‘Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or on the Nature of Language’, by Jacques Lacan | An Overview

‘Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or on the Nature of Language’, by Jacques Lacan

‘Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or on the Nature of Language’, by Jacques Lacan, is the last in a series of special lectures delivered by Lacan on 22nd June 1955, around the theme, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences’.

The topic ‘cybernetics’ assumed a lot of importance in the 1950s, after the publication of the first book on the subject, titled, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener, in the year 1948. The book gives the first public usage of the term ‘cybernetics’ to refer to self-regulating mechanisms.

In 1925, Sigmund Freud wrote his well-known essay, “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad.’” The Mystic Writing-Pad was a simple device that enabled the instant erasure of any markings on its surface. The pad’s foundation layer was a soft, waxy substrate, on top of which lay a thin layer of celluloid or plastic. Writing with a stylus on the celluloid made impressions in the wax, which showed up as dark markings on the celluloid.

Freud was interested in developing a science of the mind to  understand  human  behaviour  and  its  psychological  manifestations.  At the centre of psychoanalysis as a  method  lies  the  role  of  the  analytic  process:  to  establish,  retrieve,  collect,  and  interpret  information  a patient may share with their doctor during a therapy session (which, before  it  became  known  as  psychoanalysis,  Freud  together  with  Josef  Breuer developed as the “talking cure”).

To Freud, these two layers offered an interesting analogy for the unconscious and conscious mind. The unconscious mind, like the wax layer, receives impressions and retains them. And the celluloid, like the conscious mind, can be refreshed so that new perceptions can emerge.

Lacan, developed on Freud’s model in his lecture on cybernetics, to find a common axis between cybernetics and psychoanalysis: and this axis he referred to as, language.

What would it mean to play a game of chance with a machine?, asks Lacan.

Cybernetics, was born from the work of engineers concerned with economics of information passing through conductors, the mode in which a message is transmitted. It was given its name by Norman Wiener, one of the most eminent of engineers.

Lacan’s suggestion that both cybernetics and psychoanalysis operate upon “the subject of science”, “two roughly contemporaneous techniques,” related to the emergence of the two distinct types of sciences: the “exact” and “conjectural.”

He “looked upon cybernetics and information theory as an alternative intellectual framework for rethinking Freud. Wolfgang Ernst’s incisive observations on Freud’s conception of memory as a dynamic archive (“Archive in Transition”) have been very useful along with his outline of the difference “between the symbolic (in Lacan’s sense: writing, letters) and the mathematical real (computing)”

To Lacan, the meaning which humans have always given to the real is the following – it is something one always finds in the same place, whether or not one has been there”. Modern science was based on the assumption that there was an order of nature that always remained in the same place.

Lacan argued that conjectural sciences, including cybernetics, had developed as a symptomatic response to a realization that the order in nature had been lost, which was why “the science of what is found at the same place” had been substituted by “the science of the combination of places as such”. These new “conjectural sciences,” Lacan indicated, were detached from the real!

From the moment man thinks that the great clock of nature turns all by itself, and continues to mark the hour even when he isn’t there, the order of science is born. There is a very great clock, which is the solar system, a natural clock which has to be deciphered, and this was one of the most decisive steps in the constitution of exact science. But man must also have his clock, his watch. Who is on time? (exact)? Is it nature? Is it man? Of course, one can define what is natural as what shows up on time for the rendezvous. 

Being on time (exactitude) meant the synchronisation of watches. Do note that the watch, the reliable watch, has only existed since Huyghens succeeded in making the first perfectly isochronic clock, in 1659, thus inaugurating the universe of precision. 

There’s nothing surprising if a certain part of our exact science comes to be summed up in a very small number of symbols. The little symbolic game in which Newton’s system and Einstein’s is summed up, has very little to do with the real, says Lacan. 

In the game of chance theory, similarly, the entire movement converges on a binary symbol, on the fact that anything can be written in terms of 0 and 1. From the beginning, man has tried to join the real in the play of symbols. He has written things on the wall, and he has placed figures at the sport, where at each hour of the day, the shadow of the sun comes to rest. But in the end, the symbols always stayed where they were intended to be placed. Stuck in the real, its landmark. 

What’s new is having permitted them to fly with their own wings. Lacan emphasises that desire can be thought of as computation, as an input-output mechanism. Lacan points out that human beings are not like machines. Machines may have language, which Lacan sees as a symbolic network, but they do not have speech, which is part of embodied experience and linked to intentionality. 

For Lacan, the symbols 0 and 1 correspond, on one level, with Freud's ‘Fort/Da’ and, on another level, with Saussure’s signifier and signified. To Lacan, we are ontological machines and not digital machines. In cybernetics the notion of a message has nothing in common with what we usually call a message, which always has a meaning. The cybernetic message is a sequence of signs. And a sequence of signs always comes down to a series of 0s and 1s. 

For language to come into being, insignificant little things such as spelling and syntax have to be introduced. Cybernetics is a science of syntax, and it helps us understand that, the exact sciences do nothing other than tie the real to the syntax. 

Semantics is then peopled with the desires of men. What is certain is that, it is we who introduce meaning. So can we say that, everything circulating in the machine has no meaning whatsoever? For the message to be a message, there must be a sequence of signs, and more importantly a sequence of directed signs. Hence, nothing unexpected comes out of a machine. That is to say, it is not what interests us, but what we predicted, that comes out. 

At this point we come upon a precious fact revealed to us by cybernetics – there is something in the symbolic function of human discourse that cannot be eliminated, and that is the role played in it by the imaginary. 

So what is the meaning of meaning? Meaning is the fact that the human being isn’t master of this primordial, primitive language. He has been thrown into it, caught up in its gears. We don’t know the origin. We are told that, the cardinal numbers appeared in languages before the ordinal numbers. One might have thought that man comes upon numbers by way of ordinal, through the order of precedence, through dancing, through civil and religious procession, etc. Hence, man isn’t master of his own house. There is something into which he integrates himself. 

Conclusion: Cyberneticians tended to dismiss biological and neurological characterizations in favour of a purely logical or mechanistic understanding of network structure. The cybernetic influence on philosophy, propounded the idea of “subjectless processes”, which claimed that, it was now possible for mental states and psychological transitions to be considered as ideal and mechanical, without any need to associate with them a subject or centre of experience. In short, cybernetics, “came very close to announcing the dehumanization of man”. 

With a machine, whatever that doesn’t come on time simply falls by the wayside and makes no claim on anything. This is not true for man, and whatever doesn’t come on time remains in suspense. It is not expressed, but repressed.

No doubt something which isn’t expressed doesn’t exist. But the repressed is always there, insisting and demanding to be. Lacan thereby re-introduces the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis – the unconscious, repetition, transference and drive in a new light.

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