Between Archaism And Modernity: Pondering The Third Millennium Deadlines

Dynamo Mother: The Power of American Industry
as seen by Gaston Lachaise in 1933

Article published in 1999 in n° 23, volume 2 of the review “Social Anthropology” of the social anthropology laboratory of Laval University in Quebec.

How are we to ponder these great cracks that we sense at the end of this millennium? How can we distinguish the benchmarks that make it possible to specify the main orientations of a world in full reorganization?

The question can be formulated by asking: what does our time compare to, what does it echo? The extent of the industrial change which for three centuries has depopulated the countryside to fill the factories, seems to us to be related to only one other major transition which marked the entry of humanity into the time of History: the Neolithic Revolution, which in a few millennia by the spread of agriculture and the correlative sedentarization of nomads into peasants gave rise to the birth of cities and ancient cults.

Discovered in 1922 in France, this female statuette dates from the Gravettian
during the Upper Palaeolithic, 25000 BC.

With Gilbert Simondon (Simondon, 1969, page 162 et sq), let us follow in broad strokes Neolithic humanity which, emerging from a magical and undifferentiated, non-objectified world, distinguishes the religious from the technical, thought from action, labor from prayer, the “oro et lavoro” of the Benedictines. This initial differentiation from the great All of magical thought mutates in the West after Leibniz, when the questioning of Nature replaces the questioning of the Text. Religion then gives up its referential status to science, while craftsmanship becomes industry. In doing so, the subjectivity that religious transcendence took charge of by situating man between an Earth and a Sky bound by the unique Substance of the two Natures of the God-Man is taken up by the immanence of a romantic Ego torn between Sublime and dereliction. Correlatively, the world of thought splits between Naturwißenschaften (sciences of nature, or exact) and Geisteswißenschaften (sciences of the mind, or human), a caesura which is still ours.

It is, in our opinion, this epistemological break that is coming to an end, an end to which the unprecedented inspection of subjectivity by digital images on a planetary scale echoes. In fact, these digital images brought by the new techno-industrial possibilities are now capable of invalidating this standard of scientific truth, this scientist's retina that the photographic image has been since 1850. The image that the artist created according to the canons of the Fine Arts and that the Truth of the photographic lens had ousted, is “liberated” before our fascinated eyes, from scientific truth to invest the register of the fantastic on an unprecedented scale.

We are witnessing a historic, massive and global dissociation between Image and Truth. From now on, the images live their life, carriers of all the fantasies: ultramodernity shows its archaic face in the form of a magical thought carried along by the torrents of digitized images broadcast worldwide by satellites and other networks. It is the archaic differentiation, made in the Neolithic era between technical and religious that is currently being called into question. This massive lack of differentiation of globalized humanity carries both the best and the worst on unprecedented scales, from the industrialized Nazi massacre to the conquest of the moon. Humanity changes skin, phase, like oil and egg become mayonnaise, it mutates and learning the new limits of these spaces where it is now led to move, cannot escape the representation of its effective destruction now possible.

Pierre Legendre (Legendre, 1994) teaches us that the institutionalization of this prohibition goes through the emblematization of negativity: representing what should not be done is the only way to signify to humans the limit that makes life livableⁱ. The crime against humanity which recently entered the scene of the Law after having manifested itself in History, is an example of an attempt to think about these new situations.

If, as noted by Gilbert Hottois, (Hottois, 1987, page 65) the Neolithic marked the entry of Humanity into historical temporality, the current mutation carries the potential for Humanity to emerge from this humanized time, by its physical disappearance or its mutation into a sort of technically paired insect of which totalitarianism, a political innovation born with the 20th century, has given us a foretaste.

If the worst is not certain, the only remedy in the face of the barbarism engendered by the blindness fascinated by the image and the action decoupled from any humanized finality is the reconquest of a reflexive posture which consists in trying to think these unprecedented situations.

In this way, let us note that this unprecedented fusion of the two registers differentiated since the Neolithic finds its corollary in the field of thought with the resorption of this epistemological break which has sheared the Being of the West for three centuries. This healing in progress is visible, it seems to us, in the emergence from each of the sides of the epistemological break (exact sciences and human sciences), of thoughts which have as a common denominator the positing of the a priori of the necessity of a Third Term between Man, and the World and Man, thus mourning an immediate apprehension of the world which is the wild dream of objective science. By positing this a priori of a Third Term, a place guaranteeing the anchoring of words to things, of the name to the body, of matter to its appearance, these thoughts of the Third signal the return of a semantics of formsⁱⁱ occulted for three centuries in favor of a physics of matter (Petitot, 1989, p. 717).

On the side of the Geisteswißenschaften, Pierre Legendre, by founding the Anthropology of Dogma, took up the Freudian heritage where it had been neglected and refocused anthropology around the totemic principle, the institutional figuration of the genealogical principle. The Time of Man, that is to say, a civilization conceived as a vessel capable of navigating the flow of generations, to persevere in its being, cannot avoid symbolizing the origin and the end which is for each and for the group the horizon of speech, the stopping of words. This function is ensured by the emblems of power, whether economic, political or religious, which symbolize for the use of each of those who claim this unspeakable origin. This totem is also the yoke, the link that separates the institutional parental figuresⁱⁱⁱ : the Principle at the origin of and representing the origin for all the representatives of a civilization.

By unearthing the structures that shaped the civilization that remains ours between the 11th and 13th centuries, Legendre allows us to think about industry in its symbolic filiation. It thus restores to us a historical perspective breaking with the oblivion of our origins which has allowed our world to think of itself as superhuman, free of any ancestral claim and correlatively legitimized to impose on Others the unprecedented conception of an all-powerful Self beyond computing. genealogy, released from any intergenerational debt. Reestablishing a purpose to an industrial order at work outside of man, thus restoring our common humanity, involves renouncing this wild fantasy of pure power that the break with a historical past has instituted.

On the side of the Naturwißenschaften, René Thom declares that it is time to reinvest through a mathematized reflective thought the dimension of space and time specific to the speaking living being. Modern sciences by investing the infinitely large and the infinitely small have left fallow the dimension of the human body, the space and the time which make the life of men as if, in front of these scales of time and space of the Big Bang or elementary particles, the landmarks that historical cultures have shaped had become obsolete.

The New Men of the East, the Free Men of the West and the Nazi Supermen who fell into the pit at the epicenter of the divide showed in the 20th century the dangers of a rupture with the historical filiations engendered by the hypostasis of a scientific Truth. The time has come to reconnect with an ancestral heritage that allows man to establish himself in Reason by putting his present in resonance with a memory to allow him to think of a future. If the repression of subjectivity and ancestrality operated for three centuries has allowed this boarding of the world and of himself by industrialist man, the dark side of the Enlightenment emerging from the shadows has shown its limits.

This reconciliation is plausible by noting that, in the same way that the infinitesimal calculus was the means of mathematizing the speculations on infinity that religious traditions supported, Thomian morphodynamics allows a geometrization of meaning that can be read as the recovery mathematized of this ligature that Christianity operated by the pictorial tradition of the representation of the embodied soul. In doing so, Thom opens up the unprecedented field –– and the resistance of the scientific community is the a contrario proof of its relevance–– of a heuristic approach to reality in the name of mathematics. He develops the mathematized metaphor capable of refining intuition, of expanding the power of subjectivity in the name of science, this same subjectivity whose repression constituted the base from which objectivating science emerged. In doing so, he develops an aesthetic^iv approach to reality based on a geometric representation of meaning, re-establishing, in the name of mathematics, the link between word and thing, matter and its appearance, thus reducing the epistemological break that has reigned since the 16th century.

In this way, the works of René Thom and Pierre Legendre make it possible, without renouncing the criteria of veracity developed over three centuries, to reasonably reinvest subjectivity. Thinking about the institutional metabolization of the "delusional crucible that founds Reason" is the ambition of the work of Pierre Legendre, while René Thom (Thom, 1991, p.62), by posing the insignificant, the continuous, the undifferentiated, the real numbers at the origin of meaning, of the discontinuous, of the differentiated, of integers, pursues in his discipline a parallel path which makes it possible to think mathematically of natural language, re-establishing an organic link between speculative thought and mathematical thought.

As Jean Petitot puts it (Petitot, 1977, p. 437), “the great consequence of this affinity of modern mathematics with a natural language could be the rupture of this historical alliance between exact sciences and mathematics, leaving to computer technologies the burden of this task, in order to shift the proper objective of mathematics towards the refoundation of relationships with reality.”

Thus, mathematicians, placed by the surge of computerized technology in a situation analogous to that of artists vis-à-vis photography in the 19th century, invent a comparable parade: where artists have taken refuge in the representation of the visual of subjectivity and the abstract, leaving the visibility of reality to photography, mathematicians leave the exact sciences to computer scientists to form an alliance with philosophers. These recompositions in the field of thought echo this rupture between image and truth that accompanies the world globalization mentioned above and signal the generalized reorganizations underway in all fields of human activity.

This identifiable “new alliance” between Natur- and Geisteswißenschaften is not the least of these rearrangements which, by delimiting the field of the “Sciences of the Third”, founds a new transcendental idealism and correlatively delimits a new epistemological break by deliberately placing itself outside of the “Sciences of the Excluded Third”, of these sciences of Immanence without exteriority and dedicated to efficiency that are the Social & Behavioral Sciences, technical medicine, biomolecular engineering or Big Science with astronomical budgets, all too busy managing their political successes to question the meaning of their action.

i “The Republic, sacred object of all our wishes (...) must erase, with the signs of royalty those of a darker and fiercer tyranny, but fortunately, by its very nature more tottering and more precarious, which seemed to have taken the guillotine as a standard”. (Cabanis, 1956, p.503) cited by (Arasse, 1982, p.126). The signs and standards to which Cabanis alludes here are what Legendre designates by “emblem”.

ii “The origin of forms”, the title of issue 305 of the journal La Recherche dated January 1998, testifies to the topicality of these concerns.

iii During the theological centuries, this function operated “out in the open” by means of religious representations of the Holy and Virgin Mother and the crucified God-Man. For us, the function has remained even if the emblems are fragmented between the political, economic, scientific fields, etc.

iv Aesthetic is here opposed to Analytical

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Arasse D., 1982, “ La guillotine ou l’inimaginable, effet d’une simple mécanique ”, Revue des Sciences humaines, Lille III, LVIII, 186-187 : 123-144.

Cabanis P.-J.-G., 1956, “ Note sur l’opinion de MM. Oelsner et Soemmering et du citoyen Sue, touchant le supplice de la guillotine ”, Œuvre philosophique, II, Paris. La Note... est publiée à Paris en l’an IV.

Hottois G., 1987, “ Technolangue et technophobie philosophique ” : 59-73, in L. Couloubaritsis et G. Hottois (éditeurs), Penser l’informatique, informatiser la pensée, Mélanges offerts à André Robinet. Bruxelles, Edition de l’Université de Bruxelles.

Legendre P., 1994, Leçon III, Etude sur l’institution des images. Paris, Fayard.

Petitot J., 1977, “ Locale/globale ” : 429-490, in Enciclopedia Einaudi. Volume VIII. Torino, Einaudi Editore, traduit de l’italien.

Petitot J., 1989, “ Forme ” : 712-728, in Encyclopaedia Universalis, Volume IX. Paris, Encyclopaedia Universalis.

Simondon G., 1969, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris, Aubier-Montaigne.

Thom R., 1991, Prédire n’est pas expliquer. Paris, Flammarion.