In this talk I revisit Jacques Lacan’s engagement with Cybernetics in the 1950s as a means of thinking through current developments in Artificial Intelligence. As recent commentators such as John Johnston and Lydia Liu have pointed out, Cybernetics is a comparatively neglected aspect of Lacan’s work in that period. Indeed Liu goes so far as to suggest that what he is delineating in this kind of work is the ‘cybernetic unconscious of the postwar Euro-American world order’. This gives us a different view of Lacan’s thought to the standard one of a linguistic structuralist rereading Freud through Saussure and Jakobson, one that offers a ‘paradoxically nonlinguistic view of language, the symbolic order, and the unconscious’. The fourth session of lacan’s Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954 – 5 is entitled ‘A materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness’. In it Lacan invokes a lake reflecting mountains and waterfalls as a model of consciousness which he compares to a camera. Arthur Bradley suggests that this passage shows that Lacan is not interested in whether machines can be conscious, an issue to which he is ‘supremely diffident’, but rather that, for him, ‘“Human” consciousness is itself a kind of machine’. Because of the existence of cameras, ‘Lacan implies, we must learn to recognize ourselves anew: we human beings never actually disappeared from the world at all, but only because we were never really there in the first place, because human consciousness is itself a species of automatic photography, because we are the camera’. This is part of Lacan’s attack on the prevalent Ego Psychology in postwar psychoanalysis, which sought to restore the integrity of the ego, which Lacan saw as ‘an object that exists at the level of the imaginary’. In the same seminar Lacan analyses various games of chance to show how the symbolic emerges out of the real. Lacan’s neglected engagement with Cybernetics takes on a new relevance in the light of recent developments in AI and Large Language Models, or what Richard Harper calls ‘word geometry engines’.
Charlie Gere is professor of media theory and history at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of a number of books, most recently Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God (2019), I Hate the Lake District (2020) and World’s End (2022).