(Traduction: deepl)
Computers and robots, which are and will be constantly improved to interact with us, all have a common basis, a unique feature in a way: their ability to hold our interest or more precisely to capture our attention. The notion of capturing attention has already been dealt with by other authors. Thus, in a collective work that he edited, « L’économie de l’attention », Yves Citton, professor of literature, begins by defining attention as a « form of mental energy » (1). To approach this form of mental energy that is attention, let us start here from a short but essential article by Sigmund Freud dated 1911 and entitled « Formulations on the two principles of the course of psychic events » (2).
The ambition of the article is « to examine (…) the relation (…) of man in general to reality (…) » (3). The author starts from the « oldest » processes in the elaboration of the psyche of each human being, which he calls primary processes. At the time of the appearance of these processes in the early stages of life, « there was no other kind of psychic process ». These « tend to obtain pleasure » and their main tendency is called « pleasure-displeasure principle (or more briefly pleasure principle) ». « (4) In order to understand that, in the baby, the first psychic processes are of the order of what I will name pleasure or distress, it is necessary to keep in mind that at the beginning, the little human does not distinguish the difference between inside and outside, between him and the other; he does not think, does not apprehend the world as we are used to do. Freud supposes that « the state of psychic rest was initially disturbed by the imperious demands of inner needs », in other words, primarily by hunger. This hunger creates a state of tension that is expressed by cries and motor manifestations, a kind of distress: the chicks do the same! If one does not remain hungry, the satisfaction of the physiological need, through breast milk or a substitute, soothes the tension and gives the little one an obvious pleasure. But, as we know, human mothers are not permanently available for the feeding call. It is thus created for the baby a « persistent defect of the expected satisfaction », and the psychic apparatus must « resolve to represent the real state of the outside world and to seek a real modification ». It is the progressive appearance of the second principle of the course of the human psychic events: the principle of reality which aims to take into account what is and not only to shout to have what calms. The establishment of the principle of reality inaugurates in the human being the formation of the secondary processes and allows little by little the appearance of consciousness and rationality.
To take this step « requires a series of adaptations of the primary psychic apparatus », such as using its « sensory qualities » with more and more acuity. And it is then that a « particular function is instituted which must periodically take data from the outside world so that it can be recognized in advance when an inner need arises that cannot be postponed: attention. This activity goes to meet the impressions of the senses instead of passively waiting for them to appear. It is likely that at the same time a system of marks is being introduced which is intended to deposit the results of this periodic activity of consciousness; this is part of what we call memory. « And, a little further on: « … appears the act of judgment which must decide impartially whether a given representation (…) is or is not in agreement with reality. The motor discharge (…) then takes on a new function, insofar as it is used for an appropriate modification of reality. It changes into action. The suspension, which has become necessary, of the motor discharge is ensured by the process of thought which is formed from the activity of representation. « As one can easily imagine, this process of integration of the principle of reality with the principle of jouissance « does not take place all at once or simultaneously along the whole line. « Let us add that it is at this point – a process of thinking from the activity of representation – that human destiny begins to differentiate itself strongly from that of other animals: even if some of the latter are far from being « beasts », this intelligence is without common measure with human beings.
The flattery of impulses and the invitation to satisfy archaic impulses by means of digital representations and images are undeniably on the side of the principle of jouissance, i.e. a tendency to appease impulsive tensions through primary processes. Of course, the principle of jouissance is as indispensable to our psychic functioning as the principle of reality which leads us to defer or to renounce jouissance by the principal means of the use of our « sensory qualities », which are to be situated on the side of our animality, but also by the means of education which develops our specific consciousness of the World. The principle of reality allows the passage of the life of the societies and the life in good intelligence by taking part in creating a cultural varnish always fragile in front of the possible individual and collective impulsive outbursts.
This text shows the appearance of attention at the very beginning of the constitution of the psychic apparatus, correlatively to the appearance of memory and even before those of consciousness, language, and therefore reasoning. The digital apparatus, more and more often connected to telecommunication networks, captures our attention and proposes a multitude of data coming from the outside world by soliciting our senses, especially our sight and hearing, as well as our reasoning. In the use of digital technology, the interfaces proposed by manufacturers are increasingly close to human modes of communication, thus requiring less and less intellectual effort. In the beginning it was necessary to learn a « machine language » to communicate with one of them, whereas now, for ordinary people, it is the machine that adapts to our modes of reasoning and increasingly to our feelings and emotions. This continuous facilitation of use has allowed the mobilization of an archaic attention, implemented by some for essentially mercantile purposes.
In his text, S. Freud adds: « (…) the sexual drive (…) remains much longer under the domination of the pleasure principle. « (…) There is a « weak point in our psychic organization »: the possibility of « bringing back under the domination of the pleasure principle thought processes that had already become rational. « It is clear that the particularly important impulsive flattery implemented by digital means in its current organization skillfully plays on these attractive remnants of our impulsiveness. Another quotation from the text allows us to definitively understand the psychic process at stake: « A general tendency of our psychic apparatus (…) makes us cling tenaciously to the sources of pleasure available to us and we find it difficult to renounce them. (…) a form of thought activity is separated by cleavage; it remains independent of the reality test and subject to the principle of pleasure. This is what we call the creation of fantasies, which already begins with children’s games (…) « This particularity has been present in us since the dawn of time, but the infinite diversity of instantaneous digital proposals shakes up individual fantasizing with a multidirectional and overabundant offer that can even in extreme cases lead to an artificial, addictive hyper-stimulation.
On the one hand, part of what we call memory is made up of a system of registered trademarks, says S. Freud, and on the other, an arrangement of signs, stored symbols (« live » or « dead » memory and, on another scale, « firm » and « clouds » of data), cyber-machines tell us, have enabled the constitution of memories that can interact. In a much more complex way than our current mechanical projections, memory is, as we know, a set of processes also used by the living, to engrammer (5) evolutionary data whose origin is unknown, for example in genomes. Each human being thus carries on the one hand a deep internal, genetic memory, and on the other hand a « living » memory, linked to our capacities of rationalization and consciousness. It is also up to S. Freud to have spotted an intermediate memory which escapes our consciousness but which plays on our behaviors and which is located in a psychic space called the Unconscious. Digital cameras have no unconscious, no impulse, no affect.
The ability to produce and project on an external support of the memory reusable at will is one of the great human psychotechnical adventures, it probably started with significant traces, then continued with writing. With digitization using symbols, a great step was taken, as this invention began to produce quite striking and largely unexpected effects. First of all, thanks to the amazing technical evolution, including the miniaturization of microprocessors, the memory capacity of computers has increased at a prodigious speed that was unimaginable not long ago. So much so that this memory capacity now immeasurably exceeds that of the most powerful humans. The human conscious memory not only has limits but also great variability from one individual to another; it also has the big and frequent disadvantage of being able to deteriorate either because of often progressive diseases, or because of accidents, or because of a kind of somatic wear and tear. One can imagine, of course, the therapeutic interest for some people to have an auxiliary memory and many have already seized it. We can also see the interest of the possibility for each person to supplement his human memory thanks to machines. Most humans using digital technology are, in fact, already « augmented humans » with an auxiliary memory comprising a certain number of documents, photos, videos, e-mails, etc.
In view of the enormous digital memory capacities at our disposal, this potential is very much under-utilized: There is no doubt that better oriented learning about the selection and personal arrangement of individual data could increase the use of our ancillary memory capacities and thus our intellectual efficiency even more considerably. For, in addition to a certain alertness of mind, what we call intelligence in a human being is often also the ability to store more information in memory than others and to retrieve it wisely… A change has taken place in the possibilities of accessing quantities of information of a new order of magnitude, but it is still in its infancy concerning the individual and collective ordering of this otherwise inefficient memory potential. As a result, we often end up with a situation of over-information. It would be a matter of learning to order more knowledge through new learning, the results of in-depth psychological research, from the very first years of education. Watch » and « alert » tools are attempts to provide a technical response to this psychological difficulty.
The societal stakes around the memorization capacities of machines are enormous. The major Internet and telecommunications consortiums are doing everything they can to delegate our memory appendages to them, arguing for practical reasons for the user, reasons that are highly debatable. The reason is that whoever holds the digital traces has enormous power of influence, or worse, surveillance, constraint and nuisance. And the more traces a consortium has, the more power it has, especially financial power. Another approach, quite simple and technically possible, is for each individual to delegate as few traces as possible. The idea is to build up his or her own little cloud or protected database, which we used to do recently with the help of « keys » (removable memory storage media) or external hard drives, and which is now being actively sought to divert us, given the market value of these traces that reveal many elements of our mental and impulsive lives. It is therefore up to each person to control his or her digital space, an extension to be invented of his or her psychic space. Digital technology gives us possibilities, it also has its requirements: well-ordered digitization starts with oneself! In the same way, public data is currently open (open data) in a way that is not very transparent and arbitrary, and seems above all to be put at the service of digital and financial entrepreneurship. Some public data contains a lot of private information, it does not have to be « open » to the wind. Here we are faced with a question of ethical choice, where politicians should have had to make decisions that will benefit greatly from being informed by the human sciences and philosophy. More and more we will thus be confronted with choices concerning our own transformations, both individual and collective, considerably increasing our powers of ordering ourselves and the World.
Because of his ability to handle symbolic languages, man has since time immemorial been able to transmit from generation to generation new knowledge and know-how acquired and increased as time goes by. The new potentials linked to digitally memorizable quantities coupled with ultra-fast calculation possibilities are frantic the counters of our lazy consciences. Companies and individuals surprised by the strength of the momentum must make an effort to integrate into a kind of sight-seeing navigation, so fast are the changes. An effort of refocusing around the human seems to be necessary, dynamic psychology is particularly called upon.
Let us return one last time to the text of S. Freud: During the progressive establishment of the principle of reality, a part of the psychic energy which, in the baby, had previously tended to force its way out by all the primary means, by cries and movements of discharge, can gradually be transformed into deliberate action; for this it needs to be suspended, channeled, sluiced by a process of thought (which a computer does not have) which is formed from the activity of representation.
After having reflected on the notion of attention and its capture, so central to our uses of digital technology, we now come to the notion of representation. The latter was taken up by S. Freud from the German philosopher, psychologist and pedagogue Johann Friedrich Hebart (1816-1893), who reasoned the psyche in terms of the « mechanics of representations ». In order to shed light on psychic processes, Freud distinguished between « figurative representation », long translated as « representation of a thing », and « verbal representation », long translated as « representation of a word ». The figurative representation is essentially pictorial, whereas the verbal representation is essentially acoustic, or textual. Both allow the emergence of psychic representatives, i.e. mental expression from somatic excitations. The appearance of these mental representatives of the impulse comes to the end of the process that allows thought and thoughtful action. According to Freud, any impulse is expressed in the two registers of representation and affect. A « quantum of affect », (a variable quantity of impulsive energy), is thus associated with our psychic representations. Our actions are, according to him, motivated by « goal-oriented representations » or « representations of desires », themselves inspired by « the experience of satisfaction ». A computer or a robot obviously has no personal « representation of desire » or « experience of satisfaction ». A computer program expresses itself only in the register of the representation but can be programmed to simulate the affect, and to stimulate it too. This distinction between figurative representation and verbal representation is important, because the modes of entanglement of image and word are in many ways disrupted in our use of digital technology.
The main Freudian contribution is the identification of a part of our psycho-affective functioning that is unconscious and of the relations between this unconscious part and our conscious part. The unconscious processes are our first way of dealing with impulses. Although they are not conscious, it is the great merit of S. Freud to have been able to decipher the logic, the mode of functioning. In the work « L’inconscient » (1915), Freud wrote: « conscious representation encompasses figurative representation plus the corresponding verbal representation, while the unconscious representation is figurative representation alone. « (6) In other words, in the unconscious there would only be images. Jacques Lacan went further on this question. In any case, this « unconscious logic » functions differently from our conscious reason. The logic of our conscious reason is much closer to the functioning of computers because they are the emanation of it. As those interested in the psychodynamic approach already know, two fundamental phenomena shed light on the unconscious functioning: condensation and displacement. Condensation is the fact that two elements can be found in one, for example in a dream, a privileged place of expression of the unconscious, a character can have the look of a father and the beard of a grandfather. According to S. Freud, the various elements at play in a condensation are thus found at a crossroads representation and their intensity comes from the fact that « on these crossroads representations, come to be added the energies which were moved along the various associative chains ». (7) Condensation does not only affect images but also words. Displacement is the fact that a quantity of energy attached to one representation can be moved to another representation along an associative chain. « Through the process of displacement, one representation can give up to another all the quantum of its investment… ». (8)
In the primary process, the energy is closer to the drive. The secondary mode of representation uses the hypothetico-deductive logic of conscious activities. In the primary processes, again according to S. Freud, energy is said to be free, whereas in the secondary processes it is bound by all the logical operations generated by the hypothetical-deductive mode of reasoning.
Interactive digital devices offer us representations and solicitations established by eminently rational technical processes. The digital is a rational invention, very « secondary » but capable of touching even our most « primary », oldest representations of the impulse. The fact is that these digital representations of the real and the imaginary are more and more sophisticated and as such deserve to be considered and qualified in a new way. For example, the most advanced digital immersion spaces or robots are artificial constructions that are disturbing and even deceptive for some people who believe they are somehow endowed with natural qualities for the former, life and feelings for the latter. Interacting with our perceptions, our attention, our representations and our affects, we are faced with new interlocutors, artificial because they are the fruit of human elaboration, but extremely representative and communicative.
When he discovered the existence of primary psychological processes that remain underlying, but active, throughout existence and that these processes functioned on other bases than our consciousness, that is to say, when he described the Unconscious, S. Freud gave a sufficiently clear representation of this new space and its relations with the consciousness. In order to define its complexity and analyze its functioning, inspired by the notion of Greek metaphysics, he proposed a metapsychological approach to the psychic apparatus. This approach, still on the agenda, is based on three axes, three complementary reading grids necessary to describe a psychodynamic process: the topical axis, the dynamic axis and the economic axis.
Establishing representations of the psychic apparatus in order to make the complexity of its functioning more comprehensible has been a permanent preoccupation of S. Freud. The spatial aspect of the theory of the psychic apparatus was highlighted with the notion of « psychic place », places that he deliberately distinguishes from anatomical places. For a given subject, he thus describes intrapsychic places within the two topics he has developed over time. For the second topic, the main spatial instances are the id, the self and the superego (9). But this researcher was not satisfied to delimit these spaces, he sought the functions of these psychic places, of these instances. He then described the interrelationships between these instances, for this he used the approach that he called dynamic, which is especially interested in the conflicts that appear between the instances. The impulsive being a question of energy, the inventor of psychoanalysis was finally interested in the circulation and the modes of distribution of impulsive energy, which he called the economic approach (which finds its fundamental axiom in the laws of thermodynamics). Going even further, in the light of their clinical observations, some of S. Freud’s successors have located some sub instances, such as the ideal self and the ideal of the self, which together compose the superego. One thus sees appearing relations inside the psychic places in addition to the relations between the psychic places. These relations describe among others the interdependence between the psychological systems or spaces. In their « Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse », Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis note that by this conception of the psychic apparatus, « the intrasubjective field tends to be conceived on the model of intersubjective relations, the systems are represented as relatively autonomous persons in the person. » (9)
In any case, this particularly fine way of considering the intrapsychic would benefit from being extended to our digital projections. On the one hand, the analysis of the digital on a human scale in its entirety would probably be enriched by a system of anthropomorphic representation of the stakes detached from the machinic. One could consider this system of representation as the equivalent or the extension of the detachment operated by S. Freud when he posed representations of the psychic apparatus differentiated from the anatomic. On the other hand, on an individual scale, it is helpful to now consider the human subject including its externalized numerical appendages. By this I mean that, for example, the documents put in memory by a given human being on a machine or a memory medium, as well as the organization chosen to put this memory in order, can, it seems to me, rightly be considered as a rationalized part of himself, a part that is however eminently subjective since it is unique in its creation. Each connected human being can now build over time a personal digitalized space, with automatisms organized by himself and by others, a data reservoir echoing in part his rational elaborations but why not, just as much, his impulsive and emotional tendencies passed to the digital philter. In the same way it is necessary to note that, for some, programmed automatons, robots, are already part of this digitized space and are in part spaces of projection of their subjectivities, of their psychic functioning.
Given the very rapid evolution of the possibilities of access to the form of rationality generated through digital technology, we are invited to revise to a certain extent the metapsychological instrument of Freudian analysis: we can see that in the face of the impulsive anchoring, a new specific rational anchoring is clearly imposed that irreversibly influences our lives in an unexpected way. Our relationship to knowledge, to knowledge and therefore our possibilities to influence the living, starting with ourselves, are greatly modified. For example, the prodigious speed at which the human genome could have been deciphered could not have occurred without the use of digital technology. But just as there is no pure impulsiveness, there is no pure rationality in humans, these are two vanishing points in the representations of the psychic apparatus. It is however necessary to include in one way or another this new dimension of our relation to rationality so that the psychodynamic approach keeps its relevance and its efficiency. Would it be necessary to go as far as to speak of a new psychic place, a new instance including externalized numerical appendages? In the current state of reasoning, this would seem excessive or at least premature. It is perhaps sufficient to consider this taking into account as a consequent and externalized subset of the Ego.
Philippe Decan Nantes March 2018
Notes :
– 1 Yves Citton (under the direction of) « The Attention Economy New Horizon of Capitalism? ». Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2014, P. 7
– 2 Sigmund Freud, in « Résultats idées problèmes », Tome 1, texts compiled by Jean Laplanche, P.U.F., France
– 3 A reality that Sigmund Freud did not yet distinguish from the Real, as Jacques Lacan would later do.
– 4 Taking into account the evolution of our knowledge in psychodynamics, I propose here to rename this first tendency principle of jouissance-distress, or principle of jouissance by possibly reserving the denomination principle of pleasure at later stages of development involving precisely a part of secondary processes. This questioning would, of course, require further substantiation. The pleasure-joy distinction alone would deserve a complex and important development… But this is not the subject.
– 5 « Engram: Hypothetical organic trace that would constitute the physical support of memory » (Larousse).
– 6 Sigmund Freud, « L’inconscient » (1915), in Métapsychologie (textes réunis), Gallimard, Coll. Idées, 1968, Paris, trans. J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, P 156.
– 7 Laplanche and Pontalis, « Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse », PUF, edition 2014, P 908.
– 8 Sigmund Freud, « L’inconscient » (1915), in Métapsychologie (textes réunis), Gallimard, Coll. Idées, 1968, Paris, trans. J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, p. 119.
– 9 « Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse », Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, PUF, coll. Quadrige, edition of 2014, Page 488: « … the Ca, the impulsive pole of the personality, the Ego, the authority which arises by representing the interests of the totality of the person and as such invested with narcissistic libido, the Superego, finally, the authority which judges and criticizes, constituted by internalization of the parental requirements and prohibitions ».
Philippe Decan 