les carnets de clarisse

Que se passe-t-il autour de nous? Le monde change – parce que nous changeons –, et nous n’arrivons pas à nous l’expliquer. Monde incertain, dangereux, chaos, menaces hybrides… autant d’expressions d’incompréhension, de brouillards, d’inquiétudes.

Dans cet article sur la définition d’un cyber-commandement français, j’avais essayé de relever quelques implications concrètes de cette transformation. Le cyber comme territoire d’application, le cyber comme espace mental structurant. Ce qui va affecter nos façons de gouverner et de combattre entraînera aussi la modification profonde de nos organisations sociales et politiques. Interactions, symétries, miroirs.

Cyber

C’est un espace que nous transformons et qui nous transforme, chaque jour. Ce que recouvre le mot cyber est en réalité une somme de multiples territoires imbriqués et situés sur des plans différents; c’est cela qui en fait la complexité -et par là-même notre incapacité provisoire à l’embrasser, à en concevoir la globalité. Et ce, quels que soient les États, les chercheurs, les échelles, les référentiels et les enjeux considérés. Définir une caractéristique, s’accorder sur une direction, oui… mais impossible de faire la synthèse ni d’en avoir une vision cohérente, complète, partageable.

Peut-on dépasser ce constat, en posant autrement des hypothèses de réflexion?
(précision: je ne prétends ni penser mieux, ni réussir à expliquer ; juste une envie simple de comprendre ce qui se passe.)

Relever des pistes, des axes, imaginer des passerelles possibles. Explorer, voir, regarder, sentir. Images, textes, analogies, notes… autant de petits pas, de cailloux, pour appréhender ces changements, à mon petit niveau. Et en souhaitant qu’amateurs et spécialistes y trouvent leur compte, chacun dans sa lecture. Une sorte de carnet de voyage, donc, ou un inventaire à la Prévert – avec beaucoup de ratons laveurs.

Nous n’arrivons pas à voir cette transformation parce que nous n’avons pas encore fabriqué l’outil mental qui nous permette de la voir (comme la vision de l’espace proche et lointain avant l’invention de la perspective, ou celle du globe avant la projection de Mercator).
Qui peut, aujourd’hui, voir et nous dire ce qu’il y a au-delà de l’horizon ?

La constellation de Marconi

Par où commencer ? Premier repère : Marshall McLuhan. Une première vision, avant les ordinateurs personnels, les téléphones mobiles et les réseaux sociaux.

« Pendant l’âge mécanique nous avons prolongé notre corps dans l’espace. Aujourd’hui, après plus d’un siècle de technologie de l’électricité, c’est notre système nerveux central lui-même que nous avons jeté comme un filet sur l’ensemble du globe, abolissant ainsi l’espace et le temps  ».

« All technology has the property of the Midas touch; whenever a society develops an extension of itself, all other functions of that society tend to be transmuted to accommodate that new form; once any new technology penetrates a society, it saturates every institution of that society. New technology is thus a revolutionizing agent.» 

McLuhan découpe l’histoire de l’homme en trois âges :
- l’âge tribal primitif, celui d’une société sans écriture, où la connaissance s’acquiert et se transmet par la parole; le savoir est autour de l’homme, dans la nature ; apprendre pour survivre nécessite tous les sens ;
- la galaxie Gutenberg, âge de l’expansion industrielle avec l’imprimerie comme vecteur et multiplicateur de l’information; en retour, la logique industrielle fractionne le savoir et sa transmission, séparant  l’homme du monde sensoriel ; lire n’implique plus que la vue ; et ce savoir fractionné transforme l’ancien ordre social collectif en une galaxie d’individus qui revendiquent une liberté, une autonomie, une différence.
- la constellation de Marconi est l’ère électronique où l’information circule à la vitesse de l’électricité, partout et simultanément. Récepteur, émetteur, l’homme projette sa pensée et ses sentations dans l’espace et dans le temps, et par là-même communique de nouveau collectivement; c’est une société humaine re-tribalisée du « petit village mondial» ; les frontières disparaissent, mais pas la conscience de la liberté indivuelle.

Quelques idées relevées

Un entretien Marshall McLuhan/Eric Norden paraît en mars 1969 dans le magazine Playboy. McLuhan y explique de façon simple son travail, ses recherches, utilisant exemples et analogies. Pistes, de chemins, hypothèses sur ce qu’il y a, derrière, demain.

«I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. My books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery.»

« All media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.»

1 • pourquoi ne voyons-nous pas ce qui se passe ?

« In the midst of the electronic age of software, of instant information movement, we still believe we’re living in the mechanical age of hardware. We reverse the old educational dictum of learning by proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar to the familiar, which is nothing more or less than the numbing mechanism that takes place whenever new media drastically extend our senses.» 

2 • pourquoi avoir peur de quitter la galaxie Gutenberg ?

« But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing–rather than enlarging–the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence–violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial.» 

« This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelgänger–the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy.» 

3 • le village global redevient tribal

« The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony–the customary life mode of any tribal people.» 

« Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism–thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity; print gave man private habits of individualism and a public role of absolute conformity. That is why the young today welcome their retribalization, however dimly they perceive it, as a release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man.» 

« The world tribe will be essentially conservative, it’s true, like all iconic and inclusive societies; a mythic environment lives beyond time and space and thus generates little radical social change. All technology becomes part of a shared ritual that the tribe desperately strives to keep stabilized and permanent.» 

4 • le rôle de l’artiste

« It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it.» 

5 • société et culture tribale, espace acoustique

« Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of « detached»  literate man. Another basic characteristic distinguishing tribal man from his literate successors is that he lived in a world of acoustic space, which gave him a radically different concept of time-space relationships.

- What do you mean by « acoustic space» ?
- I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses» 

6 • l’Occident a une vision/lecture linéaire du monde/de l’histoire

« The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive. The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man.
The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished « individuals,»  or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space.» 

« Only alphabetic cultures have ever succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organization; the separation of all kinds of experiences into uniform and continuous units in order to generate accelerated action and alteration of form–in other words, applied knowledge–has been the secret of Western man’s ascendancy over other men as well as over his environment.» 

7 • nationalisme et État-nation

« By fostering continuity and competition within homogeneous and contiguous territory, nationalism not only forged new nations but sealed the doom of the old corporate, noncompetitive and discontinuous medieval order of guilds and family-structured social organization; print demanded both personal fragmentation and social uniformity, the natural expression of which was the nation-state. Literate nationalism’s tremendous speed-up of information movement accelerated the specialist function that was nurtured by phonetic literacy and nourished by Gutenberg, and rendered obsolete such generalist encyclopedic figures as Benvenuto Cellini, the goldsmith-cum-condottiere-cum-painter-cum-sculptor-cum -writer; it was the Renaissance that destroyed Renaissance Man.» 

8 • liberté et démocratie

« The day of political democracy as we know it today is finished. Let me stress again that individual freedom itself will not be submerged in the new tribal society, but it will certainly assume different and more complex dimensions.» 

9 • monde en mouvement

« Any approach to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux» 

« All media are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.» 

10 • le mysticisme scientifique

« Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.» 

11 • miroir Occident/Asie

« The Western world is being revolutionized by the electric media as rapidly as the East is being Westernized, and although the society that eventually emerges may be superior to our own, the process of change is agonizing.» 

12 • l’homme sort de lui-même et habite hors de son corps

« Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man.» 

Les frontières monde intérieur-extérieur / vie intime-vie publique / pensée-passage à l’acte s’estompent.

•••••••
McLuhan, archives Radio-Canada : Espace, temps et village planétaire, octobre 1972 – Le village global : mythe ou réalité ? février 1991
Source image : collision protons-protons/ALICE (via le CERN)