🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Today, the holidays are approaching, the weather is nice, and we are going to do something short. I would like it to be long enough for us to fill a program. I don’t know if you understood anything from what I told you last time about the game of odd or even. It seems that for some, it bore fruit, clarified certain things.

Let me briefly remind you of what it’s about. The aim is to highlight for you, through this example, through this model, the dividing line between what we might call “dual intersubjectivity and its mirages.” It is not all a mirage; it is absolutely fundamental. But at the same time, looking at one’s neighbor and believing that they think what we think is a gross mistake. It is a gross mistake without which it is impossible for us to think anything about them.

That is to say, this is where we must start. I also showed you the limits of what we can base on this dual intersubjectivity, which is not due—at least in certain borderline cases—so much to our inability to grasp what the other is, certain psychological qualities, for example, whether they are stupid or intelligent, and it is not as easy to see as one might think. But finally, it does have meaning, and when one is gifted, one sometimes realizes it. When one is intelligent, one rarely notices that others are stupid. When one is stupid, one sometimes notices that the other is intelligent. One rarely recognizes it. That is another question.

The limits of this apprehension of the other in certain cases—I have shown you, I have indicated, pointed it out to you in passing—are therefore not so much due—and this is where I drew your attention—to this impossibility or these difficulties. These properties of psychological connotation of the other stem from the fact that in certain cases, the sanction is limited to an alternative that is itself dual and untranslatable, so to speak, or more precisely, which does not translate.

There is no valid reason to translate the individual differences that distinguish the other we are dealing with from another who could be in question. In other words, their individuality, as I showed you in that famous game of odd or even, in which the reasoning—not to invent it, I went looking for it in POE, explaining how POE reports, describes the reasoning—and there is no reason not to believe that he inherited it from the mouth of the child who won the game of odd or even, which is actually quite simple. We have seen its limits.

Because if we consider that there is a kind of initial moment, which is the most natural thing, that the character playing changes […] so the simplest move is to switch from odd to even. The more intelligent type says: “The other will think that I will do the simplest thing because it’s the first thing that comes to mind, so I will do the opposite.”

But I pointed out to you that in a third moment, the most intelligent thing is to act like the fool or the presumed one, meaning that everything completely loses its significance. I showed you, however, and this is the hypothesis—that given the next step, that is, to play this game reasonably, one must try to cancel any grip the opponent might have, whatever it may be, with the clear understanding that what we just talked about is absolutely nothing at all, which does not exclude that it takes another path, within this framework of perfect ambivalence of what it conveys. The real way to play is to play completely randomly, meaning, in short, to cancel out the opponent’s chances—the next step—and this is Freud’s hypothesis: there is no chance in anything we do with the intention of producing chance.

I showed you on the board the purely hypothetical demonstration, reconstructed, of what we nowadays call a machine, and it would reveal, in the sequence of what would be played entirely at random, something that represents this formula, which can always be more or less extracted from what a subject produces at random. This formula reflects something closely related to what we are trying to define: the automatism of repetition, insofar as it lies beyond the pleasure principle, the transference insofar as it is a meaning that supports everything in the subject that appears connected by all sorts of links and motives, which we can grasp. But beyond those, no matter these rational motives, feelings, everything we can access, we know that there is a beyond—this is that beyond.

And at the starting point of psychoanalysis, this beyond is the unconscious, insofar as we cannot reach it. It is the transference, insofar as it truly modulates everything we improperly call transference, namely: feelings of love, hatred—all of this is not the transference. Transference is the meaning through which we can interpret all this. We can only interpret it, and interpret it as being the meaning of a language composed of everything the subject can present to us, and of a language that, in principle, is initially incomplete outside of psychoanalysis and is misunderstood, inaccessible. This is the beyond of the pleasure principle. It is also the beyond of meaning. The two coincide.

[Mannoni asks for the floor]
LACAN: What is it, what’s happening to you, MANNONI? Are you seized by the spirit? Go ahead, my dear.

Octave MANNONI:

Your effort to eliminate intersubjectivity, despite everything, seems to me, upon returning to a kind of dialectic, to let it persist. Because it seems to me that indeed, if there is no chance…

LACAN:

I would point out in passing that I do not eliminate it. I take a case where it can be subtracted. Of course, it is not eliminable.

Octave MANNONI:

Perhaps it is not subtracted, for the following reason: we must take into account that in the law of repetition, to which we unknowingly obey, two things must be considered. One is that it may not be detectable in the repeated thing—for example, one could study numbers indefinitely arithmetically and not find the law of repetition, if, for example, we consider rhythms. If we repeat words, it may be because a certain number rhyme with unconscious thought. At that moment, no mathematician could find the reason for the succession of numbers—it might be outside the scope of the machine.

LACAN: That’s very good, what you’re saying.

Octave MANNONI:

And furthermore, if the law is discovered, by the very fact that it is discovered, an equality occurs in the following way: one of the opponents discovers it, but the other does not. Because a discovered law is no longer a law.

LACAN

But yes, of course, my dear friend, you saw it quite clearly last time: to simplify, I had the subject play with a machine.

Octave MANNONI: That introduces the struggle between two subjects.

LACAN:

But yes, of course. But we start from the element. The mere possibility of having a subject play with a machine is already sufficiently instructive. This, of course, does not at all mean that the machine can find the reason for what I myself called last time our visions, like that, no more than anyone else’s, are ever within a certain number of resonances. And if I told you that our personal formula would be as long as a song from the Aeneid, the machine can be designed to recover it. It is not without reason that I introduced those elements of rhyme, which you were talking about earlier, the elements of poetic composition, which are situated within the material. And after all, of course, it is not at all said that the song of the Aeneid would thereby give us all its meanings.

But that is precisely what it’s about. If already we found rhymes, it’s an excellent formula, we would, in some way, be in the presence of effectiveness. Here is a new use of a term employed by Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS: symbolic effectiveness. Here I am using it in reference to a machine. The machine will have a symbolic effectiveness that varies depending on whether it can register, distill from the subject’s play in its presence, this symbolic effectiveness. It owes this to us, the builders of the machine. It owes it as something particular, if I may say so, something that belongs individually to it.

But the entire question raised by our discourse here revolves around whether, overall, generally speaking, symbolic effectiveness can be considered as something owed to man? The question has never been settled and will never be settled until we know how the origin of language came about, which is something we must resign ourselves to not knowing for a long time.

In the face of this symbolic effectiveness, it is simply a matter—it’s what I want to demonstrate to you today, and we will now work quickly—of highlighting in this ultra-simple framework what needs to be highlighted. This time, in contrast to this symbolic effectiveness, a certain symbolic inertia of the subject. In other words, I will have you play, in an orderly and considered way, the game of odd or even. We will record the results. You will contribute something of yourselves to it.

I will analyze these results over the holidays. We will see what we can derive from them.

The goal, in contrast to this symbolic effectiveness, is to mark, to see if we can highlight a certain symbolic inertia that is characteristic of the subject, and of the unconscious subject.

The difference that will emerge between this symbolic inertia, which we may eventually find in this experiment, can be detected using this: if, instead of the sequences we will record in the odd or even game, we create a sequence based on a list of randomly chosen numbers—but then this is a matter for mathematicians—it is Mr. RIGUET, here present, who will explain to us what a sequence of randomly chosen numbers is.

You cannot imagine how difficult it is. It took generations of mathematicians to carefully ensure, left and right, that these numbers were truly random. We will see the difference—thanks to a small machine that I will draw on the board—the difference obtained at a certain level of elaboration, which is significant because that is the meaning of the machine in this case, the difference obtained with randomly chosen numbers versus intentionally chosen numbers.

This game, in which I will ask you all to participate, but in a certain order and a specific manner that I have prepared for you today, will proceed as follows:

The first sheet of paper will be folded in two, then again in two, and once more, thus into eight vertical sections. Horizontally, fold it into four. You now have 32 boxes. The other two sheets will be folded into three vertically, leaving a small margin at the top for writing your name and address. Horizontally, fold them into four, like the previous one. I’m doing all this to ensure the operations are simple.

You will record the sequences from the odd or even game. For reasons that will become clear later, the game consists of 85 moves. On the first sheet, you will mark dots on the lines formed by the folds—12 dots per line, repeated six times, not quite to the bottom. On the last row, you will only put 9 dots. That makes a total of 81. You will add 4 more in the top-left corner.

For now, you will not immediately use these sheets but instead focus on what happens between two of you, preparing yourselves for the role of note-taker. I simply ask you to pay attention to the game, to observe how one presents tricks, who wins, who loses, etc. You will take an interest in it.

RIGUET, you will be the note-taker for this first part. Now, for the other sheets: on the first of the remaining two, you will write 45 dots, and on the other, 40. DAVID, you will play the odd or even game with MANNONI.

Octave MANNONI: I cheat at that game.

LACAN: I couldn’t care less.

[Game between David and Mannoni in 85 moves]

Octave MANNONI:

It’s very simple: every time I played randomly, I won. When I no longer had a rule, I often lost. The rule varied. At one point, I used the order of Mallarmé’s verses, then a telephone number, or a car license plate, then what was written on the board. The recording takes place every morning from 9… alternating vowels and consonants.

LACAN: How many moves did you play with the first rule?

Octave MANNONI: That’s when I truly won.

LACAN:

This was meant simply to get you interested in the rhythm of alternations. Just as the other day, I showed you many unnecessary things to bring you back to the center, namely that it’s about winning or losing. This was only to get you interested in the matter.

Now, the first task for each of you is to write on the first sheet, as you see fit—you can do it with great flourish, and I believe the more flourish, the better—that it has an almost automatic character. Imagine that you are playing odd or even with the machine. What sequence would you follow?

You could do it while feeling like you are proceeding randomly. So, on the first sheet, create a sequence of (+) and (-).

It goes without saying that there is no question of intersubjectivity at each move. But I ask you not to proceed as MANNONI did. Do it randomly. Manifest your own symbolic inertia, in groups of three, taking turns interrogating, responding, and noting: 12 groups.