How are we to move to today’s sum?
To the eyes of the person crossing the giant bridge that spans, from Antirrio to Rio, the Gulf of Corinth, above cities swallowed up by ancient earthquakes, the Venetian lighthouse and castle, below on the coast, seem to be dollhouses. Our technologies change scales. During my father’s generation, a person might embark in Le Havre on board a sailing ship laden with three hundred tons of cement destined for the ruins of the San Francisco earthquake; our ships have a capacity of a million tons. Found in ice core samples in Greenland, the effluents of the Bronze Age didn’t dirty the air of its time much; millions of cars darken the atmosphere of Los Angeles. With demography changing scales as well, billions of inhabitants overpopulate China and India. The internet in space, the atomic bomb for energy, the greenhouse effect for the atmosphere …: since recently, we have been producing objects for which at least one of their dimensions grows all the way up to the dimension that corresponds to it in the world; formerly compatible with the dimensions of the body, technologies have become globalized: the planet is rocking from it. The opposite of these world-objects, the alliance of nano- and biotechnologies with artificial intelligence sculpts tiny tools, atomic sized. Born from these rapid progressions towards the immense and the dwarfish, does the globality I was talking about above in order to understand today’s real exceed us because the quantitative all by itself changes the very nature of the posed and resolved problems? Not only.
This total transformation begins, as you will remember, with three geneses: the productive codes of molecules of matter; the genetic code of living things; codes or pixels of information. Knowing their alphabets, we produce open sheaves of possibilities by combining their elements. Yet the knowledge of letters doesn’t imply knowledge of the texts they can generate; music scores cannot be deduced from the sol-fa. Have we lost all mastery of our productions?
The sham master
Having arrived at this point, I dared to deploy a technology narrative. A few ideologies accompanied technology’s progress. Pragmatism, among them, celebrates the hand and the man-made objects that leave it. We think we master these gestures and their works. Wear and tear and breakdowns, however, inform us that the made object preserves an objective existence, independent of us. It participates in a real that exceeds us.
Dancing as though in lovemaking, my vessel, as you will remember, took on the autonomy of a woman. Corn was planted beyond Mexico; we had to tame the horse on more continents than the person who conquered it foresaw. Invented to prudently limit a genetic modification to one generation, terminator technology allows seed companies to enslave farmers. The Odyssey cries out even more loudly, longer and better than Homer’s declaiming mouth. How many works and results were diverted from their destination in this way? Published, a given text goes out to seek its fortune in the world, like the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice; false interpretations or unexpected translations will be overabundant. Pleyel didn’t foresee Debussy or Fauré. Designed in order to listen to opera in the living room, the telephone is now used for everything except for its initial finality. Hard or soft, have we ever mastered what we fabricated? Even here, we find contingency; even here, the father loses.
Thinking he dominates his productions, Homo faber is surprised when they end up at strange consequences, scandalized at the fact that the things that have come from his hands with some given intention would turn in any other direction than the one foreseen: what an illusion of finality! He never operates them by remote control so easily; he masters them here and sometimes; but at times and there, they dominate not only their author but the environment. You will have trouble finding a single tool whose future flowed in the channel its designer foresaw. The lesson of the sorcerer’s apprentice lies in the ordinary behaviour of the things we fabricate. Their use exceeds us. We always invent a little or a lot of automaticity. The sapwood of the handle I carve is composed of a real that reacts according to its laws and not my own. The page resists the writer like a stubborn child. Who can claim to be the full cause of the entirety of the productions-effects of his or her will? This independence even reaches less technological projects: appalling, the ways humanitarian institutions have been diverted; ridiculous, those who take fright at the idols they have sculpted. Mathematics goes to the peak of this paradox; coming armed out of Thales’s, Gauss’s or Poincaré’s brains, geometry nonetheless compelled them to think what it imposed; better, it objectively expresses vast sections of the real. The producer’s causality weakens.
This can be verified for God Himself: Eve and Adam escaped their shaper; through the sin and the expulsion from paradise, the couple ran towards their freedom. In other words, creation doesn’t necessarily imply preformation. The most improbable of the theses set forth by what is called creationism programmes the behaviour of creatures a priori. If you so desire, keep creation, but abandon preformationism.
Consequently, celebrating the possession of nature lapses into deceitful publicity; the mastery of mastery, whose formula I once proposed, attempted to manage these illusions. One must never have held a tool in one’s hand to think that a tool is always fabricated for one use and one use alone, clearly conceived, entirely subservient. If a lever is used to lift, I’m not able to say what; set up a computer: for whom and how will it be used? This illusion of finality, crowned, askew, by Cartesian mastery or pragmatism, dates back to the carving of the first stones; let’s abandon these utopias. The technology narrative therefore participates in the same contingency as evolution.
In fact, we are little by little exploring what our fabrications can do. Sometimes the artisan, like the artist, works without finality.
Evolution produces a producer of evolution
Descended from life, the technologies return to it, as I have believed I could say. Bio- and nanotechnologies invent composite structures, freely imitating the non-finality of the living and the non-finality of intelligence, whose unfolded spectrum of possibilities isn’t known to those who promote these technologies. So we are accepting today what we have accepted ever since the dawn, an uneven, weak and often worthless mastery of our productions, varying like the principle of reason. Apart from the scale, nothing new under the sun. If our terrors, ordinary today, are due less to risks, whose idea presupposes an insufficient mastery, than to this non-finality of the new man-made things, we can put these anxieties into perspective with the idea that past cultures didn’t master the pseudo-finalities of the ancients any better. The size changes, not the unforeseenness. Ourselves contingent, we fabricate the contingent; evolution produces us as producers of an evolution.
When we poorl y reconcile God’s omniscience with his creatures’ freedom, we are copying this finalism more than the act of fabrication. But, the more our knowledge advances, the more we take note of our contingency, the contingency of the world and of our actions. Except in cases of extreme simplicity, we have made and will make the unforeseen. The more we approach the Creator, the less we imitate providence. We don’t preform anything or anyone: the best teachers don’t educate parrots, but autonomous human beings. Children disobey: felix culpa; this blessed fault allows them to sometimes get around the obstacles accumulated by our formats. Omniscience would preform someone rather less than half-clever. Let me stress the definition of our new era: contingent evolution produces a producer of contingent evolution.
The ethics of the helm [gouvernail]: Precaution and prudence
From this half-mastery are born our anxieties, in the face of which we establish the principle of precaution; it decides beforehand. If a principle, preceding every beginning, remains, it risks strangling the work. Preformationist, it becomes a pretext for motionlessness, a kind of lazy sophism. Let’s abandon this prin- and this pre-, false and useless. Since everything moves and is negotiated in contingency, it would be better for this principle to vary the way mastery and the principle of reason do.
So let’s invent an ethics in the cybernetic mode. Let’s steer [gouvernons] productions whose behaviour we never decide once and for all and before all. Following the teachings obtained over the course of their evolution, let’s inflect our decisions in real time by practising the prudence of the pilot. At the helm, he steers the vessel following his intentions or those of the collectivity whose plan he is executing, but while continually taking into account the reactions of the swell, the wind, the stability of the ship, its dance with the waves, the mood of the crew, the age of the captain …; headstrong, he holds course without dawdling towards the four winds of the compass rose but changes bearing if necessary, puts into port, heaves to or lies to, retraces his steps, circumvents cyclones and the latitudes of calm weather …; in short, he steers. Aware of the contingency of the world, prudence acts according to the logic of modalities.
So scientific and technological behaviour concerning things resembles the behaviour politicians say they follow with regard to society, composed of Eves, Adams and unruly children. Continually tied together in this book, the connection between the world and humans is continued in morality. We will practise the political and objective ethics projected by The Natural Contract. We will steer the planet and humanity by virtue of a single virtue. Mixed with swell and course, the real responds to the prompting of the pilot, who carves his bearing, contingent and necessary, along a possible course that circumvents impossibilities.
Death on the horizon
Praised in this way, prudence envisions the eventuality of shipwreck: none of the newnesses will do. Can we, today, resign ourselves to failure? The globality of our engagements, the projects of other humans and even of different natures … are opposed to this resignation because we put in danger not only some given local existences but the entirety of the conditions for survival. Once more, our formats are heading towards death, a death that’s global for the first time. We find ourselves forced to find an exit hole from this deadly outcome, we who are still condemned to resurrect. I shall attempt to answer the questions concerning this serious steering later on.
The fact remains that every beginning surges up from an aged, exhausted, dying stem; that each of our resurgences gave rise to its branch from this inevitability. However far back in time we may go, every bifurcation of the Grand Narrative opens up a similar exit hole: the Universe expands from a theoretical point, unthinkable by science; life emerges from the inert; multicellular organisms are born from the first bacteria; a species mutates from a less adapted preceding one; culture, in its turn, is extracted from organic life; the human leaves animality little by little … These bifurcations occur as exits from old places, where, if it remained there, the new branch would die. In the longer and better established time, everything that exists, ourselves included, continually surges up from a prior format in which death would have defeated it.
When we were ignorant of the Grand Narrative and the sequence of its surgings, we would define ourselves as ‘being-towards-death’. But our knowledge of nature cries out that, like nature, we never cease freeing ourselves from death. All existence comes out of a nothingness. With the last of the exits out of mortal constraints – inert ones, animal ones … – humanity was born. Accepting this truth, millions of years old but renewed every morning, philosophy, taking over the reins, announces this exit from death towards life. Define humankind as hope for life.
Leaving a place
Producing and produced, projective and prudent, we all left or came out of the earth, and each of us left the uterus. The dawn delivers us from sleep, love from torpor and invention from dogmas. Depending on our wills or desires, especially so that our thought may fly, we leave customs, sometimes, and, today, I hope, we are leaving deadly human history, the state that makes war, the war that makes states, the genealogy of blood and soil, theatrical and deadly social statuses, the libido of belongingness … The monotheists say: the way Abraham quit his country and his father’s house; the Jews say: the way the chosen people left Egypt; the Romans said: the way Aeneas escaped from the Trojan hell; Saint Paul: the way the new man is released from the Law, the way Jesus Christ resurrected from the tomb, thenceforth empty. Life abandons its walls, its cities and its barrels. Inventive thought leaves formats. We deviate to exist, a deviation from the stable, from the world, from humankind itself. We continually deviate from these things and this morning as well. The Grand Narrative only recounts deviations and exits. Things leave us the way we leave things.
Leave from where? From a belongingness, from a place. To the litany of newborns corresponds the litany of places: Eve and Adam quit the first garden; the universe surges up from nothingness, behind Planck’s wall; Moses leaves Egypt; the mutant bifurcates from its species; Jesus resurrects from the tomb, a place-image for every place because every place in this world marks the place of a tomb; cultures abandon nature; science often contradicts everyday perception; and, once again, freedom abandons the land, the pagus, the plot of alfalfa, region, country …, places where fathers buried their fathers, funeral spaces; the hominian quits the environment, which other living things make their niche, but also that extra place we designate by law, traditions, ethnology, political collective …; we leave massacre through sacrifice; lastly we leave the sacred consecrated by sacrifice through saint liness … Death incessantly lines up, in procession, this set of particular and local places … What is death? What takes a place: here lies. Leave from where? From place. Tombs mark sites. Death marks belongingness and its deadly libido: belonging, dying. What is a place? A site marked by a tomb.
Vibrating, chomping at the bit, being born …, life and thought dis-place themselves. The intuitive and the inventive free themselves from the site. An old measurement of the Earth, geometry quit surveying and invented another space. A homeless fire without hearth, flying, love absents itself from places and transcends them (Rome, pp. 165–6). Place marks hatred, which doesn’t leave place. Today, we are quitting the places of the world and of humans, the complete set of our belongingnesses, the sum of deaths. A fundamental format: place and site; their content: hatred and violence. We still have to leave death.
Interlude: 1944–2004
A few days after the landing of the Allies in Normandy, while the battle, on land and on sea, was multiplying military corpses but above all civilian ones, a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt, piloted by a captain who was already famous for his victories during the First World War, was pursuing a twin-engine aircraft of the Royal Air Force cruising in the vicinity, with, on board, a twenty-year-old contender, a champion of aerial acrobatics. A fierce duel ensued, experience against youthful ardour, in which the two aces deployed twenty feats of skill, courage and tenacity. The fight to the death ended with the almost simultaneous explosion of the two aircraft. At the edge of the two blazing clouds, two parachutes opened, and the adversaries landed, by chance, on the same cramped rock, many yards from shore. Squeezed up against each other, the German, who spoke French from four years of occupation, queried the young Englishman, who had just learned French, about the horsepower of his engine and its maximum speed for turning; from his side, the young pilot plied his grey-haired colleague with questions about the old airfoils and the ailerons of yesteryear; a burning conversation began about nosedives, flares, vertical climbs and shooting angles, and especially the new V-2 rocket engines. Passionate about mechanics, they had the pleasure of squabbling in this way, an ancient practice against new things.
At dusk, the low tide opened up dry land. Continuing their excited exchange about propellers, fuselages and cabins, they sought a refuge. Groping about in the dark woods, they headed, in the black of night, in a direction from which they seemed to hear cries and clamours only to come across, flabbergasted, an isolated farm in the forest, where, despite the circumstances, a wedding was being celebrated. Bloody, dusty, smeared with grease, the phantoms appeared before a table loaded with lobster and bottles, set up in the open air in front of the barn, amid torches and lanterns. Fearful and hospitable, the farmers of the building offered the duelists a jet of water in the wash house, two towels and some Marseilles soap, cider, Pont-l’Évêque and calvados; the peasant women had them dance to the sound of an accordion, amid the laughter of the delighted girls. At noon on the following day, they woke up from a memorable booze-up, dazed.
For several decades, the two enemies’ friendship experienced not a single shadow.
Reprise: Concordance
How are we to leave death? I’m trying to answer the question and will end this book by going back over its second intention. How does it happen, again and lastly, that narratives and emergences, advents and exits suit the sciences, whether astrophysics or biochemistry, just as well as they do the arts, religions, history, everyday life and surprises of love … without distinction, whereas our formats carefully separate these cultural formations, which, in distant institutions, form segregated groups?
Global, might the new concordance announce itself, by chance, at the moment when we need it, faced with the worldwide globality of our productions? This concordance began when the hard sciences no longer limited themselves to asking the question how, a question defined by positivism, to the exclusion of the question why, and no longer considered their objects solely from the point of view of the laws of their functioning. Starting with the nineteenth century regarding the Earth and fossils, the question when or from when arose. Gradually, all these sciences also considered their objects to be memories buried beneath other codes than those of language; these sciences deciphered the age of the universe, the planets, living things … starting from archives, which were silent of course but newly readable and often including traces of origin. When positivism separated the sciences from myth and metaphysics, it was opposing the operational explanations of an exact and falsifiable knowledge to gods and nature. Said nature seemed to them and us, with good reason, to be an empty fetish; yet the same word describes, literally and wonderfully, the process of birth and development now followed by the majority of knowledge. From the big bang to the Cambrian explosion, from the accretion of the Earth to the first humanoids, nearly all of the contemporary sciences climb back to the advent of their objects. Hence their unexpected connection – concordat and discordance – with the grand narratives of religions and the little avatars of history.
But, as soon as the ‘naturing’ question from when finds answers and as soon as it unites with the question how, which clearly doesn’t stop being asked, the sciences cannot help but to meet with the question what or who, I mean the question of the individual quality of the object that was born in this way and during those times, another way of saying its ‘nature’. Over the course of the Grand Narrative, some constant or some planet … comes about with its own characteristics, as well as some species mutated or adapted like so …, not that one, but this one. As a result, a new question becomes added to the first ones: why this one and not some other? So, formerly given over to necessity, the sciences discover contingency. The Universe, the Earth, the living things, humanity itself could have not been born or could have been born and developed differently. Formerly leaning on ontology and the common logics, they are now on the terrain of modal logics, in which possibilities and virtuality play. Owing to contingency, the question why comes back, a question dismissed by the science of our fathers: why this universe and not another, this living thing and not that one? Formerly abandoned in favour of the general, the individual comes back in some way: who or which other? For other possibilities could have been born. Why this individual detail rather than that one?
On balance, there is no longer one nature, but several; there is no longer this, but a multiplicity of possible individuals. We move from natu re natured – the things born, therefore inevitable – to nature naturing – the virtual to be born. Hence the new question: why not, consequently, cause this or that of these worlds to be born, this or that of those non-real molecules, this or that of these non-born living things …, which of these unknown humans? Returning in this way, the question why, formerly repudiated for its finality, is not so much asked for the finality of a real (a real now assumed to be contingent) as for the intentions that direct our own decisions regarding the possible. To what end do you want to, when and if you can, fabricate this other? The new producer of evolution’s global question.
New politics?
From which this concordance is born: just as, owing to rediscovered time, the Grand Narrative linked the sciences with religions and history, this contingent choice of possibilities links hard knowledge, matured, made wiser by these new questions, with novels, literature and law. Scientists create the real the way novelists, journalists, poets, jurists or philosophers do; a new concordat ties these actions to morality and to politics. With the imaginary entering the factual, the tragic will arise: in the spectrum of possible births, the shadow of death looms up. If we can promote advents, how are we to negotiate the ends that, no doubt, will follow them? If we help nature to be born, will we master denaturation? With the scientists of every country not being enough anymore, everyone can and must answer these latest questions, religious people as well as jurists, experts of every culture neither more nor less than the ignorant from every part of the world. Among the accessible possibilities, what new world do we want, all of us, what living things, what humans?
This is why I quoted Saint Paul, who, like us, saw a world die, anxious to promote a new one; by forming, as here, a global thought of advent, he invented a subject suited to defeating death. Disquieted about the same questions, we make every cultural formation contribute to founding again a global subject, a different society, a cognitive, active, responsible one, in brief, a politics. Tomorrow, we’ll have to deal with the topic of power.
Three reasons for the concordat
Three reasons, lastly, contribute to the same concordance. I have said the first one, ontological: we fabricate possible humans and possible worlds by means of codes … notes, numbers, atoms, letters, genes …; their type is of no import, for having similar gestures. The second one has to do with methods and objectivity. The social sciences readily recount that the objective sciences were constructed over the course of a contingent time, inside collectives traversed with political conflicts and made up of capricious individuals delivered up to the circumstances of events; granted, how are we to live and think differently? Does this dissolve their objectivity? Would plunging a rigorous system into a contingent history of subjective individuals and various singular politics relativize its results? Would a tension exist between the constant laws and the fluctuating history, instances and generalities? Can this tension be reduced?
Yes. Even if the hard sciences proposed ten methods for analysing temporal contents that up to now have been peculiar to the social sciences, these latter would continue to set their historical perspective in opposition to a rigour that would never understand or could never compel the margin of advents, of events, of vagaries, of unpredictabilities …, details and singularities that are swarming in political affairs. But this supposed inflexibility often reduces to a ready-made and, worse, extremely old idea that the practitioners of the soft sciences have created for themselves regarding the sciences now falsely said to be hard.
For these latter sciences, I repeat, have invaded ten temporal domains: they date their objects better than the historical sciences; giving rise to the Grand Narrative, they unfold a duration that no other narrative could have conceived; their new flexibility includes contingency and change; they give rise to the individual, the instance, detail and landscape: they find themselves on the terrain of historicity. The four concepts of modal logic – impossible, necessary/possible, contingent – used to set these knowledges in opposition two to two; these concepts now unite them. What the social sciences called history often becomes science, and what the hard sciences named science sometimes becomes history.
Hence this book and its main image: the trunk or stem of the arborescence represents ‘hardness’; always effective, necessary even, the format carries the exactness of measurements and laws. No science, no education, no work does without it. But, surging up from it, freed from its exclusions, liberated from the group it can federate, the branch, pointed and piercing, causes the unpredictable to surge up, in which newness appears, in which, in addition, and I shall end with this point that seems to me ought to resolve our difficulties, in which, as I was saying, the individual is substituted for the schema, in which the landscape makes the geographic map grow green again … This is the place, new twice over, where the two sciences progressively join. From their overlapping can be deduced, in return as it were, the pluralist politics of decision evoked above.
Change of knowledge
The third reason therefore has to do with the cognitive: partly thanks to computers, knowledge is changing. The procedural is sometimes substituted for the declarative and at least supplements it; algorithmic thought sometimes replaces conceptual thought and counterbalances it, at least.
Let’s define the words of this enigmatic sentence clearly: the declarative or conceptual invents ideas, defines them distinctly, follows the principle of reason in its fixed version … by following the sequence of causes and effects. The algorithmic or procedural constructs events and singularities step by step, enters into detail, along sequences of circumstances and time. Abstract, the former demonstrates; individual, the latter recounts. An example: with the Grand Narrative, which sums them up and makes their objects come about as dated events, the exact sciences, up until yesterday exclusively given over to declarative thought and concepts, unfold an arborescent algorithm whose step-by-step development moves from format to advent or from stem to branches: in describing these two elements of arborescence, these pages, bifid, graft the procedural onto the declarative.
Up until recently, we didn’t know how to measure, calculate, think … without a concept, without its definition and its field of application, extension and comprehension. An abstract and empty form, we fill it with perceptible intuitions; clear and general, it comprehends a hundred particular instances, whose shadow-stained details we have planed down. The word and the idea of circle, for example, grasp at a blow, under their perfect light, every lopsided ball and every scalene ring encountered in everyday life. The tangible benefits of this declarative: illumination, economy of thought, lightning-fast memory. Philosophy and sciences, in sum the Western cognitiv e, were born, in the direction of Athens, from this Platonic idea. Who can do without its format?
Yet, ever since we have been working on screens, we have left a part of the work of statement, verification and memory to machines. Rapid, the electronic navigates as many balls as you may like and sweeps across them in such a way that the mnemonic economy of the concept of circle yields less benefit. We free ourselves in part from this formal belongingness. The old image of light passes from clarity to speed: to understand thousands of examples, we have less need for a concept, whose ultra-economical memory we leave a little. Inscribed in the machine, a thousand algorithmic procedures permit us to construct and directly envisage the wealth and details of singularities, consequently not planed down. Abandoned by the declarative, the individual resurrects, overloaded with modes and circumstances, roaming a thousand events, astonished at new things, endowed with a new universality; in this procedural book, the pages abound in narratives and persons.
We stroll around in deviation from the old format. Formerly and recently, we saw, in the telescope, singularities distributed over the conceptual background of our declarations, distant stars over the nocturnal firmament; we now consider the concept instead to be poor shell tossed about in a dense landscape. In the preface to Paysages des sciences (pp. I–LXX), I have already described in detail this new entry of detail into the old maps, smooth and empty, the revenge of portraits on schemas, in brief, the ramifications of contemporary knowledge towards a thousand leafy sites. In comparing, for example, the old images of the San Andreas Fault and the images available today, a simple geometric line disappears in favour of a bushy thicket of multiple faultlets; anatomy textbooks transit from abstract schemas to MRI-individuals in which the hip of this young girl or the shoulder of that old man appears; the cosmography textbooks forget the simplistic maps of the sky for photographs of each planet, at some latitude, or of some galactic collision … Certain biotechnologies prepare treatments that recognize the patient so as to cure his or her specific illness. The coloured concrete surges up from the grey abstract; the multiple escapes from the one like a swarm of doves from a magician’s hat; life resurrects from the format.
The concept forms a box, whose word says wood: touch its hardness. A porous pocket, elastic, the singularity, less exclusive, slackens, pierced, mixed, tiger-striped and zebra-striped. The concept pulls in the direction of geometry; the singularity towards topology; the one solid; the other flexible to the point of fluidity. A box never comprehends all boxes … If there exists one way to put several of them into one, you will rarely find two …, hence exclusion, forcing …, whereas you can stuff three, ten, a hundred sacks into any sack, crumpled. The old science practices rigid boxes; the new one limp sacks. From the declarative stem surge up, slender and multiple, procedural branches.
Three formats-cities
Let’s go back to the images of the old symbolic cities: studying in Jerusalem, passing through Athens and dead in Rome, Saint Paul travelled in the triangle drawn by these three formats-cities of antiquity. Our contemporary ears hear the Semitic holy city resound with the biblical grand narrative, already algorithmic and prone to individuals and their singular procedures in its narratives. Conversely, when we understand, we do so, still today, after the example of Athens, given over to the declarative. When Rome coded its Twelve Tables, where is it placed in this game?
Like his person and his travels, the Epistles of Saint Paul set up a new equilibrium, fragile, between Athens and Jerusalem, conceptual thought and algorithmic unfolding. In a new literary form, partly individual autobiography, he invented concepts in order to understand the advent that had recreated his life, and recounted the advent of another survival, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a proper name that unites Hebrew and Greek, the declarative and the algorithm. Today, we are living through another act of this cognitive alliance, the first act of which was born in the person and works of Saint Paul, which are half-Jewish, half-Greek, half-event-oriented, half-theological, in which the conceptual contributes to the narrative, in which the narrative aids the notion.
Just as the author of the Epistles no doubt died in Rome, Christianity settled into and would live there; like Saint Paul, should it leave Jerusalem for circumstantial reasons, it will have difficulty rejoining Athens. Concepts in the Greek style are further removed from the Semitic algorithms of narratives and events than the format of Roman law, whose individual and jurisprudential cases would give birth, later on, to the algebra of the Renaissance; better yet, the legal subject, an empty and formal singularity, contributed to the birthing of the Pauline subject the way Roman adoption aided the erasure of the genealogy of blood. From the cognitive point of view, Rome is closer to Jerusalem than to Athens.
For four thousand years, Western philosophy, theology and sciences had descended from Athens, the fount of concepts, and not from the two other cities, sources, for their part, of histories, narratives, jurisprudential cases and algorithmic sequences. The cities don’t understand one another. Trained from my youth in concepts in the Greek style, I failed my entire life to understand the advents and singularities of narrative religions, as well as, more recently, to assess the newness of the Grand Narrative and the surging up of its branches. My conceptual lights left the algorithms stemming from Rome or Jerusalem in the dark. Our contemporary knowledge is finally grasping them and unfolding their cognitive riches. Formerly indisputably in front, Athens is regressing. In our new cognition, the three tributaries flow together; here we find the three cities equal to each other, at the moment of melting into the universal.
Another interlude
Between the first century and today, Leibniz and Pascal had already practised a kind of Pauline equilibrium between the invention of concepts and narratives of singularities. Both of them inventors of the first calculating machine, authors of infinitesimal algorithms, drafters of procedures such as the arithmetical or harmonic triangle, both of them, tirelessly, recounted: the one related Martin Guerre or the Polish twins, which Christiane Frémont shed light on wonderfully, the other diverts us by describing the solitary in his chamber or the balance artist on his plank … Constructing procedures that make a singular individual into an incarnate universal, they indicated the contemporary direction towards the synthesis between universal mathematics and the metaphysics of the individual – the synthesis-source of the new concordance.
Saint Paul announced the first concordance; Leibniz and Pascal prepared ours. When I, a lost individual, wander in the world, hesitant and step by step, by leaving these three cities for the universal, I recount procedurally; thus I spoke of Saint Paul. When I evoke the algorithm as the set of possible narratives, it becomes true that I declare. Through these intersecting approaches, this book attempts to tie, again and for today, universal mathematics, stem-father, to the metaphysics of the individual, branch-son.
An admission
So I admit that I have never understood the Acts or the Gospels, not any literary narrative of this type. Devoted to the Greek idol and trained in Greek ideas, we understand or scorn them while only using words in the Hellenic language: allegories, parables, analogies, metaphors, symbols …, analysis, hermeneutic …, myths, theology … Does one play the piano with boxing gloves?
The scene in the Meno where Socrates arrogantly crushes the slave boy regarding the diagonal and Euclid’s hiding of the algorithm amid the Elements … show how Greek thought suppressed sequences, whose tradition came from the Fertile Crescent. This tradition returned in the past through knowledge and practices (the position of arithmetic operations, algebra, infinitesimal calculus …) and is establishing itself today through information technology. As a result, the current scorn for religions, which, in the West, generally descend from Semitic traditions, comes less from critical reasons or from atheism than from the usual blindness of one culture regarding another. Since conceptual thought agreed to consider singularity only on condition that it belong to a generality, that is to say, of destroying it, and since it understood the event only on condition of grasping it under a law, that is to say, of emptying it of its value, conceptual thought erased the specificity of algorithmic thought, which returned, formerly and recently, in the procedures of business or of operations, but is springing up again in our machines and other cognitive innovations. Lastly, uniting two gestures, erasing the disdain maintained by one culture towards its neighbouring culture, contemporary knowledge can, for the first time, think together concept and narrative, logic and literature, science and religion.
Better yet, do we attain the universal uniquely by means of the concept? On the contrary, conceptual thought reaches it poorly; when compelling itself to think the set of all sets, it runs into a paradox. Stringing operations together and advancing from events to advents, algorithmic thought constructs, on the contrary, singularities like Jesus Christ, the Abortion, Michel de Montaigne, Martin Guerre …, in which the universal is incarnated. So, at the sight of a star throwing its rays from some point in space towards the world, everyone understands that, from every point of space, a star throws its rays towards all the other points. Touched by this light, everyone can understand without any prior abstraction.
‘Others form man, I recite him,’ Montaigne wrote: others format man, I excite him and recount his circumstances and advents according to changing time. Upstream, Saint Paul: the old formats plunged man into the law, the concept and jurisdiction; I suscitate him [suscite] in the name of the Resurrected one [Ressuscité].1 Downstream and following the example of these efforts, our new cognitive branches today recite a hundred singularities of him, inciting to be reborn those singularities that sleep in the forms of information. For a long time, of man, there has been a little bit of concept and a lot of narrative; since this morning, of the things of the world, there has been a lot of concept and as much narrative; of the human and the natural, there are science and literature, stems and branches. Here is the contemporary overlapping: stable and changing, solid and fluid, format and news … narrative and idea, procedural and declarative, algorithmic and conceptual.
Will we, in the end, irreversibly return to a format? Which one? Montaigne concluded with the famous formula: ‘Every man carries within himself the entire form of the human condition.’ Incandescent, he loses all belongingness, from which comes all the evil in the world. Universal and empty, this form abandons all format.
Virtual contract
So no one will be mistaken: the singular example, the advent, the individual, the contingent and the news aim at the universal as much as formal formats do. Contingency’s knowledge equals necessity’s knowledge in dignity. Better, nothing resists the universal of the format better than the universal of the branch. Hence the exit light at the end of the tunnel of death. Do you remember zero risk, that statistical blunder? The most generous of acts, the most effective of medications … implicate their accursed portion: the law of large numbers brings catastrophe back. The gentlest of machines doesn’t spare us from accident. The best of all worlds includes Evil, mixed in at Creation. That’s why God himself appeared before the tribunal of the theodicy. Death is screwed fast into the secret fold [pli] of conceptual thought.
The equal dignity of the universal and the existential appears in the new cognition. Even if there were only one death, we would no longer tolerate it. We accept reason, but without crime; the format, but without victim. The good shepherd leaves the herd for the lost sheep. The universal of the individual completes the universal of the concept, forms a counterpart to it, offsets it, literally redeems it. We will only move towards globalization on condition of moving, at the same speed, towards the individual; reason will have to cultivate the detail of the landscape, the diversity of the living thing and the person recognized as a universal. Today, contingent existence is fighting the hominian’s last battle for immortality.
Have you noticed, recently, that the latest cures adapt to each one of us? It’s impossible to draw up statistics for this innocent treatment since each intervention resembles an original narrative. The scientist-doctor leaves the father-position for that of the brother: I recognize you to be singular, he says, and not to be an object of my act or an application of the cure. Thus, the intention of fabricating the human still follows the ancient projects in which only the father decided, whereas the son, now seated to his right, exists, free to do with his life as he pleases. Morality here consists in listening to the son. But how are we to give rights to all the sons still to be born?
To the scandal of many, I once proposed to accord ‘nature’ the status of a legal subject. Understand this term in the exact sense: things and persons to be born. Let’s agree on the natural contract with daughters and sons, naturae et naturi, those of future generations. A complementary audacity, the same status of legal subject extends to possibles, natura, to things to come. Let’s all answer the burning questions, on a case-by-case basis of course, but under the guarantee of this virtual contract.
Its recent return to the individual and contingency leads science to the son-position; science therefore requires, for its regulation, everyone’s opinion; not deciding all by itself, in the father-position, it enters, as I have said, into a game with several players, a cognitive, ethical and sociopolitical game; inviting future generations into it wouldn’t have any meaning if t hese possible worlds and these humans to be born didn’t obtain the status of legal subjects and if we didn’t sign with them, absent, a contract – a transcendental condition for knowledge and for action. Everyone sits on the tribunal that will decide these births: the public, patients, politicians, media, jurists, the religious …, both real ones and virtual ones. The subject of knowledge and of technology becomes universalized in the concordance.
In method, the concept dialogues with the individual, as, in politics, the scientist does with the public, the father with the son and, in general, the real with the possible, the necessary with the contingent, humanity with the world. Existential, this book celebrates this new contract.
Project
On the bottom of a bark on Lake Bienne, Rousseau, solitary, felt himself existing between sky and water, among the birds and the foliage; a citizen of Geneva, he signed the Social Contract, at least virtually, with his peers, present or past. There is no crowd or state in nature; no flora or fauna in law. On one side, the things; humans on the other. We are continuing this perilous acosmist divorce today: history forgets geography; neither the social sciences nor politics care about the planet. Yet, not only do we inhabit the world, but today we are weaving ties with it that are so global and closely woven that it enters into our contracts.
The UN, the WHO, NATO, the FAO, UNESCO, the Red Cross, the World Bank …, international organizations deal with our relations as though we didn’t inhabit or change the Earth. Yet our conflicts tend to occupy the ground, to seize sources of water or gas wells, to appropriate seeds and species, to grant themselves the right to treat the atmosphere like a trash can … If, like animals, we soil what we want to make our own niche, global pollution demonstrates the height – and no doubt the end – of appropriation. Let’s conceive a new institution, which we could name WAFEL (Water, Air, Fire, Earth, Life), in which Homo politicus would welcome the elements and living things, non-appropriable quasi subjects because they form the common habitat of humanity. At the imminent risk of death, we have to bring about peace between ourselves to safeguard the world and peace with the world in order to save ourselves.
Envoi
Today, we are living through a triple branch of newnesses of a spatio-temporal and global human scope: the Grand Narrative ties history to time and to the contingent events of the Universe; amid this Narrative, the advent, once again event-oriented and contingent, of sapiens sapiens unifies its species, dates its origins, opens its genealogy, cadences its spread into the world and the diversification of its cultures, renders humanity family. The end of belongingness: there is no longer any North, South, East or West, rich or poor; there are only, whatever the culture they may pride themselves in, brothers-subjects, stemming from an African source, and, because of the powers they have acquired, responsible all together for humanity, for the universe and for their common evolution.
We are reaching the limits of the view projected by Saint Paul, one of the rare philosophers, to my knowledge, who had thought newness as such, the contingent event that constitutes it, the existence and the universality of the subjects brought about by its advent and the surpassing of the formats within which this new, this event-orientation and this universal became established. Let’s redraw, with him, the triple stem issuing from our old Western cultures: the temporal conception of history, inherited from the writing prophets of Israel, taken over, after a Christian fashion, by Saint Augustine or Pascal, secularized by Condorcet or Auguste Comte, lastly made as erudite as you please …; the spatio-temporal view of the world issuing from Greek science and taken over by geometers, astrophysicists or biochemists …; community-based and solidary society, demanded lastly by every law in the world and not only Roman law, more juridical and declarative than Anglo-Saxon law, which is more algorithmic and case-based … These three feeders in the past flowed together towards a new era; swollen, these three tributaries, history, world and society, still local, disappear and flow together today in a branch that’s transcultural because connected with nature. There is no longer any history, world or society but rather the universality of space-time and of human persons.
New subjects of this conceptual and concrete universality, we put our evolution, plus the evolution of living things and of the inert world, under the beneficial or perverse feedback effect of our singular intentions and of our acts. Evolution has produced a producer of evolution.
No prophetism drives me, no proselytism impels me, yet I do not doubt that, amid the tremendous moanings of childbirth, a new era is being announced.
* * *
Through faithfulness to itself, this book should have ended with a story. Ever since Achilles and Sarah all the way up to Madame Bovary and Tintin, every narrative, at least those I am acquainted with, has recounted the adventures of a heroine or of a brave man, even if they related the banal circumstances lived by some anonymous person from the street. Even reversed or constructed, exceptions fascinate. Have you ever heard opera without soloists, composed solely for choirs? Have you ever read, seen or skimmed through films, television shows or comic strips without any star, whether brilliant or common? The old culture consumes personages.
It would have been necessary to write a utopian narrative, an exodus … in which, encountering some given circumstances and knowing how to negotiate them, an innumerable group would escape two combined deaths: the death one inevitably encounters and the one this group prepares with its own hands. I didn’t know how to invent this narrative. I suspect that those who will conceive it will felicitously open the door that was closed before my weakness.