Format-father

Anti-event protection system

Even though Venice, flourishing, was teeming with masts and merchandise, the Lagoon’s shipowners and charterers feared bankruptcy. Why? Because, along with the rising numbers and greater distances, a thousand risks and wagers increased with the growth of their shipping exchanges; power on the open sea brought with it as many unforeseen events. Carefully laden, one ship sank, while another one, light, arrived in port safe and sound; the too dry season lost its harvest; in Constantinople, one correspondent underpaid, while the one in Marseilles died … To sell a coat in Padua, herds of sheep subject to epizootics had to be bred in the Balearic Islands; after shearing, the wool had to be carded in Narbonne; shipped by sea in calm or bad weather; stored in Genoa in rat-infested warehouses; woven in Rome; the garment had to be made in Turin, shipped again via roads crisscrossed with thieves … How can one not get lost in such an arborescent network of accidents and obstacles, interrupted many times over, knotted together elsewhere and differently for wheat, wine or spices? How can one master the flows of money circulating here and there, credits, long- and short-term debits, loans, dividends, exchanges between florins, ducats and other necessities, customs duties, octrois, taxes of every type, due in a space cut up by a hundred feudal systems – to say nothing of corrupt financiers, swindlers or other pirates, whose life even Cervantes shared?

Mediterranean commerce never would have unfurled, around the Renaissance, its wealthy profusion, crowned with immortal works of art; Venice never would have experienced such a splendour and this success if they hadn’t concentrated, applied, even given rise to a thousand and one expertises as well as precise technologies and techniques: from the time-counter to the division of space into a network, from the fixing of units of every type to accounting …, measures intended to be prepared for any event.

Balance and balance sheet

The first books of this accounting described the whole of these operations in minute detail, line items and dates, transits and routes, costs and expenses, losses and profits, bills and projects. Their calculation aims at a general balance sheet that would put in order the firm of the person who maintains it and keeps it balanced, and would predict his future and prosperity. Just as, in his shop or the marketplace, the local merchant would hold a balance in his hand to weigh flour or salt and get a fair and accurate price and profit from this, so the shipowner and the banker, in their establishments, in which a hundred messenger boys and sailors hurried about, invented, so as to be able to launch operations to the four corners of the so-called inhabited world, invented, as I was saying, this accounting balance sheet, an abstract and generalized balance, as it were.

A refined instrument applied to a complex and fluctuating network, the balance sheet presupposed the gathering and support of other metric tools, already invented: balances, of course, to assess weights when preparing to cast off or unloading at the wharf, but also numbers and units (not only for these weights but also for lengths and volumes) suitable for contributing, through the series they form, to rules and accounts; clocks to mark time; a calendar that’s precise and, if possible, standardized in order to bring the correspondents into agreement regarding dates, settlement dates and repayments; currencies whose value everyone agrees on, therefore a kind of Stock Market in which exchange rates would be debated; a common language, the lingua franca spoken by sailors and port travellers during those times; an arithmetic and processes of calculation, addition, division …; natural logarithms appeared; processes for manufacturing paper, the cutting of books and page margins, the separation of words, the arrangement of chapters and paragraphs … similar to those first musical scores equipped with notes named according to the first words of a hymn: ut, re, mi, fa 1 …; printing soon after for letters; the rules of drafting for plans …; perspective, in painting; a law allowing disputes to be settled … How can one navigate, lastly, without instruments for measuring angles, without rules for calculating, without an astronomical model, without compasses or portulans, without a chart presupposing an exact network of space? These machines, these references contributed to a true mastery via this generalized metric.

This standardization of weights and measures, signs and acts made globalized exchanges possible among what was still called the inhabited world. In the space of this time, no economy of this size could have been built or could have functioned without these numbers, these accounts, not only without the measurements they permitted or presupposed, but above all without this generalized metrology. The economy resulted from this metrology at least as much as it conditioned it. Its newness lastly presupposed or accompanied the emergence of modern science at the same time and in the same places: Italy and the Flemish merchants, the respective countries of Gerolamo Cardano and Simon Stevin. Not, I repeat, that I believe that the economy determined the scientific discoveries, but the bringing together of a set of technologies and techniques of the same type, of a type I’m trying to name, conditioned the complex business exchanges around the Mediterranean, at the time of the Renaissance, and the emergence of the science we inherited.

Format: Homogeneous units, series, repetitions

I call this type format: accounting or countability formats exchanges, the way the computer, today, formats our information and globalizes it; let’s likewise call the standardization of the set of these measurements formatting, whether the measurements be scientific, practical, cultural or even artistic, as in the case of musical scores for choirs and masterpiece paintings.2 I take accounting [comptabilité] as my example because the word precedes the word that designates, in Anglicized Latin, our machines; by grouping the countable [comptable] and the measurable, both of them carry out a thousand formattings, presupposing elements, series, repetitions, homogeneity, measurements and agreements concerned with domains we instinctively think have no relation.

The Renaissance, as I’ve said, discovered the same characteristics in the musical staff, the writing of its notes, of its tempos and rhythms, as well as in the perspectivization of space, the clock counting of time, lastly in Galileo’s experiments (the son of a musician) on heavy objects, their speeds and accelerations. Did the father, in opera, combine techniques of measurement brought together by the son in mechanics and astronomy?

Things and humans: Formation

While countability unites and names a thousand kinds of counting in this way, it also makes contracts necessary. How a re we to reduce everything to countable equilibrium? Com-putare, comparing two or several things together, unites the preposition cum with the verb putare, to reckon or think, itself stemming from putus, clean and pure, used for the refining of gold or silver, but also for the cleanliness of people; Latin readily unites purus with putus. We can only compare two volumes or weights of gold if the metal doesn’t contain any impurities; in this way we will be able to repeat an operation whenever we wish. The purity of the things allows us to reduce them to numbers. Extracting, abstracting: purifying every alloy conditions repetition, that is to say, abstraction, that is to say, lastly, the law. Thus we will be able to string together series, calculate … count.

Here we find the true nature of metal defined; this principle of identity applies to the subject as well as to the object: no base metals in pure gold; no cheating in exchange. Purity of the benchmark, entirety of confidence, unsullied by any theft. The market requires erasing corruption. When pure, neither things nor humans lie. Contracts become possible. Formatting attains the individual and groups, culture and thought, the pedagogical education of humanity and the dogmatic Reformation of the Church.

Whether it’s a matter of letters or numbers, of days or seasons …, of printed books or Bibles …, units of the same nature repeat themselves in series. Physical and mental, hardware and software, an entire universe becomes regulated and formatted. The movement historians later called humanism varies according to the same word: education [formation] of young people, new methods of teaching; available information, the Bible at everyone’s disposal; transformation of minds, Reformation. A universal formatting of humanity and its world: Mercator’s earth emerged from the format of his cylindrical projection; Copernicus’s world came out of the heliocentric format; Vesalius’s anatomies formatted cadavers, which Louvain had allowed to be cut up.

The definition of format

How, once again, are we to define format? That for which repetition is law; a generalized measure groups the set of these units. Was Western mastery born from this tremendous synthesis of metrics? This has been said.

Format concerns humans and things, nature and culture … as well as the event, its opposite. While we can quickly make out the power format procures, here are its drawbacks. Preserving measurable smoothness allows effectiveness of course, by eliminating all accident, but excludes the event and forbids the news.3 Examples: television shows cut images up at a rapid rate, assess the intensity threshold of catastrophes, the number of invited guests, the character of the TV host and so on. No real news will ever penetrate this stiffness. The books published by universities require precise subjects, bibliographies and indexes, obligatory quotations, footnotes and so on. No invention can penetrate this rigidity. Formats succeed without inventing, imitate without innovating. Doing away with impurity planes down the unexpected and therefore newness. Will minds fall in this way into the countable? It therefore pleases me to think that in In Praise of Folly, Erasmus joined in Montaigne’s dance, the laughter of the people riding in concert with the knight of the book with the sorrowful face and Rabelais’s farces … amid a globalization of the economy and of culture, whose homogeneity was threatening the joyous celebrations of invention. From the formatted stem, a branch will be reborn.

A different genealogy of the computer

The Renaissance didn’t organize these alignments starting from nothing: as far back as the Early Middle Ages, monasticism was following the canonic rules of Saints Bruno or Benedict, whose edicts set time schedules, the hours and the rite of Divine Office, the way the enclosure cut up space and the way the clothes made the monk. The latter, in addition, abided by canon law, whose name evokes the addition of two formats, and by the liturgical year. An old Church word (it appeared in French during the same era: 1584), the computus calculates the epact, or the interval between the rhythms of the Moon and those of the Sun, in order to base the ritual schedule, based on the sliding around of movable feasts, like Easter and Pentecost, on the fixed feasts, like Christmas or the Epiphany.

Obeying a strict schedule, for the year as well as for hours, Matins, Prime, Terce, Sext, Lauds, Vespers, Compline, roused from the cell by the bell, leaning over the lectern at study, aligned side by side in the refectory, always in rows and often silent …, he who has never known boarding school in his youth, training ships later, lastly shift work in a factory or in a business … is lacking in his education. These collectivities follow ancient rules similar to those that organized monasteries. The cloister, the schoolyard, the factory or the office, the stadium, the prison … carve out a place in space, count time, determine the occupation of the days and the sequence of hours, clothe their monks, boarders, sailors, team members … in uniforms. In brief, they format time, space and the actions of children and adults. This programme has varied little from the Middle Ages up to yesterday morning.

Pedagogy, production, training

Far be it for me to criticize the idea of the formats propriety today would call jails. Only a few years ago, entering to teach in La Santé, Paris’s central prison, I was hardly surprised to see that its architecture reproduced down to almost the smallest details the architecture of the school where the boarders of my youth experienced a similar confinement in space and the rhythms of time; have I ever seen more attentive listeners? Punishment or labour? Forced labour for the sake of reform or education [formation]?

Shoeing horses or dehorning cattle, in the past, required that we immobilize them; they were tied up in a parallelepiped made out of wood beams joined by iron brackets; no farm was lacking this trave, in the format of three stakes.4 An instrument of torture, we now read in books written by city people who have never seen one; but, without it, how were we to equip the animals and make them fit for working the fields? They resisted at first, not long; it all happened as though they understood their interest. An acrid odour emanated from the plough oxen, at the burnt horn, as well as from the white-hot nails meant to attach the horseshoes to the mass. Like these domestic animals, I went, bound, to the ‘trave’ of the boarding school, from which I exited shod with sciences and letters. At least I learned what iron collars and shackles to resist.

I shall continue my praise of format: today like yesterday, there can be no work without traves, without the format of such a framework. Of wood and iron. He who has a calling for writing will attain this if he enters the monastery. Going to sleep and waking at regular hours, leaning over the work for a constant duration, without missing a day, he will only align his paragraphs by likewise aligning his limbs and moods, his space and his time, the whole of his existence, dedicated. The will to regulation adapts to the autonomous regulations of the body, heat or heart, and regulates them to its norm. Anchorite, writer, it’s the same battle. The West has forgotten the meaning of the Latin devotio: the passionate sacrifice of the flesh. Do you want to write? Face this death. Without format, whose forms concern the worker as well as his work, there can be no production. How does an athlete attain what he calls being on form? Through a training requiring him to follow a rule and to become a monk, like the writer. It’s a matter here of a necessary condition, which ensures, at least, a well-made work, an honourable race, a mediocre rank among professionals. For genius, the necessary condition has not yet been found. The classification of the sciences and the disciplines, of articles and theses, footnotes, indexes and bibliographies, honest quotations and humility in debate …, university constraints discipline research and thought. Conform to the iron collar and shackles of the formatting …; obey the format-father, who reigns, invisible and absent, over absolute knowledge. But if you want to invent, take risks; abandon the format. Even if it means dying, become son. Great works unite format and invention, iron discipline and freedom: father and son.

Leibniz: The mathematics of the father and the singularities of the son

An example: pre-established harmony, in Leibniz, presupposes that God, the King of power and Father of mercy, Creator of all eternity, programmed the cosmos and humans; this harmony regulates the monads in a gigantic monastery; the cloisters I was talking about are organized and function like a reduced model of this universal harmony, whose formatting generalizes the entire enterprise from just now to the universe. It has taken me my entire life to understand that this philosophy, systematized according to mathematical models (I wrote this thesis in the past and dedicated it to my father, a peasant and bargeman), referred to this haughty figure that is the Father, to his laws without any exceptions, formatted for all eternity.

Up until the individual and relational Singularités described by Christiane Frémont persuaded me that events, non-reducible to these formats, trace out, faced with this Father, the Son’s place; that the Christianity of the incarnation completes monotheism, in the strict sense; that, faced with formal sciences, a subtle logic puts events and newnesses in place. In short, that starting from the trunk, universal and necessary, of the format, a thousand contingent suckers explode in Leibniz. Extremely rare in thinkers, this double entry, ramified, now passes to my eyes as a good criterion for authentic philosophy as well as for the philosophy our times long for.

But, before getting to that, let’s see how many formattings – paternal – have seen the light of day in the West.

Five moments of formatting in the West

1. Around the Aegean Sea, the sixth and fifth centuries BC saw the invention of alphabetic writing through the cutting up of phonemes into vowels and consonants; the invention of money, another form of impression and division into elements (our word ‘pecuniary’ remembers that pecus used to signify the herd to be bartered); followed by the Platonists, the Pythagoreans grouped their arithmetic geometry around the theory of proportionality; via his homothetic theorem, Thales rigorously described the prior form of the pyramids, under whose weight and volume Egypt attempted to format unformattable death. From science to languages and exchanges, the formattings cover the same span as that of the Renaissance.

Whether it’s a question of models of the world with the Presocratics, of ideas in the style of Plato, of Aristotelian logic and mechanics … all the way up to the incipit of the Gospel according to St. John …, the Greek word logos doesn’t so much signify discourse, speech or knowledge, the conventional translations, as it writes a/b = c/d. Quasi algebraic, this formula designates a measure as well as a balance assessed on a set of scales, a spatial invariant of form across variations of size, a justice and a harmony, and therefore organizes the exactness of measurements the way it tiers the musical scale by the vibration of strings; it guarantees the arrangements of contractual apportioning, and therefore politics and morality as well as relations with God: we humans have the same relation to Christ, St. John said, as the relation that unites Christ, the Son, to God, his Father. In the format of this formula, the Greek miracle is summed up. In four letters and three signs, this logos traced the first Western format, universal enough not to distinguish any discipline or specialized field, from metaphysics to religion, from algebra to geometry, from law and justice to politics, from poetry and song to the organization of harmonic forms. With Hippocrates and his school, it brought about a new human body, which sculpture imitated by means of an omnipresent golden ratio; with Thales, for whom everything comes from water …, with Empedocles, who roots the world in the four elements, it brought about a new earth, measured in latitude by the gnomon’s shadow by Pytheas of Massalia, and according to the meridian by Eratosthenes; starting from Anaximander, the same geometric ratio or relation brought about a new universe. As with the Renaissance, a different human inhabited a new measured cosmos.

A different synthesis

Why does Plato in the Statesman devote the greater part of his preparatory efforts to questions, pointless at first glance, focusing on dichotomy and the art of measurement? Why does he evoke, as we do with the Grand Narrative, the rotations of the world and its temporal phases? Why does he pass technologies in review, the way we just visited Venice; why, lastly, does the art of the weaver become the figuration of kingship … if not because politics demands a general regrouping of every format? Plato, it is said, invented the Ideas or the Forms. This signifies that this Greek time found the art of formatting in everything humans fabricated in culture or encountered in the natural world: counting, spelling, reducing matter to elements, cutting with a knife, articulating, dividing, measuring, aligning, intertwining series … Arts and trades, mathematics and logic, education and orthography, world and living things, herds and groups, politics lastly, the supreme art …, the perceptible world and social collectives abide by the forms of the intelligible world … beneath the paternal shadow of the royal weaver.

2. Latin genius gave this general metric in the forms of law and administration, drew land and sea routes, set up an army aligned into legions themselves arranged into cohorts … More concrete than formal, more cultural than natural, more jurist than physicist, Rome formatted humans more than things, governance more than technology. In social terms, it attained universality just as much as Greece.

3. I won’t go back over the Renaissance, in which the flowering of standardized elements I just spoke about appeared. Once again, the invention of printing resides in format: the type case, into which Gutenberg put the forged letters, allowed one to move from written letters to other written letters, manufactured, manipulable, substitutable, and vice versa: the first hardware formatting of software.

4. With the metric system, around the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, one of the first attempts at global formatting appeared, universal because transcultural. Relating to the dimensions of the planet and astronomical rhythms, the decimal system moved little by little from science, manifestly universal, to a usage that’s almost everywhere accepted, beyond the traditional units, whose diversity made their translation as well as crossing borders by humans and things difficult, even if it took lots of time for the new units to assert themselves locally. Linnaeus’s language, which is suitable for designating living species, and the language created by Lavoisier for chemical elements and compounds … prepared this enterprise.

During the same revolutionary era, a new calendar attempted to format time by relating it to the weather – wind, rain, snow, fruit and harvests … – so as to free it from religious references, which had limited its use. A hopeless enterprise, formatting the regular by means of the irregular! The fact that, unlike the metric system, these new namings had quickly failed doesn’t prevent me from sometimes repeating, with delight, the stanzas of the ecological litany: Prairial, Messidor, Vendémiaire, Nivôse … Later, the positivist calendar, intercultural, united, to the contrary, sciences, arts and religions by enumerating fathers in preference to a nature Auguste Comte rejected as metaphysical; but the Law of Three Stages and the hierarchical classification of the sciences had already formatted history and knowledge.

A new earth, from which weights and measures emerged. A new universe: co-author of the metric system, Laplace formatted the solar system according to Newton’s law, thenceforth, thanks to him, as universal as the languages of chemistry and natural history. From the sciences to law and politics, the breadth of coverage we had noted in the preceding episodes is found again. Should the French Revolution be taken, on the other hand, to be an unforeseen and new event, or did it carry out projects prepared by the Age of Enlightenment and the Encyclopedia? Did it free from the old format, or did it, conversely, impose the formats that preceded?

To wrap up this era, I would readily justify the importance sometimes given to Kant by the extension of these formattings to subjectivity (knowledge, morals and judgement): a priori forms of sensibility, the schematism, concepts of the understanding, regulative ideas, the categorical imperative regulating formal morality, definitions of the sublime and the beautiful … format the subject the way metric units do the world. The fact that the naiveté of the enterprise makes people today laugh or worry doesn’t prevent its author from having regulated the inward.

Format, information, recording medium

5. I would never have attempted, so imprudently, such an incomplete retrospective if we hadn’t witnessed today a new and similar attempt, a universal one. Let’s redefine format: it concerns the size of a sheet of paper or, now, the dimension of any recording medium. This usual sense prepares, at least formally, the universal metrology in which we are living. Rare are the actions, practical gestures, exchanges or relations … in which such metrics don’t now intervene. Without these metrics, there can be no medicine, no commerce or control, no law or society, no police, no morality or politics, no thought, science or religion. Formatted in this way, the encyclopaedia added up on the internet and the Grand Narrative’s temporal integral replace, today, the grand treatises, from Euclid to Laplace …, whose publications cadence the above moments.

For computer and information science [l’informatique] generalizes the old attempts once again since the format it proposes defines the rules to be followed for the size and arrangement of information on a recording medium. Used independently of their content, these last two notions have of course just allowed us to revisit history by uniting domains that were distinguished or hierarchized without justification. Whether it has to do with graffiti on walls, theorems on parchment, notes on a score, poems by email …, representations of every type, drawings or messages, lies in love letters or falsehoods by telephone …, molecular chains in a gene, a crystal or a cell, even atoms in a molecule …, we find there information deposited on a recording medium, itself invariant in function across variations of texture.

How do we deposit this information there? The general idea of code generalizes, in its turn, figures and elements previously enumerated: letters, notes, numbers, the chemical elements of genetics, the folding of molecules … Bits and pixels don’t take content, matter or meaning, the real or the virtual into account: there are as many information units in Pythagoras as in Verlaine, in insults as in the Law of the Twelve Tables, the memory of a computer, the DNA of an organism, a chemical reaction …, as many similar pixels in the Mona Lisa as on the screen of a mobile phone or the photograph of a galaxy.

Since information is measured in proportion to its rarity, its value disappears into the minuscule in comparison to ordinary energies; as for format, whether ordinary or global, its enframing or depositing on a recording medium doesn’t add any information. More general than those of the preceding metrologies, these new concepts, formal, of format, medium and coding promise a more powerful mastery of the world, whether inert or living, of cognition and practices, by occupying things and classes of knowled ge. Of course, we exchange information with each other, whether as groups or as individuals; we would die from not doing so; but we decipher it, coded in living things, molecules and atoms. Right where yesterday we still saw exchanges of energy, we now spot transfers of information. So we are beginning to understand why certain molecules form while others disappear, as though the laws of evolution had entered into the inert world. Matter and life contain the repetitive format and the rare information expressing newness … – the global drawing of the stem and the branch.

Hence the necessity of a new synthesis, following the one by the Statesman or by Leibniz’s system. Philosophy would miss our time if it didn’t seek, through such synthesis, to reconstruct, like the two others, the cognitive, the objective, the collective. How many of our institutions resemble those stars whose apparent sparkling we still see but which we know to have been dead for ages? How many resemble museums! A thousand fossils clutter our cities. This broad synthesis would allow us to reconstruct everything.

Hominescence celebrated the greatest discovery of the century; I am retranslating it: within the very heart of matter, in the arrangement of atoms in order to form molecules or the arrangement of particles in atoms lies information. Everything in the world, ourselves included, receives it, preserves it, transmits it. Every element formerly called material or hardware says logos or software. Consequently, the act of formatting information descends into the elements. Alive and thoughtful, we are no different from them; the history of humans is grafted onto the Grand Narrative of the world. There can be no universal formatting that would be more universal. Thus coding, format and information enter into metaphysics, one in which the recording medium replaces substance. This new synthesis binds the universe and cultures via a natural contract.

The Grand Formatter

Internal or external, immanent or transcendent, does the format come from the world itself, from elsewhere or from us? We sometimes form an image of it: simple, symbolic, carnal, moving … Here are some of its figurines, its pixels: a father runs his family; a president governs; a legislator says the law; a strategist steers battles; a scientist masters an expertise; a doctor heals; a teacher teaches a language; an orator gives language voice; an architect designs buildings; a masterworker perfects his masterwork; a banker invests in businesses balanced by accountants; a priest or pastor preaches; an adman pollutes space and time with brands; a sage lives morality; a saint, a genius, a hero, a champion set examples … A thousand textbooks give names, variable according to language and ideology, to these admirable and doubtful titles.

In arranging these elementary vignettes in a large format, whether the oval of a painting or the rectangle of a screen, they are collected together and take on meaning, at a high scale, under a single and same heading; the figure of the father adds up this multiplicity. This is the synoptic integral of these shadows, the Grand Formatter, however varied the domains in which these rules are applied may be. The preceding historical moments define the eras of the Father … Plato’s royal weaver, Leibniz’s God … Have we ever abandoned this image?

The father, today?

Laws that are more regular than the laws invented by past ages to organize or enslave collectives, to understand and dominate the world, to save or subjugate souls, today format the Grand Narrative of the inert and the living, before cultures are born, therefore in the absence of human intention. Consequently, what face of the father do the laws of physics, of genetic programming, the global grasp of the narrative itself … project onto the giant screen of the universe and the gigantic duration of the cosmos? Will we find there the set of the figurines whose list I just gave? Outside space and in the eternity of time, is the God of philosophers and scientists – all-powerful, omniscient and creator, just and merciful … – returning for a handy synopsis of the format of all formats?

Does immanence regulate itself in silence, or does it apply a transcendent word? Can thought do without the integrative function, whether personal or not, of the understanding-sum of the eternal truths evoked by Leibniz? Can it unfurl itself without a global system whose equilibrium and closure guarantees the faithfulness to the real of our local thoughts? Do our pieces of knowledge resort to the regulative function of an absolute knowledge? Even the Age of Enlightenment lived in the grip of this summational form, literally preformationist, a perennial spring and reference for laws, for reason, for every formatting, physical and cultural.

Those who seek to kill the father consider this format to be brutal, not without some appearance of argument. In fact, the quantity of violence required to impose some format can easily be assessed. The strategist, the legislator, the king … dispose of armies; God surrounds himself with legions of archangels wielding swords of fire; the financier creates wealth and poverty … In the face of injustices, whoever doesn’t revolt lacks courage. Some reasons, colder and demonstrative, on the other hand, dissolve the very idea of system and preformation. Do formats become set up contingently? I shall return to this question.

The tyrant

Let’s turn to more contemporary violences. Does today’s anxiety come from the fact that we feel ourselves to be bound up by a tremendously insistent formatting? We no longer lift a finger without paying a tax for the privilege; myriads of images invade our representations and format them in their turn; we no longer feel a single desire without advertising having already aroused their brands in our automaton-souls; world and environment, acts, objects, emotions and opinions imprison us with closely set bars. We are no longer even going to have children blindly … So we link all formatting with necessity, necessity with enslavement, and enslavement with death. Freedom, what has become of your old victories? Death, have you just triumphed? The figure of the father slips into that of the tyrant. Fundamentalisms reflect its sinister remains.

Our behaviours consequently reverse the old attitudes concerning the unexpected and unpredictable, events that distressed our ancestors so much that the realizations of the formats reassured them instead, inasmuch as these realizations followed the predictions of scientific laws. The Age of Enlightenment sheds light on this idea.

Foresight and prevision

Foresight there counted as a virtue of the father of the family, with finite sight and limited horizon, whereas the other Father, eternal, all-powerful and creator, was considered to be the only one to know everything, by means of a rational prevision 5 coupled with a merciful providence; this triple variation on vision d istinguished the two fathers, the eternal one from the temporal one. As soon as Newtonian laws allowed predicting an eclipse as well as the impact of an artillery shell, prevision, formerly reserved for God, passed to the temporal father; God alone enjoys this prevision, Voltaire said, whereas foresight, random, remains human; we are now attaining not only foresight-virtue, Maupertuis responded, but also prevision-knowledge. A blasphemy to the ears of Voltaire, this advance heralded progress in the eyes of Maupertuis.

Inhabiting and living in a world given over to the vagaries of events-accidents, contingent and dangerous, these neoclassical thinkers felt themselves to be partly freed from their risks by the sciences and technologies, which create formats. The way Prometheus stole fire from heaven, we stole prevision from God. The Enlightenment therefore taught us to respect laws, not only the laws whose spirit Montesquieu described or the ones whose legislator Rousseau named and whose contract he defined, but the laws of physics, mechanics and natural history, laws that are regular and allow previsions. Starting from Newton, we knew how to govern the forces of the world. Even if it had a tendency to overturn all or part of theology, the Enlightenment continued to revere the Father; mastering prevision, the Enlightenment set itself up in his place.

We traverse this Enlightenment perspective twice. We inhabit and live in a world already so regulated by technosciences, so protected, smooth and previsional that we love the event and the new instead. We experience prevision less as a benefit than as a loss of freedom. We fear to find ourselves lacking precisely what used to make our ancestors afraid: contingency. In addition, as I shall have to say, today we are entering not so much into divine prevision as into its creation; so, refusing the risks, we reject the invention of man-made objects whose effects we cannot predict. We fear the sciences and technologies doubly: when, continuing the Enlightenment, they eradicate the vagaries of contingency; when, continuing the old vagaries, they eradicate our security. We prefer to trust the accidents of nature, provided, of course, that they remain gentle.

An age of the Son?

We are separated from the Enlightenment less through belief in God or atheism than through the difference, far more decisive, between preformation and unprevisionability: through another fear of contingency. We now create things whose behaviour exceeds our previsions. Creation becomes separated from preformation. Contingency returns everywhere, including in knowledge said to be hard; for example, prevision, mechanical, becomes fissured by chaos theory. The old triple law of the father, prevision and providence, only leaves us still with foresight.

Another example: we reason and have to decide by means of large numbers and singularities, with margins of error. When, united, the journalist and the politician demand a settled decision, the scientist today answers with a statistical estimation, that is to say, with a doubt and a proportion. When the previous two demand zero risk, the scientist denies this possibility. So the figure of the father splits: the twofold power of the media and the state perpetuate, before the public, the figure of the father, whose understanding contains preformed certainties so as to still allow belief in definitive and closed truths, in a tribunal of cases and accusation, in a world system, in a rational sequence of history …, whereas the scientist quits these formats so as to adopt a lower profile in which knowledge changes status and inaugurates a time I characterize as the age of the Son. He now says that there is always a margin of error, and therefore of risk; I think, therefore I doubt; he who doesn’t doubt doesn’t think, but plays at the ancient figure of the father.

Hence the new counter-list of sons: the scientist hesitates in his expertise; the doctor is charged before the courts; the sage wavers between impossible choices; the legislator codifies questions he no longer has any mastery of; the father negotiates the running of the family with the mother and children, and the tyrant flees his country, ruled as a democracy …; the strategist worries about no longer being able to kill children …; Homo faber and the theologian lastly understand that no one ever masters his creations … The filial age comes.

Sciences-daughters

As a result, the various revolts against the father, against the stupid and repetitive habits, against the preformation without freedom to act …, against the sciences and technologies, whose laws bear the same name as the laws dictated by a domestic and public king …, recruit their militants from the same camp as their adversaries, who lament the loss of references without seeing that contingency exceeds the format; that preformation has never taken place; that the possible exceeds the previsional; that large numbers always add an accursed portion to a regulation that only norms a majority; that freedom comes within easy reach. When law abounds, detail superabounds. Aspirin heals, but its spread is not exempt from accidents; no absolute certainty guarantees that some person will not die from it instead of being relieved by it; reason, science, law … the father … prescribe it, and it will relieve the pain of millions of people; but no one now forgets the inevitable margin of lethal risks. The event returns across the format the way a flood filters in trickles over and under and through a dike.

A new knowledge-son, which the mathematician himself has practised ever since he proved that no formal system closes over itself, unloads the bearded legislator, the lion grown old … of their self-importance, their self-assurance, their certainties. Proof, reason … format leave a residue, in every place, both natural and cultural. The real is scattered around the rational. The concrete surpasses the abstract. Singular instances exceed the rule. The flesh outstrips biochemistry. A person and his singularity draw varied landscapes such as are taught to the doctor and the magistrate by the particular, in its turn. Hands seek to hold a water that always exceeds their grasp … This disequilibrium between format and the informal, law and the multiplicities that exceed it, this deviation, this ex-istence … move the world, living things, history, cultures and the sciences …, cause, here and there, a thousand arborescent branches to surge forth.

Let’s continue on … from the simplest – we don’t know the law of distribution for the prime numbers themselves – to the most complex, which produces this dialogue: Einstein, ‘God does not play dice’; Niels Bohr, ‘Are you claiming to tell God what he must do?’ At twenty-four, Werner Heisenberg exceeded, with the profusion of nuclear nanodetail, the figure of the father, with his flowing white mane, who was dictating his law to the world. These brief words, exchanged between the triumphant relativity and the beginnings of quantum mechanics, which was running counter to intuition, reproduce, almost word for word, those that Bossuet addressed to Leibniz, who had just described how God had created the world: ‘Do you have privileged access to the divine design?’ Singular and inconstant, tattered clouds often veil the Sun in such a way that everything always seems new under its father-figured single law. Chaotic, weather conditions can prevent observation of astronomical laws. Such laws themselves, so regular in Newton and Laplace, have exploded with chaos since Poincaré or the galactic clouds of astrophysics. Landscaped, circumstances return into knowledge. Crowds of sons exceed the father.

Kill the father? Not so fast! The existence of an element of death in mastery remains an unfathomable mystery of production. Should it be necessary to revolt against the tyrant, that’s fine. Avoid, however, replacing him once victory is achieved the way Napoleon sat on the throne of kings and Stalin took the czar’s palace. The existence, conversely, in the format, of an irreducible motor of production, which I have praised and will praise, remains an equally unfathomable mystery. We need it to live, think or produce. Yet, irresistibly, it leads us to death. Seeking to kill the father to free oneself from him consists in falling back into the same law of death. A question remains: How does one escape this fate?

Erasing the contingent event in the name of rational law seems to me to be just as unreasonable on the part of the ancient father as doing away with the law to the benefit of the abundant real on the part of the new son. Might we bring them into agreement? When the theory of branes and superstrings attempts to reconcile the relativity of the first with the quantum mechanics of the second, I dream that mathematicians are settling a family argument.

The Grand Narrative and history

Before human freedom, human madness and human will format their own customs, the Grand Narrative abides by two formats, both properly universal: the laws of physics and the genetic code. The second one, whose origins are unknown to us, continually mutates and produces, contingently, thousands upon thousands of diverse living species, taking the environmental filter into account; the combinatorics that shapes its variations resembles a lottery more than a set of decrees. As for physical constants, which accompany the laws of physics, they are the hallmark of both the real and its contingency; for if they had other values, it would be a matter of another world. Their product erects Planck’s wall behind which lies, upstream, a beginning over which we have no hold, but which, downstream, opens the constitution of this particular world; for, produced differently, another beginning would have marked out another path, whose direction would have ended up at another world. Consequently, all formats, those of the Grand Narrative and not only those we decide on, necessary of course with regard with their application, become contingent with regard to their beginning. Born contingent, they become necessary. Like masterpieces of art.

The Grand Narrative then, in its entirety, obeys the following modalities: rare and full of information, a contingent event tends, with duration, towards a necessary law, a format without information; in its development, possibilities, fluctuating around it, disappear, mercilessly pruned by impossibility; sometimes one of them emerges, contingent again, surges up and, resistant to the impossibilities, becomes, in its turn, necessary … True of the inert, this succession of branches applies to evolution and to my existence as well as to cultural, scientific or artistic productions, in sum to the Grand Narrative. Epigenesis, then, winning out over preformation, changes the figure of the format-father under the influence of the event-son. How is knowledge to be conceived? What the social sciences called history becomes science, and what the hard sciences named science becomes history. System and Narrative exchange their values.

Paleoanthropology describes us as sons of Humanity. This re-rooting universalizes this title to every culture. The definition of humanity is continually being constructed; we are permanently working towards hominization, towards the birth of sons who would be more human. We find ourselves fathers of Humanity: even concretely, in our laboratories. To kill the father or to love him, this is a question of epistemology, of cognitive science, of ethics; it concerns the continuation of the Grand Narrative that we are fabricating. Once again, this question arises in the same way in the hard and the social sciences, in the arts and religions, for knowledge and the real.