Pierre Musso

Pierre Musso traces the origins of the idea of the technical network to the current of utopian thought in France in the nineteenth century and, in so doing, critiques the rhetoric which celebrates technical networks, and particularly the Internet, as drivers of technical and social changes which will supposedly have unstoppably benevolent consequences for the future of humanity.Unravelling the ideas and projects promoted by the Saint-Simonian movement allows us to see that technology, at least in the modern world, acquired its full force not just in instrumental terms, but cultural as well. In sum, technology is both function and fiction. Technology fulfils functions such as producing, controlling, informing, shortening distances, etc., but this is not all it does. Technology goes beyond the functional because it emerges, or arises, in a broad context of hopeful expectation. It matters little whether those expectations match the field of human experience or not. Musso believes that enthusiasm for networks has persisted down to the present day as a myth of social transformation. The promise of social change became a mere technological utopia and social change itself became a fiction proclaimed with the advent of each new reticular invention. It is this process which Musso elects to criticize in particular. The network has become reified as a technology and, as a utopia, has been reduced to a technological utopia. Like a perpetual promise, the network heralds a better future, but that today is nothing more than a perversion of the Promethean legacy of the nineteenth century.In order to understand the current ideology of networks and its discourses, Musso outlines the various factors which contributed to the Saint-Simonian ideal before it expanded to become a technological utopia. In the internal linkages between the concepts devised by different thinkers, he summarises the three aspects which explain the powerful impact of networks on the imagination: the temporal nature of a transition to progress, democracy, and modernity; the acceptance of the technical network as natural by means of metaphor, and rationalization as a design which can be interpreted in reticular forms.

Our question is whether technicality can institute, and thus create a new power, or even legitimize and maintain institutions. It claims to do so, all haloed by sacredness or religiosity with the development of computers, networks and the Internet. But this would presuppose that technology could symbolize, i.e. embody an instance of Truth, an irrational core of beliefs or myths that would answer the question of 'why' we live in society. It claims to do so as an ‘applied science’ or technoscience, science having become the authority of truth in Western societies. But technicity cannot symbolize and remains locked in the "how", in the order of rational action, utility and efficiency.

As engineers’ reticular techno-utopia tinkers with the images produced by Saint-Simonian concepts, the technology of the reticular mind is marking the final stage in the degradation of the network concept developed by Saint Simon. Such is the dual contemporary process of symbolic and theoretical deterioration of the network. The technology of the mind, understood as a canonical process of reasoning used in various disciplines, is an expression of the theoretical dispersion and commercialization of the concept that, with the obligation to think and be networked, has become a “precept”. This degraded concept is a catch-all. While it may indeed be useful in various disciplines, that fact of being applicable to everything makes it devoid of all substance. The common denominator is the reduction of the network to the hidden structure of a system, an architecture that can be formalized, made of interlinking relations or inter-connections. This structure is tending to be seen as the universal key to explain the functioning of a complex system of any kind (society, brain, body, planet, world, etc.). Conversely, it is enough to identify or imagine this type of network architecture in, or under, a complex system to infer this system’s mode of functioning or transformation. The network defines a hidden order that can be acted upon. This technology of the reticular mind is complementary to the techno-utopia of engineers presented in my introductory text. It reveals the difficulty of conceptualizing the network in any way other than as a metaphor or else reduced to an explanatory structure of a system. The extension of the notion is such that to track whatever remains, I propose that we characterize its constituent parts as fragments of a dilapidated concept.

Silvio Berlusconi constitue un phénomène original, et même un cas unique, puisqu'il est le seul chef d'entreprise du secteur des médias qui accède, à deux reprises, aux fonctions de Premier ministre dans une grande démocratie. L'arrivée au pouvoir du dirigeant de la grande entreprise de la communication répond à la crise de la représentation politique et inaugure dans l'Europe latine, une «néo-politique». Comme toute figure symbolique, l'image de Berlusconi est ambivalente et ne peut laisser indifférente. Si Berlusconi suscite tant de réactions d'adhésion ou de rejet, c'est parce qu'il inscrit toute son activité publique dans l'espace de l'image, de la séduction et de l'émotion, plus que dans le champ rationnel et traditionnel de la représentation politique. Il sait être l'ordonnateur du débat public en le dramatisant autour de clivages simplistes, notamment pour ou contre l'État, pour ou contre l'impôt... Il promeut ainsi une politique faite de passions et de croyances, comme dans une fiction télévisuelle. Le phénomène ne relève pas pour autant du populisme, voire du « télépopulisme ».Silvio Berlusconi represents an original phenomenon, or even a unique case, in that he is the only company manager from the world of media who twice rose to the office of Prime Minister in a major democracy. The coming to power of the manager of this large media firm is an answer to the crisis of political representation; it ushers in a "neo-policy" in Latin Europe. Like any symbolical figure, Berlusconi's image is ambivalent and cannot leave indifferent. If Berlusconi gives rise to so many reactions of support or rejection, that is because he places his whole public activity in the field of image, seduction and emotion rather than in the rational and traditional field of political representation. He knows how to organize public debate by dramatizing it around simplistic divides, such as for or against State, for or against taxes... Thus he promotes politics built on passions ans beliefs, as in a television fiction. For all that, the phenomenon does not fall into populism, nor even into "telepopulism"