Philip K. Dick & Lacan

Een studente in mijn Lacan seminar schreef een kleine blogpost die twee schitterende citaten naast elkaar zet, van Lacan en van Philip K. Dick.

Lacan:

 “We are very well aware that this machine doesn't think. We made the machine, and it thinks what it has been told to think. But if the machine doesn't think, it is obvious that we don't think either when we are performing an operation. We follow the very same procedures as the machine.” 

(Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the nature of language (304)

Dick zegt in een toespraak uit 1972, met als titel ‘The Android and the Human’:

 

“Our environment — and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components — all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves...Rather than learning about ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to.”

Interessant: de verwijzing is hier naar cybernetica, naar 'electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components.' 

Dick is geïnteresseerd in het moment van 'animation.'