‘Blinded Me with Science’: Motifs of Observation and Temporality in Lacan and Luhmann

Abstract

In taking up the topic of cybernetics in 1955, a field then exerting influence on everything from telecommunications to public health management (see Heims), Jacques Lacan proposed the rubric of "conjectural sciences" for all those sciences of combination, where "[w]hat's at issue is the place, and what does or doesn't come to fill it, something then which is strictly equivalent to its own inexistence" (Seminar, Book II 299). This "science of the combination of places as such" is, to be sure, distinct from the exact sciences, which always focus on "what is found at the same place" (299). The exact sciences, in other words, deal with positivities, the conjectural sciences with probabilities. It is, indeed, to Pascal's arithmetic triangle that Lacan turns when he wishes to trace the origins of this science of combinations: "If this is how we locate cybernetics, we will easily find it ancestors, Condorcet, for instance, with his theory of votes and coalitions, of parties, as he says, and further back again Pascal, who would be its father, and its true point of origin" (296).