Pierre LeŽvy
I am reading, you are reading, you are listening to a text. What is happening? First, the text is perforated, dashed out, strewn all over with blanks. They are the words, the members of the phrases, that we do not see (in both senses of the term, the perceptual and the intellectual).They are they fragments of the texts that we do not comprehend, that we do not apprehend together, that we do not reunite with others, that we neglect. To the extent that, paradoxically, to read, to listen to, means to begin by neglecting, by misreading, or by untying the text.
At the same time that we tear it apart by the act of reading (or, like now, by listening to it) we crumple the text. We fold it upon itself. We bring together passages corresponding to each other. We sew together members scattered, disassembled, dispersed on the surface of the pages, or in the linearity of the discourse: to read a text is to retrace the textile gestures that have given it its name.
The passages of the text keep up a virtual correspondence, almost an epistolary activity that we realize, for better or for worse, following, or not following, the directions of the author. Letter carriers of the text, we travel from one end of the space of significance to the other, assisted by the addressing system, by the pointers, that the author, the editor, the typographer has laid out. But we can also disobey the directions, produce illegitimate folds, weave secret, clandestine nets, make appear other semantic geographies. Such is the work of reading: this act of tearing apart, of crumpling, of distorting, of putting the text back together, starting from the initial linearity, or platitude, to open up a living milieu where significance may become unravelled. The space of significance does not exist prior to the act of reading. It is by traversing it, by roaming in it, by charting it that we fabricate it.
But while we are bending it upon itself, thus producing its relation to itself, its autonomous life, its semantic aura, we are also relating the text to other texts, to other discourses, to images, to affects, to the immense reservoir pulsating with desires and signs in its totality that constitutes us. Here it is no longer the unity of the text at stake, but the construction of oneself, the construction that always has to be redone, never to be completed. It is no longer the sense of the text occupying us, but the direction and elaboration of our thought, the precision of our picture of the world, the completion of our projects, the evocation of our pleasures, the string of our dreams. This time the text is no longer crumpled, folded into a ball upon itself, but cut out, powderized, distributed, evaluated according to the criteria of a subjectivity giving birth to itself.
Of the text itself there will soon remain nothing. At the most, we may have brought some improvement to our models of the world, thanks to the text. It may only have served us by making some images, some words that we already possessed resound with new depths. Sometimes, we will have joined one of its fragments, invested with a special intensity, to such and such a zone of our mnemonic architecture, another one to such and such a segment of our intellectual networks. It will have functioned as an interface with our selves. It is only very rarely that our reading, our listening, will produce a dramatic reorganization, as if through a violent threshold effect, of the tangle of interwoven representations and emotions constituting us.
To listen to, to look, to read, ultimately all equal with the construction of oneself. Making ourselves open to the effort of signification coming from another, by working, by piercing, by crumpling, by cutting up the text, by incorporating it in us, by destroying it, we contribute to the erection of the landscape of signification inhabiting us. We sometimes confide some fragments of the text to the care of the nomadic tribes of signs journeying in us. These insignia, these relics, these fetishes, or these oracles, have nothing to do with the intentions of the author, or with the living semantic unity of the text, but they contribute to the construction and reconstruction of the world of significations that we are.
I have not yet pronounced the word ÒhypertextÓ. And still I have not been talking about anything but the hypertext. Intellectual technologies almost always exteriorize and reify some cognitive function, some mental activity. At the same time they reorganize the intellectual economy, or ecology, in its totality consequently modifying the cognitive function they were only supposed to assist, or to reinforce. The interdependency of writing (an intellectual technology) and memory (a cognitive function) bears witness to it.
The emergence of writing accelerated the process of artificialization and of exteriorization of memory that had undoubtedly began with the first steps of the evolution of man. Its extensive use altered the face of Mnemosyne. We have come to conceive of memories as kinds of recordings.
The semi-objectification of memory by the text has undoubtedly favored the development of a critical tradition. In fact, written documents sever knowledge from its subject. I am no longer what I know, and therefore I may also question what is written.
Writing also promoted the emergence of a system of communication where messages are often both temporally and spatially separated from the source emitting them, and therefore received out of context. Consequently the sophistication of interpretative practices became an obligatory prerequisite for reading. As for the production, one had to imagine systems of self-sufficient enunciations, independent of the context.
With writing, and increasingly so with alphabetical writing and printing, the narrative and ritual forms of knowledge characteristic of oral societies ceded their place to the theoretical and hermeneutical modes of knowledge. The dictate that truth be universal, objective and critical, could only impose itself in a cognitive ecology extensively structured by the written document.
It is known that the first alphabetical texts did not distinguish between words. It was only gradually that the blank spaces between vocables, punctuation, paragraphs and the division into distinct chapters, table of contents, index, the art of lay-out, the reference system of encyclopedies and dictionaries, footnotes... in sum, everything that facilitates the reading and consultation of written documents, were invented. Contributing to fold the texts, to structure them, to articulate them beyond their apparent linearity, these heuristic technologies constitute a system that might well be called an equipment for artificial reading.
Hypertext, hypermedia or the interactive multimedia continue the already ancient process of the artificialization of reading. If reading consists of selecting, of schematizing, of constructing networks of internal references within the text, of associating fragments of texts to other data, of integrating words and images into a personal memory under permanent reconstruction, then hypertextual systems constitute precisely a sort of reification, of exteriorization, of the processes of reading.
By now we have seen that artificial reading has existed for a long time. But how does the system stabilized on the pages of books and journals differ from that being invented today on a digital basis?
The digital hypertext automatizes and materializes the operations of reading, and extends its dimensions. Always under reorganization, it provides a reservoir, a dynamic matrix, starting with which the navigator, reader or user, can create a particular text according to the needs of the moment. The data bases, expert systems, tables, hyperdocuments, interactive simulations and other virtual worlds, are potentials for texts, images, sounds, or even tactile qualities, actualized by particular situations in thousands of different ways.
Compared to previous techniques numerization effects a kind of small-scale Copernican revolution: it is no longer the reader following the instructions of reading who moves about in the text, but the now mobile and kaleidoscopic text turning, folding and unfolding itself, manifesting facets of itself in front of the reader, at his prompting.
On the other hand, writing and reading exchange roles. The one who participates in the structuration of the hypertext, outlining possible folds of signification, is already a reader. Symmetrically, the one who actualizes a journey in the documentary reservoir, makes manifest such and such an aspect of it, contributes to the production, momentarily bringing to completion an interminable writing. The seams and splits, the original paths of sense invented by the reader, can be incorporated into the very structure of the corpus. After the invention of the hypertext, every act of reading is a potential act of writing.
But more importantly, hypertextual systems and digital nets have deterritorialized the text. Through them there has emerged a text without distinct borders, without any definable interiority. Now there is text, like one says there is water or sand. The text has been put into movement, it has been taken into a torrent, it has been vectorialized, it has become constant metamorphosis. It is thus closer to the movement of thought itself, or closer to the image of thought that we share today.
The text still subsists but the page has evaporated. The page, i.e. the Latin pagus Ð this field, this territory encircled by white margins, plowed by lines, sown with letters and characters by the author; the page even now heavy with Mesopotamian clay, still adhering to the neolithic soil, this page of ancient origin is slowly effacing under the growth of informalization as its loosened signs depart to join the digital stream.
It all happens as if numerization were to establish a sort of immense semantic plane (cyberspace), accessible from everywhere, in the production of which everyone could participate, by folding it differently, by retaking and modifying it, by refolding it... Is it even necessary to stress the point? Today the economic and juridical forms inherited from the preceding periods prevent this movement of deterritorialization from reaching its end.
The emergence of cyberspace makes more pressing certain questions that artists have been posing for more than a century. These questions directly modify the ÒframeÓ: the work and its limits, the conventions of exhibition, reception, reproduction, distribution, interpretation, and the different forms of distinction brought about by them. The modification of the frame is now such that this time it seems that no closure will ever be able to contain in extremis the deterritorialization: we must jump into a new space. The transformation has originated in the socio-technical milieu of the multiplication and distribution of ÒworksÓ. But can we still talk of works in the cyberspace?
Already at least for a few centuries the phenomenon called art has passed more or less as follows in the Occident: a person (the artist) signs a particular object or message (the work) that other persons (the receivers, the public, the critics) then perceive, taste, read, interpret, evaluate. Irrespective of the function of the work (be it religious, decorative, subversive...) and its capacity to transcend each and every function toward the substance of mystery and emotion inhabiting us, it is inscribed in the classical scheme of communication. The sender and the receiver are clearly separated, and their mutual tasks prescribed in advance.
But certain artistic experiments have attempted to constitute agencies of communication and of production, collective happenings implicating the receivers, transforming interpreters into actors, linking interpretation with collective action, instead of conforming to the scheme where messages are sent toward receivers situated outside of the process of creation and invited to make sense of the work after its completion. Artists experimenting along these lines could well be the first explorers of the new architecture of cyberspace. Their activity matters all the more since it is often consonant with the ethico-political criteria that I wish to announce later on. Shall we soon have to take into account the art and architecture of cyberspace along with the traditional artistic genres?
In this domain even the most ÒtechnicalÓ looking of decisions have and will have strong political, economic, and cultural repercussions. We know that architects and urbanists contribute to the production of the material, practical, and even symbolical environment of human groups. Similarly, those financing, conceiving and engineering cyberspaces contribute to the production of environments of thought (sign systems, intellectual technologies), of perception (interfaces), of action (telework, teleoperation), and of communication (rights of access, tariff policies) that will structure social and cultural evolutions to a large extent.
To guide in the construction of the cyberspace, to assist in the selection between different orientations that are possible, even to imagine new ones, I propose criteria based on ethico-political selectivity, an organizing vision. Systems contributing to the production of a collective intelligence or imagination should be encouraged. Evidently, collective imagination is not be understood as a fusion of the individual intelligences into a kind of amorphic magm, but, on the contrary, as a process of growth, of differentiation, of proliferation and of mutual rebound of singularities. The concept of collective intelligence refers to intelligences distributed everywhere, active everywhere, valorized everywhere, coordinated and placed into synergy. In my mind, that is the best use the cyberspace can be put into.Following from this general principle, one should select foremost...
Interpretation, i.e. the production of sense, no longer refers to the interiority of an intention, or to the hierarchies of esoteric significations, but to the appropriation of the navigator in its singularity. Meaning is based on local pertinence, it emerges at the intersection of the deterritorialized semiotic plane and the search for efficacy, or for pleasure. I am no longer interested in the thoughts of an unattainable author, what I ask of the text is that it make me think, here and now.
This is where we arrive at the limit of the notions of text and of reading.
In order to cross the border, to try to understand what is at play beyond the border, I suggest that we make a mental experiment. Suppose that we would not yet have invented writing, but that the extra-terrestrials would have placed all the media of contemporary communication at our disposal, including the dynamic, interactive technique possessing memory and autonomous calculating capacities that makes up the screen of the computer. The extra-terrestrials suggest that we invent a system of signs in order to help us think and make records of our thoughts. What kind of writing should we set up under these circumstances? Would it be alphabetical? Certainly not, since the alphabet Ð vowels and consonants Ð is grosso modo a system for the notation of sounds, and since we already have at our disposal a multitude of devices for the recording and restoration of human voice. What would we profit by spending years and years in order to learn a visual system for the notation of sounds, when we can already arrest and reproduce them, and, thanks to the numeric addressing system, navigate in the sonorous material as we desire. The alphabet was invented at a time when the magnetophone did not exist. In the antiquity and the middle ages alphabetical texts were used almost like magnetic tapes because men had to read aloud and to hear the sound in order to get the meaning.
But writing does not necessarily have to based on the faithful inscription of the sounds of our speech in order to notate thought, as is made evident by Chinese ideograms. A form of writing may be completely independent of spoken languages as is shown by Arabic numerals and by mathematical notation in general.
Coming back to our imaginary experiment, it is clear that the extra-terrestrials are suggesting that we invent a form of writing, a system of signs, an intellectual technology, which does not merely duplicate what is already being done by the media founded on the immediate capture of pictures and sounds, but would exploit all the possibilities opened up by interactive graphic screens, even by the multimodal, three-dimensional, virtual realities.
The majority of sign-systems Ð alphabetical, ideographic, mixed, and others Ð known today have been invented when there were only static, fixed, technical materials available. It should be noted that contemporary multimedia or hyperdocuments are often contented with the re-appropriation of signs invented for other techniques (different forms of writing, static maps or schemes, video images, sound recordings) and with their netting. They organize new navigations in an ancient semiotic reservoir. They deterritorialize a stock of signs already available. There is nothing astonishing in it, since the new interactive techniques emerged from laboratories less than a decade ago, and have does existed socially in an efficient way for less than ten years. Ten years! It is next to nothing on the scale of cultural evolution, much less than is needed for a civilization to invent a new form of writing, and to refashion its system for the communication, the production and the transmission of knowledge at the same time.
The interactive multimedia based on digital techniques explicitly pose the question of the end of logocentrism, of the demolition of a certain supremacy of the discourse over other modes of communication. It is probable that the human language appeared simultaneously in different forms: oral, gesticulative, musical, iconic, plastic, with each of these singular modes of expression activating such and such a zone of the semiotic continuity, reverberating from one language to another, from one sense to another, following the rhizoma of signification, attaining to the mental capacities even better as they traversed the body and the affects. The systems of domination that were founded on writing isolated language, making it the master of a semiotic territory from then on set apart, parcelled out, judged according to the exigencies of the sovereign logos.
The apparition of hypermedia sketches out an interesting possibility (among others that are not so appealing): the possibility of retracing the path opened up by writing but in the adverse direction, beyond the triumph of logocentrism, toward the reopening of a deterritorialized semiotic plane. But it means to return to the paleolithic age with all the powers of the text, armed with instruments then unknown, instruments capable of making living signs.
Rather than staying emprisoned in the facile opposition between the reasonable text and the fascinating image, should we not make an effort to explore the richer, more subtle, more sophisticated possibilities of thought and expression opened up virtual worlds, multimodal simulations, the dynamic techniques of writing? We already have under our eyes, at the two opposing extremes of our cultural hierarchy, the premises of the new writing.
In the domain of scientific research numerical models of phenomena are visualized on screens. Interactive graphic simulations have become indispensable instruments of the imagination assisted by computers. Neither belonging to experimentation, nor to theory, simulation - industrially producable experiment of thought Ð has opened up a third way of discovery and learning, unknown to the epistemologists. The digital model, unfolding its dynamic image on the screen, still derives from a form of writing, but certainly not from the notation of speech. It does not notate sound: it notates mental models. And like the mental model it is interactive, explorable, mobile, modifiable, branching out into thousands of reservoirs of data.
On the other side of the cultural scale video-games also offer interactive models for exploration by simulating landscapes of adventure and imaginary universes. True, it is shere entertainment. But it is difficult not to be impressed by the coincidence of the two extremes: the researcher multiplying scenarios by the exploration of numerical models and the child playing video-games are both experimenting with tomorrowÕs writing, with the language of interactive images, with the dynamic ideography permitting the simulation of worlds.
Rather than to condamn video-games the humanists and the pedagogues, the creators and the authors, should grasp the possibilities of the new writing, and create works worthy of the name, invent new forms of knowledge and experimentation equalling with its possibilities, making it earn its spurs. No situation could be worse than that in which the cultured men and women isolate themselves in the territory of the alphabetical text and leave the language of tomorrow into the hands of technicians and salesmen. Separation almost always brings about barbarism.
So there exists a form of knowledge by simulation, very different from the theoretical and hermeneutical styles relying on static writing. Its principal criteria are undoubtedly no longer those of the critical, the universal, and the objective truth, but rather those relating to the potential for bifurcation and for variation, to the capacity to be altered, to operationality, to local and contextual pertinence. In fact, the contemporary means of communication have inaugurated an economy of messages very different from the one that prevailed until the middle of the 20th century. One certainly cannot bathe twice in the same stream of information, but the density of connections and the rapidity of circulation are such that the actors of communication have no great difficulty in sharing the same context. Consequently, the demand for universality and for objectivity has diminished. As McLuhan predicted, we are returning to some of the conditions of communication reigning in oral societies but on a different orbit, on a level of superior energy.
The history of the interdependency of material techniques and conceptions of knowledge could be schematically represented by four ideal types, their interferences and intersections.
First type: in the societies existing before the invention of writing the practical, the mythical, and the ritual knowledge was embodied in the living community. As an old man dies a library burns.
Second type: with the advent of writing knowledge is transmitted by the Book. The one, indefinitely interpretable, transcendent book, believed to contain everything: the Bible, the Koran, the sacred texts, the classics, Confucius, Aristotle...
Third type, beginning with the invention of printing and prevailing until this morning: characterized by the encyclopedia. Here, knowledge is no longer transmitted by the book but by the library. It is structured by a network of references, as if haunted by the hypertext from the very beginning.
The deterritorialization of the library that we are witnessing today is perhaps nothing but a prelude to the emergence of a fourth type of connection with knowledge. Through a kind of spiralling return to the orality of origins, knowledge could once again be carried by living human collectivities rather than by separate material bases. With the difference that this time the immediate carrier of knowledge would no longer be the physical community with its carnal memory but cyberspace, the region of virtual worlds through the intermediation of which this community would recognize its objects, and itself as a collective intelligence.
Here I no longer speak of the future of the classical text as I did in the first part of the discourse, or of the invention of a new form of writing as in the second part, but of the gravitation towards an entirely different ecology of communication.
The fusion of numerical documents, of intelligent software, of systems of information bases, of techniques of simulation and of interactive multimedia is already virtually realized by the world-wide interconnection of computer memories. Electronic mailing services construct a network of international communication where all sorts of data may be exchanged and commented. But how is one to orient oneself in this cyberspace where messages and data of every kind flow? How is one to find a fixed point in a torrent? Must one desperately try to freeze the form of the knowing space, to draw frontiers between disciplines? Must it be divided into hierarchies of the essential and the auxiliary? Judging by what criteria? For the benefit of whom and for how long?
Should we not rather make up our minds to consider knowledge a continuous and pulsating space, the same for all and different for everyone? Why not imagine a galaxy of virtual worlds giving expression to the diversity of human knowledge, a galaxy that would not be organized a priori but would, on the contrary, reflect the trajectories and the uses made of it by its explorers. Almost living, these cosmopedies [1] would be structured and restructured, charted and recharted in real time by the collective act of writing and reading.
Thus, the cyberspace of a community would automatically reorganize itself reflecting the mobile relation of its members to the mass of information at their disposal. As soon as an individual plunges into a cosmopedia the whole space of knowledge restructures itself around him or her, mirroring his personal history, his interests, his investigations, his earlier enunciations. Everything that concerns him would envelope him coming as close to him as possible, installing itself within the reach of his arm. Would grow more distant that which is not important for him. Distances would be subjective in it. Proximities would be functions of the contextual significances.
The cosmopedies of the 21st century will no longer make people turn around knowledge but knowledge around people. The system of trees of knowledge [2], already now technically available, prefigures this project.
Up to now one has mainly envisaged virtual realities simulating physical spaces. But here I speak of the production of symbolic spaces in the form of virtual worlds expressing significations and kinds of knowledge characteristic of a collectivity. These virtual worlds would express the interests, the kinds of knowledge, the acts of communication of the collectivity in real time, with the direct involvement and the tactile component suggested by the word.
From the perspective of the virtual worlds of shared significations, communication is no longer conceived of as distribution of messages, exchange of information, but as the continuous emergence of a collective intelligence.
Numerical instruments offer the possibility of an evolution toward greater democracy in the relation to knowledge. But nothing is guaranteed. At the moment when everyone recognizes that knowledge is at the foundation of power, when it is repeated everywhere than the capacity for learning and for inventing sustains the economic power, there is perhaps no other way for the renewal of democracy than to imagine and realize non-exclusive forms of relation to knowledge.
It is to reach this end that I propose the utopies of the dynamic ideography, the cosmopedia, the trees of knowledges, virtual worlds of shared significance, the cyberspace for the collective intelligence to your critical sense.
If ever such possibilities see the light of the day, then the Book, the library, the immense proliferating and crazed corpus of knowledge would cease to hang above our heads and to confound us. The transcendence of the text would begin to wane. We would perhaps be less irradiated by the spectacle of media. The immanence of knowledge in the humanity producing and utilizing it, the immanence of people in texts, would become more visible. By the intermediacy of virtual spaces giving expression to them human collectives would surrender to an effervescent writing, to a process of reading inventing them and their worlds.
Like some participants in the demonstrations of this end of the century who have shouted in the streets: Òwe are the peopleÓ, we will also be able to pronounce a somewhat bizarre phrase, a phrase that will resound with the totality of its significance when our bodies of knowledge will inhabit the cyberspace: Òwe are the textÓ. And our freedom will be greater the more we become the living text.
The knowledge of individuals is fragmented. Human intelligence is dispersed in space. It unfolds in a discontinuous time, broken by eclipses. The collective intellectuality will effect its unification, its re-membering. It constructs a transpersonal and continuous thought. A cogitation that is anonymous but perpetually living, irrigated everywhere, in constant metamorphosis. By the intermediacy of virtual worlds we can not only exchange information but also truly think together, put together our memories and our projects to produce a co-operative brain.
It is true that communicative media already have established a continuity in time and space: telephone, fax, electronic mail, numerical and telematic networks, radio, television, the press, etc. This continuity is still not the continuity of the active and living thought, singular and differentiated, emergent and cohering everywhere, but rather a network for the transportation of information. Do the viewers of a televised transmission share a community? Do they bring together their experiences and their intellectual powers? Do they envisage and perfect new mental models of a situation together? Do they even exchange arguments? No. Their brains are not yet cooperating. The continuity effected by the media is only physical. It is a necessary prerequisite of the intellectual continuity but not sufficient in itself.
Until this morning the work of writing was undoubtedly one of the most efficient means for the production of collective thought ever invented. The network of libraries keeps records of the creation and the experience of myriads of dead and living human beings. The fragile filament of memory is re-established, dormant thoughts revivified from generation to generation through the processes of reading and of interpreting. Translations from one language to another, or from one discipline to another, assure the communication between detached spaces of thought.
But by its nature the classical form of writing is a static and discontinuous system of signs. It is an inert, parcelled, dispersed body becoming more and more enormous each moment, and its unification and resuscitation requires that each individual sacrifice years and years to research, interpretation to the establishment of connections.
As a remedy to the present situation, virtual worlds of collective intelligence will see the development of new forms of writing: animated pictograms, moving languages that will preserve traces of their interaction with navigators. By itself, the collective memory will organize itself, unfold itself anew for each navigator according to his interests and his previous traversings of the virtual world. The new space of signs will be sensitive, active, intelligent, at the service of its explorers.
I ask again: what is interpretation? The subtle mind attempting to invite the inert body of letters into a dance.The evocation of the breath of the author in front of dead signs. The haphazard reconstruction of the knot of affects and of images in which the text originates. And, finally, the production of a new text, that of the interpreter.
But what if the signs are alive? What if the image-text or the space-thought continuously grows, proliferates and metamorphoses itself to the beat of the collective intelligence? What if the leaden characters cede their place to some dynamic and translucent substance? What if the opacity of the gigantic stratifications of texts effaces itself in front of a flowing and continuous milieu the center of which is always occupied by its explorer?
After the encounter between the vivifying spirit and the dead letter, after the dialectic of the corpus and the oral tradition, comes a new mode of the construction of the continuity of thought, a mode making possible the participation of everyone in the adventure of a nomadic language.
The first nomadic people followed after their flocks searching for nourishment, moving about following the rhytm of seasons and of rains. Today we are nomads following after the future of humanity, the future traversing us and made by us. The human being has become its own climate, an endless season with no return. We are hord and flock intermingled, more and more attached to our instruments and to the world moving with us, strolling on a new steppe each day.
Neanderthal men, well adapted to the wonderful hunting expeditions on the glacial tundra, became extinct when the climate abruptly became warmer and more humid. Their natural game disappeared. Despite their intelligence these growling or mute men had no voice, no language with which to communicate with each other. Therefore the solutions found for their problems here and there could not be made more general. They remained dispersed even when they were faced by the transformation of the world surrounding them. They did not change with it.
Today the homo sapiens is face to face with a fast modification of its surroundings, a transformation of which it is the collective involuntary agent.
We may either cross a new threshold, a new stage in the evolution of man, by inventing some attribute of humanity as essential as language but on a superior level. Or we may continue to ÒcommunicateÓ through the media and to think in institutions detached from one another, organizing moreover the suffocation and division of intelligences. In the second case the only problems we would still be confronting would be problems of survival and of power. But if we were to take the route of the collective intelligence, we would gradually invent techniques, systems of signs, social forms of organization and of regulation permitting us to think together, to concentrate our intellectual and mental power, to multiply our imaginations and our experiences, to work out practical solutions for the complex problems affronting us in real time and on all levels. We would progressively learn to orientate ourselves in a new cosmos, constantly transforming itself and drifting, to become its authors as much as we can, to invent collectively ourselves as a species. Collective intelligence does not aim at the mastery of selves through human collectives but at an essential loosening of the grip changing the very conception of identity, the mechanisms of domination and of the breaking out of conflicts, the unblocking of confiscated communication, the mutual launching of isolated thoughts.
So we are now in the same situation as a species whose each member would possess a good memory, would be perceptive and astute, but which would not yet have reached the stage of the collective intelligence of the culture because it would not have been capable of inventing an articulated language. How can one invent language if one has never spoken, if oneÕs ancestors have never pronounced a single phrase, if one has no example to follow, not the slightest idea of what language could be? We are as nearly as possible in the same situation presently: we do not know what it is that we have to create, what we may already have obscurely began to envision. Still it only took a few millenia for the homo habilis to become the homo sapiens, to cross such an imposing threshold; it launched itself in the unknown, inventing the earth, the gods, and the endless world of signification.
But languages are made for the "human scale" communication within small communities, perhaps even to guarantee the stability of their relations. Thanks to writing we have reached a new stage. The technique of writing effected the growth of the efficiency of communication and the organization of human groups; its scope was much wider than could ever have been that of shere speech. But this change took place at the expense of the unity of societies: it caused the division of societies into bureaucratic machineries for the handling and manipulation of information with the aid of writing and into those to be ÒadministeredÓ. The task of the collective intelligence is to discover, or to invent, the other side of writing, the other side of language, so that the manipulation of information would be distributed everywhere, coordinated everywhere, that it would no longer be the priviledge of separate social organs but, on the contrary, would be naturally integrated into every human activity, as a tool in the hands of everyone. This new dimension of communication should evidently permit the mutuality of our knowledge and the reciprocality of its transmission which is the most rudimentary condition of the collective intelligence.
In addition it would open up two major possibilities that would radically transform the fundamental facts of life within societies. First, we would have at our disposal simple and practical means of finding out what it is that we are doing together. Second, we could handle, even more easily than we write today, instruments allowing collective enunciation. And all of this no longer on the scale of paleolithic clans, or on that of States and historical institutions, but with the amplitude and velocity of gigantic turbulences, of deterritorialized processes, and of anthropological nomadism influencing us today. If our societies content themselves with mere intelligent government, they will almost certainly not attain to goals set by them. In order to have some chances of a better life, they will have to become intelligent by the masses. From beyond the media aerial machineries will make the voice of the multiplicity heard. It is still indiscernible, muffled by the mists of the future, bathing another kind of humanity in its murmur, but we are destined for an encounter with superlanguage.
(translated from the French by Riikka Stewen)