “Le Coup de dés de Stéphane Mallarmé et le message” (1958). Hyppolite also participated in Lacan’s Seminar II (1954-55) which centred on the issue of Freud’s dynamic psychology in relation to cybernetics (relitigating the issues that had been raised by cyberneticians including Bateson, Kubie and McCulloch). In 1953 Pierre de Latil’s La pensée artificielle appeared, followed in 1954 by Raymond Ruyer’s La cybernétique et l’origine de l’information. Two cybernetic congresses took place in Paris in 1950 and 1951, bringing French thinkers with a leaning toward the new scientific complex of cybernetics and communication theory together with leading American cyberneticians. The cybernetic congresses were co-organized by Jacques Riguet and Georges Theodule Guilbaud. Guilbaud, the author of the first popular introduction of cybernetics in French, What is Cybernetics(1954), was a close interlocutor and colleague of Jacques Lacan, and attended Seminar II. Guilbaud was considered a major contributor to game theory, another aspect of the cybernetic complex central to Lacan’s Seminar II. Guilbaud’s own seminar on game theory in 1950 analysed Neumann & Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour 5 in detail, as would Lacan’s Seminar II (as we will see in the next chapter).

The 1951 Paris cybernetic congress included the participation of two of the pioneers of cybernetics who were also at the forefront of physiological psychological research in the UK: W. Ross Ashby and Grey Walter (the Americans Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch were also in attendance). Whilst in Paris Grey Walter demonstrated his M. Specularix, or cybernetic tortoise – a machine that responded to input from its environment and adapted its behaviour in response to exterior stimulus. Grey Walter’s tortoise was one of the exemplary machines of the cybernetic era. By the time of the 1951 Paris congress on cybernetics the tortoise had achieved some fame, participating in numerous demonstrations, it had been featured on the Pathe News reels (1948) and was a star at the Festival of Britain (1951) and had been a principle topic of conversation during the Macy Cybernetics Conferences (1946-1953). The tortoises’ creator Grey Walter had worked in RADAR research during the WW II. Before and after the war, along with his fellow cybernetician Ross Ashby, he established a reputation as one of the world’s leading brain scientists. Walter worked on the development of EEG (electroencephalography) at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, UK. The tortoises he build combined the ideas of scanning and goal-seeking behaviour which had been central to his war-time research, along with his central concerns as a neurophysiologist and brain researcher.

The M Specularix (aka The Cybernetic Tortoise or Turtle. Article in Life Magazine

In The Living Brain Grey Walter writes:

“The first notion of constructing a free goal-seeking mechanism goes back to a wartime talk with the psychologist, Kenneth Craik…[…] Goal-seeking missiles were literally much in the air in those days; so, in our minds, were scanning mechanisms. Long before (my) home study was turned into a workshop [for the production of cybernetic tortoises], the two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave like a very simple animal.”

The first two tortoises were called Elsie and Elmer. Grey Walter, who was fond of giving mock-scientific names to cybernetic machines, called this new cybernetic species M. Specularix. In addition to the Elsie and Elmer, which were built in 1948, a batch of six more machines were produced for exhibition purposes (including the Festival of Britain in 1951). The machines, built in Grey Walter’s home workshop in the late 1940s, were essentially a three wheeled trolley propelled by a driving motor powered by a storage battery. The machine was directed by a steering gear and steering motor which responded to a rotating photoelectric cell which scanned the environment for light. The machine’s shell was connected to a touch sensitive contact. Walters described these sensors as organs which were sensitive to both light and touch and which sent electrical impulses via relays to the machine’s two motors (see fig 1). The machine was capable of phototaxis, returning to its “hutch” to recharge its battery. The machine demonstrated that a small number of brain cells could produce a complex repertoire of behaviour. Built “in the metal” with analogue technology the machines were “simple systems without storage”2, such a machines would code the territory in which it operated before advancing further.

At the 1951 Paris congress on cybernetics Grey Walter demonstrated a variant of the tortoise alongside Norbert Wiener’s “moth-bedbug”, which was similar in many respects. Wiener and Grey Walter had corresponded about their respective machines and Wiener commented on their similarities and differences in the 1950 and 1952 editions of Cybernetics. The key difference was that the two photo-cells on Wiener’s machine did not scan (rotate). Instead the photo-cells were fixed on the left and right-hand side of the moth-bedbug, which moved purposefully toward or away from light in the manner of a moth or bedbug (pro- or anti-phototropic). The rotating photocell on the tortoise allowed the creature to better orientate because the stimulus (light) it first encounters as it scans space is re-enforced with each subsequent scan. The scanning action accounted for the meandering gait of the machine and for its tendency to explore and investigate the stimulus presented to it. In contrast, Wiener’s more excitable moth-bedbug would seek its target and move toward it. If confronted with two stimuli the moth-bedbug would “oscillate”– displaying tremors associated with disorders of the nervous system (it was the machine’s purpose to demonstrate neurological disorder). The tortoise on the other hand would manoeuvre around both sources of stimulus – two equidistant light sources would not present a dilemma for the tortoise because the action of scanning produced a hierarchy of order – which was contingent on the function of the photocell. In an hypothetical instance, Elsie whose photocell rotated anti-clockwise would take one route (left) and Elmer, whose photocell rotated clockwise, would take another route (right). Both actions would be contingent on their experience and would establish the conditions for subsequent actions, which would in turn be a response to contingencies presented to the creature.

The quality of positive tropism affords the following: “the photo-cell amplifier and motors are connected in such a way that, when an adequate light signal is received, the exploratory behaviour is checked and the organism orientates itself toward the light and approaches it. Until it ‘sees’ the light, the photo-receptor is in continuous rotation, scanning the horizon for light signals. This scanning process is linked with the steering mechanism in such a way that the ‘eye’ is always looking in the direction of movement; thus, when a signal is received, from any direction, the machine is in a position to respond without too much manoeuvring.”

The function of the photo-cell supports the theory of “internal scanning as a function of electrical brain rhythms in the final stages of sensory perception” . [...] “What the nervous system receives from the sense organs is information about difference – about ratios between stimuli.” In The Living Brain, Grey Walter describes the cybernetic machines he built as “mirrors of the brain” and, in common with Bateson, Craik and McCulloch advocated the methods of Claude Bernard which involved a “methodical feedback system of ‘experimental theory and experimental practice’, the one always leading back to another.” The way in which the tortoise orientates its environment is recursive, an action is dependent on cycling information which influences subsequent action. The machine does this by scanning its photoelectric cell, which orders the organism’s relation to space and time. Scansion, Grey Walter argues, serves to dismantle the paradox of Buridan's Ass whereby the creature, when exposed to equidistant stimuli (two equally tasty carrots for instance), starves to death in an agony of indecision. Bateson and Wiener had discussed what would happen if a finite state computer was fed a paradox: Wiener suggested it would oscillate between the two equally valid answers before eventually jamming. Early servo mechanical robots and early computers were often associated with neurosis. Both CORA (Grey Walter’s second generation tortoise) and Wiener’s Bed Bug / Moth displayed “neurotic” behaviour when faced with a paradox.7 However in the first generation of cybernetic tortoises, the rotating scanner allows the servo-creature to resolve spacial paradoxes, as Grey Walter noted: “The creature explores the possibilities; when it gets close to the first light its moderation mode is invoked and it wanders across and does the same thing with the other light; it forms a figure-of-eight diagram” In this case the paradox of Buridan’s ass becomes academic as the creature “naturally” finds its place within a rich matrix of stimuli.

W. Grey Walter's Conditional Reflex Analogue (CORA), the 'learning circuits' which was incorporated into Walter's Cybernetic Tortoise. This is a desk top demonstration model (c.1951).

At the 1951 Paris congress on cybernetics Grey Walter demonstrated a variant on Elsie and Elma, which went by the less homely name of CORA (Condition Reflex Analogue). This was actually learning circuitry incorporated into the tortoise Elsie –an adaptation of the machina speculatrix became the M. Docilis8. This augmented machine “is now capable of forming conditional reflexes which follow the classic lines enumerated by Pavlov and elaborated by his pupils” 9. The circuits allowed the machine to make “choices” and “discriminate”. CORA “worked out the contingency of two series of events and permits a “learned response to appear if the contingency turns out to be significant.”10 In practical terms the machine manoeuvred around a stool when warned by a police whistle, after encountering the stool on numerous occasions and registering contact with its touch sensors when the whistle is blown. The tortoise first responds to light whilst a whistle is blown and “learns” to respond to the whistle alone. 11 When the obstacle that the machine manoeuvres around (a stool) is removed, the machine still takes evasive action when the whistle is blown (it no longer needs the touch stimulus). In The Living Brain Grey Walter describes the seven stage circuitry required for CORA to acquire a conditioned response. This 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. These take the form of symbolic units of difference, a cluster of 1/0 (or on/off, light/dark), in which the world encoded as a memory translates into 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 an 18 bit computer such as SEER (see chapter 10) [Note: 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”.] The next stage, for Grey Walter’s CORA Mrk 1, was to get the machine to further discriminate between two notes played by the whistle, one implying touch and the other food. This resulted in the machine experiencing “experimental neurosis” displaying “agitation and indecision. After a period of rest however it finally found its way into the feeding hutch.”12

For Jacques Lacan, as we will see in the next chapter, these moments are significant: the moments when the Cybernetic Tortoises "jams" in apprehension of another creature like itself; the moments when it meanders uncertainly; the moments it seeks shelter in its hut to replenish and restore itself; the moments it shows some quantum of desire in its wavering, curious passage. These moments offer Lacan a way to describe the discourse of the machine which shapes the human subject in the middle of the twentieth century.