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(All parts in English)

Conference: “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics or On the Nature of Language”

Professor, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In my address, I would like to distinguish among you those who usually hear me on Wednesdays at a slightly later hour. This is to associate them with me in the tribute and gratitude we extend to the one I first mentioned, Jean DELAY, who graciously inaugurated this series of conferences and who today honors us with his presence at this session.

I also want to personally thank him for providing this form of exchange, this mode of teaching in the form of seminars, which I have been conducting here for two years now, with a venue, a roof that, in itself, lends it prestige—not only by its location and the rich history it carries but also by infusing this teaching with the resonance of his own words.

Today, I want to talk to you about psychoanalysis and cybernetics. At the very least, this is a topic that, in the context of examining the connections between psychoanalysis and various human sciences, has seemed to me worthy of attention—and you will soon see why.

Let me make it clear from the outset: we will not be seeking here the relationships between our technique and the more or less sensational forms of cybernetics. I will not discuss either large or small machines, nor will I name them or enumerate the marvels they accomplish. Why would any of this interest us? Yet, there is something that seemed to me worth extracting:
– From what we might call their relative contemporaneity: the simultaneous emergence of two techniques, two orders of thought and science—psychoanalysis and cybernetics.
– And, on the other hand, certain meanings that each of these fields engages with.

Amidst all this, I must carefully guide the perspective through which I hope to offer you insights into the meanings of cybernetics. Do not expect anything that, on either side, claims to be exhaustive. The goal is to establish an axis of relationship through which something about the meaning of one illuminates the other. This axis is nothing other than language. That is why I must reveal to you certain aspects of the nature of language, offering brief flashes of insight in what I attempt to explain today.

The question we will begin with is this: It is a question that arose—since I alluded to our seminars, I can legitimately refer to them—during one of our sessions when, step by step, we arrived at the question of what it would mean to play a game of chance with a machine. The game we had chosen was the game of odd or even.

It might seem surprising that in a seminar on psychoanalysis, we would be discussing the game of odd or even. But we also discuss other things. This year, for example, we have spoken about NEWTON. I do not believe these topics arise randomly—if I may say so.

It is precisely because we speak about the game of odd or even—and perhaps also about NEWTON—that the technique of psychoanalysis risks not falling into degraded, if not degrading, paths, which is our primary concern.

Well, in the course of this discussion about odd or even, the aim was to demonstrate, to recall, that this game evokes something meaningful to us as analysts: the notion that nothing happens by chance, and that even in a game seemingly governed by pure chance, something can be revealed. The result was quite astonishing.

Among this audience of analysts, we encountered a kind of genuine indignation at the thought—as someone put it—that I intended to abolish chance. In truth, the person who said this was someone with firmly determinist convictions, and it was precisely this that frightened them. That person was right: there is a close connection between the existence of chance and the foundation of determinism. But let us reflect a little on chance.

What do we mean when we say that something happens by chance? We mean two very different things:
– We mean that there is no intention involved.
– And we also mean—this is another sense—that there is a law involved.

The very notion of determinism, however, is that the law operates without intention. That is why any development of deterministic theory will always seek to understand how what exists in reality, what functions according to a law, emerges from something originally undifferentiated, which is precisely chance as the absence of intention. Certainly, determinism tells us, nothing happens without cause, but it is a cause without intention.

It becomes clear, then, that to the extent this kind of exemplary experiment could suggest to my interlocutor that something had ultimately been grasped—God knows how easily the mind slips in these matters—which might reintroduce determinism, not quite into the game of odd or even, for that is precisely what unsettled my interlocutor, but even into the game of heads or tails, to which they more or less intuitively equated odd or even. If determinism exists in the game of heads or tails, where does that leave us? No true determinism seems possible anymore.

This question opens for us the problem of what exactly this determinism is that we, as analysts, fundamentally assume at the very root of our technique:
– When we believe that something determined and determinable can be brought to light.
– When we strive to have the subject deliver to us their speech, their thoughts, as we say, their statements, without intention—in other words, when they intentionally approach randomness as closely as possible.

What is this determinism that seeks to be found in an intention of randomness?

It is on this subject, I believe, that cybernetics can shed some light.

Cybernetics is—as I believe many of you already perceive or know—a field with extremely indeterminate boundaries. Finding its unity forces us, for a moment, to scan spheres of rationalization that cover vast, dispersed areas, grouped by a certain unity that we must precisely identify, much like in all the human sciences.

And this spans from politics, game theory, and communication theories, to even certain definitions of something that represents the great originality contributed by cybernetics: the notion of information.

We are told that cybernetics was born specifically from engineering work concerning the efficiency of information, the economy of information transmitted through certain conduits, and the method of reducing a message to its essential elements in the way it is conveyed and received. In this sense, it would date back approximately a decade, since it emerged from these experiments, and the term was coined by Mr. Norbert WIENER, one of the most eminent engineers in this kind of research.

It is here that we might identify the birth of this science. However, I believe this would certainly limit its scope, and it is through a reflection that reaches back in time that we will attempt to determine the origin of cybernetics here.

To understand what cybernetics is about, I believe we must search for its origin around the theme—so crucial for us—of the meaning, the significance of chance. The past of cybernetics, I believe, consists of nothing other than the rationalized formation of what we might call, to contrast them with the exact sciences, the conjectural sciences.

If we take this as our foundation, if we define conjecture as something very precise—which we will attempt to clarify—and which, I believe, is the true name that should henceforth be given to describe the axis of a certain group of sciences that the term “human sciences” does not misrepresent (because, after all, conjecture concerns human action). However, I find the term “human sciences” too vague and overly burdened with all sorts of confused echoes from pseudo-initiatory sciences, which inevitably lower its tension and level. Something would certainly be gained by a more rigorous, more focused definition: the sciences of conjecture.

If we approach it this way, we can easily trace the ancestors of cybernetics back to [BOOLE?], to CONDORCET himself with his theory of voting—of the parties, as he calls them—and even further back to the one who would be considered its father and its true point of origin: PASCAL. We will see what this means.

To make you feel this, I will begin precisely with the fundamental notions from the other sphere of sciences, the exact sciences, whose modern development does not date back much further and which can be seen as absolutely correlative to the development of conjectural sciences—perhaps overshadowing them, eclipsing them to some extent—but remaining strictly inseparable from one another.

How could we define the exact sciences? We might say that the exact sciences, unlike conjectural sciences, concern the real. But what is the real? I do not believe that, in this regard, human opinion has ever varied much, contrary to what a psychologizing genealogy of human thought would have us believe—a genealogy that suggests humanity lived, in its earliest ages, in a world of dreams and that even children are habitually hallucinated by their desires.

These peculiar conceptions fundamentally distort all notions of psychological genesis and are so contrary to observation that I must speak plainly. One cannot avoid questioning the origin of such myths, but today is certainly not the day we will attempt to do so.

If we were to seek a meaning for the real, to understand the meaning humanity has always attributed to it, it is something we find in the same place, whether or not we were there. It may have moved, but if it has, we search for it elsewhere, we seek to understand why it was disturbed. We might even say that sometimes it has moved on its own, but it remains firmly in its place, whether we are there or not.

And our own movements, in principle—with few exceptions—do not effectively influence this change of place. In other words, we do not always carry the real with us. The exact sciences are certainly most closely related to this function of the real.

If, nevertheless, they have not always existed, I believe the […] distinction does not lie in this supposed omnipotence of thought, which is identified with an equally supposed archaic stage of animism. It is not at all the case that humanity once lived in an anthropomorphic world, expecting human responses from it.

I believe this conception is utterly childish and implies the notion of the “childhood of humanity,” which corresponds to nothing historical. Rather, humanity believed that its actions had something to do with maintaining the order of these places. In other words, people believed—just as we do—that the real is what one finds in the right place at the right time:
– Every night, at the same hour, one will find a certain star on a certain meridian.
– It will return there; it is always there; it is always the same.

It is not by chance that I use celestial reference points before terrestrial ones, because, in truth, humanity charted the sky before charting the globe.

For a long time, humanity held the idea that something was accomplished through these rites, these ceremonies:
– The emperor opening the spring furrow,
– Spring dances guaranteeing the fertility of all nature…

That something in these actions—which were ordered actions, meaningful actions, and actions in the truest sense of the word: that of speech—was indispensable for maintaining things in their place.

They did not believe that the real would vanish if they failed to participate in this orderly manner, but they did believe the real would become disordered. They did not claim to make the law; they claimed that their presence was indispensable for the permanence of the law.

This is a crucial definition because it fully preserves the rigor of the existence of the real.

A threshold was crossed at a certain moment. Humanity realized that these rites, these dances, and these invocations had no real influence on the order by which […]

Was humanity right or wrong? We do not know.

It is quite certain that we no longer possess the conviction that seems necessary for the inevitable return of the seasons. From that moment on, the perspective of exact science could emerge. But where does this lead us? Humanity thinks that the great clock of nature turns on its own and continues to mark time even when no one is there. From that moment, the order of science is born. The order of science is precisely this: from being an officiant of nature, humanity has become its subordinate. Humanity will not govern nature except by obeying it. And like a slave, it attempts to make its master dependent on it by serving it well. From then on, humanity knows that nature can be punctual to the appointments it sets.

But what, in the end, is this exactitude? Exactitude is precisely the meeting of two temporalities in nature.
– There is an order in nature; there are things that function like clocks. There is a very large clock, which is none other than the solar system, whose diameter is traversed in a number of light-time units, from the sun to the most distant planet. This, for example, is a natural clock that had to be deciphered. Undoubtedly, this was one of the most decisive, essential, and assured steps in the constitution of this exact science.
– But humanity, too, must have its clock and its watch. How will it create them? With something we will try to indicate very briefly, something it borrowed from nature’s clock. But ultimately, this clock must be set to something.

What is exact? Is it nature? It is not certain that nature will meet every appointment. Of course, we can define as natural only that which responds to the appointed time. When Voltaire said of Buffon’s Natural History that it was not so natural after all, this is roughly what he meant.

This implies that there is perhaps a somewhat simplistic question of definition here: my betrothed always comes to the appointment because when she doesn’t, I no longer call her my betrothed. On the other hand, is humanity itself exact? Where is the spring of exactitude if not precisely in this synchronization of clocks?

I am not merely saying subtle things here. Observe carefully that, ultimately, the watch—a watch that works rigorously, that divides time isochronously, whose pulse is precise and regular—strictly speaking, did not exist until the time I mentioned earlier: that of Pascal.

That is to say, the era when Mr. Huygens—we pronounce this name in the French way; I apologize to Flemish speakers—constructed, succeeded in constructing, the first perfectly isochronous clock in 1659, inaugurating “a universe of precision”—to use an expression by Alexandre Koyré—without which there was absolutely no possibility of truly exact science.

Where is exactitude? Exactitude consists of something we have embedded into this clock and this watch, namely a certain factor, a certain factor borrowed from a certain natural time. This factor is the factor g.

g, as you know, is the acceleration caused by gravity—in short, a ratio of space and time. It is something deduced from a certain thought experiment, to use Galileo’s own term. Do not forget that it is something hypothetical, a hypothesis embodied in an instrument.

And if the instrument was made to confirm the hypothesis, there is no need to conduct the experiment to confirm it, because the mere fact that the instrument works already confirms the hypothesis. You only need to examine the matter attentively to realize this. But this instrument must still be set to something—a unit of time. And a unit of time is always something borrowed from this reference to the real, that is to say, from the fact that something returns to the same place somewhere. This unit of time is our sidereal day.

I must tell you that if you consult a physicist—take, for example, Mr. Borel—he will affirm that, in the current state of things, if a certain deceleration—sufficiently imperceptible, but certainly not immeasurable over time—were to occur in the Earth’s rotation, that is, our sidereal day, we would be utterly incapable of detecting it. This is because the said clock, which represents time for us, is isochronous, and we nevertheless calibrate its division to match the sidereal day—that is, something we cannot control.

In other words, this remark serves only to make you feel that while we measure space with solids, we measure time with time. These are not the same. No wonder, under these conditions, that a certain part of our exact science ends up being summarized in a very small number of symbols referring to things like energy and matter (E = mc²).

For a time, this was our demand: that everything be expressed in terms of matter and motion. That meant matter and time because, precisely, motion, as something that existed in the real, was that. We managed to eliminate it, to reduce it.

Well, ultimately, this little symbolic game, these few small letters I could write on the board—the systems of Newton and Einstein—are something that, in the end, has very little to do with the real. This science, which reduces the real to this small bundle of formulas, will undoubtedly appear, with the passage of time, as a remarkable epic—and perhaps it will also thin out in perspective, like an epic whose scope was perhaps somewhat limited.

But there is something else. From the moment we observed this foundation of the exactitude of the exact sciences, namely the instrument, perhaps we can ask something else. Namely this: What are these places? In other words, we begin to concern ourselves with places as voids.

This is precisely why—since the two terms are so associated, coherent, inseparable—it was exactly in correlation with the birth of the exact sciences that something else began to emerge, something that was more or less understood, rather poorly understood: the calculus of probabilities.

But originally—if we take the date when it arose, when it appeared in its first truly modern, scientific, and rigorous form: 1654, Pascal’s treatise on the Arithmetic Triangle—it presents itself not as the calculus of chance, as implied by the term probability, but as the calculus of chances themselves, that is, of encounters in themselves.

What Pascal develops in this kind of early machine, which is precisely this arithmetic triangle, commands the attention of the scholarly world because it allows one to immediately determine, to instantly discover, what a player has the right to expect at a certain moment when the sequence of moves that constitutes a game is suspended or interrupted.

What does this mean? It means that in a succession of moves—which are the simplest and most reduced form one can give to the idea of encounter—something is already acquired, already past. But as long as convention has not terminated this sequence, as long as we have not reached its conclusion, something remains evaluable.

That something is precisely this: the possibilities considered as such of the encounter, considered as such, that is to say, of the place—
– something that comes to it or does not,
– something that arises in this place or does not, as such,
– something that is strictly equivalent to its own nonexistence.

In place of the science of “what is found in the same place,” there arises the science of “the combination of places” as such, within an ordered register that unquestionably presupposes the notion of moves, that is, the notion of scansion. From there emerges something that, of course, immediately gathers its material, where everything that until then had been the science of numbers becomes the science of combinations, where everything that had been a kind of more or less confused, hazardous—meaning accidental, not random—pathway in the world of symbols, organizes itself around something precise: the correlation between absence 0 and presence 1.

It is from here that you can understand the entire evolution that leads the search for this law of presence and absence, and the sequence, arrangement, and combination of presences, to tend—through a process that we can rightly call mathematical—toward the establishment of binary order, which is precisely the most remarkable originality, at least in the genesis, in the symbolic emergence of what ultimately becomes what we call cybernetics.

Understand well that by maintaining the originality of what appears in our world in the form of cybernetics along this boundary, along this frontier, I intentionally link it to something that is inherently tied to humanity’s anticipation.

If the science of combinations, of encounters scanned as such, has come into the sphere of humanity’s attention, it is because humanity is deeply invested in it. And it is not by chance that this emerges from the experience of games of chance. Nor is it by chance that the term “game theory,” in the extraordinarily comprehensive sense we understand it today, has drawn interest from, for example:
– all the functions of our economic life: the theory of coalitions, monopolies…
– the theory of war, after all, since the notion of strategic game in war is nothing other than treating and considering war in its essentially playful mechanics, detached from anything real embodied within it.

It is not by chance that the same word designates this and games of chance. And why—since in the first games I mentioned, we are dealing with a relationship of intersubjective coordination—does humanity call upon and seek something, even in the calculations it dedicates to them, in games of chance? Why does it manifest through this semantic homophony (“jeu de hasard”—“I of chance”) that it must have some connection with intersubjectivity, even though in games of chance, intersubjectivity seems precisely eliminated?

This brings us very close to the central question I began with: What is this chance of the unconscious that we seek, and that humanity somehow carries behind it? Indeed, in games of chance, it is certainly something where one tests one’s luck, without a doubt, but also something where one reads one’s fate. What interests humanity here is the idea that something of itself is revealed—something all the more deeply personal because, in front of it, there is no one else.

This is a side remark, one I will return to only at the end, which I make here at a precise point, a specific punctuation in what I am explaining to you now.

Once engaged in this theory of conjecture, what is required for us to properly speak of cybernetics? Earlier, I mentioned the convergence of the entire theoretical process toward the theses of BOOLE, toward a binary symbolism, toward the fact that anything can be written in terms of 0 and 1. But what else is required for something to emerge in the world—something we call cybernetics, which is truly something new?

– It must function in the real, independently of any subjectivity.
– This science of encounters as such, of empty places as such, must combine, add up, and totalize itself.
– It must start functioning, so to speak, on its own.

What is required for this? It still requires taking something from the real that can sustain it. For as long as humanity has existed, it has sought to conjoin this real with this play of symbols:
– Humanity wrote things on walls.
– It even imagined, at times, that things like “Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” could write themselves on walls.
– It placed numbers where the shadow of the sun stopped at every hour of the day.

But in the end, symbols always remained in the place where they were made to be. They were stuck in this real, and one could believe that they were nothing more than markers of this real. The novelty is that symbols have been allowed to fly on their own, if I may put it that way—and thanks to what? Thanks to a simple, common device, one at arm’s length, requiring only the push of a handle: a door.

A door is not something, I urge you to reflect, entirely real. Taking it as something real would lead to strange misunderstandings. If you observed a door and deduced, for example, that it produces drafts, this might lead you to carry it under your arm into the desert to cool yourself, and the result would be nil.

I have searched extensively in all dictionaries for the meaning of a door. There are two pages about doors in LITTRÉ:
– It goes from the door as an opening to the door as a more or less tight closure.
– It goes from the oriental door, from the sublime porte, to the door: “if you come back, I’ll make a mask of it for your nose,” as REGNARD wrote.

All of this is not very satisfying. And following this, without commentary, LITTRÉ writes that a door must be either open or closed. No one will be surprised by this; it did not entirely satisfy me, despite the literary echoes it evokes.

I have a natural distrust of the wisdom of nations. Many things are inscribed there, but always in a slightly confused form. This is precisely why psychoanalysis exists. We will return to this shortly.

It is true: a door must be either open or closed. But this is not entirely equivalent. Observe this: language can guide us here. A door, my God, opens onto fields, but we do not say that it closes onto the sheepfold, nor onto the enclosure.

I know well that here I am confusing porta and fores, which refers to the door of the enclosure, but we are not overly concerned with that, and we can continue our meditation on the door.

If a door opens something, what is it, in fact? One might think, because I spoke of the field and the sheepfold, that it concerns the inside and the outside. I believe this would be a significant mistake. We live in an era grand enough to imagine a great wall that would precisely encircle the Earth—according to an American—and if you pierce a door in it, where is the inside, where is the outside?

This is an entire truth. A door, when it is open, is not necessarily more generous because of it. We say that a window “opens onto the countryside.” It is quite curious that when we say that a door “opens onto somewhere,” it generally refers to a door that is habitually closed, and sometimes even sealed. It is in this case that we say “it opens onto…”

A door, my God, is sometimes taken, and this is always a rather decisive act, and it is far more common for someone to deny you a door than anything else. There can be two people on either side of a door, watching each other—you cannot imagine such a scenario with a window. A door can be forced open, even when it is already open, naturally—as Alphonse Allais said—“this is foolish and cruel.” By contrast, entering through a window is always seen as an act full of brazenness and, in any case, certainly deliberate, whereas one often passes through a door without even noticing it.

In short, this door has something quite distinct in itself, already at first approximation, from the truly instrumental function of a window. Of course, it opens onto something, though we are not entirely sure whether it opens onto the real or the imaginary. But it is one of the two. By its very nature, the door undoubtedly belongs to the symbolic order.

It belongs to it so much that the key to this asymmetry between opening and closing is that while opening regulates access—that is, something that happens in a direction, through the door—the fact that it closes regulates enclosure. What it closes is not the enclosure; it is the circuit. More precisely, I said initially, it is the enclosure.

And it is precisely from this moment that this door becomes a true symbol, as it is precisely the quintessential symbol by which we always recognize humanity’s passage somewhere: it is the intersection of two lines and the cross they form—access and closure.

It is from the moment we could fold these two lines onto one another—namely, create the closure, precisely the circuit, that is, something where something passes when it is closed 1 and does not pass when it is open 0—that we gained the ability to transfer the science of conjecture, as such, into the realizations of cybernetics.

For if there are machines that calculate by themselves, machines that add, totalize, and perform all the marvels that humanity had until then believed to be unique to thought, it is because we have the ability to establish, thanks to “the fairy electricity,” as it is said, circuits—circuits that open or close, interrupt or reestablish themselves—based on the existence of doors, that is, cybernetized doors, the door where access regulates closure, which is the essential definition from which you can develop all its manipulations.

Because observe carefully: what is at stake here is the relation as such, access and closure, meaning that once the door opens, it closes, and when it closes, it opens again.

A door must not be simply “open or closed!” It must be “open, then closed, then open, then closed…”

The foundation of any kind of machine arises from this possibility you know: the possibility, thanks to the electrical circuit and the self-connected induction circuit—what is called feedback—a very original kind, whose effect is that the moment the door closes, it is immediately pulled back into an open state by an electromagnet, then closed again, then opened again, thus generating what is called an oscillation.

This oscillation is scansion, and scansion is the foundation upon which you can indefinitely inscribe actions ordered by a series of assemblies, which will no longer be, as the saying goes, anything more than child’s play [Cf.Fort−Da].

All possible combinations of opening and closing can be arranged. For example, you can perform operations like this: 0 0 1 1.

Here are four cases, which can be:
– In the first two cases: 0,0, a closed door.
– In the other two: 1, an open door.

Then, alternatively, a door closed or open: 0 1 0 1.

What will result from this? You can decree, for example, that a third door will, following this, be open or closed in the following cases:

• 0 0 : 0
• 0 1 : 1
• 1 0 : 1
• 1 1 : 1

In other words, when there is just one open door—3 cases out of 4—it will suffice for the third door to open.

There are countless other formulas. You can decree that both doors must be open for the third to be open.

• 0 0 : 0
• 0 1 : 0
• 1 0 : 0
• 1 1 : 1

I’ll give you a third case because it is quite interesting. Here, you decree that the third door will open only when one and only one of the two is open:

• 0 0 : 0
• 0 1 : 1
• 1 0 : 1
• 1 1 : 0

What is all this? It is anything you want. For example, this:

• 0 0 : 0
• 0 1 : 1
• 1 0 : 1
• 1 1 : 1

This can logically be called union or disjunction. Another interpretation could be: “either…or…,” “this or that.”

It can also represent a certain way of assembling the circuit—namely two doors, two relays placed in series.

• 0 0 : 0
• 0 1 : 0
• 1 0 : 0
• 1 1 : 1

Here you have a series assembly. This could logically be called a conjunction, defined by “and.” It requires 1 and 1 for there to be 1.

This corresponds, as you can see, to elementary arithmetic laws, specifically those of multiplication, which is why it is sometimes called logical multiplication.

Finally, this:

• 0 0 : 0
• 0 1 : 1
• 1 0 : 1
• 1 1 : 0

is entirely original and required a specific term: “addition modulo 2.” [xor]

This is not so foreign because if you perform addition with binary notation, you will inevitably use this table, knowing that when you add 1 and 1 in binary notation, it equals 0, and you carry over 1.

This is simply to give you the perspective that, through a certain reduction, a simplification of symbols, and from the moment it becomes possible to embody in the real this 0 and this 1—this notation of presence and absence as such—and to embody it within a fundamental rhythm and scansion, something has entered the real. And we have wondered—perhaps not for very long, but still, we have wondered, and minds not at all negligible have wondered—whether this is something we could call, as it has been said, “a thinking machine.” Of course, we know very well that this machine does not think. We built this machine, and it thinks—well—what we told it to think.

Because, after all, when we do the same things…
and we do the same things as soon as we pick up a pencil and start writing one of these signs on a small scrap of paper, performing additions, multiplications—tasks that are very tedious, extremely tedious, although each involves a resolutely original type of action, namely:
that one has made these symbols through one’s action…

…and suddenly, the symbols return themselves to action, meaning they have formed a collection.

This is the foundation of addition. And suddenly, what was completed is somehow reopened and undone. And from there, we are going to redo another. This is the essence of the mechanism. When we actually perform it, that is, when we add 2, 4, and 5, if someone were to tell us that we are not thinking at that moment, we would be rather offended. And yet, it is clear that if we deny thought to the machine, we are not really thinking either when we perform some specific operation. We follow exactly the same—please allow me the quotation marks—“mechanisms” as the machine.

What matters here is this realization:
– that something exists, which is the possible chain of all sorts of potential combinations of encounters as such,
– that this can be studied as such, and that if we study it as such, we see that it is an order that persists in its rigor—I say “rigor” rather than “truth,” which would lead us too far—independent of any subjectivity.

Through cybernetics, the symbol is embodied in a way that is literally transubjective, and which can, as such, be embodied in an object, an apparatus. It is, of course, not the apparatus that matters—the apparatus is merely its support. What matters is a symbolic play as such and a play that contains what? Dimensions that are its own.

I have had to proceed along paths that may have appeared slow to you. But you must have sustained them in your mind to understand the true meaning of everything cybernetics brings us. Take, for example, the notion of the message.

The notion of message in cybernetics has nothing to do with what we usually call a message, that is, something that always carries meaning. In cybernetics, the message is a sequence of signs, and a sequence of signs can always be reduced to a sequence of 0s and 1s.

This is why what is called the “unit of information,” that is, the measure of the efficiency of any signs, always refers back to a fundamental unit known as the keyboard, which is nothing more than the binary alternative, quite simply.

Within this symbolic system, the message is situated within a kind of basic network, which is:
– the combination as such,
– the encounter as such,

on the basis of a unified scansion, that is to say, a 1 that constitutes the scansion.

This defines the perspective of the message and also shows you precisely the limit within which you can accept or reject more or less adulterated uses of the word “message” in the context of cybernetics, which are derived from it.

On the other hand, the notion of “information” and everything said about “information”—whether or not it stands in a certain relationship with entropy—is as straightforward as the small table I showed you to demonstrate that it is the very principle of introducing this symbolic system into the real.

Observe this: When I speak, for example, of a series of two moves that must result in:
0 0 : 0
0 1 : 0
1 0 : 0
1 1 : 1

where I must have two positive moves to win, to get 1, this means that, at the outset, my expectation is 1/4. There is only one case out of four where I will win among the possible combinations.

Suppose I have already played one move. If I have already played one move:
– In one case (first move: 0), I no longer have any chance.
– In one case (first move: 1), I have a one-in-two chance.

What does this mean? It means that a differentiation in the level of my chances has occurred, and this differentiation has occurred in an increasing direction. Phenomena referred to as energetic and natural always tend toward leveling out inequalities. But in the realm of the message and probability calculus, as information arrives, the inequality differentiates.

I am not saying it always increases—you might find a case where it does not—but it does not necessarily degrade, and it generally moves toward differentiation.

The existence of this fundamental element is the foundation upon which everything we call “language” can be ordered.

Because what is required for something we commonly call language to emerge?

For language to come into being, poor little things must first be introduced—things we call spelling and syntax.

But all of this is already present at the start. Because all of this is, precisely as such, a syntax. This is precisely why machines can be made to perform logical operations.

In other words, syntax exists before semantics in this perspective.

Cybernetics is a science of syntax, and it may also be the key to realizing that everything we have called exact sciences is, fundamentally, nothing other than the act of linking the real to a syntax.

So, semantics—that is to say, the concrete languages we handle, with all their ambiguity, their emotional content, their human meaning—what are they, after all? Shall we also say that they are populated, furnished by the desires of human beings? It is we who bring meaning. Of course, this is undoubtedly true to a large extent.

But can we also say that everything circulating within the machine is entirely devoid of meaning? Certainly not, at least not in every sense of the word “meaning.” Because there is something I have not yet told you: for a message to truly be a message, it must not only be a sequence of signs, but a sequence of oriented signs. And for it to function according to a syntax, the machine must move in a certain direction. And when I say machine, you understand perfectly well that I am no longer speaking merely of the little box. When I write all this on my paper, when I establish hypotheses for the transformation of little 1s and 0s, it also concerns something always oriented in a particular direction.

It is therefore not—something we already suspected—absolutely accurate to say that within this primitive language, it is purely and entirely human desire that introduces meaning. The proof lies in the fact that ultimately, nothing emerges from the machine except—please note this—what we expect from it; that is, not so much what interests us, but the point where we decided it would stop, and where a certain result would be read. The foundation of the system is already embedded in the play itself. Of course, how could it be established otherwise, since it rests fundamentally on the notion of chance, on the notion of a certain pure expectation, which already constitutes a form of meaning?

Here, then, is the symbol in its purest form, in a form that can already produce more than mere syntax errors, because syntax errors only generate mistakes. But I would say that programming errors produce something not simply accidental but falsehood. Already, at this level, truth and falsehood as such are implicated.

What does this mean for us, as analysts? What are we dealing with in the discourse of the human subject addressing us? In this discourse, we are dealing with an impure discourse. An impure discourse—why? Is it merely because of syntax errors? Of course not. All of psychoanalysis is precisely founded on the fact that extracting something meaningful from human discourse is not a matter of logic. Its meaning lies behind the discourse, in something that manifests itself through it, in its symbolic function.

What is this other meaning of the word symbol that emerges now that we are seeking its significance? Well, this is where a crucial fact highlighted by cybernetics comes into play, and it is this:
There is something that cannot be eliminated from the symbolic function of human discourse, and it is this: the role played by the imaginary.

The first symbols, the natural symbols, originate from a certain number of prevailing images—the image of the human body, the image of several evident objects such as the sun, the moon, and a few others. And it is this, we know, that gives its weight, its driving force, and its emotional resonance to a whole part of human language.

Is this imaginary something homogeneous with the symbolic? No! The fact that analysis tends to impose it, to make the imaginary into a coaptation of the subject with an elective, privileged object—which provides the module for what is now fashionably termed in psychoanalysis the “object relation”—reducing psychoanalysis to the emergence, to the emphasis, to the limit of the discourse on these imaginary themes and the subject’s coaptation with them fundamentally perverts the meaning of analysis.

If there is something cybernetics reveals to us, it is the radical distinction between the symbolic order and the imaginary order. This distinction is illustrated by something a cyberneticist recently confessed to me: the extreme difficulty, despite claims to the contrary, of translating Gestalt functions cybernetically—that is, the coaptation of one good form with another good form. What constitutes good form in the living world is bad form in the symbolic world.

Since earlier I mentioned the pendulum and Pascal, I will make one simple observation:
The true isochronous pendulum, which makes Huygens’ construction a landmark, is the discovery of the cycloid.

As has often been said, humanity invented the wheel. The wheel is not found in nature, but we know that it represents a good form, the circle. However, what is the fundamental difference? It is that the wheel does not roll in nature:
– There is no wheel rolling in nature.
– There is no wheel inscribing the trace of one of its points in each of its rotations.
– There is no cycloid in the imaginary.

The cycloid is a discovery of the symbolic. It can be replicated in a cybernetic machine, but it remains exceedingly difficult—except artificially—to make one circle respond to another circle through the dialogue of two machines.

Here is a fundamental truth that distinguishes two essential planes: the inertia of the imaginary, which we see interfering with the subject’s discourse, blurring it, preventing us from realizing:
– that when I wish someone well, I wish them harm,
– that when I love someone, it is myself whom I love,
– or when I believe I love myself, it is precisely at that moment that I love someone else.

This confusion of the imaginary, which constitutes the fundamental dialectical exercise of analysis and allows the restitution of meaning in discourse, is the focal point around which two fundamental orientations of analysis diverge.

It is a matter of determining whether the symbolic exists as such, or whether the symbolic is merely, as one might say, the secondary-level fantasy of imaginary coaptations. This is where the choice arises between two terms and two orientations of analysis.

Necessarily, since all meanings have accumulated for a long time through the adventures of history in the ballast of semantics, the question is whether to follow the subject along the path already defined by their discourse, given that they already know they are engaging in psychoanalysis:
– and that psychoanalysis has already established norms,
– and that psychoanalysis has already told them to be nice,
– that is, to become a mature individual, freed from the stages and phases dominated by the fundamental image of one orifice or another.

The question is whether this is important enough to be reduced, corrected, within the sequence of universal discourse in which the subject is engaged, or whether it is merely a matter of coaptation with these fundamental images.

The question is whether analysis aims at normalization, a rectification in imaginary terms, or the liberation of meaning within discourse.

It is here that schools and orientations diverge. And I believe I can say that if Freud—who at most possessed this profound sense of meaning, making certain of his works readable like those of a prophet—takes The Theme of the Three Caskets and recognizes death in the character [of Portia?], one could say that he is guided by something akin to poetic inspiration.

The question is whether psychoanalysis will continue in this Freudian direction, in this pursuit that looks beyond language—not towards the ineffable, nor towards the point where language stops, but instead, towards what lies beyond: meaning itself.

And what does meaning mean?

Meaning is this: the human being is not the master of this primordial and primitive language. He has been thrown into it, engaged, caught in its gears. Its origin—we do not know.

We are told that in languages, cardinal numbers appeared before ordinal numbers. This was unexpected.

If we were to consider the normal way in which humanity enters this game of places:
– it is the order of procession,
– it is the order of dance, to which I referred earlier, whether the primitive dance or the civil and religious procession,
– it is the order of precedence,
– it is the order in which the organization of the city is represented, which is nothing other than order and hierarchy,

…then ultimately, it should be ordinal numbers that appear first. Yet, linguists affirm that cardinal numbers appeared first.

We must marvel at the paradox. Humanity is not master in its own house here; there is something into which it integrates itself, something that already regulates, through the law of its combinations, the laws of dance, through which humanity transitions from the order of nature to the order of culture. These are the same mathematical combination tables that will serve to classify and explain.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss calls them “elementary structures of kinship.” And yet, primitive humans are not assumed to have been Pascal. Well, humanity is already fully engaged in this procession, this procession of numbers or of a primitive and fundamental symbolism, which is distinct from these imaginary representations. This is something around which a fundamental conflict establishes itself.

Because ultimately, humanity also has, within all of this, the task of making itself recognized. But this something that demands to be recognized, we are told—and this is the meaning of what Freud tells us—is not expressed. It is repressed.

If this were within a machine, it would simply fall away. It would demand nothing. Once it fails to appear at the right time, it no longer explains the timing of the machine. With humanity, it is not the same. The scansion is alive. Therefore, what fails to arrive on time in humanity remains suspended, remains repressed. That is what is at stake here.

The meaning of analysis is this: something that, while undoubtedly not expressed, does not exist, but is always there, something that insists, that demands to be.

The fundamental relationship of humanity to this symbolic order is precisely the one that founds the symbolic order itself:
– it is the order from non-being to being,
– it is what insists on being satisfied and can only be satisfied through recognition. It is non-being, the conclusion of this relationship, of this grand adventure of humanity in relation to symbolism.

We cannot separate from this either psychoanalysis or cybernetics.

This end is that non-being comes to be, that it exists, because it has spoken.